Rosepetal that is great re: Amherst and procuring hotel rooms for potential covid positives. I love the Boltwood Inn! It is beautiful. I wonder though how Amherst escaped the ire of the town planning and community who basically forced UMass to shutter due to concerns of students spreading covid in a small town that could not handle it. Seems like public vs private thing.
Check the age cohort of the German study. Decidedly middle aged. And yes therefore higher risk than college aged.
@GKUnion but won’t the positive student cases be counted in their home district, not the school’s city? That was my understanding of how it works at least in VA. Our first death was early on in March. But the man contracted it overseas and went straight to the hospital in a nearby state from the airport and died there. He never made it back to VA let alone our area, and yet he counted as a death in our district.
So the city’s low numbers may be misleading, unless the students cause a big spike in the permanent residents. But at least for now, the city seems to be doing well. Much better than our area.
To be sure, the median age in the German study was 49, decidedly middle-aged and much older than college students.
But what point is being made here? 60% of the people in the German study had serious ongoing heart problems, and the incidence of the heart problems didn’t depend on the severity of their disease. That is so stratospherically high that it could be way lower and still be a catastrophe.
We don’t yet know the incidence of heart problems in the young. We don’t really know the incidence in older people either; that German study was small. But we know the incidence of heart problems in the young is non-zero, because we can name (or, at least, with a little Googling I can name) elite athletes who have the problems.
So, let’s say instead of 60%, the incidence of heart problems in college-aged covid survivors is a mere 3%. Are you OK with that? “OK, my football team, if all hundred of you catch covid only 3 of you will have to sit out the season and maybe never play again”? Is that OK with you?
We know these problems exist, and are not rare, because we hear of them. We don’t know the exact incidence. To me, that urges caution.
14 new positive cases at Notre Dame yesterday.
UNC does not update its tracker until Monday.
@ElonMomMD - ND is showing what r0 (r naught) looks like in real time unfortunately. One party, now we have 44 cases. I’m sure ND has a cap where they will make a change, but that has not been published to my knowledge.
@ClassicMom98 The school had a safety town hall where they clarified that any cases on campus would be reported in the town/county numbers.
One of our local universities announced today that they would be continuing their fall online model into the winter semester (Jan - April). Another one has announced that first year students (who have large first year courses) will continue online for the winter.
At the time of announcing online plans for the fall, most of the schools indicated that they had hopes that students would be able to return to face to face classes on campus for second semester but now I expect that many more schools are going to follow suit with similar announcements that the winter semester will continue to be online. I was really hoping that DS19 could move into his lease for at least the winter semester but I have a feeling that that’s not going to happen. I’m also wondering how, if his school does announce online continuing for the next semester, his department is going to accommodate his laboratory techniques course. The rest of his courses can run online no problem, but the whole point of that one class is for them to get actual hands on experience using the various equipment in the lab. How long can you run lab based programs in a virtual environment before you start to compromise the quality of the education?
Are we talking about a school where the campus actually closes and students sent home like in the spring? My guess is it will be at least a month post opening. I fully predict those with classes face to face see classes shifted online first before they actually attempt to send everyone home.
(Also that will be a huge mess to send potential carrier students on planes and other public transit back to their families but that is a whole other tangent.)
What type of labs are these? The idea that students are going to get much at all out of “virtual” labs is rather laughable, but a lot of faculty seem intent on trying. It’s magical thinking, IMHO. I’m going to do everything I can to at least make the effort to get my students into in-person lab experiences, however diminished they may be, but that may be magical thinking too.
I’m sorry if this has been covered already but what is ND’s testing strategy? It doesn’t seem like they are doing a lot of tests. Are they just testing those who had potential exposure due to the party and/or those with symptoms? If so, is that their plan or do you plan to do regular testing?
In the spring many of our students were sent from the frying pan directly into the fire. They would have been safer here.
