The new normal

Diya Ganguly looked frantically at the sea of bodies filling up Miller Forum. This is just like it used to be before COVID, almost like things have never changed, she thought. The students looked down at their laptops or the paper in their laps, chatting with the people next to them. Diya could barely process her surroundings with all the noise. She hadn’t been in a room, let alone a lecture hall, this packed since Spring 2020. Now, she was waiting for Sonia Shah to walk across the stage and deliver her talk, “People and Microbes on the Move in the Era of Climate Change.”

“All these people are probably just here for a requirement,” Diya said before rolling her eyes. She looked around at the blobs of students laughing and talking to each other. “I’m here for one too, but at least I actually care about public health.” She turned to her right as a girl’s braid bounced off her shoulder from a deep cough. “Shit’s dumb.”

Throughout the pandemic, 56% of college-aged students reported having symptoms of anxiety and/or depression according to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) . Muhlenberg College finally opened its doors to all students in September 2021 and for some, a climate of anxiety, anger, and fear radiates throughout campus. With a campus full of people, students concerned about their health are oozing with anxiety. 

“There seems to be this culture of fear,” said Aliya Kenyatta LSW, a counselor at Muhlenberg. “We’ve also noticed a lot of deficits, social, relational, obviously developmental, just because it was stunted during that time.” As a counselor whose training specializes in dating, relationships, and cultural concerns Kenyatta’s work at Muhlenberg focuses on how students interact with each other. “There’s a lot of people who don’t know how to make friends, which is a normal thing in college, but it seems more intense now. Students are not understanding how to conduct conversation and not understanding confrontation.”

“So,” Diya began as she flung her body into her desk chair. She wrapped herself tightly in a sweatshirt before adjusting herself. Her body was straight and still before she took a deep breath. 

“If this is an in-person thing, and this is also a public health lecture, why do we have people that are hacking up their lungs? Like, during the lecture itself?” It’s two months after Shah’s pandemic lecture, yet the anger in Diya’s voice was fresh. Every time Diya heard a cough on campus, she winced in her seat. Whether it was a cough from her apartment mate a few doors down or from a student in the back of her environmental politics class, she had the same bodily reaction. 

“I’ve probably bought 10 things of hand sanitizer, I always wash my hands before I do something. I always wash my hands, especially before taking out my Invisalign, because that’s nasty,” she waved her hand, motioning to the circular retainer case buried in a desk pile. “I’ve done everything that I could to prevent myself from getting sick.” Diya took another deep breath and fidgeted again in her seat. “When people come to public places, and others can hear if they’re sick. It seems like nobody cares!” Her voice, now heightened in pitch, radiated throughout her dorm.

“We’ve all been kind of traumatized by this event,” said Shah in one of the last remarks in her lecture. The sea of students nodded in agreement. A few tired “yeah”s echoed from the crowd.

Diya isn’t the only one that still feels on edge about the pandemic. “Our response is really shaped by the stories we tell,” Shah adds as some students nod. Others are clacking on their laptops. Few eyes darted in Shah’s direction. After a 50 minute lecture, which was shorter than most classes at Muhlenberg, the students in the audience could barely keep focus. The chatting energy had dissipated into the September night. The only sounds were faint groans, usually meant to agree with whatever fact Shah was sharing.

The response of the crowd at Shah’s lecture was just another indicator of the burnout that was blazing throughout the student body this semester. “Professors have been encouraged to get students to a certain level, but it’s not taking into consideration all of those deficits–social, relational, and developmental– that I just mentioned. So it’s creating a lot of pressure for them, which then creates a lot of pressure for the students, and it just keeps trickling down like that,”  Kenyatta pointed out from her observations of students this fall. “So that’s definitely been a thing on campus. But, that’s a really big systemic thing to break. It’s not just Muhlenberg or college, this is just the education system in America.”

As a senior, Diya is still struggling with the pandemic that engulfed the college experience spring of her sophomore year. For freshmen, this transition is even more difficult. According to a study from UNC-Chapel Hill, 40% of first-year college students—compared to 18.1% previously—have moderate to severe anxiety.

“There’s been a lot more suicidal ideation,” says Kenyatta as her shoulders drop and her voice softens. “And without divulging too much information, there are just a few hospitalizations, but more hospitalizations than previous semesters, where normally we might have one or two all semester, so statistically, more than we normally see.”

Along with the pressure of school, work, and classes, Diya has faced pressure simply because of her major. “When people ask me what major I am and I say public health, they always say something like ‘Wow just in time!’ or ‘You’re going to save us, right?’” These thoughts ring through her mind daily. “The ones that make the rules are the people who need to save us, not public health students.”

As a public health major, Diya copes with her pandemic anxiety with knowledge, the knowledge that not all Muhlenberg students can learn in their classes. “Just learning of how diseases and infections spread, like water droplets and spread through saliva. That’s the one thing that we learned about environmental health, we learned about how germs can spread pretty easily.”  

The 50-minute lecture cooled Diya’s mind from the stresses of classes, work, and studying. However, the health anxiety and fear remained.  Am I the only one who notices how ironic this is? Diya thought while typing down a seemingly important sentence from Shah: Something about a fruit bat leaving saliva on half-eaten wholly-rotten mangoes from a tree in an Australian backyard. Diya’s body stiffened as she heard more coughs from her row.

Two months into her senior year and entering the second year of the pandemic, 1,900 Americans are dying from COVID-19 every day. Diya is adamant that we can’t act like the pandemic is no longer a problem. “We could slowly ease back into normalcy if people are smarter, people get vaccinated, and mitigation strategies. It doesn’t depend on the virus. It depends on how we control it and control ourselves.”