Raymond Baccari
News Editor
Rhode Island College has stuck through with the plans to be in person for the Fall semester. There are a number of guidelines set in place with the overall goal of providing a safe in person experience on campus. These guidelines are all in coordination with the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) and recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
In order to be able to be on campus, a student must be fully or partially vaccinated and their proof of vaccination needs to be uploaded on RIC’s MediCat portal online. Religious and medical exemptions are available. Currently 96% of the students are vaccinated.
For all students, a negative COVID test result needs to also be uploaded to MediCat within 72 hours of a student arriving on campus for the first time.
Those who are exempted and partially vaccinated students may see a difference in guidelines and especially testing in the case of the exempted. For example, fully vaccinated students may be required to do three-foot social distancing in classes while partially and exempted students may be required to do six-foot distancing. As for differences when it comes to testing, weekly asymptomatic testing is required for exempted students on top of the initial negative COVID test. Testing will be done on campus at Sweet Hall Monday-Friday 10 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Masking will also be required indoors at all times and outdoors if it is not possible to keep a distance of three-feet from others.
Before coming on campus, students need to go either on the Rave Guardian app or check their student email to complete the daily symptom screening.
As for current isolation and quarantine guidelines, RIC’s website provides the isolation guidelines in their “Fall 2021 plans” pdf, with the main points being:
Fully vaccinated individuals aren’t required to quarantine. But, they are required to isolate if they test positive for COVID-19.
Unvaccinated individuals are subject to quarantine and isolation: the faculty and staff as well as those who are commuting must isolate or quarantine at home, and students living on campus are to isolate or quarantine in either their dorm room or at home.
Isolation for students living on campus will be in Sweet Hall. All students who have symptoms will get tested for COVID-19 at Health Services. Students must put in the MediCat system where they will be isolating, meaning the physical address, in the event of them testing positive. This would make it possible for RIC to plan accordingly for contact tracing and to help find alternative locations for isolation if the number of cases surpass the space RIC has in Browne Hall.
Health Services has also created four risk levels that would indicate the level of risk to the campus as the number of cases and variants are frequently changing. There are four categories that are coded by color:
Low (Blue)
Moderate (Yellow)
Substantial (Orange)
High (Red)
Currently, RIC is in the blue category, but if it were to change to yellow for example, the guidelines can and will change. Since the guidelines could change as the number of cases and variants can and have, The Anchor will provide updates as these changes in the guidelines occur.
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