A Massachusetts college recently issued a ‘stay at home directive’ for students living on campus. This order runs from Jan. 3-17 to combat the new omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The directive, by Emerson College in Boston, Mass., requires students living in residential halls to stay in their rooms. The only exceptions to this rule are testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment or to get mail.
Apparently, a 96 percent vaccination rate of the Emerson College campus community, as of Sept. 2, is not good enough to stop the coronavirus in the minds of these college administrators.
Other colleges, like George Washington University, Columbia University, Duke University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Temple University, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at San Diego, University of Washington, Illinois State University, believe their students will be protected if they once again stay off-campus and turn to remote learning for the first three weeks of the 2022 spring semester.
I wonder if they know something the rest of us do not? These colleges are acting like the omicron variant is some big storm. All we need do is ‘hunker down’ in our storm shelters for the first three weeks of 2022 and it will blow over and be gone.
I have news for them — it won’t. And when this variant has subsided another will most likely take it’s place.
In the beginning, I believed that COVID-19 would have faded away by now, especially after the introduction of the vaccines last year. I was wrong in that assumption.
Now, I pray COVID-19 will eventually become part of history like the 1918 Spanish Flu. But I am not holding my breath. We all need to learn to live with it, especially young adults.
In the meantime, there is something that is killing more young adults, ages 18 to 45, than the coronavirus. In fact, in 2020, more young adults died from this than COVID-19, motor vehicle accidents, cancer and suicide combined. According to an analysis of U.S. government data, fentanyl is the leading cause of death for young adults.
Data from the opioid awareness organization, Families Against Fentanyl says that almost 79,000 people between 18 and 45 died of fentanyl overdoses in 2020 and 2021. This compares to 53,000 COVID-19 deaths for the same age category in 2020 and 2021. This comes from data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Deaths attributed to fentanyl averaged over 114 a day in 2021.
For those of us who have not been personally affected by fentanyl, it is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin. “A deadly dose of fentanyl is small enough to fit on the tip of a pencil,” according to a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) press release.
Drugs like heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana can be laced with it. Now drug cartels in Mexico are flooding the U.S. with counterfeit pills containing fentanyl. These pills are made to fake out parents, friends, spouses and law enforcement.
This year the DEA has seized over 20 million fake pills containing fentanyl designed to pass for prescription pain medications like oxycodone.
According to the DEA, fentanyl primarily originates in China, with most of it coming into the United States across our border with Mexico.
Policies from the Biden Administration, which have opened up the border with Mexico, have allowed a record 1.7 million illegal immigrants from around the world into the United States during the first year of his presidency.
As illegal immigration has increased, so has the importation of illegal drugs. According to the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a record volume of fentanyl is flowing into America through the southern border. This can be blamed in part on President Joe Biden’s loose immigration policies.
In the first five months of 2021, the amount of fentanyl seized at the southern border increased by 360 percent from the same time period in 2020. That is just the amount of drugs seized.
Mexico’s former Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, in 2017, estimated Mexican Cartels send $64 billion in drugs to the U.S. annually.
If the President Biden truly cares about the lives of Americans, he would finish the wall and close our border with Mexico.
