I’m not sure this is universally true. In our area, the HS and college kids who are social/partiers have been pretty active for the past couple of months. Seems like it’s more than 10% of the kids too, but hard to really know. There have been some covid cases among these groups, but they have not yet resulted in significant community spread.
Not condoning this behavior, just reporting what I see.
Waiting three months instead of two is not going to give us good news here, I’m sorry to report. We already know that from the German study. The average time from first positivity to being evaluated in the study was two months, but a quarter of the participants had tested positive three months or more before they were evaluated.
I’ll quote from the study:
This is very bad. CMR is an MRI of the heart. They gave heart MRIs to the participants, and discovered most of them had myocardial inflammation. That “independent” clause is devastating.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916
Sure, but don’t you think bringing susceptible easily swayed kids who are not in that group together with the partiers will make them party, when they weren’t at home?
And therein lies the danger.
They now have confirmation and normalcy biases that minimize the risks they feel. “I’ve been to several parties, and nobody died” doesn’t mean much with regard to present and/or future danger, both to themselves and the communities within which they operate.
Columbia & Stanford announced switching to online for fall semester.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7news.com/amp/stanford-fall-quarter-covid-19-2020-campus/6370048/
Maybe for some, but I think that is also happening now, during the summer in their hometown environs.
@homerdog and @suzyQ7 - I am pretty sure they are distinct cases. I sure hope the party crowd is getting the message. I have asked myself the same question about quarantine capacity. Their plan is to hold them in isolation until they get 2 negative tests. They stated that this is reducing the quarantine time from 14 to sometimes less than 7 days. There has been no mention of how many students were at the party that started this. I’m just hoping I don’t get to go back and move my DS out in 2 weeks. That would be a bummer for all those who are following the rules.
From Fr Jenkins Q&A on Wednesday, he sounds like they are in this for the long haul. This is not a situation you can ‘wait out’. How many schools will come back in the Spring if the numbers in November are similar to today’s. What about next Fall? I applaud schools that are trying to model student participation on campus. They are trying to establish how it can be done safely.
@usma87 Has class started yet? Any news on if in-person class is worth going to?
The thing is this - teenagers have been in their own “summer pods” maybe without masks and staying negative. Now, they are back with college friends and a different pod and acting the same way but it’s not as safe as their summer-established pod.
As the summer has continued, we are seeing significant pod crossover here and the size of gatherings increasing.
I do agree that some portion of college students are going to socialize. Hope most of them will form pods, but in the short term that process will lead to infections.
From the Columbia announcement:
https://president.columbia.edu/news/update-fall-term
Makes one wonder how many of these self-assessments will come back to haunt these universities. TBH, I never thought Columbia, Penn, Yale or Harvard were great destinations for spending a quarantine.
This makes no sense and is dumb. Let’s say they’re getting tests back in two days. That means a person who gets out in 7 days was last tested at 5 days. But it can take much longer than 5 days to first show positive after exposure. So they can be letting out people that are incubating, and that will subsequently become infectious. In fact, the median time of incubation is 4-5 days, so if they’re letting people out after a negative test at 5 days, they’re letting out around half the infectious people.
Also, left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) was found to be 56% in recovered COVID-19 patients, versus 61% in risk-factor-matched controls. 55% is the bottom of the normal range. In other words, the recovered COVID-19 patients lost some of their heart function.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/16950-ejection-fraction
https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/heart-and-vascular-blog/2014/october/ejection-fraction-what-the-numbers-mean
Moved D back to Duke Thursday. Didn’t have time to read the 1200+comments posted in the last week but saw a few and just wanted to say that not all has gone to hell in a hand basket (not saying it can’t happen but I didn’t see it and D hasn’t yet either). Efficient check in for covid test, results in less than24 hours. Staggering move in of far fewer students over many days made it easy to move in and have zero contact with others in the halls, elevators, etc. Didn’t see a soul without a mask. the school seems to have made a mistake bringing freshman to move in first…they probably should have had come last…And Some RAs opted to defer or stay home to do classes online late in the game and thus missing RA staff…but getting kids in safely and minimizing initial contact was the primary goal (covid tests were originally projected to take 2 days for results so the expectation was kids would be self isolating for a few days).
