Rice delays opening 2 days, goes online first 2 weeks
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Yeah. Itâs also too soon to be definitive about what this virus is and what âliving with itâ will mean over the next several years, which is why the Atlantic piece cited above seems to me something that isnât going to age well.
Unfortunately, it means that taking serious precautions if what you want is health, for a long time. You may periodically be living in some sort of lockdown.
This is not new. If you came of age sexually in the 80s youâll remember endless Boomer moaning about how uptight the kids were and how people were too scared of AIDS and how you couldnât wear condoms forever. Except then we did wear condoms forever. And we remained extremely STD-aware forever, so that regardless of your relationship status, if youâre GenX, you are probably very careful about not just who you sleep with but about where those mouths and genitals have been. Because you remember what AIDS was, and because you also remember what the world pre-ACA was like, and you donât want to be immunocompromised and dependent for the rest of your life on expensive drugs if you donât have to be. You mightâve had a very sexy life, but it was probably not a swinging life.
Similarly, if youâre that age, youâll also remember people who grew up without antibiotics for everything, and how careful they were about hygiene. All the time, throughout their lives, and how fearful they were about the progression of a chill to a cough to something much worse. Youâll remember how seriously they took disease, also how they stopped seeming ridiculous about it as antibiotic resistance emerged as a problem and we started seeing bugs that just didnât care about any drugs we had. A friend of mine, one of the best people Iâve known, died from one of those aboutâŠoh, itâs over five years ago, now. In his 50s. 800 people and a whole array of stars showed up for his memorial, but it didnât make the bug any less resistant, or his partner any less blindsided and bereft.
We had a nice healthy time, just like weâve had a nice peacetime, but itâs not a guarantee if you want to stay alive and whole for what can be a lifespan. For some time, now, if alive and whole is what you want, youâll have to guard your health. You can stomp and yell about that if you want, but the bugs donât speak your language and ainât listening anyhow.
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Too slow and not enough, if what @Twoin18 is reporting isnât an anomaly. Itâll likely pass from roommate to roommate, and spread readily in dining halls. W&M is public VA, no? Are they also requiring surveillance testing and/or isolation/quarantine?
Kid reports that in flagship honors classes, a small minority are masked, and some profs are not only not masked but urging students to understand that masking is not required. Thereâs a large evangelical population here. We expect D will be infected and have discussed what to do if/when that happens. On the upside, I told her, you seldom get so visible a marker of whoâs worth and not worth making friends with.
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W&M students, faculty and staff will be expected to be masked in all indoor settings except their own rooms, regardless of vaccine status. Just adding this to my earlier post of a few weeks ago that stated that students could go unmasked within their own residence halls (lounges, kitchen, hallways). W&M is mandating the vaccine, except it is not, really, as it is possible to get a medical or religious exemption. There is some pressure to get vaccinated, though, as only non-vaccinated students/staff must test regularly. As of now, there with be no housing provided for sick/quarantining studentsâŠall students have to come to school with an evacuation plan. International students will be vaccinated upon arrival if they hadnât done that in their home countries. Iâm sure all plans are subject to change as the situation evolves. Though set in the South in a somewhat evangelical-heavy area, the campus tends to lean left or moderate center. One third of students are from out-of-state and tend to hail from the mid-Atlantic and NE, and many in-state students come from the more progressive N. Virginia/DC suburbs. The great majority of students/faculty/staff have been fully vaccinated or are in the process. My daughter and her future roommate are fully vaccinated. Keeping my fingers crossed for a good yearâŠthese kids need it. I believe the school plans to mandate the vaccine 100% as soon as full FDA approval is announced.
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This is an interesting comparison, because at least in my circles, growing up in the mid to late 80s, any impact on behavior amongst people who were at relatively low risk was very minimal. You accepted that, yes life is now incrementally more dangerous, and moved on. Iâm sure behavior changed more dramatically for those at higher risk (the âItâs a Sinâ miniseries rang true), but the effects were very far from universal.
Are people really that much more cautious about wanting to âstay alive and wholeâ nowadays, or are we just projecting our middle aged fear of mortality onto a bunch of younger people who will take this in their stride and want (and deserve) to get on with living their lives?
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Was wondering the same.
Many times, a bad outcome down the road can reasonably be traced to a virus. Fortunately that doesnât mean that most who get that virus will have a bad long-term outcome. However, it can definitely be a source of worry. I had a seriously bad case of mono in my teens that developed into hepatitis and damaged my liver. I had a full recovery, but you can bet that Iâm very concerned about long-term outcomes even now, 40 years later.
