S19 already took fall 2020 off and then had Covid school last spring (which was not normal but good enough and he experienced some positive things that h maybe would not have if school had been normal). But we are done with all of that and, with everyone vaccinated on campus, I’m hoping for the best. Right now, Bowdoin is still saying no masks believe it or not. Going for as normal as possible and their location helps with that. Fingers crossed. I don’t appreciate the judgement when it comes to my opinion on him missing class. It indeed would be detrimental to his learning to miss so much class. These aren’t large lectures that are being recorded. It’s not that kind of school.
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One thing that may be helping Bowdoin go mask-less and nearly test-less (only once a month, per the July 30 Fall Semester Update) relative to Amherst is local vaccination rates.
According to the Bowdoin email, the Maine CDC estimates that 99% of Brunswick residents are vaccinated. However, per the Massachusetts Department of Health’s Weekly COVID-19 Municipality Vaccination Report on July 29, only 36% of Amherst residents are fully vaccinated (despite being one of the most liberal towns in the state of Massachusetts, with over 90% of votes in the 2020 election being cast for Biden)!
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Only 36% of Amherst residents are fully vaccinated! Wow!
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This thread is so entertaining. Pseudo medical advice and school advice… Lol…
I find it interesting that I have friends that are so careful with Covid, Got the vaccine, wear masks indoors then let their kids go to Lolapolloza. Sure they have masks in their pockets if needed. I watched the Foo Fighters and some other bands on Hulu from the weekend and kids were cheek to cheek mostly. Your catching something… Lol… Maybe a cold.
Good thing for her kid Michigan has a stronger Mandate this year. School should be an improvement over last year, hopefully.
Also as obvious most students will have masks to some extent. This is a good thing not a negative. Someone asked about why Cornell is having masks even with high vaccination rate… Because their being responsible. Regardless what we all read and think we understand… We don’t… It’s an evolving medical crisis. The only thing we can do is try to stop the spread by wearing masks indoors and in crowded area’s and try to convince as many people to still get vaccinated…
As far as Zoom in classes /meeting with professors, or taped classes etc. There are actually advantages to both but if anyone thinks the schools threw away their electronics and Software packages your fooling yourself. Yes, schools when they need to will go to online classes in some form in a heartbeat.
I can only hope that this year will be some improvement over last year.
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That’s true, so let’s use numbers. There are 213,000 residents in the county (roughly - 2019 numbers). Per the CDC, 69% of these eligible residents are vaccinated which is roughly 146,970. Of these vaccinated, 346 were infected with Covid in July. That’s a very small number: only .24% of total vaccinated. However, we also know that 31%, or roughly 66,030, were unvaccinated and that only 123 of these residents were infected. Again that’s a small number: .186% of total unvaccinated. Note, however, that unlike in prior examples with prior variants, the percentage of infected vaccinated actually exceeds the percentage of infected unvaccinated. Therefore, the Barnstable County data suggests that being vaccinated doesn’t necessarily make you less likely to contract Covid. Add this factoid to the comparable transmission rates, and you have comparable risk from the vaccinated. Suggested. Not definite. But it appears to be evidence nonetheless.
I’m looking at the local hospital’s daily inpatient and staff-positives report, which I started tracking a couple of weeks ago. This is one of the best-vaccinated areas in the country, this town without students here. Adult vax rates to make an epi giddy.
Zoop, up goes the curve. Inpatients: 7, 7, 7, 12, 11, 10, 10, 13, 18…
Peds inpatients: 0, 0,…1, 1, 1, 1…
Hospital employee positives: 0, 3, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 5…
We top out at around 90 beds, btw, and the students aren’t here yet.
I rather suspect Bowdoin will have masks. I do get the “for God’s sake” urgency about the possibility of missing more in-person classes, or having to go to office hours to catch up if it’s not beyond-shadow-of-a-doubt necessary. We’re not done with the pandemic, though. Flexibility is still going to be necessary.
My kid has a big milestone coming up and we’re shifting the day because she’s been traveling, and she needs to let a reasonble incubation period pass before she does a self-test. Otherwise it’ll be masks and distancing.
It’s still a pandemic.
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Bowdoin never recorded classes last year. They believed that, if class had to be remote, it would be done with the proper online teaching pedagogy. They bought everyone iPad pros and trained the professors to use technology to teach remotely. It wasn’t recorded lecture time. No one “zoomed” in. The classes (for the most part) were creatively done and interactive (and not just zooming in everyone to talk to each other -more than that)
I understand that most other schools can just put a camera in class and zoom kids in or record lectures but they won’t do that.
Oh, also, if you’re planning on getting Binax cards, I’d recommend doing it soon. My order came through partially fulfilled today – they ran out of single-test packs, were shipping only larger quantities.
Bowdoin explicitly says on their website’s Fall 2021 page “fully vaccinated students, faculty, and staff will not be required to wear a face covering inside buildings on campus.”
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These are two separate issues. @sdl0625’s son isn’t getting vaccinated under false promises. He needs to be vaccinated so he doesn’t get Covid or spread it to others. That’s a valid health concern and separate from his college plans.
