https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article describes a case of transmission in a restaurant. It is pretty clear from the diagram that some of those who received the infection from the contagious index case were much more than six feet away. Yes, the air conditioning system in the building helped carry the air with infected droplets around, but college classrooms also have HVAC systems and/or air currents within them.
The main mitigation of risk in the classroom versus a restaurant would be if everyone wore masks (with somewhat uncertain and controversial levels of effectiveness) that would be impractical to do while eating in a restaurant.
The scenario you described to increase the number of lower SES students isn’t what I had in mind. One scenario I did have in mind is the following:
When a student applies ED, different parts of a student’s application are downloaded and processed near simultaneously by the Admissions and the FA offices, unlike at an EA school where the FA office would process an applicant’s FA application only after the applicant has been accepted. At an ED school, while an AO is looking at a student’s application, her counterpart at the FA office is simultaneously looking at the student’s FA application. There’s supposed to be a Chinese Wall between the two offices and their personnel. But in reality, the rules are rather loose at many colleges. Staff have coffees, lunch together and they talk. This is another reason ED could disadvantage students with high need at some supposedly need-blind schools.
@ucbalumnus I’ve seen that restaurant diagram. I assume those people were not wearing masks since it was a restaurant. If kids were that close in a classroom with masks, I’d like to understand if the virus would spread if someone had the virus in that room.
Greater use of ED is a means to lower the FA need of the admit class, because ED applicants skew upward in SES. That is because many FA needy applicants want to be able to compare FA offers, which ED forces them to forego, and because FA needy applicants are less likely to be in high schools where there is a college admission express train encouraging building the college application package early to apply ED (and overworked counselors and teachers in many schools may have difficulty getting recommendations done by RD deadlines, never mind ED deadlines).
@homerdog@Debbeut All of my friends and I have talked about it and it seems the common consensus is that we would agree to any and all social distancing provisions if we were allowed to go back in a heartbeat. For me the main concern is not parties or sports; it’s seeing my friends. Many of the varsity athletes and some of the seniors (surprisingly, I’ve heard many seniors are considering taking the next year off regardless of whether we return, because they want their last year to be unrestricted) may decide to take off, but I bet that most everyone else will return.
D17 will be a senior at a LAC. Initially she was thinking of taking a gap year as she would be missing out on many aspects of the experience, from being able to do a full on senior thesis with research vs an online survey, plus a variety of senior traditions. However, now she’s thinking she will stay if it’s online, BUT only if she can live with her friends. I get it… that’s a huge part of the college experience. I certainly hope they can work it out!
The answer is… we don’t know. We don’t know how good protective masks are.
However, the hypothesis in the Chinese restaurant contagion paper is that droplets, rather than an aerosol, infected the other restaurant patrons. Those droplets would drop onto surfaces, which the other people would then touch. If they didn’t do good hand infection control, they’d be carrying those contaminated droplets on their hands, all ready to go to their faces once those masks came off.
Gilead, the drug maker, was delighted to announce positive results for Remdesivir. But their hyped study was unable to detect a significant difference in mortality. They didn’t find that it reduced deaths, and it certainly won’t reduce hospitalizations because it’s an IV drug that a patient has to get in the hospital.
@ChemAM There is a lot of misinformation in your posts. If you are reading varied sources from international, scientific and both political sides of the aisles you would have a better picture.
If the virus was so difficult to spread we would not have millions of people infected worldwide. Likewise, studies are beginning to find that air conditioning and other heating systems may in fact be a source of spread. And thinking that remividvir ( spelling?) is going to help is a huge laugh. Last I read, it reduces the symptoms from 14 to 11 days. Things are rapidly evolving, but I really think you need to consider facts before throwing out lots of disputed nonsense which no one has verifiable data for.
I can’t list all of the issues but there were a glaring number of things presented in your list.
Apologies is this has been answered as I’m late to this thread, but exactly what are kids planning to do if they take a gap year? If they’re opportunities are limited at college, wouldn’t their opportunities be limited outside it as well?
I expect few will actually end up taking a gap year as most are eager to leave home asap, and do not have certain plans for a gap year already. The D1 football teams will be back in the big conferences to start games ( without fans, I guess).
