@homerdog —I am impressed that they have articulated such a measured plan. I imagine other schools must have something similar in place, but I have not seen many published. The county SU is located in presently has a rate of 3.4 new average daily cases per 100K residents. NYS is serious about not wanting a repeat of March & April, not that upstate ever did.
Some additional details here regarding Syracuse
http://dailyorange.com/2020/07/su-suspend-person-classes-quarantine-facilities-capacity/
My D’s best friend will be a freshman at Syracuse…I pray for her that they don’t have to shutdown the college. She’s in a very selective music program with 30 or so students but they have 15,000 undergrads, another 7,000 graduate students, and 5,500 faculty/staff. Keeping under 100 cases for 27,500 people this fall seems like a challenge, doesn’t it?
Has anyone already posted this Muhlenberg announcement?
“As a result of this changing landscape, the College made the decision to reduce the number of students on campus to allow us to fully implement our health and safety protocols. Therefore we will have first-year students and a limited number of approved upperclass students on campus in the fall. Each student will have a single room and share a bathroom with only 2-3 other students. First-year students will have primarily online courses with some in-person instruction and small group co-curricular activities. All upperclass students will take their courses remotely whether on or off campus.”
For Syracuse, is 100 cases a cumulative threshold, or do they mean 100 simultaneous cases? I initially assumed it was the latter, but after reading the article in nichol51’s link it sounds like the former.
No affiliation with SU, so just guessing that they mean 100 active cases at the same time, but that is just a guess based on their mention of 200 quarantine rooms. I don’t know if they plan to quarantine only infected students or if they would also quarantine others who share the same bathroom?
What are your kids schools doing when someone tests positive? Is there a threshold being reported (like Syracuse) where they plan to call it?
Rice has an isolation dorm in place. Kids who test positive move there and they are provided with linens and towels, a fridge and microwave, basic medications, a thermometer and blood ox thingy, food is delivered, they get their mail, and they have a laundry service. They have a doctor and counselor check in daily.
If your roommate tests positive then you (and any suite mates) are quarantined. If you live on a floor with a communal bathroom (which isn’t many and they have reduced the number of kids living on those floors) the roommates of a positive student are quarantined and the rest move to a hotel. Off campus kids who test positive can choose to isolate/quarantine in their house/apartment or move to the isolation dorm. The dorm holds 200. 1600 kids will be on campus and about that many off campus in Houston. Plus grad students but I have no idea how many of them are on campus. No idea what happens if more than 200 get sick at any given time.
They just published a video available on the page linked below stressing that they are not taking the easy way out but it’s time to return.
Two years?
Amherst has set aside several dorms for quarantine/isolation rooms as well as the on-campus hotel and many rooms at a local, off-campus hotel. They have several hundred quarantine/isolation rooms for only about 1,200 students on-campus. They articulated in a town hall that they wouldn’t shut down unless absolutely forced to, and in the event of a really bad outbreak, they would have students shelter in-place until the situation improved because sending students home would pose a danger to parents and the communities they are sending kids home to. They did say though that students could leave if they wanted to in the event of a major outbreak, but nobody would be forced to leave (so basically they get to keep room and board if you decide to leave). Also, if/when things improved and they could resume in-person classes, students who opted to go home would not be allowed to return.
When someone tests positive, they will be placed in a quarantine room, and they will use a contact tracing app to determine any close contacts and place those people in isolation rooms until a negative test comes back.
Kids in the system don’t have a lot of choice of where they spend their time. If their parents won’t take them to school, they don’t go. The child who was in K went to 3 different schools between Aug and March, and then there was no school at all.
Not all kids missed their proms and getting to walk across a stage at graduation when covid hit. Some missed learning how to read.
All the moving around necessitated by the quarantines sounds like a lot of potential chaos.
@vpa2019 and a big old waste of time and money plus added stress. I hope schools give back room and board if kids are sent home. And I really hope these colleges don’t cause giant spikes all over the country setting us back again.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/30/covid-19-roundup-nyt-counts-campus-cases-college-staff-worries-more-fall-changes
"New York Times identifies 6,300 COVID-19 cases linked to 270 colleges, including 14 deaths.
More than 6,300 cases of COVID-19 can be linked to students and employees at about 270 public and private colleges and universities from which The New York Times solicited and received data, the newspaper reported Wednesday. The Times identified 14 deaths from those infected"
Sorry if this is a repost.
"Of more than 6,600 counted cases of COVID-19 on college campuses around the country, Texas accounted for at least 1,569 of those cases, and the University of Texas at Austin topped the list, according to data compiled by the New York Times.
UT-Austin, the flagship for the UT System, came in at No. 1 with 449 cases. UT’s digital dashboard, which records the number of COVID-19 cases within its community on its website, cites a total of 459 cases as of Thursday evening, with 287 students and 172 faculty who have tested positive since March 1.
Texas A&M University came in fourth place with 302 cases and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas at sixth, with more than 200 cases.
UT-Rio Grande Valley reportedly had 95 cases, Sam Houston State University 88 cases, and the University of Houston-Downtown had 61, followed immediately by
Rice University, which had 59 cases, according to the Times’ data."
Same source, texas specific.
CU Boulder met with the City Council today and a couple interesting things came up.
Their testing plan is 20+ sewer test sites with at least one test per day per site, but often many more. The sewer tests will be on campus and processed in less than an hour. When there is a positive test, everyone that was “upstream” from the collection point has to be tested immediately. COVID testing will be on campus and be less than 24 hours. They will then isolate/quarantine the positive cases and start contact tracing.
Council asked repeatedly if there was a number of active cases that will trigger more restrictions, but CU refused to give a number. Sounds like there is one though.
They were also asked why they aren’t going all remote to start, and their answer was interesting. They and the health department felt they could manage the students living on campus, and the off campus students will be here anyway and it was better to have them monitored/tested.
.
I read in a different source that for one of the colleges in this article that said there were 110 cases, the majority were workers at the college-affiliated research hospital, and the rest were campus employees who contracted COVID while working remotely from home. None reflected cases occurring on the campus itself. Somewhat misleading representation for that university, If correct, IMO …
If that is indeed true, I agree very misleading. Will the NYT be publishing a correction? We will see. If not, the damage is done. Anyway this type of “news reporting” is not helpful if not accurate. Especially now.
If the article is correct, then this is another data point that would help universities/school districts/counties etc in the path forward!
As a New Yorker, I would’ve thought that was justified
Response to NYT’s article as provided by UConn:
“ The New York Times published a survey that listed the number of reported COVID-19 cases among college and university campuses in the country. UConn was listed as having 112 cases, which placed 10th in the country.
We would like to clarify how the number 112 was determined: Ninety of those cases were associated with personnel at the UConn Health campus in Farmington, CT. The remaining 22 were UConn employees who work at our Storrs and regional campuses, but were all telecommuting at the time of their diagnosis.”
Breaking: Around 40 individuals on USC’s fraternity-filled 28th Street have contracted the coronavirus. Both UCLA and USC have reported over 150 positive cases.
From LA Times Twitter feed