@homerdog Exceptions will be made for student athletes.
It sounds like course sequencing will be very complex. That’s why they opted to use mostly class cohorts. The college will be doing what it can to place students in internships at other times of the year. Oberlin was already in the process of building stronger connections to Cleveland to place students in professional opportunities. Hopefully it can build on that.
@ChemAM I don’t think that housing assignments have been made yet. Most of the dorms mix students from all grades. There are only a couple that are for first years only.
Not at all, but a decision regarding indoor meetings of thousands of largely middle aged to elderly people for over 12 hours per day over several days is not particularly applicable to colleges.
The CDC came out with some info on a sample of the servicemembers on the Theodore Roosevelt. You’ll recall that there was an enormous outbreak, over 1100 servicemembers became infected, five were hospitalized and one, a 41-year-old petty officer, died. The results of the survey let us know what a dorm outbreak might look like.
They sampled 382 servicemembers from the ship. Of those, 62% had a current or previous covid infection.
In this outbreak, men were much more likely to get infected than women. That’s surprising, because in other datasets, women and men are about equally likely to be infected.
People who wore masks were a lot less likely to get infected,
The most diagnostic symptom was loss of smell or taste. Most people (61%) who had covid lost smell or taste. A few people who didn’t have covid (13%) also lost smell or taste.
One in five of the servicemembers who tested positive didn’t have any symptoms, lucky folks. Most of the people (60%) who had covid sought medical care for it, but then, a good portion of the people who didn’t test positive also sought medical care for symptoms.
So if a college had an outbreak in a dorm, the large majority of students who were infected would be sick. Some would be quite sick. A few, probably, would be sick enough to be hospitalized. If your kid were at this school, you’d want them wearing a mask and consorting with others in masks.
CNN is reporting that an extensive MIT led study has concluded grocery stores, banks, and universities should be the first to open. Maybe someone can link it.
@“Cardinal Fang” For the 18-29 year old crowd, only 23 out of 10,000 end up in the hospital according to CDC numbers from May 30. I’m betting a good number of those are over 21 and/or those people had underlying conditions. So you aren’t likely to see any hospitalizations from a dorm break out of normally healthy college kids.
It looks kinda bogus to me. The basic idea is sound: we should open up the places that people want most, that are the least dangerous, and that make the biggest economic contribution. But I don’t trust their measures.
This is exactly what I just wrote on the other Covid thread. Any time anyone posts something here that Is remotely optimistic, you and some other posters immediately dismiss it. I don’t get it. When there’s good news about a therapy that works or a vaccine, will you all say that news isn’t believable? Do you just want to stay stuck where we are?
I am sure MIT is so bogus. Come on. Tell me who you will trust exactly?
At the very least, this report shows a very interesting way at prioritizing contact during this time until we have therapeutics or a vaccine.
You’re misunderstanding my objection, or maybe you’re misunderstanding what the paper does. The paper does not say which places should be opened. It merely says, if we are going to open certain places, we should open them in a certain order: banks and dentists earlier, gyms and dessert parlors after everything else.
I take issue with their methodology. This is not a matter of optimism or pessimism; I just think what they’re doing is bogus. I don’t have much disagreement with their results. I just don’t think they get to the results legitimately. They appear to be trying to put a veneer of science on what is mostly handwaving.
This is NOT an MIT study. It’s a study done as part of MIT Initiative on Digital Economy program sponsored by MIT Sloan business school. None of the authors is from MIT. They are from Chapman, UT and U of Cyprus, and all are from their respective business schools. It’s a study from the business and economic perspective.
It’s an old axiom that sarcasm doesn’t register very well on the internet. It took me a while to figure out what you were saying in post#6309. It’s difficult enough to follow this thread, please be more careful.
In reading the study, I was curious about the term “face covering”. Upon googling, I found other reports that stated the sailors were issued N95 masks.
According to the CDC report, “Lower odds of infection were independently associated with self-report of wearing a face covering (55.8% versus 80.8%)”.
