Is there actual data from schools that were in-person last year regarding the prevalence of Covid actually caught by teachers while in school (not picked up at a social event outside of school, etc)? There were plenty of areas that had schools in session and I would imagine we could look at actual data as opposed to speculating percentages.
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Youâd have to try to adjust for mask policy (likely had one last year, may not this year), density changes, and the fact that the circulating variant is far more transmissible than what we had last year, so youâd be back to modeling anyhow. Oh, and vax prevalence, of course.
The risk factors in in-person school last year are likely different from now:
- Schools last year had more in-class COVID-19 mitigation requirements like mask requirements and distanced seating in classrooms. Of course, the degree which these have been relaxed may vary from school to school. (+risk now)
- Both students and instructors are likely to be less rigorous with out-of-class COVID-19 mitigation measures, especially since many COVID-19 mitigation requirements set by state and local governments have been relaxed. (+risk now)
- B.1.617.2 / Delta is much more contagious than the variants circulating last year (R0 of 5-10 versus 2-3). (+risk now)
- Vaccines are available now, though uptake varies in different schools and communities. (-risk now)
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Huh. Thatâs an interesting calculator, and Iâm still testing to see if it breaks anywhere I can think of easily. The creators whose linkedins Iâve found look legit enough to me given their caveats. The problemâs that if theyâre wrong in assumptions anywhere the error bar can be kind of giant. But â once you figure out that you have to play with vax rate by using location â this is actually pretty much in line with my perceived risk of, say, having my daughter over now vs. after sheâs been living in the dorm for a while. Also of how protective being outside at, say, a sidewalk cafe might be.
The density, unknowns, talking, and timespan in the classrooms are really the problem â that and, I think, the trouble itâll be getting people to adjust from âsix feet is safeâ to whateverâs happening today. You also have to consider that whatever classroom youâre walking into has probably just been used, so the airâs already full of whatever, especially if the students werenât masked and it was a long class or particularly shouty.
Iâm really wondering what my experience of this whole pandemic mightâve been like if I hadnât learned to visualize aerosol plumes, viruses and their replication, cell membranes, biochemical cascades, etc. some time ago. I wish Iâd paid more attention to immunology, though.
You know, this might indeed happen. But we happen to have a reliance on God and on people of good will. We have extended family with means and everyone looks out for one other. We are blessed that way - many donât have this. Our church and our local community would generously step in too. I think the social safety network where I live is pretty good. So Iâm quite optimistic that should the tragic occur - whether it be long-Covid or something else - we would have needed support. A pandemic isnât the first time one has the opportunity to think through these things. Also, we are not aware of any family or friends who have become disabled by C-19. Plenty who have had it, but no one disabled by it.
I happen to skew female.
I believe that my family and I are well educated on the risks of Covid and benefits of those protection measures such as vaccination, masking, social distancing and so forth. We happen to follow the data and are pretty confident that common sense protocols work for us. We have not allowed Covid to define our life and even took advantage of last yearâs shut down in January to do some traveling to sunnier climes that had open restaurants (we met plenty of other wayfarers who were there for the same reason we were). Frankly, we are a lot more worried about other health issues right now than Covid - I believe I can take measures to reduce my risk of long-Covid, but canât necessarily do that for some types of cancer (to mention just one other disabling disease).
Tenure isnât something I will discuss here except to recognize that if someone is tenured then their job is obviously more secure. We know no one in academia who has been disabled by Covid (plenty who have gotten it). We do know many who have become disabled by other health crises, both in the for-profit world and the academic/education world. In my experience, medical leave these days seems pretty accommodating but YMMV. Most of my acquaintances involved in college work have tenure/tenure-track positions; for the most part not adjuncts or permanent instructors. Those few who are permanent instructors have the luxury to do other things should they choose to. One is married to a Nobelist. This might not be a representative sample of academia.
I do know of one particular permanent instructor - an older woman who appears physically frail (to me anyway) - who taught one of my kidsâ Core sequences at their university (they both signed up for and were lucky to get her section). Last year, thankfully, she ran her section remotely. I was seriously worried about her. This year is in person. Honestly I donât think they could have kept her from getting in front of the class again - but sheâs the kind who will try to hold class even when the university tells them not to (say, during TG week) or during the grad student union strike, when many other instructors cancelled class out of sympathy. Also, my kids laugh at me for calling her âfrailâ and assure me that she is anything but. Sheâs a tough, dynamic teacher who uses the Socratic method. Iâm pretty sure she got through practically all the material last year - I recall that she was a bit POâd that half a week was cut off due to that TG week prohibition. To her, this is crucial content. But then, one doesnât have to sign up for her course - there are other choices that satisfy the requirement. Thereâs probably a big difference between someone like her and an instructor who âhasâ to teach some required subject or other to students who âhaveâ to be there. Not saying thatâs your situation - just trying to provide some context.
