Not just luck, but there’s some luck too.
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These are not disclosures, they are reports from the school on tests they have run, now collected on site as students checked in.
Unless you are thinking that the school is falsifying results? If
At the school where I teach, there is a questionnaire about symptoms and what not patents are expected to tape to the fridge and check with their offspring every morning about. They do not fill out a form at school and there are no temperature checks, so yeah, CoVid information amounts to a disclosure. It means we are trusting parents and students (and staff) to be honest. And it’s so easy for people to lie if, say, they’d prefer to be at work rather than home with their children.
A lot of the school around here are requiring daily disclosure, but are ALSO requiring regular testing. And the schools, not the students, control the testing, so I assume they get the results.
Yeah. This is a university. Regular year enrollment about 12,000. These were lab test results of all students, presumptively without symptoms. Not fridge check lists.
Now they ALSO will be expected to fill out a daily questionnaire on an app, and for a first period of time will have tests weekly, then if still low will transition to sampling techniques.
That’s an improvement, but they can still lie on an app.
Testing is not widely available here, especially for people with erratic access to medical care. You can get tested, but i don’t think it’s obvious or easy. Even if a test were free, I think a lot of our families wouldn’t go out of their way to get it unless someone is really sick. And there’s no communication between schools and the county, AFAIK. If they don’t tell us they were positive, we won’t know.
The schools here that are requiring testing are also providing it. Otherwise they really couldn’t require it. And yes, some of them built up their own test capacity, and others entered into contracts with big testing firms to make that happen.
Yup. The University of New Hampshire has contracted for testing over the summer but will begin doing its own testing directly on campus in September. I think this is probably going to be common place in mid-to-large colleges & universities, as others have already announced that they’ll soon be doing the same, like Northeastern University.
I wonder what the sensitivity and specificity are for those Alabama tests. It wouldn’t take much error, that’s for sure, to give those same results. Unless maybe they are testing them twice when they get a positive.
STATESBORO — Just four days apart, two University System of Georgia (USG) employees, Tim Pearson, Ed.D., professor of accounting at Georgia Southern, and Ana Cabrera, a housing staffer at the University of Georgia (UGA), died from complications of COVID-19.
Following their deaths, GS and UGA released statements to the media about the deaths. Janet Frick, Ph.D., associate professor at UGA, pointed out to The George-Anne and The Red & Black (UGA’s student newspaper) that those statements were incredibly similar.
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of a member of the Georgia Southern University family. Our sympathy goes out to the individual’s loved ones. Out of respect for the family and friends of the deceased, we will not comment further,” wrote Melanie Simon, public relations manager at GS, in an email to The George-Anne. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of a member of the University of Georgia community. Our sympathy goes out to our co-worker’s family and friends. Out of respect for them, we will not comment further,” said Greg Trevor, executive director for media communications at UGA, to the Classic City News.The George-Anne reached out to Aaron Diamant, vice chancellor of communications at the USG, for comment on the statements and asked if the USG prepared ‘talking points’ for the institutions.
Diamant responded Monday via email, “USG institutions draft their own media statements.”
The George-Anne also reached out to Jennifer Wise, director of communications at GS, Trevor and Rebecca Beeler, public relations manager at UGA, for comment on the similarity of the statements. None of them responded to our requests for comment.
“What the identical wording indicates is that USG is directing campuses to use tightly scripted, uninformative, and even evasive language to speak of the loss of valued members of their campus community,” said Frick. “The dry, clinical nature of the statements belies any feeling of compassion in regards to these losses.”
“It’s obviously not an accident that UGA and GSU used identical language, which suggests to me either that it was directed from USG, or that the different campuses coordinated their messages,” added Frick.
“As a resident of Statesboro, I’m worried about my neighbors. As a professor, I’m worried about my colleagues and my students. As a mother, I’m worried about my children,” said Leticia McGrath, assistant professor of foreign language at GS. “None of us are prepared to mourn the deaths of multiple friends, colleagues, and family members.”
