UC Davis Ghost Town: Some Students Living In Dorms During Pandemic
UC DAVIS (CBS13) — It's gone from a bustling campus to a ghost town, but there is still life at UC Davis.
In fact, hundreds of students are still there, doing their remote learning just a few hundred yards from the buildings they once walked to.
Zong Jain Le sits down in his dorm room ready for class, staring at a screen instead of his instructor's face.
"It's a different way that we are used to," he said.
The freshman is one of roughly 500 students sill calling the university home out of the usual 5,700 who live in on-campus housing.
Associate Vice Chancellor Mike Sheehan is in charge of on-campus housing and dining.
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"Most of the students that we're housing right now either couldn't get home because they're international students or perhaps national students or maybe they don't have the home environment to go home to," Sheehan said.
All remaining students were moved to single dorm rooms and are given weekly health surveys to screen for the virus.
We caught up first-year student Neky Liu after he grabbed lunch, from the only dining hall still open on campus. Inside, masked servers are still working hard, scooping up from home cooking for people far from home.
Every order is to-go and it's all prepared under pandemic protocols. But most students are still smiling underneath their masks, taking this new wave of dining in stride.
"There's definitely lots of changes," Liu siad.
Changes no one saw coming. Students are putting pen to paper in a pandemic, their faces are covered but they're forging ahead.