Back to the future: Students, faculty look ahead to post-pandemic life

Paige Cirtwill
Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:41:31 +0000
Campus, Coronavirus, Instagram Page, Local, National, News, amy fairchild, anxiety, Bernadette Melnyk, college of public health ohio state, coronavirus, coronavirus mental health, coronavirus post-pandemic, coronavirus vaccine, COVID-19, COVID-19 anniversary, COVID-19 vaccination, depression, different, future, in-person, mask, mental health, normal, ohio state coronavirus, ohio state covid 19, ohio state in-person classes, online, pandemic, virus

Gov. Mike DeWine announced Thursday that when Ohio has less than 50 cases per 100,000 people for two weeks, he will suspend all health orders — including the statewide mask mandate. Credit: Mackenzie Shanklin | Photo Editor

With more Ohioans receiving COVID-19 vaccinations each day and the end of statewide mandates on the horizon, Ohio State students and faculty alike have wondered what a controlled pandemic will mean for their social lives, education, class sizes and mental health.

Gov. Mike DeWine announced Thursday that when Ohio has less than 50 cases per 100,000 people for two weeks straight, all pandemic health orders will be lifted — including the statewide mask mandate. But Amy Fairchild, dean of the College of Public Health, said masks won’t disappear as soon as the restrictions do.

“It may be years, it may be never, until we stop seeing masks as a regular part of our life, particularly during cold and flu season,” Amy Fairchild, dean of the College of Public Health, said.

In addition to voluntary mask-wearing, Fairchild predicts, like the flu vaccine, new COVID-19 vaccines will be developed as more virus variants emerge and periodic testing of sample populations to screen for the virus.

Savanna Walter, a first-year in exploration, said she will likely feel obligated to wear a mask after the mandate is lifted and hopes people wear them when they or someone they live with is sick. She said she also hopes Ohio State keeps the increased cleaning measures it implemented due to the pandemic.

“If they have the budget for it, I don’t think that should stop,” Walter said. “Even if COVID ever were to go away, I still think that overall cleanliness is important.”

Fairchild also questioned whether large in-person lectures with hundreds of people would continue after the pandemic, saying that some learning can be better accomplished online, which also allows some students better access to course content that may be inaccessible to them otherwise.

In the switch to online learning, instructors came to rely on Carmen Canvas and Zoom, but even after the pandemic, online learning will continue to play a major role at Ohio State, Melinda Rhodes-DiSalvo, associate director for strategic partnerships and operations at the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning, said in an email.

“We now know more than we did before, we have more experiences with the platforms than we did before, and we’ve seen firsthand the benefits and the challenges,” Rhodes-DiSalvo said.?

Kelly Garrett, a professor of communication who teaches human-computer interaction and user-experience, said he would be open to keeping some of the changes in his classroom, such as using a program that allows him to poll his students during class.

“One thing that I could imagine doing in the future is saying, ‘Look, if I’ve got a cold, why would I go into the classroom and risk sharing it with other people?’” Garrett said. “Maybe I should be using the online instruction mode from time to time.”

Garrett said the pandemic has also made him more aware of his students’ mental health and well-being, something he hopes to carry with him once the pandemic is under control.

“Being attentive to the fact that students’ lives are stressful, being attentive to the fact that students need to be able to make mistakes without having their grades hurt so they can learn the material — these are things that I’ve always believed in,” Garrett said. “I’ve probably paid more attention to them in the last year, and hopefully I will continue to do that going forward.”

The pandemic brought about a spike in mental health problems, particularly among young people. This was reflected in the university’s recent mental health surveys, conducted in August and December 2020, which showed that during the fall semester, rates of student anxiety increased 12 percentage points to 51 percent and rates of depression 9 percentage points to 33.4 percent.

Walter said her professors started grading more leniently and offering more support and concern for their students’ mental health after the transition online.

“I hope that that level of understanding continues on for a long time because even when it’s not COVID, there’s always things going on in people’s lives that are affecting their mental health,” Walter said.

For better or worse, Fairchild, Walter and Garrett all agree that life will resemble, but not be identical to, how it was before the pandemic, both on societal and personal levels.

“I can’t imagine that the year that we’ve had isn’t going to affect me in ways that I haven’t figured out yet,” Garrett said. “Surely it will.”