{"id":23998,"date":"2020-09-03T17:23:04","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T21:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/?p=23998"},"modified":"2020-09-03T17:23:04","modified_gmt":"2020-09-03T21:23:04","slug":"bu-student-describes-experience-in-quarantine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/2020\/09\/03\/bu-student-describes-experience-in-quarantine\/","title":{"rendered":"BU Student Describes Experience in Quarantine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/887124097&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div style=\"font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc; line-break: anywhere; word-break: normal; overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-weight: 100;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/wtbu\" title=\"wtbu\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">wtbu<\/a> \u00b7 <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/wtbu\/bu-student-describes-experience-in-quarantine\" title=\"BU Student Describes Experience in Quarantine\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">BU Student Describes Experience in Quarantine<\/a><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By Grace Ferguson<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Follow the rules, so you don\u2019t end up in quarantine. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s the advice of one student currently in quarantine housing at Boston University.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cI\u2019m kind of introverted, so I was like, \u2018Ooh, you know, two weeks, my own room, my own bathroom, completely alone, yay!\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m dying after a few days.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amanda, who asked that WTBU not use her real name, has been quarantined since Friday. She\u2019s there because, before she came to Boston, she had contact with someone who later tested positive for the virus. She reported it to Healthway, and BU staff decided that she would need to quarantine for 14 days.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amanda said she was only with her close contact for a short time outdoors, and she had already tested negative once when she reported it to Healthway. As unpleasant as quarantine is, Amanda said she appreciated BU\u2019s abundance of caution.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIt definitely makes me feel a lot more like they do care, and like they are actively trying,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amanda had about an hour to pack after Healthway officially notified her she was going into quarantine. When asked what she wished she had brought, she had an answer right away.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cBetter bedding,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">BU provides all of the basics, but Amanda said she\u2019s been sleeping on the floor because the bed is so hard to sleep on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThey give a set of sheets a week. However, these sheets are so uncomfortable. They feel like when you iron press a button up shirt. That\u2019s like the best way to describe it\u2014they\u2019re very stiff.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Under the sheets, there\u2019s no mattress topper, just the hard dorm room mattress. Amanda said her pillow is really flat, and it seems to be made of some kind of disposable plastic material.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cBring your own pillow. They said they provided [that] stuff so I was like, \u2018OK, I\u2019m not going to bring a bunch of things then\u2019\u2014absolutely not,\u201d Amanda said. \u201cYou have to sleep on their mattresses, so if you have a mattress topper and you\u2019re not embarrassed on dragging that down the street, bring it, \u2018cause it\u2019s horrible.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She recommends bringing blankets too. BU provided some thin fleece blankets, but she said the air conditioning makes the room really cold. She regrets not bringing warmer clothes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIt is freezing in here at all times. I shiver to sleep. It is absolutely horrible,\u201d Amanda said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amanda does get plenty of food delivered to her room by BU Dining Services, though she doesn\u2019t have much say in what she gets.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThey had a lot of snacks. Most of the stuff was name-brand stuff,\u201d Amanda said. \u201cIt was all more healthy alternatives, though. Like, they gave me bagged popcorn but it was Skinny Pop. They gave me potato chips but they were organic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amanda\u2019s room came with some non-perishable foods, plus two cases of water and a case of gatorade. Every few days, she gets a delivery of fresh food she can put in her minifridge\u2014some dairy products, sandwiches, and salads. She also gets frozen meals she can heat up in her microwave.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThey gave me a lot of yogurt. They gave me some fruit. They gave me some fruit cups,\u201d Amanda said. \u201cThey\u2019re really obsessed with peaches, for some reason. Like, it\u2019s peach yogurt, a bunch of little things of peaches\u2014I don\u2019t know why they\u2019re obsessed with peaches.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Quarantine can be isolating, but Amanda said that there\u2019s a student activities director who\u2019s made sure she and the other quarantined students don\u2019t feel forgotten.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cHe contacts you on the very first day, and his goal is just to make you feel happy and just not crazy,\u201d Amanda said. \u201cHe set up this thing called Club I.Q., where all the isolation and quarantine kids, we do a Zoom Monday through Friday at four o\u2019clock, so we can all talk to each other and have some social interaction. And if you don\u2019t attend those\u2014they\u2019re completely optional\u2014he does call every few days to check up on you and make sure everything\u2019s OK.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But Zoom meetings are no substitute for campus life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cYou really take for granted just how much you can actually walk around and just leave and have the tiniest bit of social interaction,\u201d Amanda said. \u201cSo I would definitely recommend that people stick to what they\u2019re doing so that way they don\u2019t have to come in here, because this is definitely not as fun as I thought it was going to be, and it gets pretty old pretty fast.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>wtbu \u00b7 BU Student Describes Experience in Quarantine By Grace Ferguson &nbsp; Follow the rules, so you don\u2019t end up in quarantine. That\u2019s the advice of one student currently in quarantine housing at Boston University. \u201cI\u2019m kind of introverted, so I was like, \u2018Ooh, you know, two weeks, my own room, my own bathroom, completely [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1597,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23998"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23998"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23999,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23998\/revisions\/23999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wtbu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}