{"id":4725,"date":"2023-03-03T08:00:32","date_gmt":"2023-03-03T13:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/?p=4725"},"modified":"2023-03-12T14:40:20","modified_gmt":"2023-03-12T18:40:20","slug":"one-year-after-cuny-ends-mask-mandate-students-remain-uncertain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/2023\/03\/one-year-after-cuny-ends-mask-mandate-students-remain-uncertain\/","title":{"rendered":"One Year After CUNY Ends Mask Mandate, Students Remain Uncertain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Students
As students ride the North Building escalators Wednesday night, some wear masks and some do not.<\/figcaption> Photo by Nora Wesson<\/span><\/figure>\n

One year after CUNY lifted its mask mandate, interviews with students show an ongoing debate about the importance of face coverings, even as the COVID-19 pandemic eases.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like everyone should be able to do whatever they please,\u201d said Arham, a Hunter student who declined to give his last name. He said he stopped wearing masks when the mandate was lifted \u201cbecause, honestly for me, it\u2019s hard to breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maryam Asif, a psychology and studio art double-major at Hunter College, agreed that students should be free to make their own decisions — to a point. \u201cYou have the choice to wear them, and yeah, you do, but you should wear them,\u201d the junior told The Athenian.<\/p>\n

Hunter College and the rest of the CUNY system lifted mask mandates on March 4, 2022, and reduced random testing earlier this year from 19% of the school\u2019s population to 5%. But COVID-19 is still sickening thousands and killing several people every day in New York State. The situation has left students wavering on the policy.<\/p>\n

Kashaf N., a Hunter student who only gave her last initial, told The Athenian that she has been wearing a mask since the pandemic started, and only stopped wearing one in class this semester. She said that seeing many people going maskless on campus has \u201cmade me a little bit more comfortable not wearing masks either.\u201d Kashaf clarified that she masks up on public transportation.<\/p>\n

Asif expressed a nuanced position. During an interview in which she wore a mask, she said students should have the choice to wear a mask in classrooms, but that they should be mandated in crowded areas like hallways. \u201cIf we can differentiate between those two, where there\u2019s high traffic and low traffic, that would be way better.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Asif feels safe on campus not wearing a mask, she recently had COVID-19, and \u201cI just don\u2019t want to catch that again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Students,
In the year since CUNY lifted its mask mandate, some students feel comfortable not wearing masks, while others still use the face coverings. Even in crowded spaces like the escalators in the North Building, more and more students are not masking.<\/figcaption> Photo by Nora Wesson<\/span><\/figure>\n

While for most people, a coronavirus infection is a week or two of body aches and coughing, some students with certain medical conditions are high-risk, and thus more likely to experience more serious symptoms. Wearing masks is especially important for them, but since the lifting of the mandate, most Hunter students are not.<\/p>\n

For high-risk students at Hunter and other CUNY schools, this may mean that they do not attend classes in person. While this was not a problem during the 2020-2021 period when classes were entirely online, since the return to in-person instruction, Hunter has drastically reduced its online course offerings.<\/p>\n

Sudi Shayesteh, the director of Hunter\u2019s Office of AccessABILITY, which offers assistance and accommodation to disabled students, said that while some immunocompromised students may need to continue isolating for their own safety, these adjustments only go so far.<\/p>\n

\u201c[It\u2019s] up to the faculty how flexible they can get,\u201d said Shayesteh, noting that professors have their own rules about how many latenesses and absences can be excused before a student risks failing a course.<\/p>\n

Shayesteh notes that her office does make some accommodations for high-risk students, \u201cWe advocate for sick students, reach out to faculty, but the student is obligated to make up the work.\u201d If work cannot be made up, a student may have to take a leave of absence or a hiatus from school, a decision that can put their academic future in peril.<\/p>\n

\"Hande
Hande Erkan, a senior at Baruch studying advertising and marketing, spoke to The Athenian about CUNY’s mask mandate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the weeks after CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez instituted the new, optional masking policy on March 4, 2022, Baruch senior Hande Erkan wrote a short op-ed in her college\u2019s student newspaper, The Ticker, headlined \u201cCUNY\u2019s mask lift is a risky move.\u201d In an interview with The Athenian, the advertising and marketing student said she stands by that statement, even one year later.<\/p>\n

Erkan thought the decision to lift the mandate came too early. When she heard masks were made optional, \u201cI was really scared.\u201d As someone who still uses hand sanitizer after touching subway poles and common surfaces, \u201cI was a little bit scared because we had this huge pandemic that lasted for two-plus years, and people still get COVID every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

While a few months ago she stopped wearing a mask everywhere she goes, she still makes sure she has one handy. \u201cIt has become this thing in my mind that kind of makes me feel safe.\u201d Though she acknowledges that masks offer no guarantee against COVID-19, \u201cIt\u2019s always a better choice to wear the mask than to not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erkan worries that people have learned to live with the threat of the virus. \u201cI hope we don\u2019t forget what we\u2019ve been through, what we\u2019ve all been through.\u201d While she said people miss \u201cthe normal life,\u201d the pandemic \u201cchanged the way we think, it changed the way we live.\u201d She believes \u201cthe normal life\u201d is something that\u2019s been forever left behind.<\/p>\n

Looking to the future, Erkan is concerned that people will forget what the country has gone through with COVID-19; that they will forget all the lives changed and the lives lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One year after CUNY lifted its mask mandate, interviews with students show an ongoing debate about the importance of face coverings, even as the COVID-19 pandemic eases. \u201cI feel like everyone should be able to do whatever they please,\u201d said Arham, a Hunter student who declined to give his last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":4736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,324],"tags":[303,15,509],"class_list":["post-4725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-student-life","tag-covid19","tag-cuny","tag-masks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/113"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4725"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4738,"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725\/revisions\/4738"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brie.hunter.cuny.edu\/hunterathenian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}