Providence colleges switches to remote learning for 2 weeks after outbreak. I don’t think they have college wide weekly testing program for surveillance - which is surprising considering RI is one of the strongest testers in the country.
Testing
The College has developed a testing program, subject to change based on evolving conditions and modified state/federal guidelines, centered on:
-point-of-care diagnostic (PCR) testing for symptomatic individuals and close contacts of symptomatic individuals;
-point-of-origin (PCR) testing, i.e. a COVID-19 test within 3-5 days of repopulating campus and broad population testing of the campus community at the time of repopulating campus, and:
-additional population PCR testing throughout the academic year according to best practices, as outlined by public health agencies and experts.
I’m wondering, as we go along, how many covid long-haulers there will turn out to be in this age group. When a student gets covid, and then they recover from the acute symptoms but don’t quite get better, that won’t be so obvious to fellow students.
Oh my gosh. You guys are killing me. How many people, what percent, are long haulers??
Fauci said last night that pick up basketball without masks will be a thing again by late third or early fourth quarter next year. I’m going with that. You all can go on and on about after-effects but I’m sending my kids to a normal school environment as soon as possible and that’s looking like it could be next fall.
Tulane’s dashboard shows 36,638 tests and 520 positives since July 28. They are in week 5 of classes now, having staggered move in before that. Current active cases are 86 with a 1.4% positivity rate. Tulane is testing all on campus students twice weekly and off campus undergrads once weekly. Not sure about grad students. To me, the benefit of having required frequent testing is that the students can’t fudge their symptoms or avoid quarantine if positive. I am not sure how the contact tracing is going, though, I am sure the students don’t want to quarantine so they try to avoid this. I heard an anecdote from a friend with a child at Madison, that kids who knew they were exposed at a party, went and did their own outside testing (and tried to be responsible, in this case) so they would not be contact traced - as in, they asked the party host not to name them because they didn’t want to deal with the University’s system. So. comparing that to Tulane requiring frequent testing, you can’t skirt the rules as easily. My son’s last test came back in 12 hours (they are doing their own testing.) We finally purchased a return flight home since it now seems like they will make it to Thanksgiving.
We don’t know what percent of infected people become long haulers. We know that two regular CC posters have kids who are long haulers and IIRC a third has a kid who took months to recover. So the numbers are definitely not negligible.
I very much want to know what percent of people who were infected with covid become long haulers, and don’t know why the CDC hasn’t done some surveys to at least start to get us closer to knowing that number.
We do know that in a CDC survey, 1 in 5 young adults (18-34) who’d tested positive for covid weren’t back to their usual state of health in 14-21 days.
Regarding ‘long-haulers’ - even though they still have symptoms for months on end, I thought they test negative for Covid at some point after initial infection. So while they still may be experiencing sickness from Covid, they technically are no longer carrying the virus and can’t spread it. Not sure if this is true for all ‘long-haulers’, but for some I believe this is the case.
Hopefully this is an allowed link- seems to be that studies are finally looking at the longer-term issues. I know my kid, as an athlete, would be devastated to lose that touchstone in her life altogether due to covid. Makes me glad she’s cautious by nature. Her crew team is doing outdoor conditioning workouts on campus since they can’t go on their boats, and they’re doing a zoom in for those remote (like my daughter). She’s enjoying that connection with her team. Her gymnastics practices are all masked and distanced, with no spotting or pit use, and she was heartened to hear an initial study that said that chalk kills COVID.
Anyway, here is the nature article on some preliminary results from studies on long haulers.
Side note about school- she has work study as a part of her aid. The school had said that remote jobs would be possible, but she was told this week that she couldn’t be hired because she lives out of the state. That was a disappointment as she’d found an ideal campus job for herself and clicked with the professor.
I’m not a doctor, but I’m guessing that if you are still expressing acute symptoms like a fever or difficulty breathing, you are still infectious. Long-haulers refers to actual changes to the body that are the result of prolonged inflammation, survive the virus and may or may not be permanent. We just don’t know.
The worry about long-haulers is not that they’re still infected with covid and still spreading it. They’re not. The worry is that it’s been been up to seven months and they’re still not better.@Creekland’s son got sick in the spring and still can’t walk a mile.
And to circle back to our subject, school in 2020-21 and covid, we know that young people are not going to be swayed by worries that they’ll have bad effects in thirty years from a covid infection now. But are they more likely to be swayed by worries that they’ll have bad effects now from a covid infection now?
And is there any info on if they had underlying conditions? I know not everyone would have but I’m willing to bet a lot of them did.
The vast vast majority of cases (especially in young people) are mild with no lingering illness.