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Vanderbilt is requiring the vaccine for students, faculty and staff but itâs not going to matter. Have been in Nashville for about 24hrs and masking is at about 25% or less. Even in places like the hotel that have signs requiring it very few are wearing them. Disappointing but not surprising given its Tennessee. I miss the NE.
My prediction is if the vaccines arenât preventing infection itâs going to rip through campus in the first 4 weeks.
Thatâs very interesting â itâs the first time Iâve heard anyone say that. As a straight teenaged girl I didnât consider myself to be high-risk, but any boy could be high-risk, because for real, who knew what they were doing? So by the early '90s, we were all getting tested routinely, and bareback just wasnât a thingâŠever, in my experience, and I had a pretty good time. I was in the NYC orbit, though, and maybe that made a difference. We all knew people who died, and I remember a local clinic managing to communicate without saying straight out that they had to submit all their test data to the state, so if we wanted results without surveillance, you know, not everyone gave their real nameâŠ
Same in London at the time. PSAs everywhere. One of my favorite ads ever stopped me in my tracks one day in London â b/w, feet-end view of a bed, very clearly a hetero couple in there, womanâs feet and manâs feet, and the copy was âBANG. YOUâRE DEAD.â Nothing else. Saatchi ad, iirc.
Anyway â even now, Iâve never before met anyone my age who was casual about unprotected sex and not obviously high-risk in every other aspect of life. Like a guy I know who also has TB and Lyme and who knows what else now. Heâs super-careful about covid because heâs out of chances, canât afford physically to be any sicker than he is.
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I would think so, and Iâm actually counting on this to protect employees. As it becomes clear how fast this is moving, and how serious it is for unvaxed students, I think weâll see things thrown in reverse pretty fast. Weâre just bleeding too many employees already, and this isnât a coast, we donât have a deep labor pool. Weâve barely got labor puddles, and even zoom school and pandemic-times research takes a lot of peopleâs experience and work.
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The UK likes showing dramatic ads. We also had dramatic ads about the effects of smoking. But my sense was that in both cases the effect on behavior was very marginal in the short term (perhaps due partly to me growing up in a poor town where the prevailing attitude was YOLO).
Over 5 to 10 years things gradually changed but there didnât seem to be a sudden, dramatic adjustment unless something happened that had a direct impact on close friends or family.
So if these college kids are seeing their friends experience Covid as just a minor cold, I donât think theyâll really worry too much about long term consequences. Those with a family member that experienced much more serious impacts may be more likely to change their behavior.
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This is also interesting.
There are definitely things I did in my teens and early 20s that Iâd absolutely never do now. Flying small aircraft. Hiking without so much as checking a weather forecast. Cycling in 20th-c London. (Iâve got an awesome story about getting hit by one of those old taxis.) Visiting a war zone just to see what was up, without bothering to tell anyone where I was going. Getting involved with Wrong Men. I got myself into some fixes Iâve still never told my parents about. And yet from AIDS on, I always took infectious disease very seriously, maybe because it was apparent to me how fast and uncontrollably things could go, also because thereâs no human element there. These things do not care, nothing in human life except cell processes are relevant to them, and they can kill you, often horribly.
I wouldnât do some of the things I did as a young person because I havenât the reflexes and sharp senses anymore to handle them, or because I just know better, but I think the only thing thatâs changed about my sense of infectious diseases is that I know more about how people die from and are disabled by them, and these are sobering things.
yeah, this is a big deal, even now. Thereâs a lot that goes into the middle-class sense of self-preservation, and itâs a sense of self and world that not a lot of kids around here share.
And back to the topic of the threadâŠ
Vaccination percentages up 1% on campus and almost 2% overall in just the last week. My S heads to his dorm next Thursday. All students and staff required to vaccinate this year. Masking indoors. Looking forward to a much more normal year than last.
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Besides agreeing with the responses below that itâs too soon to say much about long-term effects, Iâd also like to say that itâs not just about the younger people. Are some people here really ready to compromise the health of older people so that the younger ones donât have restrictions because of the virus? And of course Iâm not just talking about college students. Where I live, parent after parent gets up to speak (rudely, and sometimes by yelling) before our School Board to tell us how their precious child canNOT wear a mask because it restricts their freedom. They should be grateful kids will be in school fulltime, although I wonder how long THAT will last, if the CDCâs weak guidelines for contact tracing/quarantining are followed.
