How Colleges Can Ease Students’ Fear and Anxiety in Quarantine

Just seven weeks into her college career, Rhiana Brownell has become all too familiar with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s quarantine and isolation hotel.

Within the first month of the fall semester, Brownell’s roommate was sent to the hotel twice. For two weeks, the freshmen were reunited — and then Brownell tested positive for Covid-19.

While in isolation at the hotel, she was allowed to leave her room only to take out the trash or use the microwave. She opened the lone window and stuck her head out occasionally to get some air. She paced around the room for exercise. One lap was about 25 steps, she said.

After a couple of days, she looked at Georgia Tech’s online Covid-19 dashboard and saw the number of quarantine beds in use: one. She was the only student there. “It did feel weird and lonely,” she said.

But there was a bright spot in Brownell’s weeklong isolation: the little bag hung on her door when she arrived. It was put together by a Georgia Tech student organization called Smile. Inside were coloring sheets and crayons, information about mental-health resources, stress-relief tips, and a collection of handwritten and typed messages from fellow students.

She lined up the notes on her temporary desk. One was a poem: “Roses are red; telephones are plastic; disco is dead; but you are fantastic!” Another read: “Rona ain’t got nothin on you period.”

Care packages like these are among the ways colleges are trying to support students in on-campus quarantine, a key strategy for mitigating the spread of Covid-19. Beyond just providing a list of mental-health resources, they’re adding points of human contact, even if not in person. They’re planning safe workouts and, in a few cases, limited outdoor time. They’re creating support groups to help students feel more connected — and to help their parents feel better, too.

At some colleges, hundreds of students have been sent to quarantine and isolation housing this semester. Thanks to contact tracing, a student who tests positive for Covid-19 often lands several close contacts there, too.

As a result, some students, like Brownell’s roommate, have already been locked down two, three, or four times within a few weeks. Students in one University of Utah dorm started a leaderboard tallying how many times they had ended up in quarantine.

“This wasn’t something that we prepared for,” said Monica Osburn, executive director of the counseling center at North Carolina State University, during a Chronicle virtual forum last week. N.C. State moved classes online in August after a surge in cases, but about 1,600 students continue to live on campus. The center is offering virtual drop-in spaces to try to combat loneliness.

“The experience of isolation and quarantine is challenging enough,” Osburn said. “And these repetitive experiences are clearly going to weigh down on students.”

‘Accumulation of Trauma’

Most students get through their brief lockdown period just fine, campus officials said. Several pointed out that students knew coming to campus this fall could put them at risk of contracting the virus and landing in isolation. But for some students, the experience triggers more intense anxiety and loneliness that could harm their well-being — and their academic performance.

Sarah Ketchen Lipson, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at Boston University who researches student mental health, said isolation, loneliness, and a lower sense of belonging are all “highly predictive” of student well-being and retention.

Lipson described the situation for many quarantined students as “an accumulation of trauma.” Beyond loneliness, contracting Covid-19 can prompt fear and panic, she said. Plus, some students might be grappling with other stressors, like racial trauma. “It’s a really challenging time to be by yourself and alone with your thoughts,” she said.

Smile, the student group that left Brownell’s quarantine care package, is trying to make the experience a little less lonely. Smile — which stands for “spreading messages in love and encouragement” — has packed more than 250 bags, said Adam Lederer, a junior who founded the organization in the spring. Georgia Tech, which enrolls about 36,000 students, including 16,000 undergraduates, has had 878 positive cases since the beginning of August, and nine of the campus quarantine beds are currently occupied.

“There was already this disconnectedness in the campus community,” Lederer said, due to pandemic-era social restrictions and mostly online classes. “And then, as students started to test positive and quarantine and isolation happened, we noticed that there would be a very large need to spread positivity and make them feel a little bit less isolated.”

Amid the chaos of the start of the semester, some students reported that when they went into quarantine or isolation, there were no instructions, and no one from the university ever checked on them. At that point, colleges were mostly focused on logistics, like ensuring they had enough space, Lipson said.

“It’s not surprising to me that student well-being was not the first thing that was thought about,” she said.

