‘It has brought us together’: First-year residents of Loomis Hall look toward end of 14-day quarantine

Also, a New Student Orientation intern details the challenges of remote programming

Colorado College COVID-19 confirmed case count: 2. 

Yesterday morning, Maggie Santos, the college’s COVID-19 emergency manager who also leads the Campus Safety department, informed the CC community that a second student tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday. The student was living in South Hall, but left campus before receiving their test result and is now isolating at home. The campus contact-tracing team is now working to notify individuals who had direct contact with that student.

Today, we take you inside week two of the quarantine in Colorado College’s Loomis Hall. Also, we talked to a New Student Orientation intern about the remote programming orientation leaders organized for first-year students. 

➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained why COVID-19 quarantines tend to last for 14 days. 

🗣Programming Note: The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project will now arrive in your inboxes every Monday and Wednesday morning. We are partnering with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s independent student newspaper, to continue covering the pandemic throughout the academic year. To supplement our reports, we encourage you to subscribe to The Catalyst’s weekly newsletter that comes out on Fridays. 

✉️In Your Inbox: Colorado College’s Office of Communications is now putting out a “COVID Weekly Report” every Monday. Here are some highlights from this week’s report:

• The college will stay closed to visitors, which includes family members and job candidates. No outside speakers will be coming to campus anytime soon.

• As of Aug. 20, there are 780 students living in college housing. How that breaks down: 579 students in Loomis Hall, South Hall, and Mathias Hall, the “Big Three” first-year dorms; 107 students in apartments or cottages; 71 students in small houses; and 23 students in supplemental housing.

An hour outside, activity kits, and remote classes. What it’s like during week two of the Loomis Hall quarantine

For upwards of 150 Colorado College first-year students quarantined in Loomis Hall, the end (of quarantine) may be near. 

🤔What happened again?: During the college’s arrival testing, one first-year student living in Loomis Hall tested positive for the coronavirus. Until they received their test results, students were supposed to follow what the college calls “enhanced social distancing protocols,” but in this case, administrators simply say those protocols “were not followed.” Enough students living in Loomis Hall were exposed to the student who tested positive that the college had to quarantine the entire dorm. Sunday will mark the last day of the mandated two-week quarantine, and if no students show COVID-19 symptoms, the college will release all of them together on Monday.

Initially, administrators said as many as 155 Loomis residents were quarantined in the dorm. But since the announcement, that number shrank after some students left to quarantine at home. 

“We’re asking those students to please make sure that they and their families are following the quarantine protocols,” Rochelle Dickey, acting Dean of Students and acting Vice President for Student Life, tells The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.

The college asked students not to fly, take trains, or other forms of public transportation if they were choosing to go home, so Dickey says some families made the drive back to campus for pick-up. If a student chooses to return to campus after a home quarantine, the college will test them again for COVID-19 upon re-entry.

Last Wednesday, administrators held an information session to share some updates about the lockdown with Loomis residents and their families. Dickey says the most asked question was: “If I go and get retested and come up with a negative test result, does that mean I can walk out of quarantine?”

“Unfortunately the answer to that is no,” Dickey says. “For risk mitigation, that 14-day quarantine period ... there’s just no wiggle room.”

Though Dickey says she can’t speak about the specifics of the behavior leading up to the quarantine or the students involved because of protection of privacy, she says the college is in the process of some conduct follow-ups with students in Loomis, in other residences on campus, and students living off-campus for violations of the college’s coronavirus safety guidelines. 

“We know that none of our protocols work unless we’re changing culture and unless people are following those protocols,” Dickey says. “If we’re making the determination that we believe enough people have been impacted that the safest thing to do was quarantine the building, then that’s the decision that we had to arrive at,” she later adds.

Rain or Shine: It’s the little things, two Loomis residents say 

Getting to spend some time outdoors has been an important part of quarantine for the students in Loomis. So important in fact, that when some students were caught in a downpour of cold rain, they voted to stay outside. 

Some students held their yoga mats over their heads while others tried to hide their phones in their shirts, says first-year quarantined Loomis resident Leyla Kramarsky ’24. Other students were lying on the ground and jumping around in the rain.

“After like 15 minutes they were like, ‘Alright pack it up, we’re heading in,’” Kramarsky tells The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “But it was actually ... a nice moment.”

The quarantined students were initially allowed outside for only 20 minutes, but after a day or two, the college extended their outdoor time to one hour per day. The students sit on socially-distanced spots on the soccer field, under RA supervision. Students spend the time reading, drawing, or walking in circles around their spot. One day, a flash mob of upperclass students even came and danced for the students, Kramarsky says. 