The minimalist kickoff to college is not for all kids for sure… with many fewer students on campus (and restrictions for those who do not live on campus to be there) it will be an atypical one but I think the students had to know that going in which is why deferral was a better option for many.
Saw the pic that was circulating of the freshman congregating at D’s school that was mentioned pages back and wanted to note that a parent posted that her daughter saw the larger gathering broken up by campus security pretty quickly. Perfect? definitely not but the students were outside in a large area and looked to all be wearing masks…yes they should have had the groups spread out more so the groups didnt clump (Duke limits groups to 10 or less even outside) but it was no mosh pit. Beaches in my town Have bigger groups than what I saw in the pic and no one wears masks on the beach.
While in Durham, went to several stores, grabbed food out several times (food typically ordered online with seating available outside)…high mask compliance and social distance everywhere we went off campus as well. Have been to several college campuses in the past few days (yes we were allowed, I checked With the schools before walking around), and though students are not much back yet, every person I saw on any campus was masked even walking outside, even if alone, great signage of protocols, hand sanitizer Stations everywhere even outside buildings.
I like getting info from this thread but I have realized that parents often post mis-info and speculation about what they think is going on at schools that they have know first hand knowledge about.
Something to watch at UNC.
Two clusters of COVID-19 have been confirmed in Ehringhaus Community and Granville Towers, according to an email sent to Carolina Housing student staff Friday.
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Depends where you live. Those summer pods where I live turned out to not really be pods. All it took was the sibling of someone in a pod to get infected, then it spread to the “pod” then the younger sibling of someone in the pod infected her pod of friends. And on it went.
Somehow no parents got sick. And the kids were either asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms. And those kids you assume were “staying” negative? Did they ever get tested? Because the only reason the kids here ended up getting tested is because one boy, asymptomatic, got tested for work. Then when he tested positive, catching him totally offguard and told a friend he’d been with, that kid got tested. He had minor symptoms he thought were allergies. As word spread thru the pod, kids who had no reason to think they might have COVID, if not for being in the pod and thereby exposed, would never have thought to get tested.
WRT Notre Dame, a friend of mine who is a bit of a naysayer about COVID, felt totally confident that ND was isolated enough that with the initial testing they were doing before kids went back, that they would be safe from an outbreak. Imagine my surprise to see her post a picture on FB from her son’s dorm room, with her son, his roommates, their moms all huddled together for a group photo. None wearing masks, nor 6’ apart. Now I know the boys are living together and considered a family unit, but what the heck were the mothers thinking not wearing masks around each other and the boys?
Did the parents get tested?
@4kids4us i agree that summer pods of kids is a fluid statement here too. S19 had a solid group of seven but of course they have siblings and live with them. Yes, some have been tested because they traveled or knew someone else who was positive. No positives in his group of any of their families this summer. I dare say he is feeling a bit cavalier about that but knows that once he gets to Maine he has to start over. They will all test before they move in and then only stick with each other for a few weeks. He is going to work though. He will have a mask on there. They’ll also plan to get tested regularly. I don’t know what else they can do other than no big parties with a ton of kids outside their group. All college kids are in this boat somehow whether they are moving back to their off-campus place or moving into a dorm.
A cluster is five or more cases.
It would be interesting to know how these clusters were discovered, and how many contacts have thus far been traced and tested.
Did UNC require pre-arrival testing?
@2ndthreekids wrote:
You know what? I’m not going to beat up on a college because it has an attractive campus with lots of open space. Good on them. The kids are going to have to get the hang of “hanging out” in the age of covid. Crowds will be broken up. Hopefully, after a few well-publicized episodes they will figure out how to use outdoor space safely.