That’s official cases. Real cases would be more. Perhaps they can give their antibodies for science and determine if they are close to here immunity.
Michigan State will open up 2500 spots in dorms, with priority to those with in-person classes, students with difficulty learning at home, and freshmen.
My niece is learning from home plus she can work at her part time job. Saving the room /board right now is huge for her since she is paying most her loans this year. So… Sometimes things aren’t so bad depending on your needs
Wake Forest has a spike in cases, changes status to “Orange: Modified Campus Operations”, which entails take away food options only, moving campus meetings to virtual, reduced gathering limits, and cancellation of campus activities for the weekend. No change in classroom activities, which are already distanced and require masking. Student lottery attendance at last home football game is suspended and Fall Fest cancelled. Students asked to remain on campus except for essential shopping and voting.
Asymptomatic testing will be increased. 70 positive cases last 14 days, asymtomatic testing to date 17/3259 pos/neg.
School officials attribute spike to attendance at off campus parties and bars and dining in close proximity.
it is not a large size school - they should have been testing everyone
Not sure if this is helpful for those applying but I was surprised the numbers where this low. I expected more not to enroll.
Here is to hoping the colleges and universities with students on campus can hang in there and keep numbers down with one month to go for the semester. I am reading about numbers going up across all parts of the country in general population so it is pretty nerve wracking for these kids.
@waverlywizzard --I agree. In some areas, it appears that colleges with frequent testing and serious social distancing rules have lower rates than nearby communities. Community spread is really taking hold.
That is probably because the people in those communities don’t have access to testing.
If the colleges are concerned they could donate testing resources to local people like tufts did. The colleges have benefited from their taxes and custom of sport/ music/theatre tickets and memorabilia. All their staff and current and former students are part of those community’s. Why not give back during this troubling time and probably contribute to the mutualy beneficial situation of lower community cases?
My D19 has a remote class for a CS course. She didn’t like what she heard about the professor’s style of teaching this class, pre-covid, during the switch in spring and now as fully remote. Basically it’s more like a self study. After a grueling 3 hour midterm, she barely passed. She was so upset. The professor will only give two exams, this midterm and the final exam in Dec. Knowing my D who is very involved in her studies, this is a rough result to swallow. I told her to try reaching out to the professor or maybe to others for help. I just think this is not fair to the students. There are quite a few in her class including her friend who didn’t fair well.
I asked a few pages back about cold symptoms. My LAC son got sick last Friday night - fever of 100, aches, chills, mild headache. The weekend nurse call service told him not to worry because he had no respiratory symptoms, and he should just wait to be tested on Monday. It felt irresponsible to him to potentially expose his roommate and others in the dorm, even if he self-isolated. He had to seriously argue with the school to get their agreement to move to isolation. And after all, he was negative luckily. But it seems to us that the school was far too relaxed.
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I work in a lab. We are currently awaiting the release of the combination test for flu/covid19. Until then, with the flu season here, if your son cannot be tested for the covid19 right away, why can’t he be tested at least for the flu? My D19s roommate got really sick a day after arriving home from school at the start of spring break in March. She was tested for flu that came back negative. The swab was sent for covid19 test and came back 72 hours later as positive. Kudos to your son for trying to protect his roommates by being proactive about the situation. Also I’m glad he tested negative.
For all the faculty on here, I’m curious your thoughts on whether there will be some grading leeway on the classes that have been switched to remote or even hybrid, since this semester is basically the first true trial of this modality. (Spring 2020 does not count). Some classes maybe taught in summer, but generally small sample.
Or perhaps not grading, but adjustment in the syllabus – are you allowed to adjust the syllabus mid-way based on how students are doing? There seem to be so many rules! I suppose extra credit or something can always be given.
Reason being, this is the first trial run of remote. Both students and faculty are trying to get a gauge of workload, assessment of learning outcomes, etc. Some students still have trouble with internet, laptops and other tools. Logistically - some are in places with less than optimum study environments.
Not to make excuses, but I hope there will be some consideration. Now if the class was always online, that is a different matter. Just talking about those that use to be face to face and now remote or hybrid or combo.
Things are a little more complicated - for instance, students may underestimate how long it could take to upload their test and then they are marked late or test not accepted at all, whereas if it were face to face, the teacher would say, ok class over, give me your paper in 2 minutes, etc. Yes, students should gauge their time better, but seems always glitches when you are in a hurry, such as trying to upload a test two or five minutes before deadline! If they say, give themselves 15 minutes to upload, it may mean the difference between not finishing the last question. Just saying, before when face to face, 2 hours for a test meant 2 hours.
Ah… the modern version of “the dog ate my homework”.
