From the University of Toronto to Wilfrid Laurier University to Carleton University, students across Ontario are begging one another to take precautions against COVID-19.

Statements like those below, posted by students to Reddit, a social media site that hosts unofficial forums for universities across Canada, appear on a daily basis now. 

“I swear every lecture I go to at least 7 people are one cough away from respiratory failure.” – r/UTSC

“Guys, can you please stay home if you have the god awful cough?…I really don’t want to get sick and some of you aren’t masking or even bothering to cover…” – r/WLU

“Please wear a mask if you’re sick. It seems like a basic courtesy that if you’re coughing and  sneezing you should be wearing a mask. We are students and missing class obviously impacts our learning and how much work we can do” – r/CarletonU

On forums like r/UofT you’ll find students using the internet’s equivalent of shouting to implore people to protect themselves and others:

“WEAR A MASK IF YOU’RE SICK OR HAVE BEEN SICK RECENTLY FFS. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I’VE HEARD SOMEONE SAY ‘yeah I’m sick’ OR HEARD SOMEONE COUGHING AT 100000 DECIBELS WITH AUDIBLE PHLEGM AND THEN THEY’RE NOT WEARING A MASK…” – r/UofT

Let’s be clear: what we are witnessing here is a failure in public health as vulnerable people are being left to self-organize around a larger systemic problem over which they have diminished control and a reasonable expectation that if they were at risk (they are), the school they are attending would inform them (they are not). 

At Laurier, where I research the relationship between play and cognition, there has been no mention of the virus this term; no communication about the risks; no guidance on how students, staff, and faculty can protect themselves. At the same time, it is not uncommon for a quarter of the class to be absent at any given time in our program. This has to change.

When I say that vulnerable people are being left to fend for themselves, I mean all of us. We are all vulnerable to COVID, from our lungs to our hearts to our brains. Since higher education is about developing thinking and reasoning skills, I’ll focus on just the mental or cognitive impacts of a COVID infection. As a disclaimer, a number of these studies rely on measuring changes in IQ, a problematic tool for assessing intelligence, partly due to cultural and social biases. However, these studies do provide insight into baseline changes in cognitive functioning. 

COVID research tell us that:

• Mild COVID infections are associated with a drop in IQ, warns the New England Journal of Medicine. 
• In adolescents and young adults, mild COVID infections disrupt brain connectivity and reduce memory function, according to research from Translational Psychiatry.
• A single, mild COVID infection can result in the equivalent of the brain aging 10 years, leading to “larger cognitive decline” compared to those uninfected, Nature reports.
• Young, healthy adults who experience a mild COVID infection show memory and cognition impairment, according to a study published by Heliyon.
• More severe infections lead to higher drops in IQ, (New England Journal of Medicine); and in one study, one in nine people hospitalized with COVID saw a 30pt drop in IQ (Lancet).
• Long COVID is associated with severe cognitive slowing (Lancet)
• One in six Canadians infected with COVID report long COVID symptoms (Government of Canada)
• These impacts on cognition can last for years (Lancet)

If you or your child is attending an Ontario university and they are not taking the proper precautions, they are at risk of graduating with worse cognitive performance than when they arrived. This is not to dimmish students, a number of whom recognize the need for precautions and are scrambling to protect themselves and others. Rather, the responsibility lies with university leadership who have the resources and responsibility to distribute that information at scale. And yet they remain reluctant to even acknowledge the existence of COVID, let alone promote precautions. 

Importantly, we do have a “near perfect” solution to this problem: respirators (i.e. N95 masks) are 98 per cent effective at stopping the spread of the virus. As we saw last week on TVO’s The Agenda, informed, equity-focused experts recognize the role of wearing and promoting masks designed to stop airborne pathogens during an ongoing pandemic. It’s worth questioning why this guidance isn’t also being promoted by our governments, local public health officials, or on our university campuses where faculty are producing peer-reviewed research on the harm COVID causes, research that is then resoundingly ignored by their own institutions.

This all seems tied into a broader trend away from evidence-based decision making — the bedrock of good governance — towards decision-based evidence making. 

Though by no means a new phenomenon, increasingly leaders are deciding what a policy will be and then manufacturing the evidence that supports that position. It’s an inversion of the scientific method and a dangerous shift towards a post-truth politics in which peer-reviewed research holds as much sway over decision-makers as any other opinion, perhaps even less so given the deference we are witnessing from leadership towards reactionary right-wing framing of topics like the climate crisis, vaccines, genocide, and other socially pressing but economically and politically inconvenient issues.

Indeed, political expedience — making decisions based on what is most convenient rather than what is most moral — is becoming the new norm. The fact is, COVID is an inconvenient truth and leaders have taken the path of least resistance in responding to it, choosing the more expedient route of appeasing those who reject science and our duty to care for others rather than embracing evidence and minimizing harm. While we have become somewhat inured to this from elected officials, there’s something particularly pernicious about an institution of higher education dismissing science, particularly when this involves exposing learners to a virus that diminishes their ability to think, to reason, to learn, and in some cases to even function. 

If labelling this post-truth politics seems like an overreach, consider that while universities ignore a demonstrably harmful virus, they continue to position themselves as bastions of equity and inclusivity and to promote the very research they ignore in their own governance.

What needs to happen now? University administrators need to publicly acknowledge the spread of COVID on our campuses; they need to clearly and repeatedly convey the risks in ways that align with best practices for communicating public health information — a single email buried amongst countless others is not going to be effective. 

Most importantly, they need to explain how students can protect themselves and each other, such as cleaning the air via enhanced ventilation. The science on the harms of COVID and how to prevent it is becoming quite clear; it’s time for our university leaders to do what we teach our students to do: follow the evidence. The hearts and minds of our students depend on it.

Dr. Steve Wilcox is an associate professor in the game design and development program at Wilfrid Laurier University where he researches the relationship between cognition, play, and communication.