Remember that there are a significant number of non traditional age college students all over America.
Purdue has just under 6,000 part time students
https://datausa.io/profile/university/purdue-university-main-campus
How many are those are Middle Aged or even over 30? Likely high enough that the school should take their health and safety into account.
9 kids died on the USC campus this fall, and it did not make headlines. While the death of any child is tragic, people do die, and our goal is not to prevent every single death that might occur or we would never leave our homes. 9 children in a group of 15,000 fatalities in a city of 8 million or so is not a substantial number for public health, although of course it is to those families.
If the USC students all died of the same thing in a 30 day period, whether it was binge drinking or meningitis, I believe it would be national news.
ChemAM, you are viewing things through the (very narrow!) lens of a college student.
(Hint – this is the PARENT Cafe.)
But what if your infected but asymptomatic kids bring the virus home for Thanksgiving and infect you and grandma/pa and their aunts and uncles?
That would greatly reduce dorm capacity at many colleges. For residential colleges where it is traditional for all students (or all frosh) to live in the dorms, they would suddenly have not enough dorm capacity, with residential students scrambling to find off-campus housing (not a pleasant task for a new frosh from outside the region).
Based on NYC data, the risk of death from COVID-19 to younger people is about 1/10 that of the general population, which is not zero. This is not unusual (the same phenomenon occurs with the flu, although COVID-19 in NYC appears to be generally about 5 to 9 or more times as likely to be lethal as the flu).
What seems to be underreported is the risk of long term damage to lungs, heart, etc. after recovery from COVID-19. There are plenty of anecdotes of such around (including for younger people), but there seems to be little in the way of counting the actual numbers and rates that could help colleges and individuals make more informed decisions about what risks are acceptable to them. Right now, there is still too much of a “playing a (negative) lottery of unknown odds” situation.
All of this talk about the virus spreading to students and to faculty and then home for Thanksgiving makes me wonder about the percent of people who actually get really sick. We keep hearing that a large percentage of those infected don’t get all that sick but, if you read the news or watch tv, it seems everyone who has it is super sick! Even Chris Cuomo, who didn’t go to the hospital, seemed pretty darn sick in his basement for two weeks. Seems he still doesn’t feel great.
And now we supposedly are going to have more testing but those tests aren’t reliable.
This situation is impossible. Where are all of the scientific brainiacs out there? Is this such a mess because conquering this virus correctly just takes too long and there’s little patience for that?
I’m sure I’m not the only one here who is optimistic one day and pessimistic the next. Whiplash several times a week depending on the last story I read. A high school district near us just posted that they are preparing for online in the fall. So, today, I think college will be online in the fall. Colleges will hope that, by July, most kids will have be broken down enough by these changes that they will go ahead and do online. Still not great for the colleges though. Who knows what more will need to be cut out of budgets if schools do not have all of the revenue they would get if class were on campus.
I agree on the whiplash!
Illinois’ governor Pritzker told HSs the other day to prepare for remote learning in the Fall, should it be needed. https://news.wttw.com/2020/04/26/pritzker-says-schools-students-should-prepare-remote-learning-fall
Regarding the science, unprecedented number of people and levels of investment are being directed towards Covid-19 research. Conquering the virus is probably not a reasonable expectation (we haven’t conquered flu or HIV for example), but containment and/or effective treatment(s) could be goals. Covid-19 will never not be circulating somewhere in the world.
That’s me!
Frankly, I think it will be very beneficial in the long term for steep-priced LAC’s to reduce their administrative spending. There are far too many high-paid “Coordinators” of this and that policy, department or interest group programming. Why wouldn’t we want students to take on more of that leadership? Besides, these schools are pricing themselves out of the market even in very good times. We needed a small school for D2 given her special education background, but could not justify paying over $70,000 a year for a typical kid.
I posted this on another thread, but personally I’m amazed at the amount of outside the box thinking going on for possible treatments. I think it’s only a matter of time, a question of when rather than if. Anything that significantly reduces symptom severity would go a long way toward campuses opening. I can’t keep up with the stuff coming up at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed. Big ideas trying to rush to clinical trials, but also little ideas, tiny case studies and such (just saw one about glutathione reducing dyspnea/labored breathing in covid). Whether something sufficiently helpful is available by July is impossible to predict.
Thinking out loud, suppose colleges announce at the end of June that fall will be online due to a continuing cloud of uncertainty, but then suppose the picture for data and treatments changes by August and indicates campuses could open. Could they do the reverse of March, say, next month you will have a few days of “fall break” to move on campus if you wish.
Really?! I had not heard that the virus could be transmitted through plexiglass. Do you have a link on this?
@evergreen5 I guess the other option would be to plan a start in October and announce that in June if it’s looking at all like science might catch up by then. If, by August, it’s still not looking good for kids on campus, then colleges could start online in October with whatever sort of academic plan they were going to use.
I really hope IRL you are not so dismissive of a college student who happens to join a discussion with a group of parents. While I don’t always agree with everything @ChemAM says, his/her ideas are not so far out of line with many others in this thread. And I, for one, appreciate hearing a student perspective on this subject that impacts students at least as much as parents.
Until there is a vaccine, there will be risk. Unfortunately for a time, it may be that my parents who are in a higher risk category, have to lay low and we have to continue to practice social distancing. And realistically, as states open up and kids start to move around, there will still be the same risk to myself and their older grandparents even if the kids are not actually on campus but rather studying in their bedrooms at home.
^Just a hunch, but it seems like treatments are more likely to become available sooner than a vaccine. A vaccine might never come, though there is a lot of work happening toward both.
From another angle, more food for thought, a pre-COVID study: “Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as virus interference.” “Examining non-influenza viruses specifically, the odds of both coronavirus and human metapneumovirus in vaccinated individuals were significantly higher when compared to unvaccinated individuals (OR = 1.36 and 1.51, respectively) (Table 5). Conversely, all other non-influenza respiratory viruses had decreased odds in the vaccinated population” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X19313647
France is starting a graduated reopening of its K12 schools now.
By the time that students go back to school in person, a large number of workers will be back in-person in their jobs. Many will be at just as great a risk of contracting the virus through community transmission as they will be from coming into contact with their asymptomatic student home for the holidays. I’m personally much more concerned about catching it from my husband who is still going into work every day than from my son. The reality is that at some point the majority of us are going to get it. It’s just a question of when.
This actually brings up another potential sore spot. At some schools (not all, most likely) some of the returning students will be coming from locations which had very little impact. They may see the whole thing as “much ado about nothing” or even as a big hoax.
Other students may be coming from harder hit areas and have lost multiple friends/relatives (one of my current students has lost 3 close relatives so far). There are likely to be widely varying philosophies on social distancing and sanitizing efforts. Add to that the growing disparity in the impact to minority communities, and you have a potentially interesting dynamic, to say the least.
Agree on the whiplash! I’m hopeful about the OPV (oral polio vaccine) study that’s about to start (I can find a link, if anyone wants). The hypothesis is that receiving the OPV boosts ones immune system so that other viruses are not as severe. Something like this, if it works, might be a way for schools to open in the fall . . . .