I don’t, no. I think it just comes from people collating stats from those various dashboards, such as the one you mentioned. Though, I think the NY Times does try to keep a running count of their own. Maybe it’s up to 150,000 or so cases on the year, but the bulk of those from the spring. I don’t know that they track hospitalizations, though, so again, you’d have to pull that data from where you could find it. They do mention two deaths of students, though they can’t say for sure if those can be attributed to the virus. Basically, any evidence of hospitalizations or deaths among students just doesn’t seem to be out there. In this day and age, you’d figure it would, if it happened.
Interesting, if true, since the three different university dashboards to which I linked show the vast majority of their cases have occurred since September 1st.
Here’s a Times story from September 11 (updated October 2):
It began last month with a trickle of coronavirus infections as college students arrived for the fall semester. Soon that trickle became a stream, with campuses reporting dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of new cases each day.
Now that stream feels like a flood. In just the past week, a New York Times survey has found, American colleges and universities have recorded more than 36,000 additional coronavirus cases, bringing the total of campus infections to 88,000 since the pandemic began.
Relevant to what we are talking about here:
Since the beginning of the pandemic, only about 60 of the campus cases have resulted in death — mostly of college staff members — and only a small number have resulted in hospitalizations. But what has happened on campus hasn’t stayed on campus.
Here’s one kid who thinks most college kids, presumably, don’t see the virus as far worse than the flu:
Trenton Jordan, 21, a junior, agreed. “Probably 99.99 percent of the people, when they go to an off-campus party, aren’t wearing a mask,” he said. “Most college kids are not worried about the virus.”
The dashboard can be found here:
It is presently listing 178,000+ cases from 1400+ schools.
It says this:
Most of the cases have been announced since students returned to campus for the fall term. Most of the deaths were reported in the spring and involved college employees, not students. But at least two students — Jamain Stephens, a football player at California University of Pennsylvania, and Chad Dorrill, a sophomore at Appalachian State — have died in recent weeks after contracting the virus.
Thank you for the cites.
As @Monocracy notes, and as the WSJ article I linked to a couple of days ago notes, a big part of the issue with college students coming down with it is that they aren’t in a vacuum. They obviously interact with staff and faculty at their school, as well as people in their communties (at stores, restaurants, bars, etc.), but they also travel home to visit their families and friends back in their home towns.
The WSJ article noted that Wisconsin health officials believe that the latter is a major factor in the mechanism behind the spike in cases over the past six weeks – it started at college campuses, and then spread throughout the rest of the state.
Well, health officials these days believe a lot of things, and most of the time they turn out to be wrong. Most college campuses are far closer to a ‘vacuum’ than it’s being made out. It’s not like every student stays infectious all semester long. How many people outside of the ‘bubble’ will an average student interact with while he’s infectious? How often do people believe these kids are traveling back home, or to the next town? It’s not how typical college kids spend their typical college days.
So, if I’m reading correctly, you don’t believe what the health officials in Wisconsin are saying to be true, because (a) you think that health officials are wrong most of the time, and (b) you think that college students mostly keep to themselves. OK, then.
I like Harlan Ellison’s take on the subject:
“Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks.”
How many people outside of the ‘bubble’ will an average student interact with while he’s infectious? How often do people believe these kids are traveling back home, or to the next town? It’s not how typical college kids spend their typical college days.
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On the contrary, college kids travelling back home with some frequency is a pretty stereotypical thing for a college kid to do. Might vary school to school, but I know at the huge state school I attended, kids commonly drove home on weekends for laundry, hanging out with hometown friends, and the like. Sometimes weekend jobs were back home.
And as far as college kids heading over to the next town? You’re kidding, right? Hanging around on and near campus 24/7 gets old.
Most colleges are in town. Often they’ve only got to cross the street. Which they very commonly do.
Or are you under the delusion that nobody other than college students lives in college towns? Or that the students do all the cleaning and maintenance of their own campuses?
Coming back to this: that’s actually true. But it doesn’t appear to be what you want to do. It appears that what you want to do is to deny that covid-19 isn’t the flu and doesn’t behave like it, and that you want to open up everything entirely without considering “all the issues at play, and all the effects of our actions”.
A fair argument can in fact be made for opening schools, in most places, and with proper precautions. But that argument can’t be made by claiming that there isn’t any risk involved. And an argument for opening schools with precautions being taken isn’t an argument for opening bars with no effective precautions being taken.
That article is based on a report out of Spain and a report from the Utah school district.
More from that article.
Also, they question the school dashboard statistics from the NYTimes because it’s self reported. That could lead to the schools with the best results reporting in while the other schools are left out of the statistics.
