Do any of the airports near you still have a company onsite providing PCR testing? I know some can be pricey. Also, I saw an article on The Points Guy website in November that had some great info on where you might find PCR testing for those that needed the “within 72 hours”. If I remember right, it was called “Traveling soon?”
That was a great suggestion! I hadn’t thought of it so I looked it up. Our closest airport is only testing arriving passengers with proof of travel, unfortunately. I will keep it in mind in case they change.
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It’s on my list to give them a call tomorrow. They had only been ordering the test from the hospital, which according to the county health department is getting results in 3 days as of today.
D20 was exposed but asymptomatic. She was able to get a test at CVS on Sunday and we had results back in 24 hours. I think the CVS website says 2-7 days, but D20 says she knows of others who received results just as quickly.
And unfortunately at least around here, money works. There are many concierge practices who have expensive tests that have quick turn around and a lot of availability. These people have their own machines and can get you results within an hour or two. Some will even come to your home.
Son’s UC campus, Davis, will hold classes online for the first week of winter quarter, during which time they will test the entire campus community. Other campuses are doing similar; UCSD is going online for two weeks. The entire system is requiring boosters by Jan. 31.
Living in San Diego, UCSD has been a tremendous resource for testing and sequencing for the entire community, not just for their campus community and for UCSD Health patients. My younger child’s private high school has partnered with UCSD for PCR testing. A sick student can come to campus at noon to get tested, and results will be dropped into the school nurse’s email around 5am the next day, in time for the student to return to school if COVID negative and symptoms are improving. That turnaround time is generally available for the public at large as well, though may cost $65 depending on circumstances. I’ve gotten a UCSD PCR test in the morning and had results back by that evening.
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Labs are getting overwhelmed and as a result in the past week, typical response times (NY suburb) went from “next day” to “3 or more” days.
That’s the advantage when a college has always been doing weekly testing the entire time. They just have a dedicated lab to run the 3,000+ weekly tests, so that result are consistently showing up on students’ phones the next day.
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Well, this is going to be very interesting.
We just got our first raises in two years at my university, after months of hemorrhaging employees, and I did well to get just over 2%. Of course, this means we’re falling behind fast when inflation and rise in healthcare contribution’s accounted for. Even if upper admin lets go of their ridiculous salaries, it wouldn’t cover even inflation for all the staff and faculty here. Over 60% of contact hours are taught by non-tenure-track people with essentially no security, and the wages were poor to start with. There’s room to raise COA, but not by much – too many poor families. Tenure-track faculty who’d been riding along without fulfilling their contracts (no grants, no research productivity) can be harried into teaching more, but that’s not going to cover the hours.
A major point of employee-HR contention over the last few months has been the initial hard line against fully remote work. That crumbled about a month ago, but given that there is essentially nothing admin can offer now beyond at least pretending to care about employees and their families, I have a feeling they’re going to have to let go of this in-person-experience thing and keep the dorms and student-run student-life stuff open, but we’ll have a fair bit of online instruction next year. Who knows, maybe this’ll be the year admin decides to stop fighting inanimate objects and accept that we’re going to need online capability for the foreseeable future.
I surely hope you are wrong on this. Residential colleges can and should be able to do in person classes etc. I understand that it’s hard given the 10-day isolation for even asymptomatic and mild covid, so the current temporary change to remote is more fear of where to isolate all these kids: let’s hope that is changed very soon. NFL changed protocols—change is coming. Fauci has even said it and he tends to be conservative with regard to Covid. We have to learn to live with this now that there are vaccines and treatments are improving and the hosp/death rate is very low with Omicron compared to earlier strains. It doesn’t make sense to continue the 10day isolations for every positive case with the data we have now, especially on vast-majority-vaccinated campuses.
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I have also been hearing a lot of calls to move to a 5-7 day isolation for omicron (for example, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown’s School of Public Health, he is often interviewed on NBC, and I heard him indicate that that would be more reasonable now, etc.). I think it’s likely we will hear a change before the end of January/beginning of spring semesters. That will be a big help! Isolation space needed by colleges would be cut in half and people would be more willing to oblige and its obviously far less disruptive. I think for students who had to isolate for 10 days, it was pretty devastating; 5 cannot have nearly the same impact on mental health, etc, and having instructors isolate for 5 days is also not nearly as disruptive (odds are, some of those 5 days would fall over the weekend in the majority of cases). Here’s hoping!
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UK is changing its isolation law
“ London, December 22
The self-isolation period for people, who test positive for Covid in England, would be cut from 10 days to seven for those who produce two negative lateral flow test (LFT) results on Day six and seven since the start of their quarantine, UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced on Wednesday.”
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Shortening the required period of isolation will help during the course of the semester/quarter, but won’t make much, if any, difference upon students’ return to campus in January. If too many students are tested positive upon their arrival, what would the colleges do if they don’t have the capacity to isolate these students?
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Right. Are there any schools that allow kids to isolate in their rooms? Bowdoin has quite a few singles. Colgate says you have to go home to isolate if you live within 300 miles of campus. I bet they did that math to see what percentage of students that is. Still, with students from all 50 states and many foreign countries, that does leave out a large number of students. Bowdoin also started saying you could go home if someone is willing to drive there to get you.
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I haven’t heard any school would allow infected students to isolate in their own rooms in a building with other uninfected students. I’m not sure what the point of remote classes in the first week or two is if the infected students can’t be isolated on campus.
This is only a problem on campuses that insist on testing everyone regardless of vaccination status or symptoms. At this point I am pretty happy that my son attends a school that doesn’t. The only people that are tested on his campus are those that are unvaccinated (school has a mandate so this is a small number) and those who have symptoms concerning enough that they seek help.
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Thought I’d add… I know that some people will say that this is irresponsible and doing nothing to stop the spread. My belief is that at this point nothing will stop the spread so all this testing and isolating that other schools are doing is disruptive and futile.
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My kid’s college in Michigan recommends but doesn’t mandate vaccines and has a vaccination rate of about 83% (that’s what we were told at the start of the Fall semester). They test the unvaccinated students regularly but vaxxed students only get tested if symptomatic. They do wastewater testing, however, which can trigger dorm-wide testing. I wonder how that will work with Omicron. Also they said they are not requiring pre-arrival testing in January but would test everyone the first week. They have a rule that anyone who lives within 350 miles (which is probably the majority of their student body) should isolate at home if they can get picked up.
As a parent of a healthy college kid who is vaccinated and boosted, I’m not too worried about him getting the virus. But there’re many other people on campus who are more vulnerable. Should we not be concerned about their health and well-being if the virus spreads uncontrollably?
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Colby will be in person for the Jan Plan (1/4-1/27) semester. They are going back to testing 3x/week and limiting gatherings to 10 people. I guess I should not be surprised by this as Colby has been steadfast in their commitment to in person learning since the start of the pandemic, but it is going to be tough (maybe impossible?) to try to tighten restrictions at a time when it is too cold to be hanging around outside in Maine. S18 wan’t planning on going back in Jan. due to a family vacation that we planned. I’m sure you can all guess what happened to those plans!
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Good question but that’s a much broader issue than just covid. How much should we restrict the activities of people who aren’t vulnerable to something to protect those that are? At some point you have to draw a line. I guess the current question is where is that line and it sounds like we may have differing views on that.
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