Borrowing a term from college admissions, I think one has to look at college Covid responses holistically. Each college faces a different set of challenges. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a small mostly residential college located in some isolated area with relatively low community infections would have better results. Instead, colleges should be measured on how they responded to the crisis under their own set of different circumstances. Did they respond reasonably well? Would you have done it differently if you were in their shoes?
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This could be because of the trauma the doctor and their family have been through. There is an added layer of fear and grief when someone goes (metaphorically) into the trenches every day.
DH is an infectious disease doc, so he’s been seeing Covid patients in multiple hospital ICUs for almost a year now. Eight of his patients died on Christmas Day, which wasn’t the highest death count, but it was Christmas, so truly heartbreaking. It makes you want to keep your loved ones close. (Sometimes it makes you want to put them in bubble like the bubble boy😉.)
Anyway, our D19 stayed home this fall but is back in school now, a 7-8 hour drive away. We also have a D21, and DH strongly believes that she will have a normal freshman year experience. He thinks the vaccine supply is going to flood the country in April/May.
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Of course, college intentions and reactions if there is vaccine general availability can be very different from that before vaccine was available, so historical intentions and reactions may not predict future ones at the college if there is vaccine general availability.
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exactly. The question for fall needs to be - if vaccines are widely available then what is the college’s plan?
Santa Clara U just came out and said they will be “in person based on guidelines of local government” for fall. But who knows what SC county’s guidelines will be??
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Basically, everyone can be vaccinated. The studies are still out on kids under 16, but they have a month of safety data that looks very good.
There are people who are medically immune-suppressed, for example, people with B cell cancers in treatment to wipe out their B cells, or people taking certain medications to control Lupus. The vaccine will not be as effective for them. Very fortunately, we don’t need to use a vaccine to prompt their immune system to recognize the virus and manufacture antibodies, because we can simply infuse them with engineered antibodies. (Eli Lilly and Regeneron’s monoclonal antibodies or antibody cocktails.)
They are studying this and the data look great—100% effective at preventing severe disease if given before exposure to the virus. So, immune-suppressed people will be able to get their immunity passively from an infusion (which will need to be repeated, possibly every three months).
Colleges’ responses to the pandemic so far should be looked at a little more broadly than just in the context of the pandemic itself. How a college did in the face of a crisis tells us something about its priorities. Did the college prioritize in a way that’s consistent with its public statements? How were its priorities different, if so, from those of the students?
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Yes. I agree. Some schools were super organized and communicated clearly and often last summer and during this school year. I offer Colgate, Purdue, and Bowdoin as examples of that. Others did not do a good job of this - making last minute decisions in August, like Northwestern.
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We have a nurse in the family and she is really frightened of Covid as she sees people in ICU. Her actions are even further from normal folks who are very cautious. It seems normal. Her patients die so her fears aren’t unwarranted. But compared to many who just get sick her reaction could be overstated.
Ha! That story has zero details. They can’t even define the “loosening” of the restrictions.
Has she gotten vaccine as a health care worker?
Yes, she just got it. She’s pregnant so lots going on. Her anxiety and reality coalesced in her becoming very frightened. I get it. I really do. But she kept telling folks that they were going to be in the ICU. Not taken well by some family members.
I am wondering if any school’s advance decision to reopen in person can really be considered a done deal? I am afraid we won’t know until immediately before the semester begins. Of course, things can also change during the semester. The unpredictability of this situation continues to be so very difficult.
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Very true. We really have no idea where this is going. The variants could mean that the pandemic will just continue in waves, and the vaccine manufacturers would just be retooling the vaccine for new strains every 6-12 months, similar to the way in which the flu vaccine is re-designed every year.
Encouraging that overall, cases are dropping world-wide right now.
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Are schools planning on single dorm rooms? That would be a big problem for schools like UCLA where triples are the norm.
McGill has announced that they will be in person for Fall, 2021.
McGill will return to in-person classes this fall | Montreal Gazette
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Not a surprise. Given their deep reliance on international students for their increased tuition in general, and it’s popularity with students in the US specifically, McGill knows that if they don’t return to predominantly in-person instruction in the fall then they will lose those students to schools that do. The other part of the equation is that even though the vaccine rollout in Canada in general has been very slow due to issues with procurement, Quebec has been faster to roll out what immunization doses it does have to it’s most vulnerable populations than the other provinces have been (especially Ontario). They’re probably feeling reasonably confident that a significant portion of their and the surrounding community will be vaccinated come September. On the other hand, they announced their plans for this past school year relatively early compared to many other schools and then had to walk back those plans once classes resumed in September.
I suspect that the reality for most large Canadian universities will be some form of hybrid system with large lecture sections remaining online and smaller sections, labs, practicums, and tutorials in-person (with masks), and with the resumption of some level of in-person on campus activities which will gradually open up more as the semester progresses.
I think the biggest unknown is whether a new strain will develop (or has already developed) against which the existing vaccines prove ineffective. If the vaccines remain effective, I think that enough people will have been vaccinated by next August/September so as to allow things to get back to being (relatively) normal. If the virus mutates it’s way around the vaccines - and God help us if it does - all bets are off.
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Agree. I also think the production timeline for vaccines is optimistic. They seem to have promised more than they are likely to be able to produce by July. It’s nice that we are getting a breather but still it’s unpredictable.
The interesting question to me is if and when we change from mandates to advisories and how people respond to that. For example the CDC advises you not to eat soft boiled eggs and not to have more than 2 drinks per day. But it’s not mandatory and the majority of the population don’t comply.
So I can imagine advisories about masking, distancing etc being in place in the fall (and options for staying remote if desired), but I think that any attempt to preserve mandates into the fall won’t be acceptable to the majority of the population. Even some of the most liberal CA parents I know are openly revolting against the idea that public schools will remain virtual for the rest of this school year.
I do think vaccination will be required for students, after all CA mandated the flu vaccine for students planning to attend public universities this year. But that should allow for normal occupancy limits in dorms and lectures.
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