I wish I were confident about people’s ability and desire to adhere rules governing social distancing and PPE.
In normal times I work as research staff at a well-known state university - I’m furloughed now due to budget cuts, but I still sit in on committee meetings. We’ve started easing restrictions to allow grad students back into lab, with very depressing results. The university requires all students/staff/professors to wear masks at all times, even in lab.
To date, the grad students have been difficult. They wear the masks for a day or two, and then they stop. “I forgot.” “They’re uncomfortable.” When confronted, they either re-masked or shrugged it all off.
Their labs were then shut down for two weeks. We’ll see how they behave when their punishment is over (and after their PI/advisors finish yelling at them). But for now, I’m skeptical and a little deflated. These are supposedly intelligent college graduates who are PhD students in a very competitive program.
We know that roughly between 1 in 100 and 1 in 200 of the people who are infected with covid-19 die of it. I won’t quibble with your claim of “truth,” because you may think that 1 in 200 is “very low.” Many people disagree.
I think an infection fatality rate of 0.5% is EXTREMELY HIGH for a disease that the vast majority of Americans have not yet contracted, and that nobody is immune to unless they’ve had it.
We know that approximately nobody is immune, because in cases with big exposures like prisons and meatpacking plants large percentages get infected. We know from numerous serological surveys that the vast majority of Americans have not been infected with this disease.
We know that the infection fatality rate for college students is indeed very low by anyone’s measure. But covid-19 is an infectious disease, and an outbreak among college students will spread to those at higher risk, and kill them.
Has anyone else noticed that although respiratory diseases like covid-19 typically spread by touching, that doesn’t seem to be happening here from what we learn? Or at least not much?
Consider:
People say that covid-19 spread in the subways of New York, and I don’t doubt it, but if it spread by touching in addition to breathing, we should have seen a lot faster spread than we did see.
In that newly reported Korea case, the aerobics instructors infected their aerobics students. But the yoga students in the same facilities, with the same instructors, touching the same doors and other touch surfaces, did not get infected.
We hear cases of choir practices, birthday parties and bar mitzvahs causing infections. But we don’t hear of people cleaning up afterwards getting infected. It’s only the people who were there, with the infectious person; they’re the ones who test positive afterwards.
@shuttlebus so does that mean that the Williams’ students don’t need 32 credits to graduate? If they only “have” to take six courses this year, then I would think they’d have to lower their grad requirements to 30 credits. I don’t understand how that limits the amount of time spent on campus. I guess it limits each student to three in-person classes each semester which lessens how many kids they are in a class with. Doesn’t it seem odd, though, to lower the overall requirement? I wouldn’t want that. Are you paying the same for three classes as you would have paid for four?
And given the risk to students, that’s not an unreasonable thing to say. Of course it ignores the risk to others, but as you’ve already pointed out, many Americans are quite OK with “others” dying, even in large numbers.
It might not be helpful, and it might not be becoming. It is accurate, however.
If you choose to pursue a course of action that you know will result in people dying who would not have died if you didn’t pursue the action, then you are choosing to kill people. It is then incumbent upon you to make the argument that the number of deaths you will cause is justified by the benefit of your action, or that not taking your action would result in even more deaths.
And you can often make that case! Some people die from the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants and gasoline-powered cars, yet we accept that risk so that we’ll have power and transportation. Some people die from using seat belts, but more die if seat belts are not used. We have decided to accept these deaths.
If colleges insist on having football, people will die. Not the football players themselves, almost certainly, but others in their infection chain. It is then incumbent upon the colleges who do have football to explain why the deaths are worth it. Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, maybe you can plausibly quantify the number of deaths and it will be small, but don’t say deaths won’t happen when they clearly will, and don’t get upset at hearing the truth.
Listed deaths by COVID-19 appear to be about 0.5% to 1% of all estimated cases, or about 1% to 2% of estimated symptomatic cases (assuming about half of cases are symptomatic), with estimated cases based on antibody studies.
The flu has estimated deaths of about 0.1%to 0.18% of estimated symptomatic cases.
However, COVID-19 can also cause longer term lung or other damage in recovered patients. There do not seem to any numbers as to how frequent that is (although it appears likely in those who are hospitalized and sometimes occurs in those who do not need hospitalization).
Both COVID-19 and flu have a much lower death rate in the traditional college age group. Of course, college students may interact with older faculty, staff, relatives, and friends.
Yes, all of it seems odd to me. Without knowing the thought process that went into the decision, looking from the outside, I don’t see what this accomplishes. My kid still plans on taking 4 classes. I don’t understand why they had to make a decision now about winter study, either.
Many companies where employees have the capability of working from home told employees to “work from home if you can” even before there were government health orders on the matter. Many of those companies are being very cautious about returning to the office now and through at least the end of the year.
The subways emptied out pretty early in the crisis. Probably by the beginning of March, only essential workers were taking it. It got to the point where the homeless were taking over entire cars even during the day.
And, no one I know so far who has survived a “mild” case can tell you with certainty how they got it. Disposable rubber gloves are nearly as visible on the street these days as face masks.
@“Cardinal Fang” – Of course, you’re right that anything anyone does has always carried risk. Driving a car, moving to a polluted city, what have you. Right now with COVID, simply going outside of our home increases the risk of an adverse outcome.
But "agreeing to kill " is certainly a very loaded way to describe it-- It’s more appropriate to say we are “assuming a risk” both for ourselves and, yes, others.
Some college-associated risks (e.g., football and other sports) are higher than others (socially distant teaching), and that’s where difficult decisions have to be made, hopefully guided by public heath experts. I personally think sports are a bad idea this year – not just b/c of proximity for the players increasing their risk, but travel could spread virus between colleges.