At Sonoma State, the health and safety of students is top priority, now more than ever due to the ongoing pandemic. Over the course of this semester, SSU has had good control over COVID-19 and has not seen any massive outbreaks like some other schools. This is all thanks in part to SSU’s COVID-19 monitoring team who work day in and day out to track the spread and contain any potential outbreaks. The team uses data from daily wellness checks to track where the outbreak started and if anyone on campus made contact with an infected individual.

“The COVID-19 monitoring team helps ensure our campus is safe and following the health guidelines administered on the local, state, and federal level,” said an anonymous member of the monitoring team. 

The COVID-19 monitoring team invites students to go about their day to day lives and live in this new “normal” that many are still readjusting to. The team doesn’t want the school to be ruled by COVID-19, rather they want people to be cautious of it while also living out their lives as college students. They are very aware how difficult that can be, but they continue to diligently monitor the spread of COVID-19 at Sonoma State to help our healthcare workers at the Student Health Center pinpoint where an outbreak may have started and who was the cause of the spread. 

Andrea Vanderschoot, a senior at Sonoma State, discussed the e-mails students receive on campus, “I think the emails updating us on the spread of COVID-19 are helpful, I am just not 100% sure on how accurate they are. I can see how the emails can be alarming for some students because it seems like we get the emails more often than not, but that’s what we signed up for when we took the gamble of moving back to campus.”

The gamble of living on campus was one many students took in order to channel the “normal” school year they’ve been craving for so long, especially students in their final years of college. 

A way that the COVID-19 Compliance and Monitoring team helps create a safe and “normal” year for students is by supporting individuals who may have been exposed, are experiencing symptoms consistent with COVID-19, or who have tested positive for COVID-19. The team gathers this data through the health center and students’ health portals. That data then gets used to pinpoint where the COVID-19 positive individual spent time on campus. Once that’s done, the team then sends out emails to people who may have been exposed, and further monitors the situation to contain the outbreak by sending people who got positive tests to Sauvignon to quarantine.

Tenaya Pauly, a junior at Sonoma State, to discuss her view on the pandemic and how the monitoring team is handling it: “I would say Sonoma State has done an excellent job with limiting outbreaks on campus, I mainly feel like that is attributed to less facilities being open and a smaller student population coupled with the work the COVID-19 monitoring team has done for us.”

The COVID-19 Compliance and Monitoring Office has done a lot for the school, bringing a normal year and bringing everyone closer together as a student body. Throughout the school year, the team will be working closely with the student health center and the school’s health center staff on campus to further provide an unprecedented level of safety here at Sonoma State.