Photo by Jenny Yu ’24.
After reporting 50 cases per week, the College will continue to require mask usage while indoors.
By Sophie Soloway ’23
Editor-in-Chief
In a Sept. 28 MHC This Week: Mount Holyoke College Updates email to the community, the College announced that it would be extending its on-campus mask mandate. The news was delivered just two days before the mandate was scheduled to end, and does not cite an end date.
In her letter to the community, Interim President Beverly Daniel Tatum referenced “the relatively high confirmed COVID-19 case counts on campus,” and shared that approximately 50 cases have been reported per week in the four weeks since the semester began.
Tatum also accredited the decision to extend the mask mandate to short-staffing and depleted resources on campus, writing, “current levels of infection have taxed our campus health care system and residential services to the limit.” Beyond the COVID-19 levels on campus, the letter shared that the College is facing understaffing levels paralleling those “across the country.” Tatum’s note stated that it would be “imprudent” to lift the mask mandate given these constraints.
In addition to the mask mandate extension, the College announced its plans to “host both a COVID-19 and an influenza vaccine clinic on campus.” The flu vaccine clinic will be held on Oct. 5, while the COVID-19 vaccine clinic does not yet have a set date.
Tatum concluded her letter to the community with the note that “we will eventually shift from a pandemic to an endemic phase,” marking her “eagerness” to impose a “‘masks welcome and encouraged’ policy.”