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Several colleges and universities across the US have decided to close their campuses following a rise in coronavirus cases and growing fear over the omicron variant. Experts have predicted that it will become the pandemic’s predominant variant in the United States. One medical expert suggests it’s premature for US colleges to be closing and announcing remote starts to the spring 2022 semester. On Saturday, Harvard University announced that students will study remotely for the first three weeks of January due to a rapid rise in coronavirus cases. Other colleges such as Yale University and Penn State University haven’t yet announced a remote start to the spring 2022 semester. A professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, Dr. Marc Siegel said it’s very premature for colleges to discuss plans to shift to remote learning for the spring 2022 semester.

Siegel said that universities are a built-in quarantine situation that allows for rapid testing and additional measures, such as making sure everyone has a COVID booster vaccination. He said, “Since it’s a university if you look at it completely medically, it’s a built-in quarantine situation. What do you get at a university? The ability to quarantine people, the ability to study a whole population, the ability to rapidly test everyone, the ability to make sure everybody is vaccinated. There’s no proof whatsoever that lockdowns have actually helped COVID and that sending college students home from school decreases the spread of COVID. What do you mean they’re home? What do you think they’re doing? What are they doing? They are probably spreading it within their household, within their zip code”.

He added, “I’m not convinced that closing schools decrease the national spread of this virus. Where’s the proof of that?” Dr. Siegel said there’s no proof that sending students back home decreases the spread of the coronavirus. He also said that the number of campuses closing just before winter break is not a good sign that they will reopen in the New Year. Siegel said, “In other words, what motivates a university to close? It’s probably a liability, right? That’s not a medical issue. They’re thinking of if we get too many cases and somebody’s kid gets sick, and we get blamed for it. But I think that that’s the mindset, pretty much. So the fear quotient here is way too high for a virus that actually looks milder. And we have actual tools against this virus. We got rapid tests. We’ve got vaccines that work, boosters that work”.