‘The Covid Car Is Coming’

Late one afternoon in September, Abbie Macher, a junior studying chemistry at Brown University, sat alone and feverish in her dorm room, calling her mom.

Brown was experiencing a surge in breakthrough Covid cases — over 80 that week — and given Macher’s symptoms, the university’s health services had decided she should go to isolation housing while awaiting her test results. Macher told her mother, “The ‘Covid car’ is coming to get me,” packed a bag, and waited.

To the better-known symbols of the pandemic — face masks, nasal swabs, and vaccine cards — add the informally dubbed “Covid car,” a van retrofitted with plexiglass dividers, or a medical-transport vehicle repurposed for the task, or sometimes even a golf cart. A familiar sight on many campuses, it’s one answer to the logistical question of what to do when residential students test positive for the virus.

The advent of vaccines — and vaccine mandates — had raised hopes for a more normal semester this fall, but the Delta variant and breakthrough cases reinforced the continued need for quarantine and isolation.

How that has been carried out has varied from campus to campus. Some colleges provide isolation housing on site, and students trudge over on their own with their to-go backpacks and bedding; others require or at least encourage students to return home. But still other colleges have provided transportation to hotels or apartments they’ve booked off campus.

A harbinger of lonely days ahead, the Covid car can elicit a degree of gallows humor.

“They see the gray or the black van pulling up to a residence hall and go, ‘Who’s going away now?’” says Steve Barilar, the chief of public safety at Bucknell University. Or, as one Kenyon College undergraduate dolefully put it, “It’s the van that takes my friends away.”

While that calls to mind Charon arriving to ferry someone across the river Styx, in reality, the Covid car is a symbol more of gloom than doom. Most undergraduates, because they are young and healthy, or vaccinated, or both, seem not terribly worried about becoming very sick — although of course some are symptomatic and miserable.

In general, it’s not the illness, it’s the isolation that looms the largest for them. As Macher puts it, “With high vaccination rates, youth, most people not having symptoms — quarantine’s the issue. No one wants to be alone for 10 days.”

Who’s behind the wheel on these unenviable journeys? At many colleges, campus-safety officers drive the Covid car. In other places, it’s staff EMTs, or in some instances, student EMTs. Still other colleges have hired drivers.

Picture that job description: “Must be willing to be in close quarters with anxious students, who also may be Covid positive.”

Driving the campus Covid car is clearly not for the faint of heart, but for frontline workers, it’s all part of the job, says Barilar, the public-safety officer at Bucknell. While things have calmed down this fall at Bucknell thanks to compliance with the vaccine mandate — 97.5 percent of students are vaccinated — Barilar himself transported more than 400 students in the spring semester and says there are still one or two needing transportation every week.

“Here was a chance to help,” he says. “You have an 18- to 21-year-old, you’re taking them from their residence hall, they didn’t know what was going on, or what was going to happen — and in that short ride and that conversation, you could see them relaxing a little bit.”

Last spring the safety officers at Bucknell, Barilar says, wore N95 masks, gloves, surgical gowns, and protective eyewear. They’d help the students with their luggage and walk them into the hotel to try to ease the transition. “I carried more suitcases than a New York City bellhop,” he recalls.

Macher’s ride arrived at 10 p.m. that night in September, hours after her initial phone call, because there were so many students needing transportation that day. To her surprise, the driver was Amy Sanderson, the director of emergency management for health and wellness at Brown.

Sanderson had stepped in that night to help out and mentioned that she had 11 more students to drive. She estimated she’d be up until 3 or 4 a.m. because she had to transport each one one at a time, help move them in, and disinfect the car in between each ride — wiping down the seatbelt, buckle, and car handles, and changing the sheets on the car seats.

She took Macher to the hotel, explained what to expect, and helped her get settled. And then she slipped back out into the night, heading to the next nervous, waiting student.

Fortunately for most of them, the drive becomes just a story to tell, and there are fewer rides in the Covid car on most campuses these days. Students Barilar drove in the spring semester still come up to him to ask if he remembers them. He does. “For a tough time, there’s been some great memories. I got to meet so many more of them. Just by taking 15 minutes out of my day.”