The deadline for SUNY Oswego students to be fully vaccinated by Sept. 27 will be reached on Monday of next week.
This means that all students must comply with the plan that SUNY Oswego President Deborah Stanley outlined in her Aug. 24 email to students.
“With SUNY’s COVID-19 vaccination policy now in place, all SUNY Oswego students who have any physical presence on campus,” Stanley said. “Including students residing off-campus and coming to campus for class, activities, meeting up with friends/professors, or any reason, must complete a full vaccine series (receive two doses for a two-dose series and one dose for a one-dose series) by Monday, Sept. 27, 2021.”
The only way to remain enrolled at SUNY Oswego without the full vaccine series was to request a religious or medical exemption by Aug. 27.
Even with an exemption those students face the strict guidelines of Stanley’s Sept. 2 email, which outlined that those unvaccinated, exempt or not, will not be allowed to participate in intercollegiate athletics, club or intramural sports, any clubs that participate in high impact activity or use the fitness centers on campus.
The campus has done several vaccine clinics since April to help students receive the vaccine on campus and has also listed off all local clinics in the City of Oswego since then as well.
This mandate also coincides with another pending deadline for SUNY Oswego and its current policy for masking on campus.
The masking policy currently is unvaccinated students must mask up both inside and outside. Vaccinated students must mask inside on campus and are suggested to wear a mask when outside of campus and in crowded inside areas.
This was an extension of the original guidance for the semester, which called for masking only when in a classroom setting for vaccinated students. The spread of the COVID-19 Delta Variant and Oswego County becoming a high spread level county according to the Centers for Disease Control’s county tracker system were reasons for the extension at the time.
The original date set for another look at that policy by Stanley and SUNY Oswego’s administration is Sept. 24. Oswego county remains a hotbed for the spread of COVID-19. Yet, the campus has seen a steep decline in COVID-19 cases the past two weeks according to SUNY’s COVID-19 dashboard, with 35 estimated cases for the whole student body. This number has surpassed 100 at the beginning of September.
Another step by SUNY Oswego to reach a localized herd immunity level through vaccination while campus activities and the volume of students on campus continue to return to pre-pandemic levels.
Abigail Connolly l The Oswegonian