If over half of those wearing N95s still got infected, I wonder what percentage would have been infected had they been wearing cloth masks.
The age of the sailors ranged from 18 years to 59 years old. Did the report indicate the age of the 2 people hospitalized? (I couldn’t find that info listed) I also wonder why the CDC used the vague term “face covering”.
There will definitely be students who get sick with Covid while on campus this fall, just like there were kids who got sick with Covid while on campus last winter. The outcome for this age group who do become sick is encouraging.
@1NJParent@circuitrider thanks. Points taken. I did read the report. Just not super carefully and was going on another poster’s info that it was a MIT paper. I shouldn’t comment so late at night when I’m tired!
The MIT connected paper does a good job of showing the economic side of what the government opens. Colleges are massive economic engines and can also have a big impact on mental health. It’s why we see every state working with their colleges and universities to get them open.
The problem is what on the campus is open? We’ve been tossing that around for 100 pages, and this study still doesn’t tell us.
Local news reported this morning that lack of available testing is one of the reasons for this decision, however SNHU is a unique case as they are primarily an on-line school. Freshman are getting free tuition this year and existing students will have their tuition reduced to the on-line rate. SNHU does have a fairly strong D2 athletic program, so it will be interesting to see what happens there.
St. Anselm, which is only a few miles from SNHU, announced their plans to return. They are phasing students back to campus over a 10 period.
This ^^also take anything anyone reads with a grain of salt. This condition is extremely fluid. Evidently states are just opening up now and there is no way for this study to take that into account for all states or regions. People read this stuff then try to apply it to where they live even if the facts don’t apply to them.
Many of these pieces are more opinion and not facts. But interesting reads.
So Purdue started to release their online classes available for the Fall. It skews very heavily towards underclassmen.
Some of the older students are saying that the email wording to students was inconsistent and the implication was that everyone would be able to study from home.
My D said for her major, they are offering no junior year classes on line because the juniors have all their fundamental labs this year. There were a smattering of senior year courses available that would allow seniors to still graduate on time but not really continue with their concentrations.
The FAQ for parents was much clearer with language about underclassmen having more online options (they must have gotten feedback from the students).
D said all her friends are going back except for the couple of students who went back to Asia. The university said they would “work with” all international students who can’t get back but that might be having to take the semester, or even the year. Most international students stayed on campus and took the university up on staying for the summer to take more classes, but there were definitely some that went home.
My take from the parent perspective is that focusing on underclassman courses going online makes the most sense. Those are the larger classes with tougher logistics to hold and socially distance. Plus, almost all upperclassmen live off campus and aren’t on meal plan, so it will be easier for the university to de-densify dorms and dining if more freshmen stay home.
The university also announced that students have until mid July to decide if they are coming back to campus or taking all their courses remotely. Obviously housing contracts will be voided with no penalty, and the university said that pricing for online semester will be set at summer prices which are discounted (I’m not sure the exact figure but something like 20-25%).
While not perfect, I think most Purdue students/families feel like the university is doing a good job of planning and communicating in an ever changing environment.
@momofsenior1 Aren’t most upperclassmen courses already picked before leaving campus? My son had all his class’s registered for before the last semester was up for the fall. There was one class that was canceled that applied to both his major and one of his minors. He will need to pick an additional class now to substitute.
@Knowsstuff - Yes! Course registration for this Fall semester was back in February. That said, the university is telling students that they can make changes, and that they’ll be informed if the university makes any changes by mid July. D is thinking her molecular bio class may end up being moved online or the recitation section moved. She has a very tight schedule so she may need to drop that class if it messes things up. She needs an upper level bio selective for her major but has three more semesters to fit it in.
I’m the biggest MIT booster you’ll ever find, but that “MIT” article was not something I would take seriously.
The authors picked their own measures of value for all kinds of businesses, and created “data” from those. Great to know that they think liquor stores are significantly more important than book stores or museums. (Not just financially - they claim to have also used other considerations from a consumer preference survey.)
I guess if someone is interested only in the axes of money vs. exposure then maybe the graphs are helpful.