UBC students say pricey hotel quarantine not accessible, calls for alternative
Posted March 14, 2021 2:02 pm.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — The UBC graduate student society is pleading with the federal government for students to be able to quarantine on campus rather than in a three-day $2,000 government-mandated hotel.
Alireza Kamyabi is vice president with the grand society at UBC, and says an on-campus alternative would be much more accessible, especially for grad students.
“Graduate students are a little bit of a special group in this sense, because, as opposed to undergraduate they usually have to come to Canada to access labs, research facilities that are in or around campuses,” he says.
Kamyabi says UBC is not the only university concerned about this.
“We talked to a lot of the other graduates in societies across Canada and similar experiences were voiced across graduate schools in Canada. From there, I think there was a need to kind of make sure the government is aware of the effect that this might have on our post-secondary education sector.”
Kamyabi hopes the federal government will consider an alternative to the mandatory hotel quarantine, especially since the quarantine is financially inaccessible for a lot of our graduate students.