The article mentions “scary and tragic anecdotes” of teachers dying with cites of articles, but says that there is not enough data to show if the teachers contracted the virus at the schools. If any other professionals got the virus, their place of work would be the natural place to look for the source of infection. With schools, the teachers seem to have to prove that they didn’t get it from anywhere else before anyone would believe they got it from their workplace.
Can we please just stop this? The vast majority of businesses can carry on with masks. The only thing that’s holding us back is socializing activities without masks. Indoor restaurants and bars. The rest of the activities can be improved dramatically by simply wearing masks. I really don’t get why this is so difficult for you and others to understand. I know someone that is a spin instructor. Everyone wears masks. They have an extra one to change out quickly when they get too sweaty. The bikes are well over 6 ft. apart. As far as I know (unless she’s lying), no one has gotten covid from spinning. Before people were wearing masks, these kind of classes were considered superspreader events.
This is getting so frustrating for me. I just don’t get it. Even if you don’t have the best masks in the world and they’re kind of leaky. There is so much data out there showing how good they are. We simply do not have to shut down the economy if people complied with something so extraordinarily simple.
I agree with @Czarcasm. This notion of “most of the time they turn out to be wrong” clearly demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the literature on the subject. I could swear I already discussed this with @SayTwo before. Furthermore, it has me wondering why people argue about things without even bother to read up on it. You don’t see me in many other threads because I don’t feel comfortable talking about non-scientific things. I don’t know enough to argue. I guess that’s the internet for ya.
Just to add to my post above about masks. None of the spinners look like they’re wearing heavy masks. They’re simple cloth masks and they’re all wearing them correctly.
Sure, some incremental risk. But that’s a far cry from holding large parties without masks, political conventions in mass crowds without masks, and pub crawls (without masks). Hooking up with strangers is now riskier again - a condom isn’t going to protect you from covid. Unless you wear yours very strangely.
Right now, social activities - hanging out with family and friends - is driving the spread, the case count increases, the hospitalizations, and yes, the increase in deaths that are occurring in some areas and will be in other areas as the lag time passes. Sure, there’s a need to balance some elements of a worthwhile life with elements of staying safe. But it is false to conclude that people making choices for themselves has no effect on the community at large, and thereby the safety of the “innocent”.
You want the economy to be able to open up, you want most people to be able to resume some slightly risky activities in the name of social and mental health, then fight like mad to get the non-compliers in line. Because wearing a mask is darned simple compared to all the other means of dealing with the pandemic - including handwashing and social distancing, much less post-infection treatment and finding a safe, effective vaccine in record time.
Then that’s (yet) another example of things officials believed that now seem to be wrong. I do follow the literature, closely. There was a very detailed and technical story that was published just recently about aerosol flow that found that cloth masks such as you describe would not be effective in the way you suggest. And it clearly demonstrated that ventilation would be far more effective than masks would, in that setting.
And this is getting frustrating to me – and I do get it. There is certainly not ‘so much data [proving] (substitution mine) how good they are’. What the studies do show is that masks can be effective in blocking large particles and limiting transmission of smaller ones. Not eliminating, limiting. What those studies are far, far, far from demonstrating – and in fact, the studies themselves of course do not even attempt to – is whether limiting transmission of aerosols by the amount they do results in meaningful protection from the spread of the virus.
But even if it did, your next sentence absolutely would not necessarily follow from it. Absolutely it would not. And in fact, if anything, the correlations that can be observed say that on a community level there is zero reason to believe that mask mandates (and other such NPIs, if you want to get into that too) have the effect you claim. You wouldn’t be able to explain all the (very many) counterexamples if they did.
May I, again, encourage you to share links to stories when you cite them? You state that you follow the literature, and you want us to believe that your opinions are well-informed – then, please, share with us the actual cites, rather than just paraphrasing and not sourcing them.
That is a fine point. It does seem as though infections are more likely to happen in the workplace than in most other settings, for a given individual. Though, I suspect that many people would still like to direct their attention to things like weddings and rallies and restaurants and bars.
At any rate, it seems to me that the article, and the research it writes about, is attempting more to demonstrate that schools seem not to be the hotbed many feared they would be, and less that they are necessarily safer open than closed.
What do you consider reasonable?
It’s not ‘actually’ true. It’s very patently obviously true. No one who didn’t have an agenda would think anything otherwise.
And anyone who wanted to use data to claim that covid-19 is on the whole demonstrably worse than influenza, and who relied on data points, modeled or otherwise, such as lives saved as justification for mitigation measures, should be not only willing but eager to also use data to paint the rest of the picture. But we never heard, or hear, that sort of thing. We don’t hear that we might save X lives with these mitigation measures, which might at the same time take Y other lives. What I want is for us to wake up and maturely and soberly face that reality and make those decisions.