Colleges in the 2021-2022 Academic Year & Coronavirus (Part 2)

Parents Forum
3438

Just a local update: talking with university supervisor after university supervisor, their firm message to any staff who express fear of coming back in has been: stay home unless you can’t get your job done remotely, and then do it as fast as you can and ■■■■.

So far, that includes teaching. No, we do not have permission from upper admin to do this. One supervisor I talked to pointed out that if a heads-on-pikes approach is taken here, the response of normally confrontation-averse midwestern staff/faculty to the public attack on and humiliation of one of our own is not likely to take things in the direction admin wants.

I see the in-person semester evaporating pretty rapidly. What I don’t see is coherent planning for anything else, and I think that’s going to be a problem.

Edited to include: my course is listed as in-person, which it won’t be, because I ain’t going in. I’ve told my boss for that course that he’s going to wind up between me and his dean, and if he wants to replace me, that’s fine, just give me some heads-up so I’m not wasting time on prep. So far he’s declined to do that.

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3439

I believe in science, I am vaccinated as is my entire family and at the height of the pandemic we wore masks everywhere, saw very few people (only outside) and were very cautious. My kids will probably need to wear masks when they start school (HS) in 3 weeks. We are still careful now. But, when will we learn to live with this to a certain extent? Are we to remain masked, distanced and staying home for the next 2, 3, 5 years? As to zoom school - it was a disaster for my son, but at least I wasn’t spending $30, 40, 50 thousand dollars for it. If schools want to resort to zoom, they should price accordingly. Also, why all the fear if staff is vaccinated - vaccines have been extremely effective in minimizing serious illness, hospitalization and death.

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3440

I very much understand where you’re coming from.

The problem is that we don’t have a way of “living with this to a certain extent” that doesn’t involve human sacrifices; see the long-covid teen story above, representing 100K kids in Britain alone. I wish this were not the case. Maybe someday it will be. I hope so.

As for the pricing, I’m paying for it, too. And I get it. The problem is that the money has to come from somewhere if you want universities to keep on existing, and remote teaching has costs, too. Most teachers you talk to will tell you that remote teaching is also more exhausting and more work than in-person. I’d be perfectly happy with moving to a tax-supported, much more public higher ed system, which would mean no parents would be shelling out that kind of money for college unless it was very much by choice, but I think this is a minority view on CC.

As for vax protection – the problem there is that we don’t have good data on this atm. We know there are breakthrough cases, we don’t know how many, but we do know that the incidence of long covid after mild covid in middle-aged people is pretty high. (Recent large-cohort paper out of Oslo puts the number depressingly high.) It’s a disability issue rather than a mortality one for most – my job isn’t so important to me that I’m willing to be disabled by it. There are also many people working at universities who have small children and vulnerable adults at home, and nobody wants to bring home a breakthrough case in order to keep students in-person.

That’s before you get to the number of students who actually would rather not be in a classroom full of potentially infected classmates, especially in schools not requiring vax and/or masks.

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3441

It appears that vaccine availability in the UK is much more limited than in the US, and it seems that most referred to in that The Guardian page got COVID-19 without any chance to vaccinate. The UK only recently made 16-17 year old people eligible for vaccination (and 12-15 year old people are not eligible yet). Obviously, under-12 are not eligible in the US either, but such people typically are not in college.

For college students in the US who can get vaccinated easily, the more relevant considerations are the risk of breakthrough infections, how serious they tend to be, and how common “long COVID-19” is with them.

Unfortunately, “long COVID-19” is relatively neglected in COVID-19 research, so any personal risk assessment that includes the possibility of “long COVID-19” will be based on guessing the risk, such that different people will end up with wildly different risk assessments. Of course, risks specific to the B.1.617.2 / Delta variant are also incompletely known and therefore subject to guessing.

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3442

Yup. Afaics, all we know atm is that the delta variant gives you far higher viral load than last year’s main variants and does it very fast, that you’re infectious for a day or two before a test will pick you up, and that viral load drops off again fast for most. As far as we know from not much yet. But yeah, total crapshoot at this point on long covid. Given, though, that known long covid looks pretty darn bad, and that we have no structures in place to support people who have it, who wants to risk it?

If I were to wind up with long covid, I’d exhaust my leave, and then there’d be serious question as to whether my disability insurance would kick in. For all I know, I might have impaired cognition, so sorting through the processes competently could be impossible for me. There is no one else here to handle them for me. I wouldn’t get any benefits for having been injured at work, and probably wouldn’t get UI, since I wouldn’t be able to go out and look for work. I’d be SOL until a disability determination could be and was made. My being disabled cognitively or physically would also affect my kid’s life and ability to get through school easily.

It’s just not a good situation all around.

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3443

Any of that could happen if you catch covid outside of school and have long term affects like this. Everyone is at some level of risk. Not everyone can completely isolate. Many of us can’t WFH and are essential.

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3444

The examples cited here are pre-vaccination, and even then that article suggests only “one in 50 children with symptomatic Covid had symptoms lasting more than eight weeks”. That is symptomatic COVID not all COVID cases.

