UA is a state school. We don’t know where these “keep quiet” orders are coming from. Are they trickling down from a Board of Governors?
Will the professors agree to this…or will they be vocal?
My friend’s son has been at SUNY for over a week. So far, so good.
College confidential really needs a new response choice. Appalled , maybe like this ?. I would click on that for this post.
My son’s college, Kalamazoo College, has decided to go remote. Students had not yet returned to the dorms. My son was going to remain in California anyway, so this choice is better for him; there will be no on-campus students to suck up time and attention away from the remote students.
They weren’t planning re-entry testing or surveillance testing, perhaps because they don’t have a ton of money, so IMO going remote is the better choice.
Still don’t get the point of the waste water testing. If schools are finding virus in that testing, that means they aren’t catching positives? Then what? Seems to me that, if a school could test more, then they would. What happens when a school sees “oh lots of virus in the waste water - guess we aren’t catching all cases”?
I wonder if they were influenced by the recent editorial in Western’s school paper? (Several of my best friends growing up went to K, so any mention always catches my eye)
At Hope they have the campus divided into zones based on the location of the residence halls. They are doing daily charting of the wastewater. They are also doing random surveillance testing and testing symptomatic students. As I understand it, part of the idea behind the wastewater testing is to alert them if they need to focus more testing on a specific dorm or other housing clusters, for example. Especially considering that students may be asymptomatic and therefore not ask to be tested. And secondarily to alert them if they have a widespread problem that may signal the need to shut down. https://www.fox17online.com/news/coronavirus/hope-college-faculty-members-develop-method-to-test-student-waste-water-for-covid
@homerdog
Some schools are testing dorm by dorm. If there is virus in the waste water of a certain dorm, the population of that dorm would be tested. I believe this is an alternative plan to testing all students on a regular bases. This article about Syracuse’s plan explains how it is working there. They describe it as an early warning sign.
@elena13 How many cases does Vandy have?
This is how I originally understood this kind of testing but then saw the Georgia one and the info they have gathered doesn’t seem very useful!
Are they going to test again in a couple of weeks? How will they have any clue if they are spreading the virus themselves?
@wisteria100 - here is a link to their dashboard, which doesn’t seem particularly helpful yet. They say it is updated each Monday but it seems to be behind. It says 16 undergraduate cases, but I would think it’s more by now. I’m not sure if that number includes the football and lacrosse players who tested positive.
New York - Gov Cumo’s latest policy regarding colleges:
If a college experiences 100 COVID cases or an outbreak equal to 5% of its population (whichever is less)—that college MUST go to remote learning for 2 weeks while the situation is evaluated.
I have no doubt this will be enforced.
Plan is only as successful as its implementation/enforcement.
Why oh why do these colleges insist on updating their dashboards weekly? It’s inadequate. It’s useless. This information needs to be updated daily.
Finding a virus in the wastewater just tells them there are positive cases in the dorm, which doesn’t help much. But when there is no virus in the wastewater, there is no virus there and the school doesn’t need to waste testing capacity on those students.
Its inadequate for who? Random people on the internet who are trying to pick apart their plans? The people who work for the school know what the numbers are. Those who actually are involved in making decisions about classes and dorms aren’t sitting waiting for the public dashboard to be updated.
To me it is an indication of pretending to be transparent vs potentially really tracking, tracing and being honest with a community. The dashboard for my kids’ college is a farce.
Few overnight camps opened this summer in Maine but the ones that did managed to not not have covid outbreaks. Campers came from around the world. Testing prior to arrival, two week quarantining, isolating the sick, etc all the things that colleges need to do in order for on campus life to work this fall.
U of Arizona is a good example of how sewage testing can work. This is all from twitter, so it’ll be a formatting disaster…
SMH. Also, did they not think someone would immediately go to the press with that email?