“Definitely I think they’re doing a lot to keep spirits high, and I think it is working,” Kramarsky says, adding that while the quarantine has been hard, it hasn’t been as “miserable” as some students first expected. 

For first-year quarantined Loomis resident Yazmine Garcia ’24, the quarantine didn’t come as a complete surprise. But she also echoes Kramarsky’s sentiment — the quarantine hasn’t been quite as bad as she thought it would be, she says. 

Garcia spends a lot of her time exercising, reading, sleeping, and calling her mom. Her assigned contact tracer calls often to ask her how she is feeling and if she needs anything. She and her neighbors have been watching “Parks and Recreation” through Netflix Party, a browser extension that allows people to simultaneously watch Netflix together from remote locations. The college dropped off activity kits with crochet materials, which Garcia hasn’t gotten to yet.

“The hours go by fast — faster than I want them to actually, which is crazy,” Garcia tells The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.

The CC academic year began on Monday, and the first-year quarantined students have been attending remote classes from their Loomis rooms. 

Kramarsky says having classes this week has helped add some structure to her day and makes her feel more productive. She’s been spending about six or seven hours per day at her desk attending Zoom meetings, eating lunch, and doing some work. 

Having class assignments to complete has made time in quarantine go by faster so far, Kramarsky says. And when they come out on the other side, Kramarsky and Garcia think they will be bonded more strongly to their Loomis peers because of it.

“I definitely would say 100% that it has brought us together,” Garcia says. “We all know we’re all living this moment together.”

Behind-the-screens: New Student Orientation leaders welcome first-years virtually

For Kyle Zinkula ’22, New Student Orientation, commonly called NSO, has been full of surprises. 

Zinkula was one of this year’s NSO interns and leaders, positions filled by seasoned Colorado College students eager to pass their wisdom onto first-years. 

The cornerstone of NSO is the service-focused Priddy trip, where groups of incoming students travel across the region and participate in anything from volunteering at a school to doing trail work on backpacking trips. NSO leaders head these excursions, offering a valuable opportunity for new students to connect with one another and learn about college life from experienced peers. Because of the pandemic, the trips initially changed to non-overnight local expeditions. 

“We were hoping to do just little day trips, like as a group you’d be able to do a day hike at Garden of the Gods or something, and then you’d do a morning of service work with some local organization,” Zinkula tells The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. 

But around Aug. 6, the college announced that it was moving NSO programming online. “For most of the summer we thought we’d be able to do stuff in person,” Zinkula says. “So a lot of that work just kind of went out the window.” 

Zinkula says the decision to move NSO online coincided with the announcement that CC would test all students upon arrival to campus, because the NSO experience as it stood couldn’t take place if students were going to be adhering to enhanced social distancing protocols.  

The work isn’t necessarily completely gone, Zinkula notes, as some of the activities planned for NSO might take place over Block Break 1 instead. “We have a lot of ideas floating around,” he says. 

Remnants of the original Priddy experience included six nights of discussions that NSO leaders organized for their groups, with conversations about what it means to be a citizen of Colorado Springs, and academic and social life at the college. 

Zinkula says the biggest challenge of leading NSO in this virtual format was trying to keep everyone engaged and entertained during the meetings.  

“Our calls happen at the end of the day after they’ve spent a bunch of time on Zoom for other orientation stuff,” Zinkula says. “At the end of the day, people just kind of want to be done. They’re probably a little sick of Zoom.” 

Zinkula tried to keep his group engaged through icebreakers, alternating between big group discussions and breakout rooms, having polls, and having Q&A sessions. “Just kind of having a diversity of means to communicate … keeps it a bit more exciting, I guess,” he says. 

Zinkula emphasizes his perspective after being both a student and employee during this Pandemic Summer. He says that though he thinks there are still things CC could have done better on, they’ve done a lot to try and make the most of a less-than-ideal situation. 

“I think people are being overly negative on the school a little bit, but that’s not to say the school is perfect,” he says. “Regardless, something’s going to be wrong, something’s going to make people upset. But I think they’re doing more of a good job than a bad job.” 

About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project

The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, Arielle Gordon, and Isabel Hicks, in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear from time to time, as will infographics by Colorado College students Rana Abdu, Aleesa Chua, Sara Dixon, Jia Mei, and Lindsey Smith.

The project seeks to provide frequent updates about CC and other higher education institutions during the pandemic by providing original reporting, analysis, interviews with campus leaders, and context about what state and national headlines mean for the CC community. 

📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get the newsletter in your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or news tips by emailing ccreportingproject@gmail.com.