The major problem with the data points that you provided is that it does not show how many young people have died from Covid-19 who have been fully vaccinated or fully vaccinated and received a booster shot. This is not an “apples to apples” comparison when the age groups provided have the lowest full vaccination rates of any other age groups, while students at most colleges have mandates in place for all students to be fully vaccinated (with many schools now mandating the booster shot). This is one way that I often watch factual data get misused when talking about Covid-19 (especially since this thread is on Colleges and Coronavirus).
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I thought it might be useful to come back to this question, which I don’t think anyone has addressed (unless there’s a particular poster whose replies I can’t see who did):
At this point though I have to ask the “suit up and go back in, come what may” people: you’re really really intense about this. What do you fear is going to happen if we wind up, for the foreseeable future, in a world where you’re in and out, remote and at work/school, and virus is like the weather, where sometimes there are storms and heat waves and the like, and you shift modes depending on the viral weather? (Or the weather weather, given the increasingly severe weather we seem to have given ourselves?)
My original reason for posting was that Williams, prior to Omicron, had a total of 114 cases since the start of the pandemic. Now they have 40 cases. I was just wondering how many cases other schools had.
Depending on geographic location, the tail end of Delta and now Omicron are tearing through regions. Right before finals, Maryland colleges experienced a sharp increase in cases as we started to have a major surge here. We’ve asked these students to do many things and they’ve mostly complied as they either want to or don’t have much choice. College students/campuses are one of our most protected populations because of this. Perhaps they should be given a little breathing room because of this?
As stated above, I believe we’re all getting covid in the next year. We’ll all get some form of immunity whether we want it or not. Omicron doesn’t care if you’re vaccinated, boosted, masked, etc. It will find you and eventually you’ll be exposed. There’s still Delta out there so don’t totally discount that either. Most that are vaxxed will have mild symptoms from Omicron.
There are vaccines available. There are therapeutics available. There are quality masks available. People are able to provide for their own protection. Life is going to go on, it has to. Covid isn’t going away. Perhaps this highly contagious variant, Omicron, with it’s potentially lighter symptoms will be the step necessary to move us towards it being more like the flu or a common cold that we deal with yearly.
Colleges will be returning for spring semester soon. Omicron is going to surge on many campuses,and elsewhere, it’s too contagious not to. For the vast majority of campus personnel Omicron will be a temporary sickness of a couple days and then life will move on. The same as in the general population outside of colleges. Almost everyone is getting exposed to this in the near future. Again, this could be a minor blessing in that it finally gets us to a point where we have a widespread immunity response built up in our population. Let’s hope that is the case.
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I am puzzled by this, too. In the k-12 arena, after all-virtual, students and parents were glad to have f2f classes resume, even with the masks. Now, though, the militant antimasking parents are making this their hill to die on, so to speak. I don’t get it. It’s not good enough unless every.single.aspect of pre-pandemic schooling is the same? I get the same feeling from some of the posters here.
One thing that some school districts are doing is creatively following or ignoring CDC guidelines they don’t like. For instance, the “test to stay” recommendation is being ignored by my school district. Vaccination status is on the honor system. Perhaps that is what some of the posters here would like to see in their colleges/universities?
Students of all ages need to learn to be more resilient. Masking and take-out meals (probably just for a matter of weeks) would be a good way for students to practice resilience.
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I’ll bite - as this is literally what’s been happening for the past year and a half.
As I’ve said waayyyy up thread, if everyone was on equal ground - if everyone was vaxed, and all colleges had the same Covid response and all cities in all states had common mask mandates and everyone was being cautious and responsible about travel - THEN I believe people would be more agreeable to the “weathering the storm” analogy you quoted, for the foreseeable future. But we’re looking at two worlds - one where people aren’t leaving their homes, double masking, still wiping groceries, some colleges obsessively testing and isolating - and the other world where people are maskless, going on vacations all over the world, crowded indoor sports venues with sporadic masking, some colleges with no masking or Covid testing requirements, many reports of towns & cities where hardly anyone wears a mask…
Some people are happy in the first world I described and are eagerly supporting the narrative where that world should exist indefinitely. Other people are seeing more and more versions of the second world, they look at the generally mild version of Omicron and the fact that we will have variants of this virus around for a while, and they are willing to take their chances to have a little bit (or a lot) of the second world.
The fear response at this point in the Covid journey doesn’t match what we’re being told about the mild nature of Omicron. It doesn’t match where we are with vaccines. This fear response matches where we were in March 2020. Some people are fearful for the unvaccinated and they don’t want your fear.
You can choose to remain isolated for as long as you like, test to heart’s content - we have (or used to have) freewill here. The medically and age-related vulnerable population can take the precautions that they would normally take to protect themselves during an aggressive flu season. We need to collectively find a positive, productive, manageable path forward that lets go of at least part of the March 2020 fear level - each person needs to decide what that means for them and make peace with that decision. If we don’t, the mental health of a large portion of the population will continue to slowly erode (as will the infrastructure of the modern world) and that needs to be as big of a priority as Covid.
