We are both shut in and locked out of uni life
The thing that strikes you first is the silence. My university halls should be echoing with laughter, slamming doors and all the vibrancy you might expect from an excited group of students living away from home for the first time.
Not anymore. There’s not a single soul to be seen and it’s eerily quiet. hundreds of the residents are self-isolating following news that at least 172 students here in Glasgow’s Murano halls of residence – home to thousands of students – have tested positive for Covid-19.
It has thrust us into the headlines, and led to us being dubbed the student ‘super-spreaders’ – a label for which the payback has been swift.
About 600 of us are isolating. We have been threatened with expulsion from our courses for socialising outside of our households.
We have been banned from the pubs even as other young people can still go to them. We even face a ‘yellow card, red card’ system if we contravene strict social distancing rules.
Those of us who aren’t selfisolating are left with little choice but to largely stay indoors – especially as all our learning is online anyway.
Of course, some people will have little sympathy, putting student woes on a par with those of celebrities bleating about loneliness from their vast million-pound mansions.
Yet from my perspective, two weeks into my four-year course studying International Relations, it’s hard not to feel real anger at the injustice of it all. After all, just weeks ago, young people were encouraged to attend university in droves, with the promise of a watered-down, safety-first experience that would still be enjoyable. For me, after a gap year, I didn’t want to defer again. At the same time, I had no idea what was coming – that Nicola Sturgeon’s government was going to shut pubs and ban household visits.
Perhaps that was naïve – and I’ll admit, not everyone was entirely responsible at first. In the first week here there was plenty of drinking, meeting new people and raucous gatherings – although it’s probably the first time these usual rites of passage were juxtaposed with police patrols through the halls and anxious whispers of positive cases.
Yet what did the Government expect? It’s not difficult to anticipate what is likely to happen when you put two thousand young people – many of whom have had their freedoms restricted for months – in a confined environment.
By the middle of last week, a Covid testing centre had been set up in the middle of the street right outside our halls.
Now Sturgeon is apparently determined to hammer the last nail in the coffin of our already damaged freedoms.
Not a day goes by without another edict coming down from on high, in which she dictates new restrictions to be imposed on ever more banal aspects of our existence.
Last week, she announced that students – unlike ‘civilians’ – in Glasgow could not go to the pub at the weekend... an apparently temporary measure which made me want to laugh and cry with rage at the same time.
Aside from the rampant injustice, how on earth are pub staff meant to differentiate between students and young people in work? We don’t have badges – although it might yet come to that if Sturgeon has her way.
Then there’s the suggestion that we might not be able to go home for Christmas: something so ridiculous I can’t wrap my head around it, other than to say that I can’t see anyone I know – or their parents – adhering to it.
None of us is wallowing in selfpity – we are getting on with it, taking precautions that allow us to have social lives.
Isn’t that what everyone is trying to do?