@Happytimes2001 I am reading varied posts from international, scientific, and both political sides of the aisle; much of the media is hyping up fear surrounding the disease, as the more people are in fear, the more money they make. In one study, Remsedevir reduced death rate in very sick patients from 11% to 8%. That may not be super effective, but it is definitely not a “huge laugh,” as if the results are accurate and not due to chance, it reduces the death rate by roughly 30%. Also, it’s very easy to spread when no one is wearing masks, but when infected people are wearing surgicals, it’s much easier to keep under control. If you are going to accuse me of spreading misinformation, please prove it and be able to back yourself up.
Remdesivir.
Why even bring up results that are not statistically significant? It might reduce death rates by 30%, or it might increase death rates. We don’t know.
@“Cardinal Fang” The thing is, a test (especially a medical test) has to have a VERY LARGE sample size and have a very low chance of having occurred to due chance (p < alpha) to meet statistical significance. My AP Statistics teacher in high school said for many medical tests, there must be less than a 1% chance of the results of the experiment being due to chance to be considered “statistically significant”. That’s a pretty darn high bar to meet, and I can tell you there has to be a very large sample size with major results to meet that bar! For most non-medical things, the alpha-value is 5% rather than 1%.
“Why even bring up results that are not statistically significant?”
The results are significant, even though yes, I don’t think it’s a classic, random, double blind, peer-reviewed study that scientists and doctors prefer.
From NIH:
“Preliminary results indicate that patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery than those who received placebo (p<0.001). Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo. Results also suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8.0% for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6% for the placebo group (p=0.059).”
Gilead is supposed to be disclosing more info over the next few weeks, so let’s hope it’s good.
So that means that there is a 99.999% chance that the results with regard to recovery time were not due to chance, and there is a 94.1% chance that the results with regard to decreased fatality were not due to chance.
“The downside risk of a contagion on a campus is far greater than the downside of virtual teaching.”
“Marketing Risk Thought Experiment: Assume a college rolls the dice and goes for in-person fall term. That campus then gets an outbreak in October, when thousands get sick and dozens die. First and foremost, there is a huge human cost that could have been avoided. And second, there is the reputation of the institution, which will be trashed. Who is going to go to Coronvirus U next year? Why trust what they do or say after that? What parent will want to send their kid to a place where dozens died unnecessarily. It’s very easy to destroy the reputation of an institution.”
I think these points sum it up, as things stand today. At the end of the day, the health of the people on campus will be paramount. I just don’t see the college leadership risking this, when there is a safe alternative, at least for the fall term.
Oh, gods, no it doesn’t. No. No no no no no no no. That is not the correct interpretation of the p statistic.
The p statistic does not tell us the probability that the result we observed happened by chance. It can’t. We don’t have enough information to know that.
**The p statistic tells us the probability that if the intervention had no effect, the result we saw could nevertheless have happened just by chance. ** If p is kind of big (and a p of 0.059 is quite big) then there’s no particular reason to think the our intervention caused our result, since it could easily have happened by chance anyway.
Let me give you an example. I tell you that I have the psychic ability to make a coin flip heads. You are skeptical. I say, “Take a fair coin and flip it, and I will make it turn up heads.” You flip it. It turns up heads. I say, “See, p=0.5. [It does.] That means there’s a fifty percent chance that I have a psychic ability to flip heads!”
Do you think there’s a fifty percent chance that I have a psychic ability, just because you flipped one head? No, you do not, because you are not an idiot. You think there is a zero percent chance that I have a psychic ability, because you know perfectly well that half the time the coin would have come up heads anyway, and telekinetic abilities do not exist. The p statistic is exactly what tells you “half the time the coin would have come up heads anyway.”
The very lax p=0.05 standard for statistical significance says that you shouldn’t accept a result if it would have happened anyway more than 1 out of 20 times. And this remdisivir mortality rate doesn’t even clear that low bar. So there’s nothing more to say until they show up with more and better data. It’s bad science to trumpet a result that doesn’t pass the significance test chosen beforehand, and you should know that.
(I wish we’d see more remdisivir tests for covid patients at an earlier stage of the disease. Its effect is to stop viral replication, so it would make more sense to give it to patients early in the course of the disease when the virus is replicating more.)
I think the asymmetrical nature of the risks, which motivated the early decisions from schools like Harvard to close campuses, hasn’t changed a whole lot. Things could change in the next few months as schools learn more. But ultimately these decisions will depend on factors that many schools can’t control, including the local health care infrastructure, testing capacity, various supply chain issues, and ideally further development of therapeutics.