Chapman University needs to provide all campus community members high-quality masks to prevent the spread of the omicron variant.

The California Department of Public Health has laid out that N95, KN95, & KF94s are the best masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. 

Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of UC San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, has said since Omicron is twice as infectious, “an encounter that you could have tolerated for Delta may well infect you [with] Omicron. Knowing this, it’s worth upgrading the protection you get from your mask.”

However, when students & faculty return to campus, they will come with whatever masks they have, many still wearing the cloth masks Chapman sent out over a year ago. If Chapman invested in KN95 masks today the way they did in these cloth masks in 2020 they could provide each student with at least 25 masks.

Providing students & staff with access to higher quality masks will allow us to return to campus safely and provide an additional layer of precaution on top of the testing and contract tracing steps being taken by Chapman.

At the beginning of the fall semester, we saw how fast breakthrough cases could spread through campus - we cannot afford to be caught off guard again.