Bowdoin is sending lab materials to students to use at home, clearly for experiments that don’t require equipment not typically found in a home. Still not as good as the real thing, but a good idea (and expensive).
Your comment is an example of confirmation bias. Your daughter received results, so obviously the information people are sharing on the internet is wrong.
There are going to be exceptions, but the vast majority of all tests in all states take 2 days. It is very unlikely (especially given the massive increases in testing that about to flood the systems) that test times are going to below 48 hours. There are dozens of reasons why your daughters’ test results happened quickly. Hopefully, those turnarounds are maintained, but they are an exception.
My 2 cents…in the next few weeks there will be a school (probably several) that either shelter in place (large scale isolation) or go 100% remote because testing that they had contracted with turnaround guarantees isn’t being delivered on a timely basis.
From the Notre Dame website:
Surveillance Testing
Because some carriers of COVID-19 may not exhibit coronavirus symptoms, surveillance testing is part of the University’s overall testing strategy. The pre-matriculation testing of all students, as well as testing of individuals associated with our football and volleyball programs this summer, represented the first wave of surveillance testing. Moving forward, we plan to randomly test some students and a smaller population of faculty/staff over the course of the next 3-4 weeks. In addition, if symptomatic testing, or the results of the random testing, suggest any meaningful concentration of cases in a given class, building, or residence hall, we will test broadly in those environments. Depending on the outcome of these rounds of testing, and the status of case rates in St. Joseph County and other key indicators, we may test all students once again as well as a concentration of faculty/staff regularly coming to campus.
He’s a second year physics major. He has 2 labs scheduled for the fall, E&M I and Computational Physics, and one for the winter, Introductory Laboratory. The computational course can run online no problem, and E&M I could be ok with an at home lab kit, but the lab methods course? You can’t send students that kind of equipment.
Yes. There’s that little sticking-point of how many people (and NOT just in “Red States”) refuse to take those precautions. If that were not the case, I’d be a bit more sympathetic to your view. But if it’s still not happening, I’m not holding my breath for all Americans to start taking it seriously enough to get to that “normal life” we all crave any time soon, I’m afraid. Until we ALL–“at risk” or "not (?) at-risk) take this seriously, and consider all lives equally important, and act as a community where people take care of each other, even if it means some temporary inconvenience, it IS kind of “black and white.” @ny2020ny , can you guarantee that you and EVERYONE in the group you believe should be allowed to go about their “normal lives” will take the necessary precautions, all the time? Every single one? If you can’t, then those who might have a greater risk of illness can only hide out in isolation and fear you, indefinitely.
Here is what Notre Dame is saying:
From mom1720’s quote:
- They're doing surveillance testing.
- They're testing broadly in the case of outbreaks.
From this article (https://www.southbendtribune.com/news/local/notre-dame-sees-spike-in-covid-19-cases/article_df400178-de64-11ea-9eec-8f4e8e14e00d.html):
- They've conducted 348 tests since Aug. 3.
- Of the 348 tests, 160 were associated with the football program.
- Of the remaining 188 tests, "many" were of symptomatic people or people who had contact with symptomatic people.
- They've had 28 positives since Aug. 3.
- Almost all the positives were connected with one party.
- The county deputy health officer maintains they haven't seen community transmission, where the source of the infection is not known.
I say, this is wholly inadequate, and ignores the role of asymptomatic transmission.
They mostly tested symptomatic people and their contacts. It doesn’t look like they found asymptomatic transmission, but they certainly didn’t look for it. They claim to be doing surveillance testing, but if so, they’re not doing much of it. How many people did they test who weren’t associated with football and didn’t have contact with a known symptomatic positive? Not very many. Definitely less than 100. Not enough.
My kid has been waiting for his COVID test results for about 100 hours. We are in PA.
My nephew got his covid test on move in day at his school - was told results would be within 24-36 hours and he waited 58 hours.
A friend’s son just took a test in NH. Told results within 48 hrs took 72+.