My son actually had an instructor last year who caught Covid right after the end of the in-person portion of fall term, but still ran the last two weeks of class remotely and then continued that well past the end of fall term (attendance not required at that point, of course, but apparently the turn out was pretty strong). I enjoyed that my son got to continue his learning over winter break, free of charge. And he was thrilled. They had gotten through the planned material, but thereâs always lots more to learn. That was a more specialized class, not an intro sequence.
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I do not know what your long term risk of covid is from teaching in person this year, but I am certain that your immediate risk of being terminated for cause is quite high. Good luck with your plans and alternatives.
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My kidsâ university had no cases of Covid spread person-to-person from either in-person class or dorm living through at least end of winter and I believe end of spring as well. The college had an outbreak following spring break and had to shut down in-person instruction for a couple of weeks. Several in the dorms were infected but contract tracing revealed that they had all attended an off campus party. Everyone had a single and dorms were at 60% capacity so that probably helped contain the spread there. No reports of in-class spread from that outbreak.
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Unfortunately the dorm density this year will probably be a major factor. I feel especially badly for those students at the many overenrolled schools who are being packing into every nook and cranny.
@bennty thanks for the binax recommendation!
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Also fewer students studying abroad, so more juniors on campus.
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No, I guess thatâs probably not representative.
When you talk about âmedical leaveâ â understand that this is part of the problem. Even if the leave is available, and for most instructional staff in the country it is not (recall that tt accounts for a shrinking minority of contact hours â tt wanted to do research, after all, but did not want non-tt to have sal/ben/governance-privilege parity), you need a diagnosis, one that the medical community is agreed upon. If you have MS, no problem. A stroke, cancer, fine. But a collection of ill-defined chronic symptoms that leave you unable to get out of bed reliably and think straight â itâs not insurance/HR-ready, yet. Might not be for years.
Iâm very fortunate among contingent fac in that teachingâs not my primary job, Iâve been around a long time, and my benefits and job security are spectacular. (Which is the only reason Iâve been able to teach for the laughable, increasingly insulting money weâre paid for teaching. The effective wage for adjuncts is frequently below minimum. If you want to talk about devotion to students, you might start there.) Iâd actually have paid leave for months. But if I were sick longer than that with something that has no clear, codable medical definition, even Iâd be out of luck. And I wouldnât have been paid well enough in the run-up to have been able to sock away tt-type money to cover a long period of unemployment, nor is someone else here to carry and take care of me â nor would I want them to have to do that. Getting SSD would be a multi-year nightmare even after long Covid was defined. As they said in The Wire, âThis America.â
If thatâs how it is for me, consider how it is for your average non-auto-renewing lecturer, especially where contracts can be shortened at the universityâs will, and for patchwork-of-classes adjuncts who have no benefits and no guarantee of teaching until days before a semester starts, and grad students, who I find are less terrified than they used to be of crossing their advisors, more debt-laden, more aware of labor issues and the value of mental health than they once were, and less likely to be paid money they can live on, given local rents. Last year did a lot of damage. A lot of adjuncts were told they werenât wanted, a lot of lecturers with long and well-praised service werenât renewed, because they were the easiest people around to cut loose if you wanted to save money fast. The grad students were often sent back into the labs and classrooms before the tt faculty started showing up with any regularity. Theyâre all less inclined this time around to risk themselves and their families for the universities, because theyâve had a very vivid demonstration of what a one-way street their service is.
In nearly 30 years of working at universities, through union drives, furloughs, âdo more with lessâ cuts, protests about this or that, postdoc despair stories, etc., I have never seen them angrier, more exhausted, more demoralized, and more likely to be looking for other work than they are now, here and elsewhere. Itâs unfortunate that tt fac tend not to spend very much time developing collegial friendships with contingent fac and staff; I find that when I tell them they really have to stop leaning on someone and expecting a normal-times level of service, because weâre on the verge of losing them and this would be a bad time for it, theyâre surprised, also surprised to hear about the amount of anger and bitterness there is in the ranks. I would suggest listening, and stepping outside the mindset of someone in a tt career, and imagining a life in which itâs pretty easy to move from job to job, no one will think less of you for doing it, and no one cares about CVs, schools, advisors, publication gaps, etc. â and no one has an existential fear that leaving a job or career means deep loserdom.
I note that nothing in your response is about what a family memberâs disability means for the people who become caregivers, the cost to them, financially and otherwise. I understand that nothing in R1-land trains faculty to think about these things, and it selects very hard for people who have a good deal of support and minimal responsibility for family membersâ care, and will in general avoid discussion of these things. Like you, I imagine, Iâve seen plenty of whatâs happened when a tt professor suddenly is stricken with substantial, career-damaging caregiving responsibilities or disability. The academic community is nothing if not efficient in walling off that person, dropping them from conversation at work, moving on, and behaving as though in some vague way it was the personâs own fault, that somehow the person invited misfortune (unless itâs a wife who got sick; then itâs the wifeâs irritating weakness), then forgetting them. And meanwhile the unfortunate professor is likely to be convinced that some serious injustice, rather than ordinary life, was perpetrated against them. Iâve seen enough of it to find it all boring. But thereâs a wide world of people out there who do know the costs of long-term caregiving, and many others who have quite a practical idea of what disability without either money or selfless caregivers, let alone without diagnosis, might mean.