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This is what I fear, the horrific toll on the young:
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One explanation is that Africa is handed down surplus with only weeks before expiry:
If the post has nothing to do with colleges, the discussion is better on the following thread:
OT posts are subject to deletion without comment or notice.
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But do they freak out students?
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If those are Bowdoin rules then, yes, I would know students hesitant to go back to that. Hopefully, Williams students are right about feeling optimistic and the rules will be temporary.
Yes I realize that. I am a physician. What I am saying is that what we are seeing on the ground is that very very few(far less than 1%) of vaccinated teens and College aged kids are going into the hospital with Covid. it was less than 1% hospitalization rate in UNvaccinated in this age group, but it was more severe and a larger percent had longer lasting symptoms in the unhospitalized group, pre-vaccine). Residential colleges with high vaccination rates among students and faculty need to adjust policy to reflect the lack of risk covid causes to their population.
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The town of Williamstown, Massachusetts (where Williams is located) does not even have a mask mandate. This is a town in the most liberal state in the country that is filled with elderly people. The professors that we are purporting to protect, live in an area where others (many not vaxxed at all) are not required to protect them, but the students (triple vaxxed) have to? These are the kinds of rules that make no sense… I am not even against a short term mask mandate in the classroom, but campus wide is over the top. Grab and go food is theater.
I’m not picking on Williams, they are just an example of the virtue signaling we are seeing at some colleges that will (hopefully) hurt them in their pocketbook (although, I doubt it, as the top LAC in the country, they can do whatever they want and not lose business). Hopefully prospective parents are watching carefully. Covid is here forever and rolling restrictions will likely be ongoing at some colleges that are most virtuous.
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We just don’t know that (“lack of risk”) yet, since we hit 1,000,000 daily cases yesterday and we’re not even a couple days out from the holidays. My D21 just got to class yesterday and my D18 starts tomorrow.
The % may be low, but the whole numbers could be large. Very large.
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Everyone in college is going to get covid. It’s just a matter of time. We’re all going to get covid the way Omicron is exploding. It absolutely matters that the percentage of college students with major issues because of covid is low. That’s the whole point, it’s low. The vast majority will have a minor inconvenience for a few days. It’s going to spread like crazy in the next few weeks or so.
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But when college-age people can be drafted/deployed into war/conflict zones, marry (with parental consent) at 16, and a good number are already parenting at college-age, I don’t feel it at all being condescending to be consistent, and refer to someone that age as an adult and measure their actions accordingly.
Yes, some might not yet be as good at being adults - some not even at age 60. But that’s because people are different and not every adult manages/copes equally well with every challenge.
I’m old enough (very late Dad) to have seen young people having to deal with challenges. In comparison, wearing a mask, having their nostril swiped once a week, and/or keeping distances in-door for a few weeks, rates as an inconvenience.
We have lost perspective what “bad” is, when for a good number of us, the biggest concern was, how soon our 529s, 401k’s or IRA’s would bounce back in 2020, if we could get good WiFi for our latest iPhone, how quickly DoorDash would get to our front door, or if Amazon would drop off our latest “necessity” 12 hours later.
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I recognize that college students are adults, and if they conclude they are willing to accept the risks associated with fully in-person education, why wouldn’t we accept that decision? They seem to have a better grasp of the statistical risk level to themselves than many others do.
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Well – that’s not quite what I’m asking about.
You’re talking about “weathering the storm” as though there’s one long storm.
I’m talking about a population that understands that some weather is bad and some is fine and some is just kind of dodgy, and that it changes all the time, as do our behaviors in response to it. Here, for instance, when there’s a tornado warning and a tornado actually nearby, you will see very few people wandering around outside. Same in subzero temps, blizzards, etc. We close city schools when it’s very cold out because we can’t have rural students stranded in schoolbuses with jelled diesel in subzero temps. We close districts when some of the schools have no a/c and it’s 94F out in May. Nearly everyone recognizes that this is reasonable and behaves accordingly, and doesn’t go around talking about how people need to just get over their fear of tornadoes and freezing to death and get on with life, strap on the fitbit and go for a run outside. But these situations don’t pertain on an average day.
In a world with highly virulent variants like Omicron, we can expect spells of very bad viral weather that last a few weeks, then end.
So my question is about what the fear is about reacting to that – a few weeks of “no, we won’t travel, we’ll work at home, etc.” now and then – vs the thing we already do, which is to treat bad weather like bad weather.
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Bad weather lasts a day or possibly two. A day of learning loss can be made up and worked around. Endemic virus outbreaks last weeks and months. That level of disruption can not be sustained and causes egregious learning loss, dropouts and disruption.
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