Article linked in the first article linked above is interesting:
https://wsbt.com/news/operation-education/notre-dame-students-share-coronavirus-testing-struggles
Some students say testing is not what it should be or what was promised.
This is so bad. I’m not sure any school is going to make it without testing everyone regularly to find asymptomatic cases. And denying a test to a student who wants on? Yikes.
Not even sure if the schools doing a ton of testing will do ok but a lot of those schools (like the NESCACs) welcome students in about ten days.
From the article posted by @saillakeerie
If she had, he would have told her, for instance, that he spent about 15 hours less than six feet away from his girlfriend Monday and Tuesday – and they spent the night in the same bed.
This is the other part of college life that schools won’t be able to control or contain.
And if testing is limited to symptomatic kids only that will be completely inadequate to control the spread.
Notre Dame:
147 positives of 927 total tests: 16% positivity rate. This seems high to me.
ND tests students, faculty, staff, employees who “red pass” on their daily health check and have any of the leading symptoms or have been in close contact with someone who tested positive. Our ND friends report that there is a central, on campus testing facility. Apparently, surveillance testing has not yet begun, though it was initially scheduled to to start last week.
And a significant portion of the 927 tests are athletes all of whom are getting tested weekly so their positivity rate should be lower. Would expect positivity rate of non-athletes is higher than 16%.
Yes, also means they aren’t testing enough, which seems apparent to everyone but them.
I think college sports are in need of a major correction and that students should never have to fund multi-million dollar coaching salaries…but…
I think we’ve reached a point where students should stay home and athletes should be on campus and playing for the revenue-generating sports.
I am appalled at my typing that, but hear me out.
It’s obvious campus environments for 18 to 23- year-old students just can’t be organized in such a way to stop the virus. Remote is sadly the answer.
The Power 5 conferences stand to lose over $4B in revenue for not playing football. I hate to say this, but schools should focus on generating that support to help offset the massive costs of COVID.
It’s a business decision.
I’m going to go shower now…
I wonder if ND can change course and get enough tests to start testing more.
It’s very likely they haven’t moved to surveillance testing because their capacity to process tests is being used on the students with likely infections. ND has the money to test a lot more people but the lab is limited.
Which brings us back to the Broad Institute and can they process an unlimited number of tests quickly. If not a lot of schools won’t be able to stay open.
There’s one thing I genuinely don’t get…would there be a scenario where there wouldn’t be positive results in any given group? I’ve seen notes that, say, 200 kids are positive which proves that we can’t have college…but if you were to randomly test any 20,000 people (without symptoms so they wouldn’t normally be tested), wouldn’t it be expected that a certain % would have it?
I guess I fall into the camp where i don’t correlate positive test results with campus failure.
Yeah, no. Remember, the positives at these colleges are coming from off campus, not on. If you send res students home, positives will go down for res students and they won’t test nonresident students (no reason to if campus closed) so I guess the numbers magically disappear from the college tracking, but doesn’t change a thing!
Proximity.
Social distancing works. You bring folks together, the virus spreads.
Sure, but if you no longer have the Room and Board revenue, and most of the classes are online anyway…what exactly are you doing F2F?
EDIT: I remember…playing football!
Quest just reported that they are all caught up on testing and the article mentioned the yale testing"breakthrough". We may be on the cusp of alot of new availability for testing.
The company now has capacity to conduct 150,000 diagnostic tests per day, it said, adding that they “expect to scale up our capacity to 185,000 tests a day by Labor Day with further gains possible after that.”
Frequent testing (and isolation) is probably going to be key. At Duke, I’m hearing of frequent random testing of students (and probably faculty/admins).
“Duke University’s comprehensive COVID-19 testing program has administered 5,765 tests to the students who have returned to campus since Aug. 2nd, school officials announced Monday, the first day of undergraduate classes for the fall semester…A total of (only) 11 positive results have been reported and those students are in mandatory isolation.”
11 positives over 16 days seems manageable. Let’s see if they can maintain this “bubble” for the next 3 months? If so, spring looks much more promising…
Back to elementary schools -interesting article. I happen to agree with this:
"My first reaction this summer in realizing that the fight over reopening schools was largely pitting teachers–who were anti-reopening–versus parents (who were mostly pro-) was one of confusion.
Shouldn’t it be exactly the other way around? I had assumed that the parents would be the ones against sending their kids back into an unsafe situation–as some indeed are–while the teachers would be doing everything possible to coax them to return. Hence my puzzled feeling throughout this interview a few weeks back with the head of the Essex County, N.J., teachers’ union.
Thinking it over the past few weeks while watching my neighbors try their best to sort out their plans for their kids this fall has crystallized the paradox in my mind: I don’t think public school teachers realized just how much they have to lose.
Interest in homeschooling; in “learning pods” comprised of small family groups; even in parochial schools has absolutely skyrocketed, especially in areas where public schools aren’t fully reopening this fall. One family I know is sending their kids to the local Catholic school this year, simply because they’ll be open. (And they got in; many are stuck on the wait list.) Another is opting for a nearby private school for their youngest even though they’ve been deeply involved for years with the local public school’s parent-teacher association.
As families opt out, it’s no wonder that some places–like Montgomery County, Md., whose public schools will be online-only this fall–have also tried to ban private schools from reopening. But even places that succeed in doing so can’t stop parents from withdrawing their kids to do homeschooling or learning pods instead. ** My guess is that public school teachers and workers are suddenly realizing they’ve been advocating their own irrelevance. They are stuck in an awful situation, between that and risking their health; but that’s something that essential workers across the country have been dealing with for months. Public schools now risk being classified altogether as non-essential." **
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/17/kelly-evans-schools-out-for-ever.html?recirc=taboolainternal
That is the positivity rate since students returned to campus. If we knew the # of football players tested and could isolate their results, we would see a significantly higher positivity rate, such as the 50% rate for Aug 16th. Yesterday’s rate was 19%, but I am guessing that was a football testing day. May not have been as it appears there were four days between the first two football testing days. Time will tell…
If ND does not step up and test all students a couple of times/week for the next two weeks, there will not be any way to control this outbreak.
K-12 is and will be different in different parts of the country. In many parts, the option of homeshooling or learning pods isn’t a practical option (at least not one that will result in signficant reductions in demand for local public schools). So in many districts across the country, that threat isn’t one that is or really should be concerning to public school teachers.
Switching to private schools will also vary by district/state. An attractive/realistic option for some but definitely now for all. And in certain parts of the country likely not for many. Private schools will have capacity limits. And they have to show they can operate safely. Just like certain colleges made the business call to go f2f for classes, many private schools are looking to do the same. If you go 100% online as a private school, you run the risk of some parents putting kids in local public schools (why pay private school tuition for online classes when publics are online). So their choice is often made not based necessarily on a belief that they can operate f2f safely but because they think they need to as a business matter. Again, will vary by district/state.
@EyeVeee Mack Brown at UNC agrees with you:
Sure as long as you don’t need to take labs or practicums. Those are going to be very difficult to replicate online over the long term. If a small school manages to pull off having in-person instruction I would expect them to become a popular choice for students with a hands on/in-person component to their studies.