I wish there were more data coming out of Sweden, where they haven’t closed elementary, middle and nursery schools at all. Since they are following a herd immunity approach, I don’t think they are testing, tracking and isolating as rigorously as countries with a containment approach. Their cases are plateauing, barely going down.
What is the contribution of schools? It would be so helpful to know!
Sweden is doing testing, contact tracing, quarantining and isolating. I can’t speak to their level of capabilities in those areas though.
Not sure if this has been posted here - I think I’ve managed to read most of this thread and didn’t see it but I may have missed it. It’s specifically about athletics, but has larger implications for the student body as a whole. And it’s depressing as all get out.
Here’s another by the same author, detailing all the specific moving pieces (each one extremely costly and hard to pull off) needed to bring athletes (and really all kids) back to campus. Again, depressing. As much as I’d like to hope my D gets a normal sophomore year (she has several lab courses and a research position that will be hard to pull off online), I just can’t see any way colleges are going to have the money or resources to make this work.
I’m the middle about this whole thing. I’d like to see my son’s school re-open in the fall if it can be done safely, I don’t want him to be in a city with a big outbreak or worse be part of a big outbreak, and I think we’re all operating in a fog with not enough information.
We do, however, know with pretty good certainty that if you send your 18-22 year old child off to a residential college during this pandemic, the risk to your child’s own life is miniscule. The risk that your child would be hospitalized if they became infected is very small. I don’t have a handle on what fraction of infected college-age people get sick enough that they’re sicker than they’ve ever been before; I would guess 1 in 10. Not huge.
So if we’re thinking about what risks there would be in re-opening a school, and who would bear them, the students are not the ones who would be bearing the risk of lethal illness. Rather, their risks are passing the disease on to someone who could have a bad result, and having their education interrupted by closings or other outbreak measures.
We can go in circles all day long but, right now, it looks like a lot of colleges are spending tons of time and energy and money and having kids back. If it happens in August, kids can decide whether to go back. I think most will. And then we will see what happens. None of us have any control over anything except in our own families. And I’m getting a little tired of all of the guesses as to how it will be too hard and won’t work and shouldn’t happen. Is anyone here on an actual college committee who has all of the knowledge that school has to make its decision? I don’t think so.
Yes to this. States could create programs along the lines of the WPA projects. And you wouldn’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel, either. You could add man- and woman-power to many already existing programs that depend on volunteers. Trail building in national parks. Tutoring in K-12 schools. Planting trees in cities. Fix-it projects for the elderly/disabled.
All good ideas, but how will the kids be kept safe, and the various populations they would be in contact with?
It’s basically the same issue as at colleges, just without the dorm piece…in which the majority of college students do not live.
[quote="Mwfan1921 Getting the students back to their college towns is absolutely crucial for some of the local communities and their economies. Recent stories about this at Clemson and Ithaca.
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** Provided these communities have a medical infrastructure big enough to handle spikes in Covid. Otherwise you’re just compounding the problem, or pushing it onto other communities.
It’s what happened in Colorado where Covid was brought by infected Australians to ski resorts. Those towns had to close themselves off, call off the ski season, and sent their sick to Denver.
Didn’t help their economies, either.
I presume maybe homerdog’s child wouldn’t since she mentioned his bedroom, but maybe she meant his dorm. IDK.
Yes, but are students, faculty and administrators going to be flocking to the coffee bars, sports bars, restaurants, theaters, gyms, like they use to? I look at small college towns like Davis and Chapel Hill who are so dependent on the college economy but I don’t think that just because kids are allowed on campus that that will translate into flocks of kids going to (or even being allowed to) frequent these off campus establishments?
I’ve spilled a lot of electrons here trying to impress upon people that capsules full of RNA are not creatures you can negotiate with, and that they don’t care what people think is reasonable or fair or tolerable. They just infect as opportunity arises and, if they’re in a sweet spot like this virus is, they reproduce and spread easily before the victim dies. You may as well try to negotiate with a hurricane. If people try to ignore the hurricane, physically cannot get out of its way, you get Puerto Rico and Haiti and New Orleans. This time, the hurricane is invisible, and it’s likely to go on for at least another year or so.
There also isn’t reason for confusion, even though the answers are unpalatable. There are two roads to controlling this virus and disease well enough to allow the society to function pretty normally, or at least more normally, again:
- A working vaccine;
- An understanding of the virus's diseases that's good enough to allow effective disease treatment.
We’re currently far away from either one. Yes, there was nice Phase 1 news from Moderna. We’ll hear a lot of that about vaccines in the next couple of months as other vaccines complete Phase 1. Phase 1 still doesn’t tell us that the vaccines work, and most vaccines don’t work, so hold onto the champagne. As for what the infection does in human bodies, the medicine is still all in disarray. We’re far from knowing how to treat this or even what it is.
I know you and lots of other people are looking frantically for ways around. However, the only other way around involves having more people die and be disabled. More than would otherwise die and be disabled. Which is why, every time you ask for something to go back to normal, you have to ask:
Who do I want to kill in order to get this thing? Actual people, names, etc.
Whose life do I want to reduce to sitting in a bedroom, feverish and trying to breathe, for the indefinite future?
Whose children do you want to have growing up in a house with such a parent, or a sibling who’s suddenly died?
