Schools in Denmark have been reopened for a month without a spike of cases. Other counties too -
“Of the 22 countries where schools have reopened in waves over the last month, 17 have only allowed children to return to kindergarten settings, primary schools and final years of secondary level as part of a tentative lifting of the lockdowns imposed to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.”
Every college for themselves will be interesting. Imagine half go back to school and the other half are online. I suspect there will be a lot of summer melt or kids trying to transfer at the last minute. I would hate to be an AO.
There’s a local company that started with 3D masks. My wife was one of the guinea pigs. Very hard to breath given the design. They added a canister to the 2nd design. It’s better but still hard to breath. Basically you had HEPA filters cut to fit. I added some plastic cinches to the elastic cord to make it nicer. They’re getting better at making these but still not ideal. Unless they’re CDC/NIOSH certified it’s a liability to use them at the hospital so they’re still not using them. Still have to use N95 masks and clean/reuse them.
There’s good reason to believe that, indeed, heat tamps down the coronavirus. A new paper says that for every degree © of temperature above 25 degrees C (77 Fahrenheit), the infectiousness of covid (the R0) goes down by ~3%.
This is great news! This virus will not be as contagious in the summer, as some had hoped.
This is also bad news for NESCAC schools and other schools in cold winter areas. The strategies that were keeping the virus more or less at bay during the summer will soon stop working when students come back to college in the fall. Colleges will have to clamp down to get suppression.
I know I’m in danger of beating a dead horse, but I know a good bit about the mask guidelines from the state covid call I listen to every week.
Originally the CDC was very dismissive of the public wearing cloth masks. The science says it won’t have an impact and there is the whole issue of doffing a mask. The non scientifically proven anec-data is groups that have a high adoption of mask wearing have VERY low virus transmission. Basically wear your mask. Maybe you can create a Dr Seuss like rhyme about how you wear in on a boat, you wear it while you float,… 
I asked about masks while running because I run a lot. The scientific answer is there is almost no chance of transmission when you jog past someone. In the real world runners are breathing hard and that might increase the chances of transmission. Especially when there is no wind or an enclosed area. I keep the mask at the ready and when I’m likely to be within about 10 feet of someone I pull it up.
To bring mask wearing back to the purpose of this forum…
This is a great opportunity to talk to our kids about being part of the larger solution instead of the problem. It’s not a lot to ask, and it literally will save lives. We just won’t be there to see the life we save.
and that concludes my TED talk.
Do you mean this paper?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.29.20085795v2.full.pdf+html
If correct, it would be good news for many poor countries near the equator, since they could even less afford to have the virus running around their countries.
ticketthannock yes I do understand what it means to move a class to online. I’m trying to suggest the nastiness and bickering stop.
U of Oklahoma announced an update. It’s on twitter, so here are the basics:
Classes of 40 or fewer will be face to face
Classes over 40 will be online
The school day will be lengthened because more classes and 30 minutes between classes.
Aiming for class size to be 25-50% of classroom’s normal capacity.
Has any college made a decision about sports yet?
The big football conferences like the SEC have stopped just short of saying they’re 100% playing.
I think most other sports won’t play or it will be very limited if they happen at all.
@chmcnm I just don’t think there will be many schools that have class all in person or all online. Most schools will have a combo. I think it will be hard to compare school versus school if most welcome kids to campus but maybe have different ways of dividing up how class will run. All online is an issue and likely won’t compare favorably to schools that are making detailed plans to return to campus.
Right now we’ve got big schools (UCSD USCar), medium sized schools (ND, Rice) and lots of small schools that have come out and said their committees are meeting with public health officials to get the campuses ready and their academic teams are working on strategies to have some classes in person.
And yet in France
70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening
@suzyQ7 It makes me nervous when people compare Denmark’s return to school with the possibility in the US. Unless you have a very small school, it is hard to imagine how we can spread our kids out. My D1 is 3rd grade teacher with 25 students in a portable - when she only had 18 it was decently roomy, but still wouldn’t have been able to provide appropriate social distancing. Don’t know how most Danish kids get to school, but in SC it is mostly by bus with around 77 students - or three to seat.
Cost is a huge problem. At a time where many of these issues could be solved by more money for more teachers and portables where needed for smaller classes, new buses and more support staff, districts are hurting for money and talking cutting budgets.
