Oh, ok, I misunderstood then. I thought the whole “seems a bit self serving” thing was in relation to people wanting students to return to school in the fall.
If everyone in your scenario we’re actually responsible, the 20 year old would get tested before going home, then self-quarantine for 2 weeks, and possibly get tested again before interacting with parents. Also, the parents should be tested before visiting the nursing home.
Nursing homes around me aren’t allowing visitors at all unless it’s immediate family for an end of life visit.
That makes even more sense…
At the moment only obviously symptomatic people are getting tested unless they they are rich. Even healthcare workers who have minor cold like symptoms but no cough or fever are not able to get tested. Until universal testing is available to everyone then we have to limit free movement.
But you can require testing before visiting (say) a nursing home. We’re all in this together.
Also the testing is completely ramping up. I live in RI which has the highest per capita testing in the US now. Tests are exceedingly widely available, no one being turned away I believe. CVS is headquartered here and used RI and 4 other locations to add rapid testing sites a few weeks ago. They plan to add 1000 other sites in the next 2 weeks, and over 1.5 million tests per month. Walgreens, Walmart, and others will add similar capabilities. This is literally changing drastically every single day. You do NOT have to be rich to get a test at this point, that is old news.
I can’t yet and I work in a hospital with elderly and chronic ill patients. You have to have the classic symptoms of new continuous cough and fever to be eligible for the test so mild and asymptomatic carriers remain unaccounted for.
Nobody should be visiting nursing homes if we are serious about protecting the most vulnerable.
Seems like if we are allowing nursing home visitors, a bad idea, then that is more likely to occur if college students stay home rather than go away to college. Targeted interventions to protect the highly vulnerable will be more effective than broad lockdowns.
You’re absolutely right. All anyone has to do is google “cytokine storm” to see the potential serious health risks for young people after they come back to college dorms and classrooms, following the relative quarantine period in which they’ve been living at home.
Boris Johnson was very flippant about building herd immunity in Great Britain before he himself was infected in March, spent 3 days in intensive care, missed weeks of time from his job, and faced an outcome which he said “could have gone either way.” He returned to work in mid April, much sobered by the experience.
Many seem not to appreciate how disruptive to in person instruction this will be. Colleges will undoubtedly have policies and protocols in place as well as regular testing. They will likely err on the side of caution. So it’s not only students who become deathly ill like Johnson whose lives will be disrupted. Upon testing positive, Johnson immediately self-quarantined. College protocols will likely require the same thing for students. The normal quarantine period is 14 days. So large numbers of students will likely miss weeks of in person instruction whether their illness becomes debilitating or not. It leaves one to wonder what the point is of bringing them back in the first place.
NO one gets to visit a nursing home in CA. They haven’t since March 15(?) and the order is still in place until June 15th.
Failure to thrive is a new killer of folks in those situations.
My mom with severe dementia died a few weeks ago. She had not seen family in 6 weeks. She would not have seen us for another 8 weeks. I love my mom, I miss my mom - but seeing what I’m seeing - she got the better end of the deal.
As others have noted, the risk to college students of a bad outcome from covid infection (hospitalization or death) is microscopic. Colleges and universities cannot continue online learning and await a vaccine or curative treatment which may never come. Colleges students interact with older professors and community members who may be more vulnerable. The vulnerable population need to be isolated to reduce their risk . This is a risk benefit analysis that is a feature of government policy making. There is no perfect, risk free solution.
On the question of “who is vulnerable” a risk profile already exists which should guide public policy and institutional decisions. There will always be outliers but the goal should be to manage the risk. Some reliable data about fatalities from covid is important. By way of example, the Massachusetts Board of Health reports that of the covid fatalities in that state, the average age is 82. About 64 % were over 80 years old, 86 % over 70 yrs old and 95 % over 50 yrs old. No one under 20 in Massachusetts has died from covid. 1 person under 30 has died and 7 others under 40 have died. In Pennsylvania, 65% of the covid fatalities were nursing home residents, mostly in their 80s and 90s. The point is the public health policy relating to reopening colleges in the fall has to make a realistic risk assessment, and should be focused on protecting the vulnerable population (especially those over 65 and definitely those over 80). Those people will need to isolate whether students are on campus or not. However, we cannot keep colleges closed/reduced to online learning until the virus is eradicated ( and that was never the stated goal of the shelter in place orders).
Wake Forest just announced a “highly structured” move out for Spring semester students who were unable to vacate campus housing, starting May 11th:
"Approved students (and up to two move-out helpers) will be expected to:
Complete a health screening at the time of scheduling and 24 hours prior to arrival.
All individuals will be expected to provide their own cloth face coverings to be worn at all times while they are on campus.
Maintain social distancing (6’ from other people) at all times while on campus.
Students will be allowed to have no more than 2 individuals accompany them onto campus and help with their move out. Students must be able to answer health screening questions for their helpers.
Students are expected to abide by all local, state, and/or federal restrictions, including stay-at-home orders, in travel to, from, and during their time in Winston-Salem."
Appointments must be made in advance.
DD was notified earlier that her belongings were going to be packed and stored due to her suite being needed for students who were unable to leave the campus. Hopefully we’ll be able to load the majority of her belongings into a storage facility.
Forgot to note above, there is also a no cost pack and store option for students unable to return to campus. Well done, WFU…
Will students in shared rooms eventually find that their stuff is missing but their roommates’ stuff is in their boxes?
