For parents who want to homeschool, I am confident that they can do as well or better than the public schools. My issue is all of the parents who do not want to, or do not have the time.
Here’s the article about the Purdue incident. In addition to suspending the students, they suspend the entire co-operative as well. A new warning went out to all the Greek houses as well.: https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/public_safety/article_44ee2388-e30b-11ea-87d3-2b15e6a6994d.html?fbclid=IwAR1Le4G0-vcUIo2hI5-W3iW8v4Yfh2YBzIA8ORto90Jx6tMfVajDEaHTBtg
D also just got off a round table zoom call with the chem E department highlighting the changes to their building to de-densify and promote social distancing. They also reviewed that students will need to wear face masks, googles, and face shields whenever they are in labs. They emphasized to not come to class if you are sick and that every lecture will be recorded and no one will be penalized for not attending courses in person. She was listening to it on speaker while packing up so I got to hear it too. Very well done. I’m pleased with her department.
I would be so angry if my student was living in a Greek house but really wanted to behave. My niece is the president of her sorority and this is kind of a nightmare. She’s had to change many things about the house for this fall but all it will take is one member going to a party that ends up with a virus and the whole house will likely be quarantined. I don’t know what I would do if we were in this situation as parents. I’m sure it would be too late to find other housing and fall housing has already been paid to the sorority anyway.
I’m a little suspicious about all of this spread happening at “parties.” It’s just as easy to spread it in a room with 5 people in it, and those kinds of gatherings are likely deemed OK by many of the schools. Just seems a bit convenient to blame the “bad kids” is all. We had a great plan if it weren’t for those rule-breaking kids! Hm, maybe.
When it was running all through NYC in March and April, it wasn’t as if we were all bogeying down every night.
It’s a complex network modeling. There would be a certain amount of overlap between/amongst the contacts and the positive cases, with a lot of input factors.
I understand your skepticism, but this another example of a complex network. One would expect that a small group which interacted with each other regularly but not with non-group members (or more social distancing with non-group members) would spread the virus within their group, but less so outside of it.
OTOH, a large party has a lot of participants who are also connected to their own small groups and thus are more likely to bring the virus from outside into the group. Similar to the spread resulting from strangers using the subway and bringing it home. Subway = large party.
I haven’t seen schools saying it’s ok to have any indoor gatherings unless it’s your roommates or your masked and socially distancing. So I’d say most of the initial spread is due to not following the rules.
Sure, but with communal living, small groups are just temporary subsets of large groups. My daughter has 30 on her floor. She will likely interact with 20 of the 30 during the course of a weekend, in smaller settings each time, by the rules. If one gets sick, the whole floor will eventually get sick.
I’m sure parties are super spreader events, but that’s all we are hearing about. Maybe without the parties, they could keep it under control, but I’m not really convinced of that. Especially when students can go out and about in the community…full of virus.
But I do think the stricter a school is about social distancing (always!), the better chance they have of pulling it off.
@Leigh22 Some schools allow one guest per resident in the room if they are in the same area, so 4 total in a double but more in a suite.
But your D will be in a mask so won’t “interact” with 20 out of 30 of her hallmates. And, if kids meet in a room,they are supposed to stay in their masks. I get that this may not happen though. And the chance of a spouse catching the virus is 16%. I’ve read that a number of times. So the whole floor will not catch the virus. We’ve known multiple people who had the virus for probably a week before they thought to test (this was early on) and no one in any of those households caught the virus except for the one family member.
I’m a big fan of social scientist Susan Dynarski, formerly of the University of Michigan but I think she was just poached to Harvard. She was the one who did the study where they mailed glossy mailers to high-scoring low-income high school seniors, and others to their parents, telling them they could go FREE! to the University of Michigan. It worked extremely well to get well-qualified students who would have otherwise ended up at lower-ranked four year or two year schools, or not go to college at all, to end up at Michigan. Huge success.
She’s been vocal in opposing college re-openings, and her latest Twitter thread is hilarious.
We cannot quote Twitter, but check it out. She links to various episodes where, shocking surprise, frats had parties, and concludes that even if 90% of students follow the rules, that won’t prevent outbreaks. She points out that social scientists already know that telling people to “try harder” doesn’t work with safe sex, drug addiction, weight loss, smoking cessation or drunk driving.
I have seen and experienced the exact opposite!
The rules at Hope are that the only time you’re supposed to be unmasked indoors is when you’re inside your own dorm room. And no one is ever supposed to be in your dorm room who doesn’t live there.
Hope has some cottages that are basically very small houses that have multiple people living in them (mostly 5-7). The cottages, I believe, are allowed to agree within their own house that they can go maskless in their common areas (kitchen and living room), but if they let anyone else visit their common area, then everyone must be masked while the outsider is present.
Hope is also doing daily wastewater testing. So part of the idea is not to have anyone using a dorm bathroom who doesn’t live there, so that they can detect a potential outbreak and focus the swab testing at that location.
It’s happening. D has a friend who had to drive home late last night after her roommate tested positive and they were booted from their sorority house. Her rapid test was negative, she can test again next week, not sure how many neg tests she needs to go back. They hadn’t been going to parties, but the roommate had dinner last week with a girl who was and then tested positive, everyone at the dinner has also now tested positive. Some sorority houses have quarantine rooms, some just show them the door. I’m not sure that a house could have enough q rooms given the proximity they live in.
Story is girl A picked it up at a frat house, but who really knows. The reality is that kids being kids will spread it, and she appears to be really good at spreading it. Classes haven’t started yet, so study group and in class spread hasn’t begun.
Was this allowed, the roommate going to the unmasked superspreader dinner? I thought we were hearing about students having to eat alone on a nice blanket outside, not go to dinners with groups of people one of whom might be infected.
The picnic dinners are for dorm kids. Many sororities have their own dining rooms.
The ones I’m picturing, like I lived in, have bedrooms and bathrooms on upper floors, and large living rooms and kitchen/dining rooms on the main floor. There is no way to have a quarantine section without blocking off a floor or half a floor, and really, they aren’t set up for having students shelter there, have meals there, be sick there - those are rooms assigned so other students.
We had one guest room, with its own bathroom, that we could use if someone had something contagious like mumps, but I don’t remember anyone every using it for illness.
I’ve never been in a sorority house, but this incident was described as the friend’s roommate in the sorority going to a dinner, everyone at the dinner being infected with covid, and then the friend and her roommate being booted from the sorority. If the dinner was a dinner at the sorority house with other sorority members, and if everybody at the dinner and all their roommates were then thrown out of the sorority, wouldn’t that be most of the sorority?
There are a lot of different arrangements for eating at sororities.
At Alabama chapter of my sorority, they have about 75 members living in the house, but there are about 300 members on campus who eat in the house daily. They have shifts!
At the house I lived in, about 50 lived in the house but all members (about 75) ate dinner there on Mon and Wed, and often other meals too. Of course we ate out all the time too (and no meals on Sundays).
It sounds like these two girls ate elsewhere and got the virus. No different than if a dorm kid did, or a music major went to a group dinner, or (gasp) went to class.
Purdue de-densified their Greek houses. I’m seeing now that most if not all of the sorority houses have a no visitors policy.
But I thought dorm kids and music majors were not permitted to go to group dinners.
Allowed? You assume there are rules.
The dinner was a handful of girls, each from a different sorority who most likely ate out, I can see that happening all over. Now you have another seed of covid in a few houses…
The reality is that covid has been passing unchecked and uncounted among the greek community all summer, and now there is more fuel for the fire…