March 17, 2021 – A little over a year ago,  University students were sent home during spring break due to the rise in concern surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. If only you knew that that would be the last maskless hoorah for a year (and counting), then maybe you would’ve bought that hot mom a drink or skinny dipped in that private pool like the degenerate you’ve always hoped to be. How could anyone have known we’d get our precious spring so viciously stripped away from us? The cruel realization of not being able to subside the work week with 15 beers and caf pizza every Saturday only fully set in as students prematurely packed their things. 

Now, here we are, in what we thought by now would be a post-COVID world. Asynchronous classes, chairs at the caf soon to be bolted into the floor, and the severe lack of parties contravene our bustling, work-hard-play-harder campus ethos. Although things seem grim, one should consider looking at the situation from a half-full glass perspective. Indeed, the more positive cases recorded, the harder it is to tell if this is a college campus or the Lewisburg Penitentiary. At times like these, it is important to remember the proverb, “This too shall pass,” applying both to the university-required class you’re getting a C in and the uptick in COVID-19 cases. The half-full glass of our outbreak is that we are approaching herd immunity (get it?). As droves of students emerge from their solitary confinement at the COVID Suites, the only thing they want more than an edible meal is a party. Ask and you shall receive. With St. Patrick’s Day this week and antibodies flowing through students’ veins like the rate of your professor’s emails filling your inbox, the perfect storm of Irish-influenced debauchery is bound to hit. 

The theory of herd immunity is especially successful in a bubble like the University. With little-to-no connection with the outside world aside from trips to the bowling alley (which I’m convinced the employees there have already brewed their own vaccine, a steady stream of Jim Beam and monster energy cocktails), a utopian society of immune students seems within our grasp. Hopes are so high about our potential COVID-safe bubble that the University president has made the executive decision to recall the Moderna vaccines that would’ve been shipped to campus. The unused funding is rumored to be allocated towards $10,000 USD worth of obnoxious orange and blue lawn chairs, and a renovation of substance-free zones so that students can completely ignore them and everything about them on their way to Super.