COVID-19 cases highest among 18- to 24-year-olds as students return to campuses

Local institutions of higher education are meeting the state requirements that faculty and staff be fully vaccinated, but their responses and protocols for handling the spread of COVID-19 if an outbreak occurs on their campuses vary, and some safety measures are proving to be difficult to enforce.

“I’m in a big lecture hall for my art history class and there are a couple of kids who, two years into this thing, still don’t know how to wear a mask properly,” Western Washington University (WWU) senior Charleigh Nogler said. “But it’s too big, really, for the professor to enforce something like that. I feel like students still have a weird thing where they don’t want to snitch on each other.”

WWU instituted a COVID-19 clearance tracking system through the MyWesternHealth homepage, which color-codes individual students’ COVID-19 status based on their vaccination status or if they have been exposed to the virus.