My son is a history major. In his classes, there is a good deal of discussion. Nobody’s stopping to eat. It’s talking the entire time.
They’re not all singing at the same time, or all chanting religious responses at the same time, so it’s not as bad (in that aspect) as a church service, but an infected person would have a good chance to infect everyone in the classroom during a ninety minute class.
I do wonder how dining will work. Even if you require masks to enter the dining hall and while getting food, once you sit down to eat, the mask has to come off. I don’t know anyway to eat and drink with a mask on. I doubt most dining halls are big enough to ensure kids all sit 6 feet apart. I guess they could just close off the seats and make everyone take their food back to their rooms to eat.
I have spent a lot of time on the MIT campus. I have never heard the saying, “MIT hard”. I hope this phrase is not becoming a saying because I really think it is cringeworthy.
It’s not a made up number. I won’t go into why
Comparing workers at colleges to essential workers is pointless. Colleges CAN be run online; food can’t.
And lawsuits keep employers honest. No, one shouldn’t win a lawsuit if they got infected while honest, real safeguards were in place, but absent a stick, what’s to make organizations be careful at all? In the current environment, the corporate ethos is–do what you can get away with. Take away fear of lawsuits, and why bother with any precautions? (Do you want me to start listing way employers “legally” endanger workers, when not reined in?)
So it seems everyone’s version of a class room might be different or at least for different situations.
For an auditorium type class I think once your on class and several seats apart then taking off your mask is OK (unless your sick then you can just remote into class… Hybrid).
Even smaller classes with limited amount of students it might be OK
. Have to be maybe in a half circle configuration and not a circle. Don’t want to sit with someone in front of you. If you sneeze don’t want the chance to infect someone.
Just thinking… Sorry to diverge… What’s going to happen with cold /allergy season? I guess these kids will have to go online.
I wonder if, in the main cafeteria, freshmen and other on campus kids with meal plans will be given a seating time/window for meals to make sure it’s not too crowded. Of course, you could get a boxed meal if you had a conflict.
But why even have a concern about low infection rates if it’s the equivalent of a hangnail? Perhaps by August, we will all realize the zero level risk involved and just ignore the whole darned thing. I’ve had hangnails. They didn’t kill or disable me.
Not one poster has claimed Covid is the equivalent of a hangnail. But it is not bubonic plague, either, as some fear.
However, we have–whoosh–gone from “well, of course they will wear masks” to “oh gosh, do they REALLY need to keep them on in the classroom?” in a nanosecond here, even as the same posters agree that classrooms are non-stop talking.
The smaller discussion-heavy classes that are so favored on these forums would have plenty of talking from students. Even classes where the instructor is doing most of the talking still have someone (the instructor) talking most of the time, which could be an issue if the instructor is asymptomatically contagious.
Probably differences in local politics.
To be fair, someone did mention athlete’s foot.
Sort of makes you nostalgic for when the biggest concern was whether the college would open at all. I wonder when people arrive from all over the country at those schools where geographic diversity was a big admissions factor, whether masks become a dividing line?
My daughter goes to Rice. Even with their plan to supply cloth masks to the kids daily that they will turn in and have washed, we will be sending our kid with some of her own. I just ordered a Rice one off Etsy and a Rice parent has been making some embroidered with the residential college logos. We will also get some simple cloth ones and some disposable for emergencies.
RIce has 11 residential colleges (dorms). I THINK one has traditional shared hall baths and maybe another has a section set up that way. The rest are all some version of suite style rooms. My D’s college mostly has 2 double rooms connected by a bath.
Every college is a bit different in their common spaces too. Some have a small common space for a group of rooms, some have floor common spaces, and some (probably most) have large common spaces on the first floor for the whole college. My D’s is the later, which she loves, but I am not sure what that will look like this coming fall.
D spends most of her time at the Library studying or in her college common area. IF the only place she can be mask-free is her room, she might be spending more time in her room that she’s used to!
I don’t know why but I don’t like the idea that the school washes the masks and dispenses them. I think we will outfit my son with plenty of masks and he can wash them when he does his laundry. Kids sneeze/cough in /on them etc. Rather him deal with his own germs.
@homerdog “I was thinking the same thing and I asked many pages back. If people are sitting down six feet apart, then why the masks? I thought masks were for when you can’t be six feet apart.”
For the same reason why a surgeon not only scrubs his hands but also puts on PPE. For the same reason an ICU nurse wears a clear face shield and also wears a mask. For the same reason cars have seat belts and airbags.
It’s the cumulative effect of many steps that truly protects us – not one step, bang we’re done.
I expect that face masks will be given out at school events, like T-shirts are now. My kids have so many school T-shirts and almost all of them were free. I expect my son will end up with a similar collection of face masks.
I feel the same. I’ll supply her with enough so that she’ll have her own and let her decide how she feels about their process. She doesn’t love to share stuff like that with people so I suspect she’ll stick with her own. Rice’s President’s daughter will be at Rice this year so I like to think he’s comfortable with whatever decisions he’s making for the student body for his own kid!
You’re right. Except there’s reason to fear it, as it’s WORSE than the bubonic plague. There is easy treatment and preventative measures for the plague. Covid, not so much.