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Coronavirus contact tracing shrinks at MSU

Shalom Baer Gee/MDN Praise Okunbor, left, and Wardah Husain, right, sit in the Student Government Association office at Minot State University on Thursday. Both students are pursuing degrees in nursing. They said they have noticed changes in COVID contact tracing this semester.

Active coronavirus cases in North Dakota dropped to 7,793 on Wednesday after reaching an all-time high of 12,040 last Friday. The last peak was in November 2020 at over 10,000 cases. Ward County accounted for 903 of the cases on Friday and 574 of them on Wednesday.

On Thursday, there were 42 active cases at Minot State University. Five of those are students living on campus, 34 off campus, and three are faculty and staff.

The North Dakota Contact Tracing Team changed its protocols in regard to case interviews and contact tracing at the beginning on January, according to Minot State University information.

The university notification included a Jan. 8 announcement from the N.D. Contact Tracing Team that stated, “We will suspend calling, collecting, and reporting close contacts for university cases during the omicron surge. As case numbers start to drop, we will plan to resume full contact tracing as we are able.”

Kevin Harmon, vice president for Student Affairs, said that because of the change, Minot State has received less information from the N.D. Contact Tracing Team during the first few weeks of the semester and, in turn, has had less information to pass along to faculty, staff, and students.

“In the past, we used to receive a notification that student A, B, or C, was actually identified as a close contact. We used to get live time notifications for close contacts. We no longer receive that from an outside agency,” Harmon said.

Minot State University students said they’ve noticed the change this semester.

“They’re not telling neighbors, roommates — they’re not telling anybody. Before, if I got COVID, they would ask me who I met with, get their information, and reach out to them,” Praise Okunbor said. “Everything is so dependent on personal discretion. As much as I believe everybody in college has that mindset of being responsible for what they were doing, what’s the guarantee that the person sitting next to you is taking the extra precautions.”

Okunbor is a junior nursing student at Minot State, a Student Government Association (SGA) senator, and residence assistant (RA).

Harmon said that the university has been relying on campus community members to self-report positive COVID results and close-contacts. The form asks if the person reporting is student, staff, or faculty, and has blanks for names, contact number, email, gender, age, and address. It also asks if the person has tested positive, if they have self-isolated, if they live in a residence hall, and if they have been identified as a close contact of someone diagnosed with coronavirus or been notified by the department of health or medical provider that they are a close contact.

“It’s a little bit more reliant on the self-report, the case, and Minot State doing more follow up with the case and or roommates, and working through all of the information that’s needed so that we can try to keep people safe as possible,” Harmon said.

Another nursing student, freshman Wardah Husain commented on what she sees as the inconsistency of self-reporting.

“And if you don’t want it, you don’t have to do it. Who cares? You can just walk around infecting everyone,” Husain said. “There’s more anonymity. You could be talking to us and have COVID and no one would know. I think it’s easier for people to infect each other.”

Minot State is not currently requiring masks, a measure that Harmon said increases the number of close contacts and makes it difficult to notify people who may have been exposed to an infectious person. He stated that the director of Student Health and himself try to notify students who may have been close contacts when they’re able.

“If you live in the same house or apartment as a case, we then would contact that roommate. If you live on campus, we know who the roommates are,” Harmon said. “If you live off campus, we need to ask them, do you have roommates? What are their names? Then we can reach out to them to have them fill out the self-report.”

Okunbor and Husain both said that they haven’t been notified this semester of sick classmates, even though they’ve known about active cases in their peers.

“It’s horrible,” Husain said. “It’s bad enough that they don’t have the mask mandate. On top of that, it’s also anonymous.”

Both Harmon and the statement from the N.D. Contact Tracing team state that they plan to resume more thorough contact tracing when possible.

“It is their intent and our intent to go back to that protocol and practice when we start receiving that information on a regular basis,” he said.

The Minot Daily News contacted the North Dakota Department of Health but did not receive a response by press time.

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