School in the 2020-2021 Academic Year & Coronavirus (Part 1)

Parent Cafe
6762

@homerdog it seems that Bowdoin will decide on the plan, and students will be able to decide: come back to campus because they are good with the plan (or as good as they can be), attend virtually, or take a gap year (or semester). That seems like a fair process.

This is exactly what I have been trying to express…the school presents the plan, and students decide what they will do.

I would leave it up to the students to decide…to research what everyday life will be like and whether they can accept it…but then of course we go around and around in circles again…because the issue of cost kicks in. Some families don’t want to pay $70,000+ for an experience that they didn’t sign up for (not judging).

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On the topic of what are your kids doing now - my S19 has been working over 40 hours per week overnight shift at an essential retailer for a little over a month. We have no special requirements for him changing his clothes or showering immediately upon arriving home like I read on another post. He just quit that job as it was too many hours and he didn’t like the overnight. He just got a new job at a not-so-essential retailer that just reopened for less hours and during the day. That starts later this week. When he’s not working he’s socializing with friends. His life is pretty normal right now except that you have to wear a mask while inside the store.

Someone asked when will you decide if your kids go back to school or not. We’ve decided, he’s going back. He’s got an off campus apt with friends and will be much happier there than here. If classes go all online again he will do them from there.

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Sorry @homerdog I misremembered.

@roycroftmom my oldest is a grad student at MIT, and even with our help living locally, it was nearly impossible for him to find housing this month. I follow nearby real estate and it’s not a trivial thing in Cambridge.

Also, I follow the science carefully and I think there’s a good chance of a vaccine during the winter or spring. That’s one difference you asked about. The other is that with exponential growth, every change for the better will help at the beginning.

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Yes, all of my kids, me, and my husband are working out of the house. (My college son also has an online internship in addition to his out of the house gig.). My oldest is back at the office. He wears a mask in the elevator and common areas, but not at his work station. Neither of my college kids are wearing masks at work due to the nature of their summer jobs. The hospitalization rates are trending down, most likely due to the time of the year and the fact that many people are in the sun outside. I expect the hospitalization rates to begin trending back up when fall arrives, similar to what happens every year during cold and flu season.

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A vaccine study proving safety and efficacy in such a short time, the US having enough supplies to package and administer the vaccine, and then distributing and administering the vaccine to some proportion of 330M people is a herculean task…truly a moon shot that this could happen in a year (with that said, people did walk on the moon).

There could also be ethical issues related to ‘requiring’ people to get the vaccine (for work, school, etc.) if it launches with relatively less safety data than is typical of a vaccine.

I am happy to see people so supportive of the pharmaceutical industry, which has taken many knocks over the years. The industry, along with some governments, has invested an unprecedented amount of money, brainpower and other resources into the development of vaccines and treatments for covid-19, and hopefully that will pay off sooner rather than later.

The best thing people can do is sign up for the large vaccine clinical trials that will be starting up over the next few months, tens of thousands of study participants are needed for the studies to have a chance of success.

6767

Purdue released the details of their plan two days ago (maybe three) and gave students until July 1st to decide if they are coming back to campus or not.

6768

Stupid question? Will you have to get the CV-19 vaccine if you have already had the virus?

6769

Regarding testing sewage - from Inside Higher Ed:

https://insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/06/05/syracuse-test-sewage-coronavirus

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I don’t think we know that yet…many think getting the disease results in a person having antibodies, but we don’t know to what degree those antibodies protect one from getting the disease again, and if they are protective, for how long does the protection last.

It’s possible any vaccine would need to be administered every year.

6771

That Florida scientist who was in charge of reporting on the Florida Covid cases was actually fired for telling the truth. She’s now posting the numbers as a private citizen

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“Is it the colleges and K-12 schools making the rules, or is it the States’ Department of Health driving these policies? How much leeway, if any, do the colleges have when determining campus regulations?”

In CA anyway, it’s the state and county health boards that are making policy, and if the county is more restrictive than the state, the schools and colleges follow the county’s. By leeway if you mean relax the county or state’s restrictions, I can’t imaging any college doing that for many reasons - first safety of the community, second, they’d be open to so many lawsuits if something happened, their PR would take a huge hit. Lastly wouldn’t they be setting a bad example in saying, well the rules are optional for us?

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Not a stupid questions because no one knows. Don’t know if having the virus makes you immune, and if so for how long. Don’t know if there will be multiple strains like the flu or cold, don’t know if the vaccine will be more like the flu vaccines that have to be renewed every year, don’t know if any vaccine will be 80% effective or 95%.

Don’t know.

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I’ve seen several writeups looking at Florida’s excess deaths. So far, nobody has shown a suspicious number of unaccounted-for deaths in Florida. They’re undercounting by not including probable deaths and non-resident deaths, but neither of these are large percentages.

On the other hand, Florida is putting out deeply misleading testing results. What I want from testing results is

(1) How many people did you test for current infection?
(2) How many of those people were positive?

I want to know, basically, how everyone who was tested was eventually classified. How many ended up having the disease, and how many didn’t?

That’s not what Florida is reporting. If a test is repeated–let’s say because there’s some reason to believe it’s wrong–it’s counted twice. So if I show up at an emergency room with no sense of smell, a bad cough and a fever, I get a test. Suppose I test negative, and my doctor says, I don’t believe this test, test again, and this time I test positive, in the Florida statistics that counts as two tests, one negative and one positive.

It turns out this makes a huge difference. In Palm Beach County, 13% of everyone tested has ended up testing positive. But using Florida’s method of counting, Palm Beach County has an 8% positivity result.

