Students React to Covid-19 Five Years Later

By Cleary Percy
Staff writer
IG: cleary_percy

It’s been over five years since Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020.

For many, Covid-19 would drastically change their way of life during the pandemic.

Perhaps no other group’s day-to-day lives were changed as much as students.

Many college students across the world, and attending Hutchinson Community College, were in their freshman year of high school, or in 8th grade when Covid-19 became a pandemic.

I talked to two Hutchinson Community College students about their high school experiences when the pandemic hit.

Tatro Unruh, a sophomore from Hutchinson, said that he had a mixed experience with Covid in high school.

“On one hand, I could sleep in later and have online school, and on the other hand, I couldn’t hang out with my friends as much except for on video games,” Unruh said.

Like many other high school students, Unruh had his school athletics affected by the pandemic.

“Another unfortunate part of Covid was that they had to cancel my first year of golf,” Unruh said.

“When we got back to school, we still had to wear masks everyday and that was probably the worst time for me,” Unruh said about his return to in person classes.

“My class was in one classroom all day, and overall it was a very boring and annoying time to be in school.”

While Tatro recalled Covid being a mixed bag for him as a student, another sophomore from Hutchinson, Ethan Glover, had a totally different view of the pandemic.

“Possibly the greatest year of my life,” Glover said. “I had no responsibilities as a freshman in high school. I slept through my zoom classes in the morning or played video games with my friends when we were supposed to be working on homework that wasn’t even graded.

“In the afternoons, we would bike around our neighborhoods and play basketball or watch movies. None of my friends really cared about quarantining, so we just chilled all day everyday.”

Just from these two, you can see a pretty drastic difference in each students’ attitude toward the pandemic and what new experiences came with living through it.

While it has been five years since the pandemic, it is still fascinating to see how students’ lives were affected in a real way by the pandemic.

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