Both of the authors are philosophy professors, and in my personal opinion, it really shows. Their expectations for reopening seem very impractical, and do not take economics into account at all (even in the mentioning of consequences for universities, they seem to drastically underestimate the degree to which the nation’s higher education system and employees would be affected by staying closed another semester). Not to mention, as many others on this thread have mentioned through personal anecdotes, it seems that most doctors and scientists believe we should return to school in fall (though I do not have any data to support that).
The Chancellor at UC Davis sends out a weekly update. Today he wrote:
Let’s not kid ourselves here. The NCAA brings in $4 billion a year from football alone and those football conferences are not going to easily give up that revenue. In addition, football keeps alum invested in the college (e.g. Notre Dame football) and will give lots of money back to their university with big donations.
As I said before, if colleges allow students back on campus you can damn well believe that their revenue generating sports will also be up and running.
Unless there is some unforeseen huge spike in cases and deaths, professional AND college sports will be back in business come fall. No doubt about it IMO.
My school doesn’t guarantee upperclassmen housing and still has to put people in triples, etc. If everyone needs a single or their own bathroom, I really don’t see how that’s feasible. They ended up being really strict with who was allowed to stay on campus post-March because they wanted to have room for everyone to socially distance.
As for the costs of testing by the fall, I’m sure a lot of you have read about the third type of testing, antigen testing. So the primary way of testing right now for if someone currently has COVID19 is with PCR lab-based testing for live virus, with the painful long nasal swab. This is pricey, invasive, and in many cases can take days to get results back from the lab, but is largely accurate.
The 2nd type of testing is not to see if someone is currently suffering from COVID, but to see if they’ve been exposed in the past, by showing antibodies. Also called serology testing. Maybe this is a blood test? There were some early questions about accuracy, but in the past few days they have fixed a lot of the accuracy issues (there are a few ways to test the samples, and they eliminated the option to use a medium that was less accurate, so now these tests are 99% plus accurate, very recently.).
The third type, the newest, and probably most game-changing, is antigen testing. This is very cheap and very fast (15 minutes). Lower nasal swab (just in nostril, not the unpleasant brain-tickling type). Can buy a 100 pack of tests for less than $100. It is less accurate than PCR testing. I think it will catch approximately 85%-90% of positives. But even though it misses cases, it is so cheap and so easy/fast, that it will quickly identify the majority of cases, and can be re-done quickly (in one to two days? With great frequency), so it will pick up the few remaining positive cases quickly.
Anyway, it looks like this antigen testing is really ramping up. Several companies will be providing this. I saw one CEO talk about it. Right now their focus is offering to health care workers, military, and frontline. They now have a capability for 1 million test per week. By next week will have 1.5 million per week. Within 3 weeks will start having enough to begin offering to employers and overall private/public markets. Growth by August will be absolutely tremendous.
Anyway, it seems to me that this type of testing (that is painless, cheap, super fast, and largely accurate but not perfectly accurate) is what will truly help schools contain outbreaks by the fall. A true game-changer. Let’s hope it really works out!!
I have been really curious about social gatherings/parties once colleges resume on campus. How to prevent kids from gathering. So difficult!!
A few thoughts/questions. First, if they really want to prevent large gatherings, can’t they have kids sign contracts to return (or put out rules). So, if the maximum gathering is XX kids, can’t they say that if you get caught at a party bigger than XX, you will be kicked off for the semester, and if you are caught hosting the party bigger than XX you are kicked out of school permanently? If so, I would think that’s a pretty powerful stick to wield to discourage large parties.
But the other more recent thought has to do with the size of parties that will discouraged. I am currently in NJ. They just lifted their social gathering maximum size from 5 to 25 during this phase. It will keep increasing and is expected to be much larger by September. My own state is currently 5 but expected to move to 15 people by June 1 and 25 by July 1 and possibly over 100 by end of summer. Obviously this varies by state and what phase of reopening they are in by September, but all of this concern about getting singles vs doubles, or takeout dining only, may all be moot if their state is allowing gatherings of 40 plus, 50 plus, 100 plus by September. I would love to hear thoughts of if you think colleges can control social gatherings in the fall, and also if you think colleges will NEED to control social gatherings in the fall if the states are allowing larger social gatherings by then. I mean, even if the kids stay in their hometowns and don’t go to college, if they are allowed in social gatherings of over 100 by the fall, this will be happening everywhere by then, not just on college campuses? Wondering what others think about this. I was fascinated to read how quickly our social gathering numbers are expected to ramp up in the coming months, and think it has big implications for colleges.
My guess is that the university will not officially sponsor any events with attendance over the legal limit. That is it, and students will do what they want
@EmptyNestSoon2 wrote:
Governor Cuomo was on the air this afternoon and admitted that it will be all but impossible to social distance on subway trains pretty soon; many kids will arrive on campus after traveling in packed airline cabins. It would be hypocritical to expect them to be any more risk averse than their elders.
@roycroftmom I bet they would also probably shut down (if they even started) major parties on-campus; besides that though, I don’t think they would do anything about informal, small group gatherings.
@EmptyNestSoon2 I don’t know if they would kick all the party attendees off-campus for the semester; maybe the host for the semester. If there were a major party, the campus police would probably figure it out pretty quickly, especially on a small-campus like Amherst. They already are alert on Friday and Saturday nights in case any of the parties get too crazy.