I am sorta laughing at this. I just drove up today to live my son out of his on campus apartment at University of Michigan. There’s like 4 cars in the parking lot (I better not get towed ?). Some kids are still getting boxed dinners. Everyone has to be out at 11:00 am tomorrow so forget about sleeping in. Lol. My son is making chocolate chip pancakes ?incase anyone was worried…
LOL…
Packing up should take less then an hour since I was here several weeks ago and did a moving load then… This part of campus is empty but everyone here and at the stores are wearing masks.
Now onto summer plans… Oh… There aren’t any yet… Crap!! ?
Wash U did this in the spring. Packed up kids’ stuff and sent it home. The kids I know got all of their stuff and no one else’s. I think they FaceTimed with the company who packed it.
Here is the problem with this. It is not conclusive!!! Period!.
We really just don’t know. I can get tested today with antibody test or with the covid nasal swab and be negative. Great . Soooooo many false negatives are out there. So many different tests. Some are purely Crap.
We are about to test every surgical patient with at least the antibody test. Great, Monday they are negative. What about on Wednesday the day of their surgery??
At college picking up my self isolated kid. Except for him wearing a mask when going to stores and washing his hands /sanitizer nothing more for him to do. Yes, stay away from the elderly but after 14 days… We really don’t know what happens on the 15th day yet.
We can all just do the test we can at this point and hopefully use some common sense.
We should be following some type of plan nation-wide, presumably the actual plan that exists and spells out when states should reopen. We are not doing that well enough so I expect we will be making a mess and continue having outbreaks. The goal of staying home was to flatten the curve. I am not sure what that means to you but to me it means we have a rate of transmission that would be less than 1. if the rate of transmission stays at 1, then the virus doesn’t ever have fewer numbers. I live in a state that is still quite impacted by it. if it is like this we could not open in the fall, so we for sure want that rate to come under 1. If the rate is over 1, then the numbers are increasing, which I believe is the case in some states (or all?) that are opening now. This to me seems supremely stupid and reckless because if we continue to allow outbreaks we will have parts of the country and economy that keep having to shut down over and over and that will cause a lot more damage to things that doing it right the first time. If our country worked together and really brought the transmission rate below 1 and were ready to implement the rest of the plan to contain any outbreaks with testing and tracing contacts and quarantining people who have it to prevent spread, we could start opening. But to rush that out now means I don’t know how schools will work out in the fall. It’s scary to be in a country where people value their individual rights of going out during a pandemic over the lives of those who they put at risk. I think the right not to get killed by a preventable exposure to a pandemic at the height of that pandemic is more important than those who want to go out during a ‘stay home, stay safe’ order. I think if we don’t get this under control we are going to have a lot of industries hit hard when other countries that respond to this pandemic using a science-backed approach get things under control and don’t want their citizens to come here for tourism and business or to have us go there for business. Maybe I’m wrong about a lot of this but I don’t think i’m wrong about all of it.
The idea of if we will open colleges in the fall or not seems to be putting things ahead of what can be known now. The way it looks to me is that opening is possible but people should do what is needed between now and then to enable that to happen. We need testing up and ready and contact tracing up and ready. Our state isn’t there yet but working hard to get there. It is ingredients creating a problem now.
One single super spreader can infect hundreds or thousands. Without testing and contact tracing ready to go in great quantities, how can we prevent another New Rochelle and NY city and state, another Boston, etc? Impossible. It is like this weird magic thinking where people seem to think that viruses know state and national boundaries or just think it is going to poof away. We did pretty well with stay home and stay put, better than I thought we would, but we are not yet where we should be to open.
All we have to do to know this is to look at what has happened elsewhere. Look at Wuhan, China and countries that handled this well and how much of what they did can we do? Look at how China quarantines visitors from other countries 2 full weeks and how everyone in high contact jobs (airports, etc) gets full protective gear more so that doctors in the USA get. We can’t do that because we are ‘free’. How free are we all right now? Now so much in most places here.
I dislike that following experts has become politicized to the point a large percent of the country distrusts scientists and what experts in pandemic response tell us. I dislike that we have national guidelines for opening that are being flouted and stepped on by people doing what again to me is purely magical thinking.
Some other things I think that would help are getting protective gear to doctors as well as all who come into contact with the public, which means almost everyone in the country. We should have actual effective masks. I see more and more people coming up with innovative ideas online of masks that actually make a good seal (no leaks) and seem to have filters that will work well. These people are often using odds and ends. Surely if our country tried we could get masks that don’t have gaping holes on the side and aren’t filtering much of anything out to the public or at least recommend some people could make that would have a chance to actually protect the wearer a bit. Schools could have restroom sinks that have water that stays on longer than a couple seconds. Maybe we could put toilet lids on public toilets. We would fix the hand sanitizer shortage one way or the other and those people with garages full of it would not still have the stuff. Schools need it! hospitals need it. Grocery store workers, janitors, UPS and mail delivery people, doctors, offices, etc all need it. We would encourage mask use even more in everyone. We would not be looking at or talking about having large events like political rallies. We would get this stupid virus to the lowest possible transmission rate before the fall and hope that schools can open and stay open or that any 2nd wave could be something we handle by being out ahead of it, not behind as we have been so far. We want kids in school so parents can be back at work and the economy can be open. We should be doing what we can to make that actually possible. I see too many who are not doing those things and find that very scary and stressful. My friend is an infections disease specialists and his opinion a month ago when I last year was that we are all (bad word you can’t say here that starts with the 6th letter in the alphabet said in the past tense).