To the Journal editor:

Last year, Northern Michigan University did a spectacular job of navigating through the COVID-19 pandemic and the students, faculty, staff, and the wider community all benefited.

Now it’s time for the leadership of NMU to once again step up and battle COVID’s second act.

In an Aug. 4 letter, NMU President Fritz Erickson shared that all individuals, vaccinated or not, will be required to wear masks in campus classrooms.

While the covid shots are spectacularly effective, a few vaccinated individuals will become mildly ill after their shots.

These breakthrough infections are even more common with the delta variant, and some victims have been shown to be contagious. Infections in the vaccinated happen far less often than in the unvaccinated, the symptoms are much milder, and the breakthrough infected are less likely to pass it on to others.

Nonetheless, it was enough to cause the CDC to revise its recommendation for fully vaccinated people to wear a mask in public indoor settings in areas of high transmission. It also prompted NMU’s revised mask mandate.

What is more important, however, is the CDC long-standing recommendation that all people get vaccinated unless a medical condition or young age prevents it. Disturbingly, only half of young adults ages 18 to 24 have received their first shot.

Students will be returning to NMU in the next few weeks. They will be coming from parts of the country where delta COVID infections are exploding. At the time of this writing, Marquette County has less infection than 85% of U.S. counties, but this influx puts both students and local citizens at risk.

With vaccines widely available for the past few months, most of the unvaccinated have decided to risk getting COVID rather than get the shot.

They are right in pointing out that it is their choice. It shouldn’t be their choice, however, to pose a risk of infection to those under age 12 (who are not yet eligible for vaccines), the immunocompromised, and the elderly.

Mandating that both the vaccinated and unvaccinated “mask up” on campus is a poor substitute for what could really make a difference.

Our local university needs to do what the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and over 600 other U.S. colleges have done. It needs to mandate that NMU students, faculty and staff be fully vaccinated.