So true! I have figured out that the admin of my school district really doesnât care about covid. The supât was not there for âhealth reasonsâ so his chief of staff sat in for him at the last SB meeting. It was known that there would be lots of antivax/antimask loons there. So why did the chief of staff (and then two other central office admins) show up without masks? If they donât care about themselves in that atmosphere of Delta flying around, then why would they care about the students, staff, and (often forgotten) community at large? There is supposedly going to be a mask mandate for SB chambers now, so all will be masked. They will be masked (they have been masked in the past when it was required). But they have shown their true colors now. When someone shows you who they are, believe it.
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S18 and D20 both attend schools that schools require vaccination but, as of yet, have not announced mask mandates. D20 received an email last night from a prof. announcing that masks will be required in his classroom. So I am guessing that her school has left it up to individual professors to decide how they will run their classroom. Anyone else seeing this approach?
When universities are seeking to issue bonds to cover new construction they are required to submit a massive amount of date to Moodyâs. Among the data submitted are the admission and retention stats that many think are only used for USNews rankings. The higher the number of applicants, the lower the acceptance rate, the higher the yield, the higher the stats of enrolled students etc. the higher will be the bond rating and thus the lower the interest rate on those bonds.
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Yes, Bowdoin is running things this way, so far.
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In a broader sense, many older people are extremely willing to make life more difficult for young people if it benefits the older crowd. The rich also like to try and impose things on the poor to preserve their lifestyle and wealth. Housing is a good example, where old, rich people like to see their house prices increasing and fight tooth and nail to stop multi-family housing in their neighborhood that might âlower the toneâ.
This is not quite the same, but thereâs still a tendency towards excessive fervor to impose restrictions from those who suffer least/benefit most from the restrictions. Just like the push for continued lockdown was most intense from those who could work normally from home, get their food delivered, etc. (And on top of that, some of our politicians ignored the restrictions they enforced for everyone else)
Is it foolish to oppose masks and vaccinations? Yes. But our institutions have been far from perfect, whether thatâs the WHO being corrupted by China, or the CDC flip-flopping on masks and failing to expedite full approval of vaccines. So thatâs very problematic in a country where roughly half the population already believed that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are âIâm from the government and Iâm here to helpâ.
So life is messy, but yes, I think there are limits to how far we should compromise the lives of younger people to protect the old. Where those compromises are reached will differ around the country. And thatâs ok with me. In the end, the politicians have to take the decisions and be held responsible later on.
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Regarding the political conflict, it is intensified by the Delta variant increasing the negative externalities associated with infection. Considering that many societal rules and political conflicts are about regulating negative externalities (e.g. pollution), it should be no surprise that increased negative externalities increase political conflicts.
Before vaccines were available, being infected carried significant negative externalities, where (even if you had an asymptomatic or mild case), you could spread it to others who could get serious cases or long COVID-19 (without knowing or others known, since you would be contagious for days before symptoms, if any). The tools used (masks, social distancing, and other rules) brought about the usual type of conflicts about personal freedom versus regulating negative externalities imposed on others.
When vaccines became available, they greatly reduced the negative externalities. People who chose to vaccinate were largely protected from COVID-19, from asymptomatic to mild to serious. Unvaccinated people were less seen as a contagion threat to most vaccinated adults, although medically vulnerable and children unable to get vaccinated were still a concern. But those associating with the latter groups could at least have some confidence that their vaccinations greatly reduce the risk of them becoming an unintended vector of infection.
Now, the Delta variant seems to be causing more breakthrough infections, although more so on the asymptomatic to mild side. But that means that vaccination is no longer as protective as it used to be against the negative externalities of infection that someone else can impose on you, and protecting the medically vulnerable and children becomes more difficult if you have less confidence in your vaccination preventing you from being an unintended vector of infection. It also appears to be the case that people tend not to pick up the nuances of how vaccination still reduces the risk of getting COVID-19 (even with Delta) and (if you get COVID-19) greatly reduces the risk of a serious case, so news about breakthrough infections has led to the apparent widespread fear that the vaccinations people received are now useless (see the âboosterâ thread). Other negative externalities like overloading the health care system also sometimes get attention.
So it is not surprising that the political conflicts are increasing, and college policies are subject to such political conflicts.
An additional conflict driver at some colleges are mandatory isolation and quarantine at student expense policies for those who test positive. Being made homeless for a week while losing education after a positive test (and false positives sometimes happen) is hardly a way to gain support for the policy.
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Fair enough. My limits might be different from yours.
Iâve done the right things, and donât think my life and the lives of so many others like me should be compromised so that the young can have their lives exactly the way they were before covid, which is what so many seem to want.
Get vaccinated, wear a mask, social distance. Whatâs so difficult about that?
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