I think, in very broad terms, there are three possibilities:
- Complete remote learning
- Having students on campus and trying to enforce social distancing
- Letting the virus spread through the campus
2 and 3 are very different. If campuses aren’t turned into fairly dystopian environments (no interaction within 6 feet, one-way walking paths, single dorms only, etc) then I don’t see how 2 is possible - this is simply too contagious to be contained in a place as crowded as a college campus without drastic measures. I think pretending that just banning big frat parties will contain the spread is magical thinking.
If 3 is the plan, then there have to be measures put in place to protect vulnerable members of the campus community (eg, janitors can quit and still be able to collect unemployment, students and profs can opt to go online for their own safety, etc). Even with those measures, there will still be people put at a higher level of risk than in option 1 (for example, vulnerable people who live around the college and might be more likely to catch COVID because there are thousands of mild/asymptomatic cases nearby).
One suggestion would be to do as several other countries have done and use an APP … if you are clear (temp normal, no symptoms, etc) you get a Green QR Code on your phone. You use the QR Code to gain entrance to all locations - dining hall, classrooms, labs, etc. Not green and you don’t get access to public areas.
I’ve been reading asymptomatic carriers don’t necessarily run fevers. I don’t know if this is true.
@petitbleu There is an option between number two and number three; colleges wouldn’t necessarily have to prevent every single small group meeting, but they can prevent the large ones. Also, requiring everyone to wear surgical masks would be a great help, as the wearing of surgical masks can reduce spread by roughly 75%, according to one study.
The spread isn’t going to be contained anywhere. As Dr. Fauci said in March, “we are past the point of containment.” The goal now is only to slow the spread and protect those vulnerable. They can slow it through universal wearing of surgical masks being required on-campus.
Fever is a symptom. By definition, asymptomatic infected people don’t have symptoms.
But it gets worse. If you are infected, and you will show symptoms but haven’t yet, that’s when you’re most infectious. You’re the most infectious one or two days before the symptoms start.
Doing screening by checking fevers is not a good plan for this virus. It’s going to miss a lot.
Hypothetically, if a student catches the disease on the way to college, (plane, train, bus) how long till they are contagious? Do we know?
Am I correct they will need to be tested when they arrive?
And then, at least once to catch the cases caught in route?
Unless there is a way for everyone to self-isolate for a period of time after arrival?
A student exposed to the virus can develop symptoms as soon as 2 days and as late as 14 days after exposure, with 50% of those who get sick developing symptoms by 5 days after exposure. A person is the most infectious on the day they first develop symptoms and for the 2 days prior. The person is considered to be infectious for a minimum of 10 days after onset of symptoms or for 10 days after a positive test if asymptomatic.
At many colleges, the big parties are off campus in places like off campus fraternity houses. To the extent that there is campus recognition of the fraternities, they can lean on them not to have parties, but some fraternities at some campuses are completely off campus organizations (often because they were not following whatever rules the campus had for them to be recognized in the first place).
"As I said before, if colleges allow students back on campus you can damn well believe that their revenue generating sports will also be up and running.
Unless there is some unforeseen huge spike in cases and deaths, professional AND college sports will be back in business come fall. No doubt about it IMO."
They might sure, my point was that athletic revenue is about 2% of total revenue and so it would be health and safety driving the decision, not revenue. And many colleges are ending by Thanksgiving, so what about conference championship games, bowls, and the non-conference college basketball season? They could play the games, but nobody will be on campus.
It isn’t Kawasaki disease. It’s Pediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (PMIS or MIS-C, they haven’t decided on a name).
Kawasaki mostly strikes kids ages 1-4. It causes inflammation in medium-sized muscular arteries throughout the body. Serious complications include coronary artery dilatations and aneurysms. Without treatment 15-20% have aneurysms. Some have them with treatment, potentially meaning a lifetime risk of clots which could block blood supply to the heart. (This risk is present for PMIS also.)
PMIS looks like Kawasaki in some younger children, but is different in these ways:
- More likely to strike people in their late teens and early 20s.
- Can get serious more rapidly.
- Acts more like hypovolemic or cardiogenic shock, especially in the older patients.
With both conditions, it’s important to recognize it quickly and get treatment. Doctors do not know what the long term recovery from PMIS will be like.
Yes, PMIS is rare. However, if a couple hundred million Americans are going to get this disease, even a rare complication gathers numbers. Our local children’s hospital has seen 43 cases.
I both think and hope that colleges will have students on campus this year. But this syndrome is not, “less than a blip.”
I would certainly want D19’s college to have a health education campaign about symptoms of PMIS. If she got it, I would be concerned because it’s likely that the local hospital near her school has never seen it before.
Desire for our lives and the economy to accelerate back towards normal is not going to blind me to the fact that information is still emerging, and it is important to be educated.
This change affects nine students, so I wonder if there is something other than money at play here. Having said that, I am not surprised and suspect we will see more of the same, especially in liberal arts fields.
Many universities have extended PHD funding for another term or year to allow current students to complete their programs. I suspect that the PHD pipeline will be a bit clogged for at least a year. Faculty may be unable to take on additional first years without some of their current students moving on.