For comparison pre-pandemic there were reportedly 250,000 people in the UK already suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME (UK to launch world's largest genetic study into chronic fatigue syndrome | ME / Chronic fatigue syndrome | The Guardian). And an estimated three million in the US, with some researchers suggesting that long COVID and CFS/ME have numerous commonalities (https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/long-covid-really-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-another-name).

If only 1 in 50 symptomatic COVID cases have effects lasting more than 8 weeks (not all long term) and our kids have now gained a lot more protection from vaccination, then there’s little reason to think that long lasting effects amongst the young will be any more common than the CFS/ME risks that they have always been exposed to.

And just to note, UK schools were in person for most of the last school year even before vaccinations were available. Despite articles like this, there is zero support for going remote again.

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3445

It’s great that long-Covid is getting so much press attention early on. PoTS is totally under-diagnosed and doesn’t get this sort of attention. I actually don’t know anyone suffering from long-Covid (biased sample, most likely). However, I’ve known several teens who suffered severe debilitation from PoTS, and a couple more from other autoimmune disorders. All started with either a virus or bacterium. The lack of support, definitive answers or even understanding was quite frustrating for them. Most of the time they weren’t even taken seriously (or felt they weren’t).

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3446

I am going in and teaching in person, masked and behind a plexiglas shield, because I have tried to create effective compelling courses online and with the exception of the highly motivated and well-prepared graduate students I had last year, I could not succeed in getting engagement.

I think kids need to be back to school in person. Not just little kids but all students. Learning is social. Some students do well online but the vast majority don’t.

I am not worried about my own health. I may get a mild case of Covid but if I’m vaxxed and masked I’m not too concerned. I don’t have any underlying conditions or comorbidities that are cause for alarm.

If I have to teach online I will probably quit because even though it would be extremely disadvantageous economically for me, the stress and lack of gratification inherent in online teaching would be too great if I’m looking at 5+ year of doing it. I can’t do it. I took all the training classes and learned to use the LMS and external learning tools. I’m not a Luddite. I still hate it.

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3447

I don’t think most of my kids’ teachers found on-line teaching to be good for them or their students. A few threw in the towel altogether and resorted to using pre-recorded lectures (sometimes from Khan academy) in lieu of teaching live. Others (especially the older teachers) really struggled technologically (constant glitches, unable to access assignments, not sure how to use tools). It wasn’t good for anyone - and it was more work for teachers for something less effective. I don’t think our kids or teachers can take another year of the same.

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3448

Two of my daughter’s four professors this fall are over age 75, and they are all teaching in person. I assume they had options to go on leave or retire and chose not to do so. The other two younger professors are still in their 50s, again in person. All vaxxed.

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3449

I can attest to that—RSV has been horrible and is still going strong. Sigh

3450

The same is true with any other type of infection. The CDC estimates that 36,000 Americans die of influenza each year. Roughly 50,000 Americans per year die of pneumonia. Colleges (as well as their students, faculty, and staff) have a trade-off between risk and degree of normality. For affiliates of colleges with vaccine mandates (especially the students), the risks appear quite low. Probably for faculty too, as studies conducted last year show that very little COVID spread was happening in college classrooms. Assuming we will get to a point where we won’t have to decide that a certain level of deaths is “tolerable” to start “living with this to a certain extent” sounds somewhat idealistic, especially with experts saying it is now extremely likely that COVID-19 will become endemic. It seems the overwhelming majority of college affiliates have decided that the risk-level is tolerable for them to return to a state of affairs much closer to approach normal than that of last year’s.

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3451

Moderna is currently testing an mRNA vaccine for RSV:

A previous RSV vaccine caused antibody-dependent enhancement in trials and had to be scrapped. Fingers crossed for the mRNA tech.

As for Long Covid, I fully believe that it exists and can be debilitating. My DH has treated hundreds of adults with it (getting the vaccine has helped around half of them). However, I think disabling Long Covid in kids is not as common as the media is making it feel.

Here’s an excerpt from an article about a recent study:

Emma Duncan, professor of clinical endocrinology at King’s College London who worked on the research, said the “takeaway message” was: "Can children have prolonged illness after Covid-19? Yes they can, but it’s not common and most of these children get better with time.

“Children can also have prolonged symptoms from other illnesses as well. We need to be looking after all children who have protracted illnesses, irrespective of whether that illness is Covid-19 or anything else.”

Of course, it would be great to have more data, but this is a very tough thing to study. The most common symptoms of Long Covid in children and adolescents are headaches and tiredness. I have two children with chronic migraines. I guarantee that they would have headaches and tiredness for weeks after a theoretical Covid infection because:

  1. They have headaches and tiredness about 15 days a month normally.
  2. This gets markedly worse during/after any illness.
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3452

If the comparisons were good, I’d go in without worry. Unfortunately, they aren’t. Flu carries off the very young and old in high proportion, and while I’ve had flu bad enough to have lingering effects from one of them over ten years on, almost no one winds up disabled by flu. A few syndromes that do emerge after flu are recognized and codable. Pneumonia (which I’ve also had) is particularly dangerous to the very vulnerable and almost no one else.

