Martha’s Mask Misinformation

The week before Thanksgiving break, Ithaca was graced with a rare visit from Cornell President Martha Pollack.  Immediately after an eventful week of threats against Cornell’s main campus, many recoiled at the deafening silence emanating from the President’s office.  Further, after two months of COVID level green and cases at an all-time low, the unasked but ubiquitously-felt question was simple: when will the restrictions end?

Of course, our queries were unsatisfied.  The mind-numbing bureaucracy that is the Cornell Administration merely shape-shifted into the form of Martha Pollack to offer non-answers and punt on the most important questions.  Most egregiously, Pollack refused to offer any timeline for the end of the mask mandate, citing “state and federal regulations.”  It seems as though the Cornell administration cannot let us down to any greater extent, but they somehow stumbled across a portal to a lower dimension and started digging there.  Pollack had the temerity to claim the university’s unintelligible COVID policy is “follow[ing] the science.”

It does not.  Allow me to review the current state of COVID in reference to the Cornell community.  My hope is that, with such a fact-based student body, the statistics will be more persuasive than the platitudes of an absent bureaucrat.

Cornell’s Ithaca campus is currently 97% vaccinated, more than any country on Earth.  Additionally, Cornell’s aggressive testing regime has identified virtually every case of COVID this semester, resulting in a very stable supply of data.  The week of the President’s statement, precisely 0.04% of Cornell’s population had contracted COVID-19.  That number is a rounding error, the definition of statistically insignificant.  Some perspective is helpful here.  Take Introductory Oceanography, a staple Cornell experience and the largest class on campus.  The probability of one of the class’s 1,000 students having COVID is 0.00016%.

For reference, the CDC defines “Low” community transmission as less than 5% test positivity. At the risk of incessantly citing Cornell’s COVID Dashboard, our positivity rate is 0.32%.  As such, Martha’s enthusiastic passage of the buck to the “state and federal” restrictions is a ridiculous proposition.  Even if our numbers were worse, the CDC’s advice is a recommendation, not a regulation. 

Tompkins County is perfectly content to punt the metaphorical football back to the CDC.  “Federal and state” authorities cannot save Pollack this time, but what of her promise to follow the vaunted science?

President Pollack is clearly unaware of the irony in her usurpation of “the science.”  In doing so, she undermines the vaccine she forced into our arms.  Indeed, the science is very clear regarding the vaccine’s effectiveness.  A long-term study over the course of this year found breakthrough infections occur only once per five thousand people.

The decision to remove the brick stapled to the accelerator of COVID regulations is Cornell’s alone.  Federal authorities have reneged too many times for their recommendations to sway the people.  I implore Cornell’s administration: do the right thing and take action, cease these mandates before they become, much like COVID itself, endemic.

This article was written by a member of the Cornell community who wishes to remain anonymous.