It’s interesting because, when you hear most
Ok. but the last time I had the flu, it took me six weeks to be able to start running like normal so I know Covid isn’t the flu but any bad respiratory illness can set you back for a while. When our D had pneumonia, it probably took her two full months to feel normal. So, don’t act like Covid long haulers are special to Covid.
As for school, I can’t imagine any college student turning down a vaccine that let’s them go back to normal college.
I agree with this. D19 had mono last year and was not ok’d to run for 3 months.
Much of this talk belongs on the inside medicine thread IMO…that Nature article that milgymfam posted is good, and researchers are starting long-term studies which helps…but whether or not researchers will be able to draw conclusions is really complicated.
We don’t know what percentage of people who were infected become long-haulers, but we absolutely do know that for some of them, fevers persist for months after they are not longer infectious. There seems to be some kind of autonomic dysregulation: automatic functions like temperature regulation, heartbeat regulation, blood pressure regulation go haywire for reasons we don’t understand.
I’m thinking that if kids truly don’t feel well, they will mention it their friends. Kids will hear about it. I’m not picturing lots of kids feeling notably ill after they are cleared negative from COVID, and keeping it secret from friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, teammates, etc. Or perhaps a lingering symptom is so absolutely tiny-minor that it isn’t worth mentioning to anyone. But I believe genuinely annoying lingering symptoms will be mentioned among friends–they do communicate.
I myself have had (X-ray diagnosed) pneumonia 3 times in the past decade. Totally stunk, and I definitely had not returned to 100% by 14 days. Maybe 21-28 days. But I stopped being so miserable about 24-48 hours after I started treatment and I continued to feel better each day, and I did fully recover each time. I couldn’t run my normal speed/distance probably for a month, but I felt mostly ok within a week. I can see parallels with what some of the COVID-long-haulers might be like. My guess is that for most 20 year olds, it would be worth the very, very small possibility of enduring that type of somewhat lingering illness for the chance to socialize (remembering that the vast majority of them are completely asymptomatic, the bulk of the rest have minor cases, and only a small portion get serious cases and/or are long-haul. We may not know the actual percent of long-haulers, but the Purdue data that focused on the students this age who tested positive showed 85%+ were absolutely asymptomatic, so we are talking a small sub-portion of the remaining 15% who have these lingering symptoms).
I think unfortunately for us oldies, who are more concerned about COVID than many of these youngin’s, they are seeing with their own eyes their classmates getting COVID and being fine, and not complaining about long-haul symptoms. If they are on campuses that have had outbreaks, they have probably met way more of their peers who have survived COVID than most of us have, so have more firsthand experience and they will draw their own conclusions. Too bad COVID doesn’t leave them with something non-painful but that they would want to avoid–like a terrible 2 month case of severe acne–that would really discourage them from excessive socializing!!
ETA: oops, I took so long to post this that others made similar points ;-). Sorry for the repetition. And I’m also very, very sorry for Creekland’s son; that’s absolutely terrible. But it is also rare enough that I don’t think it’s top-of-mind for most college aged kids. I can say for sure that for my own kids, their being super-careful about covid is definitely not out of concern for themselves, it’s out of concern about spreading a virus to people who think wouldn’t fare as well as themselves.
OK, you’re on, how much do you want to bet? The CDC took a random sample of people who’d tested positive and were symptomatic. Of those who were young adults, one in four* weren’t back to their usual health in 14-21 days.
If it were the case that these people had underlying conditions, then we’d have to believe that 1 in 4 young adults who get symptomatic covid had underlying conditions. Do you believe that? I do not, and I don’t think there’s any evidence for it.
*I initally wrote 1 in 5, which is what the CDC graphic says, but, confusingly, the text of the report says 26%, which is actually more than 1 in 4.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: I’m not going to go back and delete posts at this point, because I know I would miss some, but please don’t drift off topic. One user was correct - a lot of this information should go in the COVID and Medicine thread.
POSTS IN THIS THREAD MUST BE DIRECTLY RELATED TO SCHOOL.
(This is what is discouraging. People ignore and ignore and ignore moderators’ instructions and then are shocked, SHOCKED, when a thread is closed. Please help us.)
I don’t think they’ve been back to school long enough to really know yet. Everyone pulled the plug in March and while it’s true that some young people caught covid over the summer, many colleges-aged people stayed in or were very careful most of the time. Just anecdotally, in the last two weeks I’ve heard about so many more cases in the 17-27ish crowd than even during the peak in NYC, and I posted earlier about the kid with myocarditis.
I don’t think we all need to hide in our basements but we do have to admit that in many ways, college students are guinea pigs right now. I just hope all of this info is being collected and studied. Seems rather scattered.