The same is not true of Covid or of what’s currently being called long covid. As has been mentioned a few times here, the issue is not the fear of death. The fear is of disability and destitution.

I’ll illustrate. Suppose I go in, teach, go to meetings, etc., and mid-semester feel a tickle in the back of the throat; for the next three weeks I’m fairly ill but caring for myself, as there’s no one else here to do it and I’m not sick enough to be hospitalized. Fortunately, since my job is union-adjacent and I’ve had my job while healthy for a long time, I’d have enough sick leave to cover that, though the same would not be true for many teachers and professors. And then…I don’t really recover. Symptoms come and go. My mind isn’t quite right, and my vision feels off, and some days I can’t get out of bed. My boss, though sympathetic, realizes I can’t really do an intellectually demanding job with deadlines, and recommends I go on paid leave while seeing if I can get the paperwork together for disability.

Which I’d do if I could get myself together far enough to organize it all. Eventually, HR, which isn’t really interested in helping me, does offer enough help that I can submit my paperwork. It’s denied. I have a few months’ worth of sick leave left and am told I can try to resubmit the paperwork, which I do; it’s denied again.

When the leave expires I have nothing. I don’t have disability insurance; I don’t have unemployment insurance; I don’t have Social Security; I don’t have workman’s comp; I don’t have anything. Nothing pertains. I spend my savings, not too well because my head just doesn’t always work so well and I don’t have energy to do things to deadline, and am forced to start spending my child’s college money. Eventually, I’m fired, and I lose my health insurance. Things can spiral readily from there into poverty.

Given the prevalence of long covid in middle-aged people who’ve had mild forms of a less infectious covid virus, why would I risk this? For doing what, teaching your child for what’s not enough money at the best of times? I mean you really have to think about why people would do this sort of thing.

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3453

Please open the door and windows, if you can, and create as much airflow as possible. Before delta started coming through I told my dean that if we were looking at the likely policies at the start of the semester I’d be hauling around a box fan, sticking it in the open doorway, creating airflow, and wearing a duckbill N95. I’d have been more or less inaudible with all that going on, so if they wanted to mic me, great; if not, happy to move to zoom. Nobody’s happy to move to zoom, of course.

3454

Anything could happen to any of us at any point. We aren’t guaranteed tomorrow. I certainly hope my children’s teachers and professors show up and do a great job this year. The students need proper instruction and in many places last year was a disaster. Some did good, others scrapped by and others failed miserably.

Vaccines are available. PPE that protects the wearer is available. Many workers in many professions have worked this entire time so that society can continue to function. Just like it is necessary for a society to have money, taxes, to function, it is also necessary to have workers to do the essential jobs. I consider adequate teaching an essential job. I am thankful for the teachers that are taking their job as an essential one and doing what needs to be done to actually effectively teach the students.

@NJSue, thank you for being there for the students.

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3455

True, but as in the planning for retirement money, the idea is to delineate goals and risk tolerance, and manage the risk. If you’re someone who’ll be taken care of by a wife and other family members indefinitely if you become longterm ill, your idea of tolerable risk might be different from that of someone who hasn’t got your sort of cushion. Of course, it always seems to me minimally polite to have the “here’s the risk, what do you think” conversation with the people who’d be the fallback for the person who gets sick. Apart from that, if you’re hoping your kids’ teachers will show up, are you also willing to contribute what’s necessary to funds for their care and salary replacement should they fall longterm ill? If so, would you be grinding them down with requirements to prove, somehow, that they caught Covid from your school specifically, or would you be willing to say, “I get it, you’re too sick to think about furnishing that kind of evidence” and letting it go?

In any case, I think this is promising:

This is about K12, but colleges and universities are beholden to the feds for an awful lot of revenue. At my institution it’s hard to think of anything that isn’t touched by federal money, one way or another. I’m guessing it won’t be long before we see similar letters going to governors and trustees/regents and presidents of state universities, also community colleges that aren’t governed by school districts.

3456

If teachers are expected to self sacrifice in the name of providing an essential service then the students and parents should also have to play their part in creating as safe an environment as possible. Get vaccinated, wear masks, socially distant, get tested regularly, isolate if symptomatic. But that’s not always the case.

If I was a teacher in a district who isn’t mandating all those things then I say screw them! Take my original degree and find a non teaching WFH opportunity that I am qualified for.

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3457

What makes a teacher/professor any different than other front line employees that have been at work and keeping our country going during this pandemic? I’m sure teachers have benefited from others working in circumstances that also put those workers at more risk. Workers across this country show up every day so we can have the essentials necessary to live. Vaccines have made it safer for employees but many had to do these jobs even before vaccines were available. The reality is Covid isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and we can’t just all isolate and avoid life. The country would collapse quickly if we all stayed isolated. I personally believe that educating our students is a priority. I’m glad that many teachers/professors feel the same way.

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