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

Parents Forum
3498

Please step back and reflect on what you want people to endure and risk in order to provide something you want for your child, what you think they owe you along those lines, and how you came to that level of entitlement. How in fact you regard them and their humanity relative to your own.

My kid had a small breakdown last night at the thought of possibly having to go online again. She’s missed, as they’ve all missed, so much. As she pointed out a few weeks ago, this has gone on for ten percent of her life now. It’s many, many times worse for the kids next door, one of whom does not remember a time before the pandemic, and was so excited about starting kindergarten and playing with lots of other kids.

These are serious and terrible problems with long-term consequences. But I would still not ask my colleagues to come in and risk serious long-term illness, disability, impoverishment, loss of longterm quality of their own lives, danger to their own families, and so on in order to teach my daughter in a room, rather than on a screen. Nor am I stomping around waving my arms and demanding that her university refund all the money. My money is harder-earned than yours and I have less of it. I’ve worked harder than you have to ensure that a kid can go to college without the usual debt necklace that lowish-income kids come out with. But I also understand that we’re not the only ones here, and that in ten years other kids will also need to go to college, which means the colleges will need to be there for them. So yes, I pay.

The calculus is somewhat different for very young children, whose harms from this will, I think, fade much less easily. These experiences and losses will mark my daughter, and all young adults. But they will be foundational for young children. And there I can see the elementary teachers risking it for them.

I hope, but expect to be disappointed, in your response in supporting those people when inevitably some of them become seriously ill and it has major effects on their lives. The people demanding most insistantly that teachers to get in there and serve their kids also seem to be the people readiest to decide that these “essential workers” are slackers grifting away on the system, overpaid at the best of times. Again, I would suggest you step back and reflect on how you view your relative humanity and where your sense of entitlement and responsibility to those people come from.

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3499

You have ten days from exposure for monoclonal antibodies, and the sooner you get them, the better they work.

They used to be given by IV infusion, but can now be injected like a vaccine. You can get a prescription from your doctor or an urgent care doctor. In our area the hospitals are giving the treatment in the ER, but there are mobile units giving them in some places. Like vaccines, the treatment is free for the patient.

If you don’t have a doctor, or your doctor is not knowledgeable about monoclonal treatment, call the HHS’s Monoclonal Antibodies call center:
1-877-332-6585

For more info:

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3500

So you’re saying all of us who don’t think we’ve had Covid might have actually had it and should be worried about impending long Covid symptoms? No.

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3501

Thank you so much. I just found some info for them in NYC where they live.

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3502

Of course, and best wishes for your son and his girlfriend!

3503

I’m very sorry. The one good thing I can think of there is that N95s are readily available now, so at least if you get some, you can have better protection against this and any later variants. I never know how easily people visualize aerosols and transmission in quantities, but if this is a thing that comes easily to you, that 1:1000 number for viral load should give you a sense of the risk relative to last year when it comes to transmissivity.

I also suspect that DoL will be weighing in sometime soon on workplace mask mandates, and at that point it’s a federal regulation. It won’t be one bit popular, and I can see it costing the next election pretty hard, but it would put out a whole lot of fire. Maybe they’d mitigate that by requiring masks only in areas of substantial to high transmission, except for unvaccinated people, who could be required to mask all the time at work.

3504

You may have missed my question but given your background as a corporate lawyer I was anxious to get your opinion.

Is it not the case that employers have to make reasonable accommodations for staff who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons or refuse vaccination because of “sincerely held religious beliefs,” according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)?

You seem to suggest that there are no exceptions employees can exercise and I was hoping for some clarity. Thanks.

3505

Unfortunately, that’s how it is, sort of. I wouldn’t sit around worrying about it, but if you’re just knocked out for no obvious reason and you test negative, or have any of the other usual symptoms, I’d talk to a doctor. Hospital clinics that have opened over the last year or so to attempt to help people with long covid – they’re funded largely as research venues, because the collection of debilitating, merely troublesome, and silent inflammatory and other problems is so sprawling that we don’t have a handle on what this is or how it works – report people coming in who were never tested for covid and some who don’t even recall having had it, but their symptoms are so much like other long-covid sufferers that they’re referred. For some of the “I was sick but never got a positive test” people, there’s an obvious administrative problem, because they have trouble proving they had covid. But these people don’t even have that, so they’re dealing with “do you actually have another chronic disease that we know more about and that looks a lot like long covid”.

