Story by Taylor Heeden
Graphic by Claire Willmschen
Photos courtesy of Claire Perry
CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina — Lexi Freas was excited for her first semester of college. She packed her bags, ready to experience her first fall in Chapel Hill.
She set up her dorm room in Granville Towers and settled in for what she hoped would be a fun-filled college experience, despite the pandemic.
One week later, she was tested for COVID-19 and sent to quarantine.
“I had already unpacked my real dorm, and walking into an empty dorm was so exciting the first time,” she said. “But walking into a second empty dorm was so disheartening.”
Disheartening. Isolated. Emotionally drained. Terrified.
That is how students who underwent UNC-Chapel Hill’s university sponsored quarantine describe their experiences.
UNC was adamant on returning to in-person learning for the fall semester after moving online the previous spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This urge to return to a somewhat normal semester resulted in the creation of “the Roadmap,” which detailed a new set of community standards students had to follow.
Last month, as students were preparing to start their fall semester, the first alerts of COVID-19 clusters were confirmed.
Through the first week of class, the quarantine residence hall started to fill up, and rumors circulated that it was reaching capacity. Students who got tested started to go to off-campus hotels to quarantine.
One of the “pre-test cases” sent to the off-campus quarantine location was Claire Perry, who also happens to work for Carolina Housing as a Resident Adviser.
Perry spent the first three days of her quarantine in an off-campus hotel, which she did not want to disclose out of respect for the privacy of other students and hotel staff.
Perry documented her experience in university sponsored quarantine on Twitter. She posted pictures of her room, the food Carolina Dining Services provided, and she discussed the process that took place to get to her quarantine room.
Each day, all three meals were delivered at one time and were pre-selected by the dining service at UNC. These meals, however, may not have been the most nutritious, Perry said.
“For the three days I was there, I got two pieces of fruit, which is weird considering vitamin C is crucial if you’re fighting a disease,” she said.
Once, CDS forgot to deliver her food to her room for the day.
“I had to call, and CDS came back,” Perry said. “If someone was scared to self-advocate or didn’t know that was an option for themselves, I can see how they could be in a really, really bad situation.”
Just a couple miles down the road, Freas spent her quarantine in an on campus residence hall, Craige North, located on UNC’s south campus.
After entering quarantine, Freas was told she would be receiving calls from housing to check on her wellbeing throughout the entirety of her stay.
“Housing did not communicate with me, which was very frustrating,” she said. “I like feeling like someone is checking up on my wellbeing everyday.”
She said during one of the 14 days she spent there, a cleaning crew knocked on her door while she was in the shower. She described the men as wearing hazmat suits.
“I was scared,” Freas said. “I’m a first-year female student, I have just gotten into quarantine, and I’m in the shower, which is the most vulnerable place you can be.”
After she got out of the shower, Freas put on her towel and walked into her room to see what was happening.
She said they sprayed her room, which left her belongings drenched and her with a migraine from the strong chemicals.
Freas has been trying to get in touch with Carolina Housing since the incident but has not received a response. Carolina Housing declined to comment.
A statement from UNC Media Relations said housing sanitizes rooms in between occupants as well as cleaning common areas at least twice a week.
“This cleaning includes elevators, entryway doors, hallways and the laundry room,” the statement noted.
UNC Media Relations also said students will not receive a call everyday, but that a survey is sent daily to track if symptoms appear over the course of a student’s quarantine period. This statement also said students who respond to this survey can talk to doctors and nurses at Campus Health for further guidance.
Freas said she was never called whenever she did or did not fill out the survey.
“Nobody knocked on my door, nobody called me, so who knows what could’ve been happening at my dorm,” she said.
Troye Curtin is a first-year student at UNC who, like Freas, was excited for the upcoming semester. He went into the semester optimistic, but when the university switched classes to be completely remote, Curtin decided to get tested for the virus before returning home.
What Curtin didn’t know was after he got tested, he would have to go into university-sponsored quarantine.
“They told me to be out by midnight, so I got all my stuff, got onto the P2P and then went to the hotel,” he said.
Curtin was in the hotel for five days when he got a phone call. He had tested positive for the virus.
From there, Curtin was moved to Parker residence hall, which had been designated for students who have COVID-19. Curtin said the fear and stress did not hit him until he had to go into isolation.
“It didn’t really hit me until I was actually at Parker,” he said. “I still had to complete my homework and assignments on time.”
While most of his professors were accommodating, Curtin missed a couple of assignments while in isolation.
“I was not able to make those up,” he said. “They said ([the assignments were) built into the system, and it couldn’t be changed at that point.”
While in isolation, Curtin had a roommate, so he didn’t feel as alone as he did in the hotel quarantine. In fact, he said those who stayed in Parker seemed to bond over the situation.
“It was like a community in there because everyone already had COVID,” Curtain said. “We would talk to each other, but after a while, everyone would just hang out and walk in the halls without a mask on.”
Curtin believes the university could have done a couple of things better, one of those things being giving more information to students about the process of getting tested and what quarantine or isolation entails.
“I think they’ve gotten a lot of scrutiny, but we’re the first major college to do this,” Curtin said. “A couple things could’ve been more orderly.”
