Over 100 faculty members at the University of Saskatchewan have submitted a request for masks to be made mandatory on campus.
A letter of more than 100 signatures was presented to President Peter Stoicheff and the Pandemic Response and Recovery Team Thursday afternoon.
They’re asking for mandatory masking, the normalization of masks on campus, and having N95 masks be made available to anyone who wants them.
“We’re all back on campus, which is wonderful, but we’re in smaller spaces and reinfection is a reality,” Julie Boughner, a professor at the university who signed the letter.
“So it’s just one other way that we can protect ourselves, protect our students, keep everyone in the game, keep everyone in the classroom,” she added.
“Case counts and COVID infections, the number of COVID infections are going up on campus and in Saskatoon, and masking is a really simple way…to break that chain of transmission,” said Stephen Urquhart, professor of chemistry.
“If a student tells me ‘Look, I’ve got to be absent, I have COVID’, I report the number and the university has numbers of reported infections. Maybe not all infections get reported, but the numbers have gone up consistently since the start of term unfortunately, and we’re seeing the absences in our classes.”
Chair of the University of Saskatchewan’s pandemic response and recovery team Dr. Darcy Marciniuk said the university was paying close attention to cases of the virus, which can be measured on campus.
“Our cases which were 168 on campus last week, we’ve had eight prior weeks with higher cases. That number is about 56 per cent of a peak that we had in the spring when we had full on campus cases. We’re also monitoring the wastewater, which plateaued last week. It’s there, but it’s plateaued,” he said.
Dr. Marciniuk said the university’s current policy was that masking was preferred, but at this time there was no plan to mandate masks.
“We don’t want to bring back a mask mandate if the uptake and the indications for mandatory masking are not there. We’re going to lose credibility and trust,” he said.
“Some people are looking for black and white, and the reality is we’re living in a lot of grey. That’s our life right now, and so our job is to understand, to assess, and to thrive in that grey rather than be troubled by it.”
Premier Scott Moe says the province is not considering implementing any other public health measures.
“At this point in time due to a number of factors, one of them being our health system is not in a position where it was when we did implement public health measures here in the province, that there’s none that are under consideration at this point in time,” he said.