Rebekah Jones, the woman who was in charge of the Florida website and who was fired because she thought they were putting out misleading data, has made her own website, where she supplies lots and lots of data, down to the city level.

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7572b118dc3c48d885d1c643c195314e/

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@homerdog
I can’t keep up with this thread! You had questioned the Claremont colleges for trying to form student groups who can socialize without distancing. I would say that’s a whole lot better than having everyone isolated in singles!
Btw, Pomona at least has freshman sponsor groups of 15 who live together, and they are carefully chosen based on commonalities. Scripps has mentor groups. My D17 met most of her friends through her group, and her roommates were also well matched. I’m sure all LAC colleges have something similar to this.
Fortunately outdoors transmission seems to be a lot less of a possibility, and as we find out more that may dictate how we handle the situation. There’s no reason they can’t socialize with others (outside the group, clubs, etc) outside, with some distance, especially in SoCal. D and friends spend a lot of time outside, as it is. It will be more difficult in colder climates, but I am sure they will find a way to adapt. In any case, I suspect they will all be home during the peak winter season.

I don’t know about your kids, but my D is itching to go to college with her friends and will do almost anything to make that happen. They are extremely conscientious, and even at home she has yet to meet any friends. They have a park meet up scheduled for this week, which is the first time since March! Clearly not all kids are as conscientious, but there are honor codes to follow and I hope they are smart enough to know that an outbreak will be a setback. There’s not going to be 100% compliance, no matter what, but I think it’s important to set some ground rules to increase the chances for this to work.

Of course it’s not going to be a normal experience, no matter what, but we are in a pandemic so we may as well adjust to the new reality. Or take a year off.
I have a feeling international students will stay home, so the dorms will be a bit emptier anyway, plus additional housing.

Let’s see what they end up doing.

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College administrators have to follow state regulations when setting covid policies. In our state, if the governor and state education department mandate running at 50% capacity or closing campus and teaching 100% remotely, colleges will comply or risk losing the authority to confer degrees. I don’t see how families can sue them for following state mandates.

If students return and there’s a spike, the state government has the choice to manage another hot spot (at the state’s expense) or dedensify campuses. Colleges don’t want problems with the state, so they’re going to tread cautiously.

But that doesn’t mean people will be forced to download contact tracing apps. Unions and other organizations would challenge such a demand. There are other ways to handle contact tracing.

The college cleaning staff doesn’t have the luxury of doing their work in empty buildings. So colleges have lots of details to consider when planning for the safety of everyone on campus.

The ability to obtain, afford, and administer frequent tests will affect fall policy. Even if colleges can find a vendor to supply all they need, who’s going to administer all of them? And who’s absorbing the cost of the test kits, the additional staff needed to administer them, and the cost of processing?

There’s a steep learning curve here, and I think colleges are being encouraged to err on the side of caution. If things go well in the fall, I expect spring to be better.

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I know there’s underlying political motivation to knocking Florida for many. But not everyone of course.

No, half the state are not retirees and the other half service workers. Which is the vacationers view of things. They have astronauts. Engineers. Doctors. Farmers. Manufacturing. Research. Artists. Musicians. Even gasp, academics.

It’s not all Orlando and Disney. It’s a large and diverse place.

I’m a New Englander but coastal elitism is a thing on CC.

Also their Governor is Harvard grad. Doesn’t that usually give one super human qualities on CC? Lol.

Florida is doing much better than some would have thought and oddly seems to be disappointing to some folks.

You can hide a lot of things but deaths are counted and known. By the families. Compared to some areas they have done a pretty good job.

This is a virus. It will be with us, perhaps forever. We need to figure out a way to live life within the realization of that as part of our longer term planning.

6778

I think it’s a good question! With H1N1, we all (my family) caught the virus, but also signed up for the vaccine when it became available, “just to make sure”. IIRC, it was then also bundled into the seasonal flu shot for at least the next two years. I felt OK about that until I read that those doses were at the expense of availability in poorer countries. I certainly didn’t need quadruple immunity to H1N1 considering how that virus behaves.

I would be interested in being in a phase 3 trial but can’t find one that I match with.

6779

There should be zero political motivation for knocking any state. Each of those numbers represents a person – someone’s parent, sibling, child, spouse, grandparent, or friend – and all of them matter. I’m sad for everyone affected by this pandemic.

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I would assume yes. No one knows if immunity and for how long.

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My county population is 10 x the size of the population of the county where D’s college is. Our county health officer’s policy requiring masks in public where distancing 6’ from others wasn’t possible was very controversial and she was seriously hassled…the county sheriff said he wouldn’t enforce it…and then came the death threat against her, and her resignation this week. The county wide mask order was rescinded immediately by the acting health officer. Our town still requires masks inside all stores. Surreal experience at the grocery store today with the masked (and gloved) guy in front of me telling the cashier that the he was a doc on the front lines, that Covid is far from over and why isn’t the store stopping people from walking in the door without masks…and the two maskless guys behind me (maybe 2’ away) with their board shorts/flip flops clearly headed for a day at the beach saying we don’t have them because they aren’t required anymore. The change was made two days ago and these guys don’t have masks in their cars. No wonder D’s college implies that visitors on campus will be severely restricted.

Contrasting our local county with plans by D’s school to keep students from being within 6’ of one another and masked at all times indoors, whether on campus or not, makes my head spin.
Will be watching our Covid hospitalizations and deaths trends closely over the next month. All of this June planning by colleges may need to be further modified come July…