On March 10, 2020, Dr. Chrysan Cronin was desperately trying to stay calm as she stood in front of a packed room full of Muhlenberg college students, faculty, and staff. As the head of the Public Health department at Muhlenberg, she was tasked with an impossible feat — to present information about the impending COVID-19 pandemic to the campus community without causing panic. Her hands gripped the podium in the Miller Forum event space, keeping herself steady as she predicted the course of a year-long pandemic to a room full of aghast onlookers. Students rapidly took notes on their laptops, and public health professors sat sombre at the front of the room. This was the first time that most of these people would be hearing the phrase “flatten the curve,” or “wear a mask,” and Dr. Cronin knew that this was just the beginning. After the event, a news reporter for a local TV station approached Dr. Cronin and asked her if people should be worried. “I just looked at her and as calmly as I could, I said the only words I could think of,” Dr. Cronin said, “and that was ‘We will get through it, but many of us are going to get sick.’”
Just two hours after this panel, at 8:00 p.m. that night, Muhlenberg sent out a campus wide email announcing the evacuation of the campus by the end of that week and the pivot to online classes. The students in Miller Forum may have remained calm while watching Dr. Cronin’s pragmatic presentation on the growing pandemic, but a few short hours later pandemonium ensued. Victoria Retterholt, a sophomore at Muhlenberg at the time, remembers the moment well. She was with her friend in the New Science building (known by students as New Sci), working on some midterm assignments. “We were reading about how West Chester University had just gotten the email that they were getting sent home, and we were like, ‘West Chester is kind of close to us, and they’re kind of the same size as Muhlenberg, I’m surprised we haven’t heard anything yet.’”
Just a few moments later, students received the announcement email and shouts erupted in the academic building. The two left the room they were studying in and walked the halls. Students were pacing up and down the black steps of New Sci, sneakers squeaking against the floor. Lots of kids were on the phone with their parents, frantically explaining that they would be forced off campus in less than a week. The conversations blurred, one big mix of hysteria. “Everyone was just wandering around like chickens with their heads cut off,” Retterholt laughs. It’s funny now, but at the time, Retterholt admits that she too stood in that room and called her mom, her voice echoing against the high ceilings.
When Muhlenberg closed their doors at the end of that week, the plan was to hold classes remotely until April 13th, at which point the college would reevaluate and hopefully be able to bring students back on campus. Of course, this was not the case, and it wasn’t until over a year later, in August of 2021, that in-person courses would resume for all students. The same goes for most schools in the Lehigh Valley area, including Lehigh University and Lafayette College, both within 25 miles of Muhlenberg.
For the Fall 2021 semester, over 1,000 colleges and universities brought students back with the requirement that they get a full two-dose cycle of the COVID-19 vaccine in order to live and study on campus. Despite this extra precaution, however, colleges and universities in the Lehigh Valley area are still experiencing breakthrough cases. In the Lehigh Valley, hospitalization rates have not waned and are in fact once again increasing. As of November 30th, the Lehigh Valley Health Network and the St. Luke’s University Health Network are each experiencing over 30% increases in their COVID-19 hospitalizations in less than a week. “We have the highest hospitalization rates that we have seen since we had the peak approximately a year ago in December,” Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, an infectious disease physician at St. Luke’s told 69 news. Most of the schools in the area continue to implement some sort of once-a-week surveillance testing of their students and staff — Muhlenberg is not one of them.
In the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, Muhlenberg College reduced their student capacity, committed to weekly surveillance testing, and had a strict campus visitor policy. Students were even required to wear their masks when socializing outdoors, and sports teams and singing groups wore face coverings whenever practicing. Walking through campus in the cold, early spring months was eerie, the silence echoing off of the piles of snow. There was little socialization to be seen. “I think they did take the necessary precautions [in the fall], especially by not having everyone back,” says Retterholt when asked her opinion on the college’s past COVID-19 policy. “Even though there’s an extensive healthcare network here, there’s a lot of people it has to serve, and I know there were times it was at capacity still — and their policy of not bringing people back after Thanksgiving was really smart.”
Not only was it smart, but it worked. Muhlenberg’s COVID-19 policy in the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters was strict but effective, and kept the total number of reported cases low. Besides a 25-case outbreak in late March of 2021, Muhlenberg’s campus-wide surveillance testing consistently communicated only one case a week, and frequently the campus testing resulted in no positive COVID cases. In Fall 2021, with the requirement of vaccinations, the policy changed once again. Muhlenberg dropped the weekly surveillance testing and ceased sending out email communications to the student body with the number of COVID-19 cases on campus — all this, despite the still-rising cases in the area. “Unfortunately, we are beginning to see another surge with increasing cases and hospitalizations and deaths not only in the Lehigh Valley, but also across the state and the country,” says Dr. Cronin. “Some states are reporting the highest number of hospitalizations due to COVID since the beginning of the pandemic. This is definitely cause for concern for our campus community and the greater Allentown community.”
Not only are cases rising, but vaccine effectiveness is weakening. According to a study of over 800,000 people in the journal Science, after six months the COVID-19 Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines dropped from 89, 87, and 86 percent effective to 58, 45, and 13 percent effective respectively. What’s the solution? “You can boast about having no cases, but if you aren’t testing weekly, of course you have no cases,” says Retterholt. Students and faculty alike mention that bringing back surveillance testing would make them feel more at ease, but it isn’t that simple.
Keeping up with this pandemic is costing higher education a fortune. While the government gave $10 billion to K-12 schools in March 2021 through the American Rescue Plan to specifically fund COVID-19 testing, the same was not done for private colleges and universities. The lowest reported cost for a single COVID-19 PCR test is $20 if ordered in bulk. Using this number, to test Muhlenberg’s 2,000 students over a 16 week semester would cost over $600,000 dollars a semester. In an ideal world, colleges and universities would be able to provide top-of-the-line testing and surveillance programs for their students and faculty. Unfortunately, considering the financial pressures that COVID-19 has placed on higher education, some schools cannot afford this level of care.
While being back on campus has been a joy after almost two years of isolation and anxiety, for some this lack of testing makes them just as fearful as they were in the start of the pandemic. This fear came over Dr. Cronin as well on September 22, 2021, as she was once again standing in front of the Muhlenberg College campus community in the Miller Forum, presenting about COVID-19. “Thank you so much for the great turnout this evening,” she begins, her eyes scanning the event space as she introduces herself. “It’s kind of weird to be in here,” she admitted. “This is our very first live event on campus since we fled in March 2020.” Brief, dry laughter comes from the audience. “That night I was also up here, doing a COVID panel, and two hours later the school announced that we would be going online.”
Reflecting after the fact, Dr. Cronin says, “I did not ever anticipate that the virus would take the lives of nearly a million people in the US in the next 20 months. Looking out at a packed audience in September 2021 from that very same podium, at a sea of masked people made me feel so many emotions. I was happy to be participating in some semblance of ‘normalcy,’ but also felt trepidation knowing that it was risky to be gathering in such a large group, and I was sad at the realization that our lives as we remember it before COVID will probably never be the same again.”