A group of Boston University parents sent a letter to senior leaders last month, asking for daily in-person nurse check-ins for students in isolation and quarantine, daily outdoor time, and the ability to receive mail while in lockdown.

“They weren’t thinking about the emotional well-being of these students in isolation and quarantine,” said Alessandra Kellermann, one of the parents. A BU spokesman referred The Chronicle to links outlining a range of support services for quarantined students. He said the university has conducted more than 200,000 tests in 11 weeks, with 105 students testing positive. BU enrolls 34,000 students.

Campus officials want to support their students, but they don’t want to put employees at risk by exposing them to the virus, said Kevin Kruger, president of Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education.

Kruger acknowledged that the stakes are high. “If you don’t have eyes on students, you can end up in a situation where students can slip through the cracks from a mental-health standpoint,” he said. “That’s the thing we all worry about.”

‘Concierge Relationship’

Campus officials said they’ve recognized that even a little dose of human contact can go a long way in calming students down. “One of the strategies that a lot of campuses are employing is creating a concierge relationship with folks in quarantine,” Kruger said.

Increasingly, colleges have tapped people to do regular check-in calls with each student, during which they’ll ask about symptoms, mood, and whether they need anything. At Syracuse University, isolated students get a daily call from a campus nurse, while quarantined students are assigned a case manager in the dean of students office. Syracuse — which has about 23,000 students, including 15,000 undergraduates — has 77 active cases and 191 students currently in quarantine, on and off campus.

When students are moved to quarantine, “they have a lot of anxiety, a lot of questions,” said Frankie D. Minor, assistant vice president for student affairs and director of housing and residential life at the University of Rhode Island, where more than 100 people are currently in university-operated isolation and quarantine rooms. The campus has about 17,000 students.

“There’s a genuine desire to talk about their individual situation with someone who can reassure them,” Minor said.

At Rhode Island, he said, the students’ resident advisers check in every day. Health staff try to do so every other day, he said, but “the sheer volume” — URI is about to start using its second quarantine hotel — has made that more difficult.

With athletics postponed until the spring, some athletic department staff members have been pitching in, too. Assistant coaches have stayed at the quarantine hotel in the evenings, Minor said. But even that extra support hasn’t been quite enough: The university is about to hire someone to oversee the two quarantine hotels and handle “the logistical details of managing students’ well-being,” he said.

Kruger said he’s seen other colleges also doing some “last-minute hiring.”

One of the toughest mental-health challenges associated with college-operated quarantine facilities is that, in most cases, students can’t leave their rooms. But at Rhode Island, quarantined students — those who have not tested positive for the virus — can go outside during a set time. That’s permitted by guidance from the state’s health department, Minor said.

They have to wear masks the whole time, can’t gather, and can’t leave the property, he said. Administrators had considered offering distanced, masked outdoor yoga or workouts for quarantined students, he said, but “we couldn’t quite pull it off.”

At Syracuse, students can sign up for virtual personal-training sessions, with workouts adapted for their small rooms, said Cory Wallack, executive director of health and wellness. “Just because you’re in an isolation room or quarantine room doesn’t mean you should let go of those parts of your life,” he said during last week’s Chronicle forum.

Syracuse offers a virtual support group once a week for students in isolation and quarantine, Wallack said, and — in a first for the university — there’s now a support group for their parents.

The university, Wallack said, is “really trying to provide those parents two things. One is an outlet for their own anxiety. ‘My student’s tested positive. What does that mean?’” Then, he and other staff members offer tips on supporting their children while they’re in lockdown.

“In some cases, they’re feeding the anxiety of the students as well,” he said. “So we want to give those family members a place where they can place their anxiety.”

At Rhode Island, where more than half of students are from the small state, many families are within a short drive of the campus, Minor said. Some parents have camped out in the quarantine hotel’s parking lot and talked on the phone to their children, who can see them from their window. One parent even put up a scarecrow outside the building with a “get well soon!” balloon.

“None of us have ever done this before,” Minor said. Safety and mitigating the spread of Covid-19 is the first priority. But he and his staff are also trying to accommodate “basic human nature.”