Sounds like France and Germany close a school if they find a case? I didn’t think that would be a thing like it was in the spring. There are going to be cases, no? And if the schools are supposedly being cleaned each day then why close the school? If schools get closed every time there’s one case, that’s going to be a mess.
I thought that, if a student or teacher was diagnosed with the virus, the kids in the class that he was within six feet of for more than 15 minutes would be told to monitor their temperature or something like that? if we close a grade school or high school every time someone comes down with the virus, the kids might not be in school much and how will working parents plan for that?
Wouldn’t it matter whether the sport involves contact, proximity, or lots of touching of shared objects as part of the sport?
Of course, the biggest revenue sports, football and basketball, would be among the higher risk sports in this context.
So your idea is that the virus would be endemic, and it would be a normal thing for a kid to have it? We don’t know how well the virus transmits between kids, or between a kid and an adult, but if it transmits like other viruses, if one kid gets it, most kids would get it, and teachers too. Is this the plan? Let the virus go through the school and infect most students and teachers?
PAC12 has said that if students don’t return to campus, they will not have sports (fall, spring). Cal State schools are still looking at sports even though they are online for the fall.
Other conferences are still looking at it.
Furman dropped men’s lacrosse and baseball today.
It’s good to hear that some places in the country are actually following mask wearing and distancing protocols. I’m losing my mind here. Today only about 1/3 of the people I saw were wearing masks. And when I did take out last night the couple in line behind me without masks were standing within elbow length away and when I asked them very nicely to take a couple of steps back because I am concerned about Covid they looked at me like I’m from mars. At least they stepped back. That was better than lunch when the person refused, even though I asked nicely, so I left instead.
I guess my point is different parts of the country are following, or not following, the recommendations differently. When kids from all across the country get onto college campuses it will be interesting to see what social norm prevails, and how a school would go about enforcing rules.
A university president writing in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/colleges-that-reopen-are-making-a-big-mistake/611485/
I agree, but am also glad that he’s linked to the new Weeden preprint. (Her twitter feed tells the story well and briefly.) In short, universities by their nature are wonderful petri dishes. It doesn’t much matter what you try to do once the kids are back. The spread will be rapid and comprehensive.
I’ll be a little surprised if ND goes through with their plan, despite the nod to God, the strong verbal push to thoughts and prayers and the suggestion of an “unexpected” severe outbreak in fall/winter. (It’s expected.)
As parents, you have some decisions to make and some studying up to do, because no amount of saying “I didn’t know X could happen” will reverse the fact that X has happened when your kid’s in the ICU or worse. One of the things that makes pandemics difficult is that it’s a minority of people who have enough background to read the papers and reports and interpret them with any degree of accuracy; the other is the “It isn’t happening to me, therefore it isn’t serious” problem. And because of those I’m dreading the news stories with sobbing parents saying “I thought the testing was going to keep him safe, they said they were doing testing, I don’t understand.”
I cannot stress this strongly enough: End of the day, the university will not look after your child. It will look after itself as best it knows how.
I know that showing people data like Weeden’s, explaining the science at people, will not make them do the smart thing. That’s why Americans still use on average over 10K kWh a year to run their houses and drive over 13000 miles a year, lots of it too fast and too close to other cars, while distracted. It’s why so much engineering essentially goes into idiotproofing, and why vaccines are defaults at children’s checkups. Why the vast majority of Americans are overweight or obese, why many still smoke.
The problem is that there is no idiotproofing engineering that can happen now. All of it is DIY. It’s like overnight every modern safety feature, from airbags to pillars to seatbelts to rearview cameras to drift correction to crumple zones to egg-carton passenger-compartment design to you name it was stripped out of everyone’s car, and people were told: “Just be careful. We’ll give you random bits of info about how to be careful, but honestly physics is hard, so if you want to read up, that’s up to you. Here’s your keys back. Freedom cars!”
I think the biggest lesson so far in this pandemic is: not enough people will cooperate for long enough for public health to be very useful in a pandemic.
If you listen to Rick Bright’s House testimony (it’s up on C-SPAN), you’ll hear something about that “masks are only for medical people” business. I thought it sounded weird at the time and ignored, found my mask. There was a reason it sounded weird.