I may have to ask my D about this specific class. She is on campus with only one in-person class, and the three(?) others are hybrid/remote. Like I said this is going to be hard for her to swallow as she is a type-A person, who has excelled very well in class since kindergarten =). I think this is her first exam in all her educational years that is not in the 90s. I think she took her exam in her room for that 3 hour period.
Except I actually saw “the dog eat the homework”! It happened to a student (not me) 
A lot of my D’s classes are adding an extra 15 minutes or so onto test times to allow upload time. If the exam takes 2 hours the kids have 2:15 to get it in. Some are allowing LOTS of time but making the tests particularly long and difficult. My D is in the middle of a midterm right now. She started it 3 hours ago. The instructor opened it at 5pm on Friday night and the test doesn’t have to be submitted until 5pm Saturday. That allows kids in different time zones plenty of time to get it done. He school has an honor code so the kids are for the most part trusted to follow the rules and not work together. The last test for this class took her 4 hours to finish and then she reviewed it the next day before submitting.
Thank you, @kpopmomrunner. Yes, I do think he could have had the flu, he was pretty sick and hadn’t gotten his flu shot yet. We’re very relieved it wasn’t Covid.
I think it will be difficult this winter if the school instructs kids to stay in the dorms when they are as sick as he was… I can’t imagine any student would like to be in the same room as a very sick roommate during this pandemic!
That could be part of it, but from what I see, it’s the mandatory nature of the college testing that is having the impact, and that is not something that our government will be imposing on the populace including the communities surrounding the colleges. Lots of colleges are donating testing resources—another example is Harvard & MIT through their Broad Institute donating massive quantities of testing to the red zones in MA and homeless populations. I’m sure there are others—lots of colleges work hard to support their communities. However, I can see in my own state that citizens are not motivating enough to get tested asymptomatically. It’s a bit of a pain to go get tested, so if you don’t think you’re sick, many people are not motivated to go out of their way to get tested. The college programs are so effective because they can mandate the kids get tested X times per week, so they catch the asymptomatic cases and can break the chains of transmission by isolating those kids before they are infectious (or at least before they’ve done much damage).
In my state, we have had lots of excess testing capacity for months now (all free for everyone) and our governor has been basically begging certain categories of people to go get themselves tested regularly (for example, people in close contact jobs such as hospitality, healthcare, hair salons, etc; also anyone age 18-39; anyone in the towns with high rates of covid, anyone who is traveling, etc). They set up so many testing sites to make it easy, including walk-up testing sites in communities where people might be less likely to have cars. Bending over backwards to make testing not only free but very accessible to everyone, especially those who might have more difficulties. They communicate like crazy, including the message that it’s free. Some people are taking advantage of this, but not nearly enough. Is it laziness, bravado, a feeling of invincibility, a feeling that you’re too busy to get tested, nervousness to find out you’re asymptomatically positive and not wanting to have to quarantine which is a massive inconvenience and could possibly cost you your job and definitely cost you your opportunity to socialize, fear that the test will be painful or uncomfortable, a belief that covid isn’t real or as dangerous as described, other factors? I think without it being mandatory, you just won’t see the same level of participation and control as you will on campuses that require students to test frequently.
But yes, it is a nice gesture to see the colleges that have testing capability this fall offering those services to their neighbors. Let’s hope neighbors step up to take advantage, even if not mandatory.
I’m one of the professors on here – I spent the whole summer revamping my classes to prepare for in-person, plus the possibility of synchronous students in quarantine and the possible switch to virtual at any time of cases got bad. Without fall break for students to recharge and catch up, I reconfigured my syllabus and adapted assignments so they achieve my teaching goals but were somewhat less complex. And my students are still – of course – exhausted and stressed. Our institution has emphasized the importance of being flexible, of giving students the benefit of the doubt and, as we head into the final stretch, to continue to look for ways to ease the burden on students. I can’t imagine other schools and departments not taking a similar approach, certainly that’s what’s happening at my recent grad’s school.
It looks like in China and some other countries, they are not testing like crazy and manage to have the virus in check. Other methods like taking temperature, or contact tracing, etc. seem to be used. Japan is not testing like crazy – someone posted an interesting article in the Atlantic that looks into how they have contained the virus and its not through massive testing. It could also be blind luck (one of the conclusions in the article about why places around the world of similar population density, temperature, etc experienced different outcomes with Covid. Some were catastrophic like Bergamo or that city in Ecuador, and yet other places went unscathed.)
One of my friends just told me her friend’s daughter goes to a college in Louisiana and mandatory testing 2x a week and her nose is sore because they are using that nasal swab test.
Anyway, testing, which does have a cost, is only one method.