Whether he’s vaccinated or not he needs to follow the college’s rules. The parents are wise not to let him go to school if he’s insistent that he won’t follow health rules. They can’t trust that he’ll magically change his mind once he’s there, and getting expelled would be a costly mistake. Choices have natural consequences. If he refuses to follow the rules he can’t attend in person classes.
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HOw sick are those vaccinated people? Vaccine was going to have breakthrough cases. Not sure how many times people need to say that. Efficacy went down when delta came to town. Again, maybe one percent of all vaccinated will contract Covid. That’s over a million people. We will all know some. I feel like many here are blowing this way out of proportion. You guys need to stop.
Bowdoin is consulting with some pretty impressive experts. I trust their plan for now and if it changes,
Aren’t you in FL? I’m thinking that, even if your neighborhood is vaccinated, it would be pretty easy to run into unvaccinated people coming and going. FL not taking Covid all that seriously.
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I wouldn’t draw either conclusion from the Barnstable County example. All it tells us is that the vaccinated still has a significant risk of being infected, if they engaged in activities that exposed them to large quantities of virus without additional protection.
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The hospital employees – no idea. But the others are all hospitalized.
The problem with CDC reporting on vaxed infected is that they’re reporting only hospitalized. Milder breakthrough cases are not being reported, so in fact we don’t know what the breakthrough rate is. The issue there isn’t “will this kill you” for those people, it’s “will this disable you”, and since long-covid symptoms are common even in unhospitalized adults, that’s a problem.
Oh, also, no, not in FL. It is possible that we’re receiving patients from elsewhere, but I hadn’t heard about hospitals out in the state being overwhelmed yet.
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The information from the Provincetown outbreak does not suggest this in any way. Since this is not the “Inside Medicine” thread, I will not go into detail other than to say that:
- PCR does not measure viral load, and
- Not only was PCR the wrong test to use to determine infectivity, the testing in P-town was by choice, not random, and the numbers were not large enough to power a study.
For those interested in reading about an actual research study of 100,000 people, I suggest looking at a preprint of this paper: “REACT-1 round 13 final report: vaccine effectiveness associated with Delta variant in England during May to July 2021.”
Here’s an article about the research: REACT Study findings
And here’s a quote from the article:
The research found that infections were three times lower in people who were fully vaccinated, compared to unvaccinated people. The data also suggested that people who were fully vaccinated were less likely to pass the virus on to others, due to having a lower viral load on average and therefore shedding less virus.
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That sounds like the key nugget to me.
this was already discussed directly with @sdl0625 (see above) …thank you
The town of Amherst low vaccination numbers are misleading. I read an article in a MA paper that the numbers appear low for 2 reasons. 1. The population number they are using includes all the college students (and UMASS is a big school), but the vax numbers don’t account for many of the students vaccinations since many of them did not happen locally. 2. Amherst has a higher % of children relative to total populations then many other MA towns and they are not eligible for vaccines yet.
If you look at the new Covid case numbers for the town of Amherst over the past few weeks/ they are extremely low. The last weekly report listed just 6 new cases in Amherst over the last 14 days. And the 35% rate mentioned in the post above is a number from June. Not totally current. Number as of last week was about 46% though still marred by the data issues mentioned here.
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The problem is that the CDC did, indeed, draw the conclusion as to transmissibility; specifically, their conclusion is that breakthrough cases may be as transmissible as unvaccinated cases. That’s one reason why there has been a return of indoor masking for the vaccinated. The other is that "Vaccines prevent >90% of severe disease, but may be less effective at preventing
infection or transmission. Therefore, more breakthrough and more community spread despite vaccination"
See page 22 and the preceding pages: https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/54f57708-a529-4a33-9a44-b66d719070d9/note/7335c3ab-06ee-4121-aaff-a11904e68462.#page=1
We don’t have an accurate count on how much of the current surge may be caused inadvertently by the vaccinated. Right now the strong odds are still with the unvaxed, not the vaxed. But the CDC believes now that the vaccinated can spread Covid in notably greater numbers than they did just a few weeks ago. This is a very new and quite sobering finding. That’s why they took the precaution to recommend re-masking indoors for the vaccinated.
Amherst’s letter reads: “Those who are battling serious illness, are hospitalized, or have succumbed to the virus have been overwhelmingly unvaccinated individuals. However, there is increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals can and do transmit the Delta variant as easily as those who have not been vaccinated.” Looking at the most recent data in a prudential light, and considering the precautions that the CDC has recommended, this doesn’t seem like an incorrect statement.
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The CDC says “vaccines MAY be less effective in preventing transmission”. Amherst’s statement seems irresponsible and not proven. I don’t know why Biddy would go out on a limb and say that the vaccinated CAN transmit as easily as unvaccinated people. That’s not at all what the CDC said.
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Vaccinated people simply do not transmit as easily as unvaccinated. In the interest of not debating, I will duck out of this thread for awhile.
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