Covid tests before re-entering is a must in my uni I can see many others doing the same. There are also other unis that plan to do everything online. In regards to tests, I feel like they’re bound to go online if this continues. Besides collges all know of the difficulties in getting standardized tests done atm.
My freshman S will be living on campus, 4 out of 5 classes are f2f (small). Junior D is likely not going. She was just notified sophomores and juniors can’t head back until mid-late Sept. (freshman late Aug, seniors early Sept) Then leaving by mid-November. She doesn’t think it’s worth it for 8 weeks. All online until move in, then she’ll have one regular f2f class, one f2f class that she’ll be attending 1x/week, and the rest online.
I have one sophmore college kid. He will be living off campus at a large public school. So far all of his classes are in person. Masks are required. Filling out a daily health survey via app is required. It would not surprise me if some/all of his classes moved online at some point. I don’t have strong feelings either way about his classes. Complete them as required, graduate, get a job and move on is the goal. The parties/out of school activities are of more a concern. He knows the risks and is probably more concerned about getting sick than the average college kid. However… college kids do dumb things all the time. I was definitely one. And his roommates could just as easily bring it in. I hope they are all smarter than I was at that age, but we will see. I am glad he isn’t in a dorm. Those are breeding grounds for disease!
H is an elementary PE teacher in a poor school district. He starts Monday. No plans have been voted on by the school board. The current favored plan is to be online for the first 9 weeks. This is fine by me as long as H goes to school to work in his office for a few hours/day. He needs to get out of the house for his sanity and mine. I am sure that learning will not happen well for the majority of H’s students. Once they come up with a plan for f2f, I will be more worried then. People here do no believe in masks. I heard that the safety guy has said that no kids under 10 will be in masks. And this is the guy who closes school for not only the threat of snow, but also if the overnight temps dip below 20 degrees. (I’m serious.) It would shock me if they required it for any student. I hope I’m wrong.
In my “as good as I can hope for” in H’s school, I would limit the students to 15-20 in a class. 3 feet apart spacing - all facing forward and not at the usual round tables - and all masked. Lunches can be boxed and delivered to the classrooms. Get as much outside time as possible - in small groups led by H or special teachers. The main issue I see is that it doesn’t solve the problem when teachers get sick or must be out for 2-3 weeks. For many years, when teachers are out they can’t find subs. Those students are split up into the other classes for the day. That won’t work now. And then what happens when a kid comes off the bus sick and parents won’t pick them up? That happens all of the time now as well. Those kids sit in the office sick until the bus takes them home, only to return the next day and repeat. Who wants to babysit the covid kid room?! There really isn’t a good solution.
What new information is the article providing us if they lumped students and college employees who tested positive for Covid on campus during the time the colleges were open in March WITH students and employees who tested positive weeks and months later - never having stepped foot on campus when testing positive? The numbers they are reporting are absolutly meaningless. Look at the UCONN response… that illustrates how meaningless the article is. And because people don’t read articles anymore, other sites will scrape the tidbits of this l, attribute it to NY times for validity, and everyone will believe that colleges have had huge undergrad recent outbreaks when ITS NOT TRUE. This is called misinformation.
“Complete them if possible, graduate, get a job.”
See this is why S19 is taking time off. We don’t see college as a grabbing of credits and a degree.
As for where our kids are? S19 deferring at least a semester, living in a house with some college friends (3 taking class, 3 deferring) and working in an internships and/or doing research. His house is not “off campus” since living off campus isn’t really a thing at his school but it is about 15 min from campus. Only freshmen are allowed on campus for any reason.
D21 will be hybrid - in school two days a week, half day so no lunch. Masks and social distancing mandatory. I see it lasting less than a month.
