Why would you assume the students in your class aren’t going to be vaxed? I think the large majority of students want in class instruction, and thus, would get vaccinated if it maximizes the odds of that happening and/or continuing.
(Unless….maybe all students are hearing through the grapevine that faculty refuse to teach in person no matter what.)
Red state. Low vax rates, high evangelical population, young people. It would be glitter dust and unicorns if they followed your chain of logic, but I’d be shocked if the vax rate among students struggled above 50% here. Bar scene is already riotous. Gonna be ugly at the hospital.
Guess remote classes don’t look so bad now… Sorry about your friends experience especially at such a top notch school.
We received a communication today about testing protocols at my midsize private university. A “close contact” (for purposes of testing) is defined as being less than six feet away from someone for at least 15 minutes within a 24-hour period. Our desks are now 3 feet apart. Under these circumstances, if someone in my class tests positive for Covid, I (even though vaccinated and asymptomatic) have to get a test within 5 days at the Health Center as a condition of employment. Unvaccinated students have to quarantine for 10 days.
This is just not going to work. I am very committed to in-person instruction and I am willing to wear a mask (the plastic shields, I guess, per the NYT, don’t help and might actually hurt), but the disruption of this constant testing is going to be very hard to deal with pedagogically.
Of course, all of this may change. We don’t start classes until after Labor Day. I also wonder whether the administration will now yank any religious exemptions and require vaccination now that the FDA has approved Pfizer. The archdiocese of Philadelphia also has said it does not support religious exemptions from the vaccine.
This doesn’t even make any sense – this is for the wt virus. Delta’s far more transmissible, with people spewing out far higher amounts of virus – the 6’ thing doesn’t apply. Essentially, if you’re in the same room or outdoor crowd, you’re a close contact.
Just because you are in the same room doesn’t mean you are closer than 6’. You, in the front of the room, might be 25’ away from the positive person, so you aren’t in contact with someone for 15 minutes within 6’.
If the rule is anyone in the room is considered within 6’, then any person in a 300 seat cafeteria, or a 500 seat lecture room would be required to be tested. How would they enforce that? Who would know if you were in the cafeteria from12:15 to 12:30 or if you were still there at 12:50 when the positive person came in at 12:31?
Not in our K12 schools district. If you are 3 feet apart and masked all day next to a positive person, you aren’t considered a close contact. It’s how we have 34 positive cases and only 6 exposed (probably siblings).
(I’m not saying I agree. It’s just the policy.)
I do not know whether the professors did not announce their intentions, or the school failed to covey them, but an unfortunate situation at Georgia Tech. She is trying to transfer to in person alternatives. She might have taken a gap semester if she had known.
Correction, the school is GA State, not GA Tech
The 6’ rule does not take into account the airflow of the place. In a closed indoor classroom with typical (not great) ventilation, one contagious person could fill the airspace with virus so that people more than 6’ away could get infected (remember the restaurant example and the call center example from last year, and that was with the ancestral virus that was not as contagious as the Delta variant?).
On the other hand, outdoors within 6’ may be much less dangerous unless you are directly downwind of the contagious person (outdoors is probably like a 95% reduction in risk compared to typical indoors).
I see your point; yes, I’m not going to be within 6 feet of all my students for more than 15 minutes. But I do think that contact tracing is going to be tough. It’s not as if we have seating charts. Maybe that’s next.
Maybe I should make all of my students move seats every 15 minutes. I’m only half joking.
Is Red U leaving it up to each prof. to require a mask if they wish to? In other words, not imposing a mandate at the university level but allowing faculty to do so for class?
How can colleges be operating under the “business as usual” plan if the cities they’re located in are experiencing Covid levels similar to last year?
There’s nothing magical about the 6’ (or 3’) distancing. If the virus can be airborne for hours (which seems to be the case), only good ventilation can reduce its concentration. Ventilation isn’t an issue outdoors unless you’re so close to the source for an extended period of time.
So not Gtech, correct? I would be surprised if it was
Oh, it goes farther. The university (and state) policy explicitly does not require masks or vax. Profs who require masks are going rogue.
Lot of rogue profs around here, from the looks of it.
The longer term effects of this should be interesting: a lot of faculty are noticing for the first time that admin isn’t all-powerful.
Again, it’s important to stop thinking in terms of what we learned about the virus in 2020. This variant produces massively higher viral load very early in the illness, often before people even know they’re sick – that’s part of why it’s so infectious. So it’s as though any area you’re in is suddenly jammed with 1000x the infected people you were expecting. Which is why if you’re going to be in a well-populated area outdoors, you should wear a mask, especially if there are young children or old people around.
You wouldn’t. You’d put things online and lock down until we had much higher vaccination rates nationally and vax approved for the under-12s.
We’ve never had this many children in the hospital for covid before, locally, and we’re just getting started. School’s just starting now. Almost no one in any elementary school is vaccinated.
What you should understand is that the spike protein is not the only thing susceptible to mutation. This is a very large virus that we don’t know well. But it does seem to be doing something untoward to levels of T cells in some people, and I really think more people should be worried about giving this virus room to spin the combination dials in a large population. It’s cracked “be very infectious”, though it hasn’t defeated the vaccine, just weakened it. I don’t thikn we want to mess with “knock out human defense response” as well.
Hold on a second. There’s an academic freedom issue here; while the university has chosen not to impose a blanket masking policy, surely it’s not interfering with its profs requiring masks for class if they feel most comfortable with that. Some (many?) will and some won’t. It’s like last year allowing the instructor to choose the modality of instruction (I realize many universities did NOT allow that freedom but many others did). That’s how I’d be viewing this issue - not as instructors going rogue but being at liberty to set their own policies in their own classrooms. Unless the university has actually forbidden instructors to require masks?
Take a look around, JB: there’s a whole bunch of states where that’s precisely the situation. Between that and no-vax, the on-campus experience is going to include dead roommates and disability for a nontrivial number of students this year.
Keep in mind that this situation is still preferable to K-12’s in the same states, especially elementary schools, where none of the kids are vaxable yet.