McGrath brought her concerns about these statements to the Faculty Welfare Committee, which McGrath chairs, even asking if faculty could write their own obituaries and provide them to colleagues and university administrators to release should they die.
Diana Cone, vice provost at GS, explained it was illegal to do so in the meeting. McGrath went to Maura Copeland, chief legal affairs office at GS, asking for the exact legal justification on why faculty members couldn’t write their own obituaries. Copeland hasn’t responded to McGrath’s emails.
“I think the message is that it will be up to employees, families, and local journalists to tell the stories of people we lose to [COVID-19],” said Frick. “Because our campus communication departments will not take the lead on that.”
That doesn’t seem just a little conspiracy theoryish to you?
“We are deeply saddened by …” is simply a very standard way to announce a death. It would be pretty shocking to not look over death announcements made in a system like that over the past years and not see that phrase used over and over again.
Not quite related- as cases counts are released how should we interpret numbers from these college populations?
First off just stating the absolute number is pretty meaningless. The number of cases at a college of 3,000 really cannot be fairly compared to the number at a college of 30,000, or a university system of 240,000. Probably per capita?
Then do you compare that to national numbers or local/state ones?
And also, is it fair to compare rates gathered at those colleges in which every incoming student is tested with confirmed case count numbers (which likely underestimate true case counts by at least an order of magnitude), be that in general or just other schools?
That last bit raises an additional thought. Universal screening of all incoming students is a chance to at least add some data to the question of how frequent asymptomatic and presymptomatic infections are. I wonder if they are being tabulated?
But everything else was practically word for word too. So no, it doesn’t sound conspiracy theory-ish (whatever that means…we aren’t talking about COINTELPRO here). It sounds like some administrator on high came up with a boiler plate for the UGA system for this exact situation, but they won’t just come out and admit it because it would make the school look bad.
Searching the following two quoted segments on Google returns only results from those two schools:
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of a member of the” “Our sympathy goes out to”
Out of all of the pages indexed by Google, zero show up aside from the USG statements. It’s not a coincidence.
I can think of a very plausible non-conspiracy explanation - the person in charge of the second death announcement found it a bit overwhelming for whatever reasons (COVID stress, bad with emotions, inexperienced, generally not great at their job) and dealt with the situation by plagiarising the first similar instance they could find online. So not a coincidence - but not a conspiracy either. Now they’re embarrassed, and don’t want to come out and say that’s how it happened, because that would look kind of bad.
Agree that this is plausible. The guy who wrote the second announcement may have had the first one in his inbox, so didn’t even have to go online to look for it.
My kid told us yesterday of an arrangement she made w/ the mother of another kindergartener. The 2 kids do their lessons together, 2 days a week at my dtr’s house, 2 days at the other house. (The 5th day is art/music/gym). Really sounds like a great solution. The kids get some of the socialization, some experience w/ an adult other than mom/dad directing them, mom gets 2 days’ break…
I was happy she figured out a way to make the best out of this situation.
Even if that’s true, and some administrator wrote the boilerplate… it just doesn’t seem all that horrible?
On the scale of horrors, it’s at the bottom. And if we were talking about hundreds of staff/faculty dying from COVID, I could understand using a boilerplate. Using one for two deaths is less understandable.
I don’t think it would have been bad for the administration admit that a standard template was used rather than lying about it. It creates the perception that the administration will lie about anything, if it will lie about something so stupid. That isn’t a good look right now.
I read today that the NFL found 10 infections out of 58,621 tests on 8739 people. That is an incredible rate of specificity! They do say they are ‘confirmed positives’, though, so presumably that means they re-tested all their initial positives. I wonder if colleges are doing the same thing. And I also wonder how many positives the NFL initially got. Not that test procedures are necessarily the same everywhere, but I’d still be curious to hear the data.