I thought there are summer classes online? Our neighbor’s kid who attends Boulder is going to his rental there next week and I thought they said he had a class? Maybe he’s just doing research or something.
Regardless, you can’t make the students leave their rentals, which many of them have to pay for all summer long whether they are there, or not.
One of the main reasons it seemed the CSUs are going to a primarily online model is because they can’t afford the frequent testing that would be required to have students on campus.
I know some insurance companies are paying for tests, and also read that the whole state of CT doesn’t have to pay for tests (Not sure who is paying for that though).
I believe Michigan’s Hybrid example is the large lecture classes are online (they were always available that way before) and the small break out discussion sections (that go along with those lectures) meet in person. So the large Psych, Bio or Chem Intro classes would be a hybrid model but the upper level, smaller classes would be strictly in person. I would guess worst case is someone has 50% online but others may have 0.
Spring semester is over. These are students who have come back to their apartment because they’re tired of their parents, and yeah it’s near impossible to tell them they can’t be here. It’s a small number today, but it will be a lot more in the fall.
The city doesn’t want to go crazy and sic the police on them, but at the same time they can’t risk becoming a hot spot.
I’m going to get some flack for this next comment but here goes. Even if schools cannot test super super often, we should still feel good about those hospitalization and fatality numbers. And what if a lot of kids get the virus and are asymptomatic and don’t get tested? Let’s face it. That is going to happen. After that they are hopefully immune for a little while at least. Most researchers agree that it’s very likely that antibodies will protect those infected but we just don’t know for how long.
So, we could be in a situation where the virus is ripping through colleges this fall and schools will catch some but not all positive cases and quarantine where they can but so few cases require hospitalization. Students might be sick enough to miss a week or ten days of class but, hopefully, schools will figure out how to work with them. Is that such a bad thing? Again, we are back to just making sure that hospitals are not over burdened.
I think these numbers show that it will be hard to get a handle on but, at the same time, maybe it matters less? At least for healthy people under the age of 65, we should all be feeling a little less scared. It’s not the same for those immune compromised or older and they might have to make different choices. How many professors are over 65? Not many.
All of the labs are closed to students, summer school is online, all of the restaurants are closed, and all of the retail is curbside pick up. There is nothing to do here but hike 6’ apart with a mask on.
Right. So they need to protect themselves. And when the students go into town, they need to follow whatever rules are set by the state - masks, distancing, etc.
My parents are in Florida and are almost 80. I’m telling them all of the time that this virus is much more concerning for them and they need to be serious about distancing. I’m not preaching that quite as much to our kids who are now allowed to see one friend at a time as long as they are outside. I wouldn’t want my kids to be around my parents though. Until there’s a vaccine or therapeutics, people in high risk categories need to be more careful and we all need to be more careful around them as well.
The California State system apparently estimated the cost of testing at more than 25 million dollars a week, which was a big factor that pushed them to online classes in the fall.
UCSD plans to test 70-75% of their community every month. To me that seems like a lot of opportunity for asymptomatic shedding between testing.
Tests cost anywhere from $50 to $150 each. UCSD anticipates spending $2million/month for the testing described above. And that’s with them sourcing and running the majority of testing in house at their own facilities.
I could see testing all students to start and then after that testing representative samples of the student population. Based on those results, in addition to contact tracing for any specific cases, you’d know if additional testing needs to be done and ‘where’ to target. For example, for a large university you might see a small cluster in certain dorms or students in certain programs so you test more there to get a better handle on what’s going on.
I don’t think testing all students every week is feasible.
Why are we doing all this testing of kids for an illness less serious than flu for students? The ones who need to be tested are the faculty and staff, for whom this is a more serious disease. One Ivy I follow has been testing staff upon request/symptoms, and with school closed, 50% of staff tested were positive already.
In that case, would you recommend that college students variolate themselves during the summer, so that the herd of college students will have herd immunity when they go back to college?
Sounds like a lot of parents would be okay with colleges adopting a herd immunity approach like in Sweden. Would you send your kid to a college with a TO policy for COVID-19 in place?
I know most of these athletes aren’t at risk for covid-19, but Illinois is just going to get to Phase III next week (groups up to 10 allowed with social distancing), so I don’t understand how athletes are going back to UIUC on June 3.
@ucbalumnus well, who am I to suggest anything but ,looking around our neighborhood and all of the kids not social distancing, I bet a LOT of them will get the virus this summer.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if 30% of the students who returned were already positive for antibodies. Too bad that would entail a completely different test.
@Mwfan1921 The way I read the athlete thing was that they could come back to train but not really practice. So, in the gym and social distanced. They won’t be throwing a football around.