My student’s school starts classes 8/17. Five different formats, including versions of traditional face to face with distancing, hybrid and online. They are requiring everyone to do a saliva test before arriving, then will be doing nasal swab (shallow kind) of everyone in the first 100 days, plus wastewater testing. My student just registered for the saliva kit using a link forwarded by the college. They want a government issued photo ID uploaded. The saliva test is collected while on a Zoom video call to verify identity. Here’s a link for the saliva test (the fee was paid by the college so no charge to us): https://www.vaulthealth.com/covid?fbclid=IwAR1kkvKDm3dAIf_-AWHlS0N527F9z9DBuE7AA07VZIVAoz8RdinImTClukA
Vassar President Elizabeth Bradley on reopening colleges during coronavirus in the Journal of of the American Medical Association:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2768917
My son just found out that all of the classes he signed up for will be online only. This is great for him, since his school is in Kalamazoo, whereas he is in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were worried that the one class he needs to graduate would be in person only, but fortunately that did not happen.
My daugther is going back for in person classes (all of hers so far are scheduled for in person) at a large public. This will be her last semester so she has upper level classes which tend to be smaller and a lab. Plan for the school is detailed though they admit some details need to be completed and flexibility will be key. Off campus kids must have negative test before they can come on campus. On campus kids will need to be tested before they arrive or within first week. They have 2k/per day testing capacity with 24 hr results.
She has an off campus apartment. If they go to online classes, she plans to stay in the apartment and isolate with her friends. They still have a laundry list of things they want to do (mostly off campus) which they plan to get done early in the school year. Hope they can make it through the semester on campus even if classes need to go online.
This summer she has worked as a vet assistant. She has been interacting with the public for 3+ months. Probably greater risk on campus but not sure by how much. Its been tough for her to be away from normal daily routine. Getting back with her friends will be good for her. She isn’t a partier and neither are any of her friends. I understand she will be around kids who are. Just like I don’t control what the people I work with and the people living in their households do.
They are synonyms. “Scared” is a schoolyard taunt, and I find it extremely offensive that it continues to be used in this context.
- What is a "Gryphon" included in every Lehigh room?
- Saying that it doesn't "count" that Princeton or wherever had a lot of cases, but they were of employees and not (necessarily) acquired on campus - is like saying that it doesn't "count" that a driver ran down a pedestrian because he was drunk. Sure, people used to say that, but it's ridiculous. If 48 people in the Princeton community have COVID-19, who cares where they got it? They have it and could be circulating, and the proportional numbers of asymptomatic people in that region is still calculable.
Saying that numbers don’t count because of a medical center is even more wrong - if there’s a medical center on campus, that obviously increases the risk of COVID-19 and can’t be distinguished from other buildings on campus, because it’s all new/more exposure.
The tests need to give results quickly, so that contagious people with no symptoms can self-isolate. Test results a week or two later would be of little use.
However, for the purpose of public health of the school community, the tests need only check for contagiousness, not infection, if the tests are done often with quick results.
@ucbalumnus Broad Institute, which D’s college is using, is still turning around most results in 24 hours with no problem, and expects no issue when all kids return to college.
Of course, the virus infection could have caused the heart issue, or aggravated a pre-existing heart issue to fatality.
We’ll substitute “rationally concerned and unwilling to risk lives unnecessarily,” thank you very much.
It matters where the employees acquired the virus because that is the point of contagion, not the school. Very few Princeton employees, other than faculty, live in Princeton, a quaint but very pricey town. If the infected employees live in Trenton or Newark or New Brunswick, and have been there since March, those places are the potential hotspots. The identity and location of their employer, Princeton, is irrelevant.
Medical centers, for example at UCONN, are often in a separate location and even a separate city from many campuses, so inclusion in this case is particularly misleading. Hospital employees may have never even visited a university campus during the course of their employment.
While I would like to think of all employees as members of the Princeton family, they are certainly not members of the local community. Some are all over the world.
In that school district, is PE predominantly done with outdoor activities and sports, or inside enclosed gyms? In the former case, it could be the lowest risk part of the school day (if the activities are not close-contact/proximity ones); in the latter case, it could be a high risk part of the school day.
A gryphon is their term for an RA and there’s one per floor.
And there are some deaths and will be others going forward that result from people skipping regular checkups, cancer screenings, etc because of Covid restrictions.
If I’m on a campus and 2% of the people on campus are infectious, I don’t give a hoot who they got covid from. I care who they might give it to: me. It doesn’t matter how they brought the disease to campus, if they brought it.