Unfortunately, “we just don’t know” is not only meaningful but the only reasonable conclusion unless you care only about hospitalizable cases. Given the limited info we have about long covid, this is a very cavalier approach.
If you care only about hospitalization and death, then yes, Lolla worked fine. If you also care about people’s wellbeing, then the answer is we don’t know if it worked or not, and likely can’t know, since if people who went and were asymptomatic/mild afterwards later develop long covid, it probably won’t be possible to trace it to Lolla given Covid prevalence now.
Gainesville also doesn’t have a deep academic labor pool, which means chances are pretty good that tenured faculty are stepping in. The tipping point comes pretty fast there because there are more non-tt than tenured around, also because there’s only so much more that the tenure-track folks can take on in emergencies, let alone chronically. Your average tt prof is already working 60-80 hours a week on average for some nice, but unimpressive, pay. I’m also seeing pipeline damage as people in ed schools and PhD programs are looking at what’s going on and seeing how unusual it is for leadership to have teachers’ backs even when it comes to life/death matters, and deciding that’s not what they want to sign up for. The most immediate effect I’ve seen is good principals and senior teachers leaving for online academies here and abroad.
Some tt faculty here have been walking in, telling students that the courses are moving online, and following through. So far no disciplinary action. Others have been telling students to mask up and students seem to be mostly compliant so far. (And yes, that is specifically disallowed here, fac may not require masks, or move courses online without permission, and I haven’t heard of anyone asking and being given that permission.) Daughter says she’s seeing more masks than during orientation week and expects that to increase as weather gets cooler and more profs require masks. It sort of sounds like the kids are putting pressure on each other, sensing that we’re in for an online semester unless everyone does their bit.
The only thing there that’s unfortunate is that this is transmissible enough that unvaxed/cloth mask will still contribute to substantial spread in the classroom – I can see people going halfway like this and then getting frustrated that there’s still so much spread that things shut down. Moving people from wt rules to delta’s shifting and much more complex rules…I’m not sure we’ll get there before the next important variant rolls through. I don’t know how this is going to be managed internationally.
Maybe I’ll shift my late-fall course to bring in some global public health.
That’s likely only for a couple of weeks at most and not quite true. Masks are not required in residence halls at all - common areas, rooms, bathrooms. Dining at full capacity and masks off while eating.
And the exact language is “Effective tomorrow - and for what I expect will be a very limited time - masks are required”…
And then “we hope to lift this mandate for vaccinated individuals on Sept 4th”
This is just for the first week or so of school until they can get everyone tested more than once. Also, fewer that FIVE students are unvaccinated.
I’m not sure this is good or bad but I have a feeling that the positivity rate for this coming week and future weeks will go up significantly now that all students are back on campus. For example, D said that the local bars are packed with students (sans masks). Would not be surprised that some in-person classes go remote in the coming weeks. I hope not…
According to my D, few students are wearing masks in the dorms or outside. They’re wearing them when in large group sessions during orientation. So far her school hasn’t done any testing as students arrive for move in and there’s no current Covid dashboard. Only unvaccinated (3% of the students/faculty? Website doesn’t specify) are being tested. SMH.
Oooh, my niece and her H went to school at UNG. Will have to pass this along.
@bennty, UNG is in Dahlonega (spent a summer at a program there back when dinosaurs roamed the earth)…the academic labor pool is even slimmer.
It’s about 65 miles from UGA, so a long commute for someone in Athens who might be able to pick up the class.
Amherst imposing more restrictions now. No indoor dining. Double masks indoors everywhere except individual dorm rooms, masking outdoors when 6 feet distance is not possible, no off campus dining allowed. Spectators at outdoor venues allowed but must be masked. Sports teams masked for initial weeks.
Unfortunately it’s going to be very tough to form conclusions and public health recommendations from potential outcomes that aren’t knowable, measurable, or verifiable at this time. Perhaps someday they will be, and can then be included as a metric.
I’m extremely worried. I think the testing of asymptomatic, vaccinated students are going to uncover extremely high numbers of cases and with 10 day isolation, classes are going to be a disaster. I haven’t found any studies on how long, if at all asymptomatic, vaccinated individuals are contagious for - only some vague language on CDC site that significantly lower viral loads mean likely less contagious. Even symptomatic, vaccinated individuals are shown to have shorter duration of high viral loads, but there’s not enough data to modify the previous 10 day guidance. I think Duke is setting themselves up for failure quite honestly. 2 of my daughter’s friends have tested positive in the last couple days - all arrived early to help with freshman move-in. I frankly prefer my son’s school’s plan this is only testing symptomatic or unvaccinated - I think they’re much more likely to have something approaching normalcy.
Edited to add, not sure why it’s showing I’m responding to homerdog, I meant to respond to @socaldad2002
Zero cases at first year move in today at Bowdoin. That also included RAs and orientation trip leaders.
Duke is located in a state and a town that’s not highly vaccinated so there’s Covid around. Brunswick is, no joke, 98 percent vaccinated for 12 and up. And virtually everyone at Bowdoin is vaccinated too. Location matters.
Low local transmission means some colleges, including Amherst, in certain geographic locations, have an option others in other geographics locations may not have. They actually have a decent shot at keeping the virus away by adopting more strict rules (at least at the begining). It’s analogous to what New Zealand does to control the spread of the virus (it doesn’t have many cases) vs what US does.
Oh, yikes. I didn’t even notice – I know people who used to teach at UGA, and that’s a story by itself. I can’t imagine that someone there would pick it up, driving two hours for that?
Nearly everyone I talk to here who hasn’t already quit is drawing up plans for getting out. Moving retirement forward, going back to school themselves but somewhere else, leaving academia, or just jumping and relying on someone else’s salary for a while. I’ve had an unsettled few months waiting for my own answers to sort themselves out and settle, and this evening it all thunked into place: I have my goals, timeline, priorities, plan, and feel like I know what “forward” means now. The people who’re having the most difficulty are the mid-career tenured academics: most of them are pretty much trapped even if they’re talking big about leaving, and while it’s incredibly hard to fire them (see Sabatini), you don’t free yourself from an academic culture of what to want and how to value yourself overnight.
Like I’ve said before here, academia is endemically moany, but I have genuinely never seen it like this before. In 30 years. The most by-the-book people I know are deep into Eastern-European shrugging at people openly ignoring the terrible rules, throwing tantrums, etc., and making plans themselves to get out. While I can see things being radically different in places where admin is actually being smart about covid, there’s a huge swath of the country where this is not the case, and it’s the part that’s already in deep trouble. Unless something happens that makes this bad dream go away here and allows healing, and I must say I don’t know what that might be, I think “university” here is changing in meaningful ways, and that we may wind up with an even deeper divide than we’ve got now. I just don’t know who’s going to show up here to do this work. Same problem medicine and K12 have in rural areas.
I feel like I’m watching a kind of human desertification in progress. And it’s the craziest thing. All the ingredients for something nice are here, and yet it’s like this.