Point Park has stopped providing tests for COVID-19 and no longer recommends symptomatic students to isolate for more than 24 hours after symptoms end.
Current CDC guidance recommends that symptomatic people return to their normal activities after one day of improved symptoms, with “additional prevention strategies such as wearing a well-fitting mask” for five days after symptoms improve. The university, which follows CDC and Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD) guidance, adopted these guidelines on March 1 of this year.
Asymptomatic people who may have been exposed to COVID-19 are not recommended to test for the virus.
With this change, the isolation floor in Lawrence Hall, floor 19, has been discontinued. This is not the first time the university has relaxed restrictions, as the COVID-19 vaccine requirement was dropped during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Current university guidelines suggest that students who show any viral symptoms such as a fever, chills, or fatigue should not go to their classes until they have gone a full 24 hours without symptoms.
Rebecca Harper, director of Student Health Services, says that financial reasons contributed to the loss of COVID-19 testing.
“Truthfully, now that a lot of the grants and things like that are gone from COVID, they are truly cost prohibitive,” Harper said. This mirrors what much of the U.S. has seen as emergency orders around COVID-19 have expired.
Harper only recommends someone to take a COVID-19 test if they are immunocompromised. However, she notes that this practice is uncommon for those with the flu and that COVID-19 should be treated similarly to the flu.
“As scary as it sounds, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Harper said. “I know that is a big thing for people and that is scary, I appreciate that it’s scary to people that now we kind of are like ‘oh it’s fine, it’s all over,’ but we have to get to the point where it is.”
According to the CDC, PA’s test positivity rate is 14.9% out of 3,103 tests, which is considered mild. The positivity rate is down 2.6% from two weeks ago. However, emergency room visits caused by COVID-19 are at 1.8%, which is considered low. This follows current trends of the disease, which is causing less hospitalizations than it did during the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Zane Ford, a sophomore human resources management major, does not find the changes unreasonable.
“I think it’s a tad bit irresponsible, but I feel like we are out of the brunt of the COVID-era,” Ford said. “It’s not entirely unfounded for them to not follow all the policies that have been taken out of effect.”
Hospitalizations due to COVID-19 peaked in January 2022 and have been trending downwards ever since. 33 people have died from COVID-19 in the past week – down from 143 during this time in 2022 and 263 in 2021. 55,600 total COVID deaths have been reported in PA since Jan. 1, 2020.
The university no longer keeps track of cases, so there is no official metric for how COVID-19 has looked on campus this year. Harper has only had five to six students asking her for excused absences from class due to major sickness. She says that this is a low number – official case counts last year were also low, according to Harper.
If CDC guidance were to change again, the university would align itself with those guidelines as it has done in the past. The university also follows Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD) guidelines and regularly met with the department during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Harper.
“If things pivot, we have a good pulse – I have a monthly meeting with the county health department, so we always know if things are getting wild and crazy,” Harper said. “We have good resources to get that information up to students fairly quickly too.”
The same is true for a mask policy. Harper encourages students who are worried about their health to wear a mask if it helps them. She also says that the new CDC guidance encourages students to be in clean living spaces, not just common areas.
“One of the hammer home points of the CDC with this kind of shift was to also clean your environment, to make sure that you’re changing your sheets and wiping down surfaces in your dorm room,” Harper said. “You’re spending so much time there, it doesn’t get any down time, so try to keep your space clean and tidy to make sure your life in general is healthy.”
David Chapman, a first-year special education major, says that he hopes the university doesn’t have to change its policy again.
“It’s obviously still important to test because there’s still a lot of people that are kind of still at risk,” Chapman said. “If there’s not a strong outbreak, then it won’t affect [university operations], I hope.”
Being the director of student health services for five years has shown Harper a pattern of sickness surges on campus. She says that colds and upper-respiratory infections are common during the beginning of the fall and spring semester, while students with stomach flu symptoms spike close to fall break.
The Student Health Center is on floor three of the Student Center. While free tests and masks are no longer available at the student health center, they are still for sale at stores nearby such as Target and CVS. For more information on COVID-19, visit cdc.gov/covid/.
