Coronavirus News (130)
What Will College Be Like in the Fall? The Cal State system recently announced that its 23 campuses will do most instruction online in the fall. On the other hand, other universities, like Purdue in Indiana and New York University, have said they are inviting students back to campus. Schools like the University of South Carolina have decided to bring students back from August until Thanksgiving and then end the semester online, to avoid a second trip back to campus before the winter holidays. ............. With any virus, a big fear is a spread you get when an interwoven community mixes with a larger population — like a college campus in a city. ......... We’re in a global pandemic, and the idea that college life is going to be normal if we do reopen is just a fantasy. ............ students are often silent carriers, because many people in their age group who have the disease are completely asymptomatic. ............ When we reopen, it’s no longer a time of unlimited freedoms. It will be a time of mutual accountability and collective responsibility for the well-being of one another. ............. We can say, “You’re going to die if you don’t do this, or other people are going to die,” but young folks often think that’s not going to happen to them, or it’s not going to happen tomorrow. Making the campus safe has to be about people coming together and coming through for each other. ......... I can’t imagine this working if it’s top down. The community has to collaborate. ........ I was there at the time when the AIDS epidemic began. We had all sorts of policies and practical approaches to dealing with it. We had great massive socially conscious movements to try to do things to help people behave more safely. But the epidemic kept spreading. What worked was developing a highly effective antiretroviral therapy. Nothing else honestly worked. .................. The virus waits for opportunities to exploit human behavior to allow people to infect other people. We expect that there will be those who will not follow the guidelines and that the virus will swoop in. We have to know how we’ll react when things fail and try to limit and curtail the brush fires that will break out. ............ The idea is for a person who is infected to have a single room with a private bathroom. ............. There could be a 14-day quarantine for those who broke the rules ............ four kinds of behavior — sanitary hygiene (washing your hands frequently); reporting your symptoms, including the most minor symptoms; social distancing; and wearing masks. ........... Suppose we start the school year on Sept. 1 with one student out of 1,000 unknowingly infected with the disease. You can think of this as the fraction of the population that falsely tests negative on arrival to campus. Further suppose that the number of people to whom an infected person will on average transmit the disease (the R0, or “reproductive ratio”) starts at 2.26, which is within the range of numbers calculated in the first month of the outbreak in Wuhan, China. If the population is 100 percent susceptible to the disease — in other words, students arrive with no immunity — and there is no social distancing, 85 percent of the students will have experienced infection by Dec. 18. .................. But if social distancing is practiced 50 percent of the time that individuals have potential for close contact, only 0.9 percent of the population will be infected in the same time period. And if there were 60 percent social distancing, the R0 would be less than 1, and only a very tiny fraction of the population would become infected — 0.2 percent in four months. ............... I think you have to say to people who misbehave chronically, you’re being sent home. ........... The members in our local are 85 percent black and brown and often live in multigenerational households, and many of them have comorbidities for the virus. They feel two contradictory things. One is: People are very afraid to go to work. They are very afraid of the public-transit system. They’re very afraid that the institutions may not take the level of responsibility that’s necessary to keep them safe. And I think they’re frankly very afraid of the unknown................. The last thing we need is for people to lose health care in a health care crisis.............. Dining-hall workers, and to some degree custodians who have to clean bathrooms, face significant risks. Anyone over 60 to 65 years old, anyone with comorbidities, accommodation needs to be made for people in these categories, for both staff and faculty, and especially for those who interface with students. ............. The most important thing to protect our staff and our vulnerable populations is testing. We have to have adequate numbers of tests so we can test all our students and all our student-facing staff, including faculty, prior to opening schools for residential purposes. That is absolutely a precondition................... schools could use pooled testing. That means combining several samples and then doing one test on them. If the test is positive, then you’d test each individual sample separately. .............. There are about 11 million undergraduates enrolled in four-year colleges, and that doesn’t include staff who are essential to campus operations. .......... Testing is really the entry-level benchmark to reopen any industry. ........... The culture around being sick at work is you go to work anyway, particularly in the food-service industry. ............ The idea is to keep the same team of workers together so that if someone does get sick, and people have to go home and quarantine, you’ll just have to replace that team. It’s less flexibility for the workers, but it’s good for them in terms of reducing infectious spread. ........... All the institutions that I know of are operating on a grab-and-go system. ........... I also see senior colleagues who are real gems for the institution committed to figuring out Zoom. I have faith that we can figure out a hybrid of some in-person and some video classes. Whatever needs to work, we’ll make work, because the stakes are so high........... the development of critical thinking, problem solving and leadership skills — skills that are so important in this search for equity and mobility — happen within and outside the classroom. Being together, being seen and heard, really matters. Also, for some of our students, they need the housing, they need food, they need safety, they need to be in community. ....... nationally many higher-ed institutions are among the largest employers in our regions. It’s important for us to reopen, to keep people employed, to keep the economic engine running. And I would also say, for some institutions, there is an existential threat that’s out there if they’re not allowed to reopen. .......... We learned this spring that online education is not a perfect alternative to the residential experience. ........... the colleges most threatened economically by this downturn are the smaller or midsize private institutions ......... for many small liberal-arts colleges, and even midsize schools that are private that have some graduate programs, I think they’re definitely in much bigger trouble because they rely primarily on tuition for revenue. Unlike the elite private schools, they don’t have large endowments; they’re basically tuition dependent ............ From talking to small liberal-arts colleges in Connecticut, I know many of them feel that they are existentially threatened by a possibility of having to be online for an entire year. ........ We’ve done an assessment of all of the classroom spaces to see what it would take to observe a six-foot radius around all students. ........... Some West Coast schools are thinking about holding a lot of classes outdoors in the fall. ........ you will see a lot of schools end the on-campus portion of the semester at Thanksgiving. ......... we could extend the school year and make the summer a full session. ........ there is a lot of talk of students taking gap years if school is all online. ............... We were very pleased and actually a bit surprised at how eager students are to come. ........ after a while the mask could morph into a new norm — don’t touch me, don’t get near me. .......... If there were a manageable number of cases, I don’t think we would see the same wholesale movement nationally to send students home and move all classes online again. In the spring, no one wanted to be the first campus to get a case and to have an outbreak, so there was an element of reputational risk that drove some institutions to say, Oh, no, we’ve got to move them off campus immediately.............. Now we know that one of the keys to successfully weathering and containing an outbreak is to be able to test, trace and isolate immediately. Planning for that must be a condition of reopening .......... in the hotel industry. We had the Biogen conference at the Marriott Long Wharf, which turned out to be a superspreader event. The entire hotel industry in the city of Boston has been painted with that stain. .......... It isn’t going to be the same kind of fun, and you aren’t going to have the same kind of parties. But you are going to have great educational opportunities, and there will still be a lot of benefits to take away from it. I think we’re in a world of imperfect choices. And I think everyone has to be a grown-up and recognize that’s where we are.
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