Trust me, I hate Zoom as much as anyone. That little blue logo is burned in my eyeballs and haunts me in my sleep. However, Fordham is still far from being ready to part with it. Given that the university barely made it through the fall without shutting down in-person learning at the Rose Hill campus, the administration is in no position to guarantee the safety of a hybrid spring semester, and it shouldn’t try. 

COVID-19 cases have been back on the rise in the United States since the summer. On Jan. 18 alone, almost 1,500 people died and over 120,000 were hospitalized. 

Between Jan. 10 and Jan. 16, there was a 2.78% positive test rate and 99 new cases in Fordham Lincoln Center’s Upper West Side ZIP code. Citywide, there is an 8.54% positivity rate (a seven-day average as of Jan. 16). For reference, the city’s public schools shut down at a rate of 3% citywide in November before beginning to reopen since then.

I have a heartfelt appreciation for everyone working on the ground to administer vaccines, but the fact is that the vaccination rollout system in New York state has been far too slow to make a hybrid semester wise.

Even though Fordham students have been away on winter break, the pandemic hasn’t taken a vacation.

As of Jan. 18, 3.5% of New York City residents had been vaccinated, and herd immunity would require 80-90% of the population to have the antibodies (though this does include people who have them from prior infection). Even though the vaccine exists, it is still too early to count on it as a saving grace. 

Fordham’s administration sent an email on Jan. 11 saying that it has no idea when the vaccines it had ordered will arrive. 

In the email’s words, “It will likely be some months before the vaccines are universally available.” That means “some months” more of watching the university dashboard’s case count rise and exposing members of Fordham and their families as well as other New York residents to the virus. As we’ve seen repeatedly, thousands of lives can be lost in a matter of days, let alone months. 

Even though Fordham students have been away on winter break, the pandemic hasn’t taken a vacation. The average infection rate across both Fordham campuses has been 1.22% between Jan. 5 and Jan. 18. 

To be clear, no plan is a perfect solution or is without drawbacks. But, given the circumstances, drastic preventative steps will be helpful in the long term. As to the extent of those steps, the school should at least switch to entirely virtual classrooms, meetings and events.

It might be last-minute to make that call, but so was the swift decision to close the campus last spring, and the urgency hasn’t subsided.

Beyond that, it might make sense to limit the dorm availability. Housing priority should be given to current residents who are unable to move out due to travel restrictions and students who don’t have a safe place to spend the semester other than the residence hall. Ideally, all residents would be able to live in separate apartments without shared common spaces.

The choice to continue hybrid instruction doesn’t only affect the Fordham community. For example, even though the Zoom University experience is far from comparable to an in-person education for many reasons, college students remain better equipped to handle it than their younger peers. Attention span increases with age, and the most crucial years of social and emotional growth are behind us. The longer Fordham is complicit in letting the pandemic continue to worsen, the less in-person instruction will go to elementary school students who desperately need it to ensure their cognitive development (and many working parents need it as well).

Fordham administration, it’s better to take a hit now, so that maybe next year more students and staff can return in person safely, with more security for their families and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods and with a higher percentage of the community vaccinated.

It might be last-minute to make that call, but so was the swift decision to close the campus last spring, and the urgency hasn’t subsided. It’s increased, even, and we still wake up to it on our news feeds every morning as we have for months. 

I am asking to give up a piece of my final semester of college, and it’s not because I want to. The situation demands it.