two students with Covid and they closed down? There are going to be cases. Wouldn’t it be more about contact tracing and not shutting a whole school down?
I believe the same policy is in effect in NJ - if there are two cases that can’t be directly connected to each other (same classroom, or siblings, for example), school goes remote for two weeks.
would a weekend get together count as two cases connected? K-8 back to school here but lots of kids hang out sans masks with their summer friend pods after school.
looking through a summary of the recommendations, I think in your example, no…school would remain open:
— If two or more people in different classrooms have confirmed COVID-19 cases within 14 days at the same school, it gets more complicated. The entire school could be shut down if “a clear connection between cases or to a suspected or confirmed case of COVID-19 cannot be easily identified,” the recommendations say.
Well after 3 weeks of classes and 15,115 student and employee tests, Hamilton has it’s first positive test result. It is of an employee who is working off campus, so that should mitigate spread at the college itself. Hoping the employee fully recovers and this remains contained. The school is now in all out contact tracing mode for this case.
CU Boulder communicated their current enrollment numbers to the state regents yesterday. Here are the basics:
Overall enrollment down 2%
Freshmen down 12%
International undergrad down 22%
International grad down 11%
OOS US resident down 6%
So you are probably wondering how they are only down 2% overall, and the answer is non-freshmen instate UG and Grad went up. They did not give a number.
Tuition revenue down $25 million. Increased costs and enrollment loss were almost covered by CARES Fed money. There won’t be CARES money next year though.
Last year 342 deferrals and this year they had 1,247 deferrals. In normal years at CU and nationally very few deferrals end up enrolling. I think this will be interesting to watch.
Michael Mina, a professor of epidemiology, has been banging the drum for these tests for a while now, notably on This Week In Virology 640 on July 16: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-640/ I learned about them from this very thread. I don’t remember who first wrote about Mina here, but thanks to that person.
His point is that right now we have slow very sensitive PCR tests that detect a small viral load in a person. But from a public health perspective, we don’t care about that! We want to know if a person is infectious, and people are only infectious when they have a super high viral load. You don’t need a sensitive test to detect a super high viral load; a cheap not-very-expensive test will do the job. Such tests exist now, in prototype.
Infected people are infectious for about a week. We want to catch them at the beginning of that week and isolate them. If it takes a week to get a test result, it can’t possibly be useful for isolating the person, because by the time we learn they’re infected, they not infectious any more and don’t need to be isolated.
Mina claims a test that could be used at home by anyone, like a pregnancy test but even easier, could cost a dollar. You’d just lick the stick, wait a few minutes, and read the result. Schools could have each kid do a test at the door to the school each morning. No negative result, no entrance to the school.
Oh yes, why are these tests not available now? Mina says pharma companies and the FDA don’t think they’re sensitive enough, because they don’t detect people who have lower viral loads. Mina says that’s the advantage of the tests: because they’re less sensitive, they only detect the very people we want to detect, and don’t detect the people we don’t want to detect.
@waverlywizzard Thanks for the concern. He’s an EMT and is in full PPE for confirmed Covid transports in the ambulance. The ambulance then gets a full 30 minute decontamination at the local fire department.
What if students took these tests each day and then could go to class if they are negative but everyone still wears masks? So, if they have a tiny load that isn’t showing up on the test then they certainly won’t be contagious if they are still wearing masks. Maybe the distancing thing could go away with these tests but keep the masks for class.
On-line classes started 2 days ago at Brown, and yesterday they announced that they will welcome back it’s Sophmores, Juniors and Seniors for October classes (some still on-line, some in person), but they will arrive starting on Sept 18th for a 2 week quiet period. Brown sent out a newsletter today, and I thought the following was interesting and applicable to what we had been talking about for future semesters…
"“We and other leaders in higher education well understand that nowhere in this country will the public health conditions be anything approximating ‘normal’ for a long time, considering the trajectory of the pandemic and the projected timeline for the widespread distribution of an eventual vaccine,” Brown’s senior administrators wrote. “Yet for our own campus, what Brown and Rhode Island are currently experiencing is a set of conditions that may be among the most conducive to bringing more students back to campus that we’re likely to experience for up to a year.”
NO! Asymptomatics absolutely have high viral loads in the first week of their disease, like symptomatic people. How do we think all those colleges are having outbreaks? Asymptomatic students are spreading the diseases.
With regard to SDSU, in addition to students living in dorms, there are students who have all or mostly remote classes who are living in apartments in the surrounding area (I presume they are there to get the “college experience”). A lot of these kids are not following mask and distancing protocols. It seems SDSU will not be successful as long as its students are living in “mini dorms”, over which they have little to no control, in the surrounding area. Going fully remote is not going to solve the problem, unfortunately.
3 post-secondary institutions in Saskatchewan just announced that the 2021 winter semester will continue online. They have very few cases (though also aren’t testing a whole lot) so that doesn’t bode well for schools in more populous regions.
Re the HS in San Diego that closed down for two cases: yes, it’s probably because there’s no clear connection between the cases, and so those two may just be the tip of the iceberg.
According the school, students were “having trouble” social distancing both at school and away from school, suggesting to me that the school was getting reports of out-of-school social gatherings without masks or physical distancing. That’s something that could happen at any school; I hope it doesn’t at my daughter’s school, but I’m not so arrogant to be 100 percent confident it won’t.
As for the trouble social distancing at school, that’s the administration’s fault, not the students’ IMO. My daughter’s HS’s plan is so strict there is just no way for students to get close to one another during school hours without blatant, willful disobedience, in which case the school has made clear that offending students will be sent home immediately and required to do distance learning for the remainder of the term.