Quarantine on a College Campus

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode contains strong language. Infected with the coronavirus and separated from their peers in special dorms, some college students have taken to sharing their quarantine experiences on TikTok. In some videos posted to the social media app, food is a source of discontent; one student filmed a disappointing breakfast — warm grape juice, an unripe orange, a “mystery” vegan muffin and an oat bar. Others broach more profound issues like missed deliveries of food and supplie. It was within this TikTok community that Natasha Singer, our business technology reporter, found 19-year-old Zoie Terry, a sophomore at the University of Alabama, who was one of the first students to be sequestered at her college’s isolation facility. Today, we speak to Ms. Terry about her experience and explore what it tells us about the reopening of colleges. Guest: Natasha Singer, a technology reporter for The New York Times, spoke with Zoie Terry, a sophomore at the University of Alabama. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Across America, colleges that have reopened for in-person teaching are struggling to contain the spread of the coronavirus. To this end, the institutions are using one of the oldest infection control measures: quarantine.While universities in other states were closing their doors, the University of Alabama opened up to students, banking on its testing and technology program to prevent an outbreak.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Megan Tuey. This is The Daily.
0:11.9	Early in the pandemic, nursing homes, jails, and meatpacking plants were the sites of
0:17.2	coronavirus outbreaks across the country. Now, as some students have returned to campuses for
0:23.7	the fall semester, the new hot spots are colleges and universities. My colleague, Natasha Singer,
0:31.2	has the story of one school and one student.
0:44.6	It's Wednesday, September 16th.
0:46.9	Natasha, tell me how you came to find Zoe.
0:56.5	So in August, we started receiving what I would call these SOS messages from students at universities.
1:07.5	And we got these messages because we have a system called TIP Char where readers who want to be
1:14.0	whistleblowers or who just have complaints or who want to give us tips about things to look into
1:18.8	can write to us anonymously. So these messages started coming from different campuses of college
1:25.2	students who were sequestered in these special dorms for students who test positive for coronavirus.
1:32.1	And they were describing being kind of trapped in these filthy conditions in quarantine dorms
1:37.7	with like dead bugs and mold in the walls and like leaking bathrooms. But also they felt like
1:45.2	they'd been abandoned that the university had sort of cut them off to keep them from being contagious
1:50.4	and infecting anybody else and then forgotten about them. Wow.
1:57.8	Good morning, TIP Char. So I'm quarantined in my NYU dorm room for two weeks and I can't
2:01.6	leave and they bring us meals every day. Well, and so I decided I would try to find some students
2:06.1	who were in quarantine and isolation on college campuses. 11, 15 and I just got my breakfast.
2:12.4	So let's see what it is because so far the food has been questionable.
2:16.7	And I like to tick-tock because we've been seeing all these videos of kids on
2:21.5	tiktok complaining about bad meals. For breakfast that was delivered at 12, 30.
	...

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