A transition to normalcy at Penn State?
A week after the mask mandate was lifted, a group of maskless men and women brace the long line of the Starbucks at the HUB-Robeson Center, anxiously awaiting to get the taste of a coffee or whatever they insist.
The employees, experts on the busyness of a Starbucks on a Tuesday morning, calmly work their stations for what looks to be an efficient work environment.
The girl at the front of the line has a beaming smile on her face as she receives her coffee from the cashier. After swiping her credit card, she swiftly walks away.
“Have a good day!” the girl says as she walks towards the doors where she is surrounded by maskless people as they’re walking in.
With the mask mandate gone, there’s hope from some students for a sense of normalcy that hasn’t been seen on the University Park campus since the Spring 2020 semester.
“It’s been kind of similar so far,” Phares (junior-economics and political science) said. “I think people are still getting adjusted, but it’s been similar enough.”
Reactions to the mandate being lifted
On March 22, Penn State announced that the mask mandate will become optional in all indoor spaces, effective Mar. 23.
It will be the first time that masks will not be implemented since it was announced on March 11, 2020, that Penn State would go online starting March 16. Then, from July 1, 2020, to the 23rd, students and faculty at Penn State campuses were required to wear a mask in all buildings. Fall 2019 was the last full semester that masks were not enforced at Penn State.
Chase Rensberger said that with the cases going down, he said getting rid of the mandate was done at the best time.
With the cases going down, now would not be a good time,” Rensberger (junior — computer science) said. “Unless the cases rise back up like a few months ago, it wouldn’t make sense to enforce a mandate now.”
Prior to the start of the Spring 2022 semester, rising hospitalizations from COVID-19 made Penn State officials debate whether to start the semester in person or not. On Dec. 30, the university decided to start the semester in person.
As of April 1, new COVID-19 cases in Pennsylvania have dropped to 821, a dropoff from 30,482 cases on Jan. 5. In Centre County, COVID-19 cases have dropped to 6, a dropoff of 196.
Wyatt Dubois, the Assistant Director of Strategic Communications, said that the university was waiting for the safest time to eliminate the mandate.
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, University officials have been monitoring the course of COVID-19 in consultation with the COVID-19 Operations Control Center and experts in epidemiology, medicine, public health and more, and relying on guidance from the CDC and Pennsylvania Department of Health,” Dubois said. “University leadership developed a series of on-ramps and off-ramps to adjust its mitigation measures as conditions changed.”
“Relaxing masking is an example of one o]f those planned on-ramps, and the masking policy was changed when it was because of evolving public health guidance, low community spread and the University’s high vaccination rates indicated it was safe to do so,” Dubois added.
Penn State’s announcement comes after the State College Area School District announced that masks would become optional starting on March 21.
The mandate was first modified on March 4 when students were allowed to be maskless in dining halls, marketplaces, on-campus gyms, sporting events, and extracurricular classes, but not in classrooms, labs, and other academic spaces.
Emily Schmidt said she didn’t understand why the first announcement wasn’t for all buildings on the 4th but was happy to hear the second announcement.
“It was a sigh of relief,” Schmidt (freshmen-biomedical engineering) said. “They lifted it in all places except classrooms and I thought ‘that’s kind of weird’. Why didn’t they do it all at once?”
“You interact with more people outside the classroom than you do inside of it.”
Along with the elimination of the mask mandate, as of March 27, unvaccinated students are not required to undergo weekly testing for the virus.
Melisa Slye agrees with the decision and that the university will have difficulties in requiring vaccinations for all students.
“Enforcing a vaccine mandate for a public university is a tricky situation,” Slye (junior-chemical engineering) said. “They have to understand that there are certain things they are not gonna be able to do as a result of the unvaccinated students’ decisions.”
What has life been like without masks?
While classrooms, labs, and academic spaces were still fully masked from March 12–22, students were maskless at the HUB.
Along with a Starbucks, the HUB has 11 different eating spots for students to choose and work from for extra cash. There’s also a student lounge and many seating spots for students to do homework or socialize.
With the HUB being a popular spot for students and constantly going there himself, Schmidt added that it feels normal to go into the HUB now.
“In an area where students go to hang out a lot, it is good they get to talk and hang out with one another without having a mask over their faces,” Schmidt said.
The same applied to students who go to the White Building and Intramural Building, who could go to the gyms or Kinesiology classes and breathe a sigh of relief, literally.
Students on the treadmills no longer had to wear a mask while going on a run. Justin Sweeney said he is pleased with this, as the mask was an inconvenience when he would run on the treadmill.
“It sucked because it would be hard to breathe at times with a mask on if I was running a lot,” Sweeney (junior-psychology) said. “It feels good to run with no mask on now.”
Now, with classrooms becoming maskless, students can reap the benefits of being maskless fully now.
For a building that has some big lecture halls, the Thomas Building is one of them. Lecture hall 101, in particular, holds a 200-seating capacity for Communications 370: Public Relations on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 11:15.
The professor for that class is Steve Manuel, a Senior Lecturer of Communications. He currently teaches 195 students in the class.
With the ability to see his students fully unmasked, Manuel said he was happy when he heard the mandate would be lifted.
“It’s actually a huge, huge sigh of relief,” Manuel said. “You can actually see the faces of students. I hope that the mandate never comes back again.”
A fellow student that takes a class in Thomas 101 also agreed.
Lauren Smith is a part of Economic 315, a 161-student class that is taught from 2:30–3:20 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Because there are other lecture halls bigger in the Thoms Building, Smith is content with others not having a mask.
“It’s alright,” Smith (senior-statistics) said. “I’m in one of the smaller lecture halls compared to others in the building, so it’s not a big deal.”