When the HCWs were saying last year that they’d never seen anything like this before, they weren’t kidding, and it’s a thing to be taken seriously. They were freaked by the novelty of it, because it seemed to have so little to do with what they knew of medicine and disease. It’s why so many people have died and so many are now disabled, and also why there was the full-court press for the vaccine. It wasn’t just about your inconvenience and the economy. It’s a very interesting and weird virus, which is also why there’s still so much uncertainty and suspicion about where it came from even among non-conspiracy-theorists, and while we’ve made a lot of progress quickly, this is not a well-understood virus.

The thing is, all that federal grant money I bet you’re not happy about being spent on medical research – part of what we get for the money is free access to all the results of the work and all the data. All this stuff is available for you to read by six months, at the lastest, after the (private) publishers make their money off the temporary copyright. Lots of it is available before then as preprints on bioRxiv. PubMed is there for you.

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3506

DoL will most assuredly not be weighing in anytime soon with mask rules. The agencies are having a brutal time figuring out how to implement the vax requirements for fed employees and contractors, and who is going to pay for the testing the non vaxxed will require. Further federal intervention is not coming anytime in the foreseeable future.

@bennty, I understand you feel undervalued, underpaid and unappreciated, and you believe that your remote teaching is an acceptable alternative. Regardless of the veracity of those claims, they are not legally relevant. Your current employer can require you to work in person. Plan accordingly.

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3507

To be fair, this was a point in time in June - when many of our government leaders were letting their executive powers expire. I just thought it was interesting. And I actually mis-remembered as republicans are actually more diverse than democrats in this poll. Also, 35% of the “it’s over” crowd identified as independent. Polling was done betw. 6/14 and 6/20.

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3508

Would bennty potentially be able to claim a religious exemption?

Employers have to make reasonable accommodations for staff who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons or refuse vaccination because of “sincerely held religious beliefs,” according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).”

People religious views are fluid and evolving and the test here is “sincerity”.

You are clearly the expert as a corporate lawyer but why would this not be an option?

3509

I’m going to assume that you have used the pronoun “You” in a general sense. In case not, let me hasten to clear up something: I too am in a situation where an ongoing disability from Covid will notably harm income security. I just happen to believe that 1) this is a quite low probability given the vaccine and Covid protocols; and 2) there is a duty to these students that supersedes focusing on our own comforts, fears and feelings of uncertainty. Half of the members of my family are involved in the teaching professions, two of them working closely with demographics that have a very poor vax rate. Another, like you, will be lecturing in front of many college students this fall. All of them have a sense of what is accomplished through education and are simply not willing to harm their students by not showing up. I’m not exactly sure of your age; mine is not friendly to getting Covid (or probably Long-Covid based on your research). So I believe that I am probably walking at least a portion of your walk, and that both of us could stand to look into that mirror. Something to think about would be why each has such a different understanding of this vocation.

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3510

Somehow it’s apparently ok for the workers at meat processing plants that supply us with food to face exposure and risks even though they may be vaccinated and wearing PPE. Or farm workers picking, sorting and packaging, etc our fruit and vegetables. Same could be said for the workers at power plants providing us electricity. Waste management employees taking away our garbage. Factory workers providing us with everyday needs. These people are on the job so the world can go on. Our schools are essential too.

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3511

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Hopefully the University of Maryland can have a mostly normal year this year. Students, professors and other college workers are being required to be vaccinated this year.

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3512

@bennty I think my perspective on risk is probably different from yours because my NJ employer is requiring vaccination and masking for everyone, and probably will have weekly pool testing of all (because Princeton is doing it, and throughout the pandemic we always end up doing what Princeton does). I would probably be much less sanguine about returning to class in person if vaccine and mask mandates for students were not in place. Actually my union was instrumental in demanding the masking rule for all, regardless of vaccination status. I initially opposed it but I have come around since news of Delta breakthrough infections has surfaced. Students and faculty have to apply for religious exemption from the vaccine rule. We have some Orthodox Jews and some (not most) Catholics in the area who are vaccine averse and this is a loophole for them. However, all unvaccinated students and faculty have to submit to weekly testing and I think the president will announce next week that we all have to submit to weekly testing. So at the price of having a swab up my nose every week, I will at least have some peace of mind. The classrooms have all been equipped with plexiglas shields, hand sanitizer and wipes, and 3-foot distancing of student seating (down from 6 feet earlier).

I am grateful to my faculty union for insisting that these protective measures be put in place. It sucks to teach in a mask but it’s still better than Zoom.