These are some of the factors in play when it comes to why some people might be unwilling to stride forth into the pandemic classroom in order to teach college students in person. Which reminds me; it occurred to me our front-office staff, whoâre coming in on a rotating basis, can cut down substantially on the number of people in the office if they set up a zoom/ticketing kiosk outside the office, so that only students who really need to be in there are told to come in, and/or they can limit occupancy â I have to email them.
Thank you and just sent you a PM!
Yes! Contact tracing is an art, and one that can be manipulated to produce a certain result. As long as there is asymptomatic spread with no surveillance testing, transmission can occur anywhere. I am certain it occurred in my districtâs schools far more than was officially listed.
This school year teachers have already admitted that they will not do quarantining as they might have done last year, because they would have to use their personal sick leave. My district thinks vaxxed people in schools do not have to even test if they are asymptomatic (which is against current CDC guidelines). It hasnât been determined how vax status will be determined, but if itâs on the honor system then there will be lots of lying. Lots of mild illness will be passed off as something else. And if people buy the self-administered tests in stores, the results donât have to be reported anywhere.
Last year there was inconsistent masking and social distancing. It will be even worse this year. And Delta is far more transmissible.
Lots of ugliness in my district with mask showdowns. I do not understand why masking is so awful. Better that than remote learning! Except for the youngest ages, I just donât see the problem.
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This, I think, is not generally true:
My understanding is indirect and imperfect, but from what I understand, medical coding matters for reimbursement situations. By contrast, for a disability you need a disabling condition (and then you need to actually be disabled according to whatever the definition is in your policies).
DHHS guidance specifies that long COVID qualifies as a disabling condition under the ADA.
Also even if they never code âlong COVIDâ you can rest assured that all the stuff under the hood of long COVID is coded.
Best not to contract it in the first place. And no arguing that getting paid leave granted would probably be a hassle.
Lets imaging that a contact tracing system claims that a student caught Covid at an off campus party.
That student was invited to that party by a class mate that is a commuter who lives with their parents but has the same major as them. 80% of the other people at that party either live in the same dorm complex or has in person classes or is in the same in-person ECs as the Student.
How can it be claimed that they got COVID at the party and not from a hundred other possible interactions during the other shared activities? It doesnât make logical sense.
How can a professor or medically high risk classmate not be worried that they where exposed by our original subject?
The same scenario is true for the professor, who presumably commutes to work, likely lives with other people who themselves are venturing places and active, and may also socialize, shop, or go out to places thereby getting exposure to covid.
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@bennty, your objections seem to center on the problems of employment in academia generally, Not necessarily related to covid. To encourage employees to leave that terribly overcrowded field is a good thing, in my opinion, and hopefully they will have better futures elsewhere. I would prefer that reopening decisions reflect the science and logistics of the time, and not be based primarily on instructor preferences (nor solely on student preferences). Instructor retention is not a substantial concern for most college administrators.
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I donât think colleges will be quick to terminate faculty who arenât vaccinated. The difference I see with academic positions versus many other frontline workers is the length of time it takes to recruit and hire qualified replacements. It takes the better part of a year to hire a faculty member. Adjuncts are rarely available on short notice even when weâre not in a pandemic. I wish colleges luck finding any this close to the start of classes. I can only imagine the reaction of parents who are paying to send their kids to an elite private when they find out their kids are being taught by adjuncts who are also working at the local 4-year public or cc. Thatâs where the immediate replacement pool is.
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Bowdoinâs policy - hard core
âFaculty and staff who are not fully vaccinated by August 24 and do not qualify for a medical or religious exemption will be placed on an unpaid leave of absence until further notice. Based on operational needs, there is no guarantee that the position will still be open if the employee later completes the vaccination process.â
And here is Colgateâs. These two schools arenât messing around. Looks like colleges can indeed mandate the vaccine.
"Employees unable or unwilling to show proof of vaccination or medical or religious exemptions may resign or take a mandatory 12-month personal leave without pay and benefits beginning Aug. 2, 2021. Please inform your supervisor or department chair as soon as possible, but no later than July 19 if you determine that you will be exercising one of these options. Failure to provide an exemption or confirmation of personal leave will be considered to be a voluntary resignation. "
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I was referring to termination for not following college policy regarding teaching in person. In contrast, for vaccination instead, there will be medical and religious exemptions, but barring those, I expect suspension and termination proceedings begin. Hospitals fired nurses for not vaxxing, despite a severe nursing shortage.
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Right, and although it can take a year or so to hire a permanent faculty member, there is no shortage of candidates (PhD or otherwise qualified) seeking professor appointments and/or opportunities to teach college courses in many subject areas.
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