If you take those questions seriously, I think you will find that you don’t want many things to get more normal that badly.
When you reach that point, the answers become pretty clear: yes, it will be a long time. And at that point you let go of some long-held hopes and dreams, because end of the day, you’re not willing to kill and cripple other people and their children for them. Is it bitter, sure. But at that point the work is in making this waiting situation more generative, happier, more content, easier. And for those who’ve lost jobs, solvent.
It’s a difficult thing to accept in part because it’s not the culture of this country. We’re all about can-do and buy now. The problem is in expecting can-do to be immediate: that’s the propaganda, the fairy tale, not the reality. We didn’t fix the Depression in two months, we didn’t fix polio in two months, we didn’t find a way to live with AIDS in two months. And there is nothing to buy yet.
You also ask about K12 and the economy. Things we haven’t started talking seriously about yet include “who will fall irretrievably behind if they can’t get real in-person education, and who will simply have a miserable but adequate Zoom time”, or “have we identified which things we actually must have working, and what it will cost to kit those places and workers out, and who will pay” or “how do we help people with abusive family members”. If you go into these conversations with these questions in mind:
Who do I want to kill in order to get this thing? Actual people, names, etc.
Whose life do I want to reduce to sitting in a bedroom, feverish and trying to breathe, for the indefinite future?
Whose children do you want to have growing up in a house with such a parent, or a sibling who’s suddenly died?
…and you take those questions seriously, then you can start building an interim world. Looking for other ways of teaching, of working, of helping people who’re really going nuts because they need to see other people or need relief from caregiving work. Keep in mind that when powers want to have shooting wars, there are few qualms about rationing, reorganizing economies, etc., for years on end.
If on the other hand you find yourself negotiating with yourself about how many people it’s acceptable for you to kill in order to get, say, kids flying off to college, or stadium games with people sitting in staggered formation, or malls operating at 50% capacity, it’s time to stop and ask yourself how you came to this point. Which is really the point, incidentally, that the college president in the Atlantic was making.
As I understand it, “the dorm piece” is what makes college re-openings tricky. That, and keeping them away from faculty more at risk of Covid.
So students who don’t want to do online learning or whose campuses aren’t fully reopened would live at home, wear masks, observe social distancing, etc etc… and through these programs participate in their re-opened communities, dealing with restrictions etc., just as mom and dad are. Not ideal, for sure, but a way to engage these temporarily displaced college kids and make them feel like they’re not wasting their time or paying for a college experience they’re not getting on campus.
It seems to me possible to create student volunteer groups that self isolate, creating their own bubble. They need tasks that limit their exposure to anyone outside the group. They live and work together. New friends, real life socialization possible in addition to their work. Kind of love the idea.
eta. For all the super ambitious high achievers, they can still do their online coursework. In addition.
That’s a great story for future job interviews.
Agree. Just wait, i bet 90% of people on this thread will choose to send their kids back if colleges are open and a gap year is not possible. I bet 90% of teachers/professors will also go back - i’m guessing colleges will accommodate “at risk” or uncomfortable profs with virtual teaching (from home) to the classroom where students and possibly a TA are present. I have faith that colleges will do their best to open in a safe way with many of the ideas already mentioned here.
@katliamom I meant his childhood bedroom. Kids don’t live off campus at Bowdoin. Everyone is in campus housing. That being said, I know some students are thinking of finding an apartment or house in Maine and doing remote class from there if Bowdoin does not welcome kids back to campus. They would do that because, that way, at least their student is having some freedom and not regressing being at home. Those kids still would not be allowed on campus though. We haven’t gotten too far on that discussion since it now looks like Bowdoin is working hard to have kids in dorms. If they bag that idea and go all remote, we may consider it if his friends are open to the idea.
This is what I said at the beginning of this thread 
The school reopening thing is really not up to us. But lots of posters didn’t want to accept that sense of powerlessness, I guess. And began offering all kinds of reasons - some from their parents - why schools should and would be open come fall. And 203 pages later here we are.
How do we not know that by Aug/Sept we wont have treatments available. Do we know what has happened to ICU rates for those under 80 as time as moved on? I read about one hospital that did not have a single death. We have basically had March/April/1/2 of may and have learned a bunch. Now we have another 12 weeks or so before mid August.
The vaccine that everyone is hoping for , may or may not work/happen/etc.
I personally have no issues with my college age kids going back to their college towns. I have a Dec graduating Senior, who if left in her childhood bedroom for the next 6+ months (and likely longer if she cannot find a job), would continue to have increased anxiety /panic attacks. We are already seeing it. I feel like at least being back on campus, (living off campus), even if some classes are online , might be better for her. Same for my other kid. Will be a sophomore. Being isolated and not being social to begin with, has really affected his mental health. I would also send him to live off campus as well.
The main area of why they should not return has been protecting the faculty and staff. But what if we do find a way to reduce severity or deaths in the fall. the science today is much better than 1918
I was with you until that last paragraph: we certainly could have at least as much international travel as there was 100 years ago! Isn’t the whole model of residential college predicated on exactly that?
I don’t trust any college or university that plans to have a football season to operate their school in a safe way. There is no way to have football safely. Not with what we know now.
Good point. Some businesses like those with takeout/delivery may still do ok, while other places like bars maybe not.