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3513

It is absolutely not okay unless they are actually vaxed, wearing PPE, and the plants shut down if there are outbreaks anyway. I don’t eat meat, btw; I buy my eggs and dairy from local small producers who are able to make the rules to keep themselves protected, and I’ve just come in from my garden. I’ve got solar panels and could weather a fair amount of system shutdown. As for consumer goods, the fact that some people have enriched themselves enormously through JIT supply chains should not be everyone else’s problem, which is why there are federally-funded studies underway to fix that situation to the point where sending people home so they don’t get sick and die doesn’t result in empty shelves. I could go through the rest here about what sort of measures we could take to protect people, which in some places have happened, and in others have not happened because they’ll make someone who’s rich slightly less more rich.

3514

I dont know where you live but in the NYC area you can get in almost any er, have your S call his primary doctor ASAP and he should be able to be treated. I replied before I saw your last response, please PM me if he is having issues so I can give you more specific advice

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3515

This is not by a long chalk the only thing we have very different understandings of. But you could start by looking at all those other family members you mention. Should you become disabled, would they be available to help you with daily living, perhaps indefinitely? And would you be willing to burden them with that longterm so that you could teach one way, rather than another?

I do not, of course, know your sex. But I notice that on the whole, the “go in and do it” people skew male, which is not surprising to me. Men benefit mightily from the invisible, frequently unpaid labor of crowds of women: it’s invisible because the men are reluctant to credit it or acknowledge just how much work, and what complex work, women are doing to support them in every aspect of their endeavors.

Which women help you daily for free, or for deeply unimpressive salaries and no credit that might, say, go into building their careers? What do they do for you, day after day?

I am aware of what disability would mean for me and for the few other people who would be affected by my disability. Are you, and if you are going in to teach in an area of low vax rates, have you discussed these things with them, and have they confirmed that they’re on board with giving the time and effort that would be required to help support you for what could be a long time if you’re disabled?

Also, are you tenured?

3516

For @bennty @NJSue and others writing about the risks to the instructor of teaching a college class…

Here is a risk estimate for the instructor of one class session with the following assumptions:

  • US overall for COVID-19 prevalence (choose your state or county for local prevalence).
  • instructor has two doses of Pfizer (most common vaccine in the US – choose your vaccine).
  • 55 minute class session (adjust for your actual class session length).
  • Nearest students are 6 students 6 feet away (a big lecture hall would have a closest row of more student further away with less risk – adjust for your actual class).
  • Students’ risk profile is equivalent to “went to a bar in the last 10 days” (assuming that many students go to weekly parties – may be a less risky profile for commuter, non-traditional, or graduate / professional students).
  • Indoor (adjust for actual class location).
  • No masks (adjust for your mask if worn; if there is a student mask mandate, better to assume the worst kind of masks for the students).

If the students are not talking much (i.e. instructor does most of the talking in a more lecture-type class), risk to the instructor is about 0.3% for each class session. If the class has 45 sessions per semester, the instructor has about a 13% chance of getting COVID-19.
https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=sixFt&duration=55&interaction=oneTime&personCount=6&riskBudget=1000&riskProfile=bars&scenarioName=custom&setting=indoor&theirMask=none&topLocation=US&voice=silent&yourMask=none&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer
For a more discussion based class (students are talking), risk to the instructor is about 1% for each class session. If the class has 45 sessions per semester, the instructor has about a 37% chance of getting COVID-19.
https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=sixFt&duration=55&interaction=oneTime&personCount=6&riskBudget=1000&riskProfile=bars&scenarioName=custom&setting=indoor&theirMask=none&topLocation=US&voice=normal&yourMask=none&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer

Within the chance of getting COVID-19, breakthrough infections are much less likely to be serious. The long COVID-19 risk is a big unknown, due to limited studies and information; some have estimated that, conditional on getting COVID-19, the risk of long COVID-19 is about half of that of an unvaccinated person, which may be about 30% from limited studies. If we assume that 15% of breakthroughs result in long COVID-19, then the lecturing instructor would have about a 2% chance of getting long COVID-19, while the discussion instructor would have about a 6% chance of getting long COVID-19. Of course, long COVID-19 also varies in severity and duration – a lifelong difficulty breathing is much more of an issue than hair loss for several weeks.

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3517

Holy crap. That’s actually quite a bit higher than I was estimating. I’ll have to take a look at that calculator, but that’s not good.

The Oslo paper puts self-reported long-covid symptom prevalence at 41% for adults (average age 47, n…I can’t recall offhand, but it was over 10K) at 8 months out, btw. Everything from general malaise and not quite being back to normal to cognitive problems. As 3sails points out, though, these are from last year’s variant, so we just don’t really know.