That seems like a lot.
Sigh.
They are have a fair number of cases to to be sure but reporting like that is fucked up.
Overall they are running 5% with a 7 day rolling average under 10%. There were two days in a row in which they ran very very low volumes of tests (Labor Day and the next day) that ran 20% and 23%. Normal volume days have dropped back down. Under 5% they are not. But still 7 day is under 10%. Not 20%.
I’m not saying the real numbers are great but a news report that reports the holiday lab low volume high positivity two days as what they are running is beyond even the usual pale. Either very dumb or very intentionally misleading.
My university sent out this message to try and limit the spread of COVID.
The letter states what I’d heard from my department director last week: No cases have been linked to in-person classes. The letter does not say, but my director said that no cases have been linked to in-person research activities, including with human subjects, or other official campus activities.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that students can’t seem to stop going to parties. The university has been doing lots of testing, including preemptive tests for all on-campus residents. They’ve seen an increase in cases over three weeks.
| Positive tests (not cumulative) | |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | 13 |
| Week 2 | 90 |
| Week 3 | 205 |
Other communication from the vice chancellor for safety suggests that this type of increase was expected and planned for, so the university isn’t being caught by surprise–school Daddy caught you sneaking out, and he’s not shocked, just disappointed.
That’s interesting - one of the teachers I talked to in my area was saying that their high school was allocating a certain % of teachers to be dedicated to remote classes, proportionate to the number of kids doing remote schooling. As well, it sounds like they were pooling remote students across several schools (I think 3, in this case) into the same online classes, I assume since it sounds like in her school they have a relatively small % of kids opting for online classes so they wouldn’t have a “full” online class otherwise.
It gets really complicated. For example, a school may have 48 sections of j English – but so many variations. 4 different grades, maybe 3 levels in each grade. In the normal way of things, every teacher teaches 2 varieties, or preps, with a few having one or three. But divide that into remote or in person, and now you have twice as many preps, so each person has 4. And the master schedule is a mess, because all those preps have to line up so that kids in every level of English have all the types of math and science, since a kid who is in honors English may or may not be in honors science. Plus, yearbook ONLY meets 3rd and girl’s athletics are 1st and boys are 8th.
Anyway, to make the dedicated academies work, you really have to limit their options. And that’s not a popular thing to do.
And the college students have all been grounded. They’re allowed to leave their rooms to go to classes, jobs, and other necessary activity, but nothing else.
Yeah, I’m glad my county decided to go all-virtual, at least for the first semester. The schools and teachers could concentrate on prepping for that, and it seems to be working out well so far. The classes have specific meeting times when students have to be present. Classes meet on every day except Wednesday, which is for independent work and consulting with teachers when you need help or have more complicated questions.
Frankly, I hope they stay with this setup all year, even though Gov. Hogan, who I guess has decided to be a real Republican after all, is pressuring the schools to reopen to regular classes as soon as they can. (Starting Monday, by his order, indoor restaurants, other retail, churches, etc. can go up to 75% of normal capacity. Batshit.) There’s still far too much virus out there, and that’ll be the case for a good while even after President Biden gets sworn in, knock on wood. In the meantime, every reasonable way of minimizing transmission channels should be done.
We are just weeks in, but we’ve been surprised how well it is working. I’ve had nearly perfect attendance, and work is getting done. It’s not perfect and I am not sure how it will age, but at least for high school kids, it seems plausible we could make this work.
As of now, about 60% of students plan to stay remote until at least Nov. Juniors almost all want to stay home: I think that’s T least in part because we’ve got our strongest team at that level, so they have been getting a good education and aren’t motivated to change. Freshman are about 70% coming to school: we assume they are more interested in meeting their classmates, since they don’t know each other. The seniors also seem more likely to want to come back. I am not aure why.
To further follow up on those numbers stated on the news. (Over 20% positives.)
Current positivity rate there is a 7-day rolling average of 7% and the most recent daily 5.2%. Absolute number of cases per day diagnosed is also dropping, having peaked on 9/9. Since 8/1 47 staff have tested positive with a positivity rate of 0.8% 7-day average. The pause of in-person instruction which began on 9/10 cannot take credit for rates dropping beginning that day.
For comparison the state’s overall the 7-day average positivity is 15%.
For kicks I checked out the dashboard of another big midwestern university- University of Illinois.
Positivity rate down at 0.31% and new cases numbers plummeted since peaking on 8/31.
I am speculating that maybe those most likely to disregard the rules and guidance (having beer bong house parties) got themselves infected in moderately large numbers right off? Meanwhile the larger share of students are following the guidance fairly well and at less risk moving forward as the bad actors who have high numbers of close contacts
are now less likely contagious spreaders for at least the near term?
UIUC is one of the schools that tests everyone twice a week. In fact, they have a phone app that shows the date of your most recent test and the result. You can’t get into any building on campus (and more and more off campus establishments) without a greencard.
So that positivity rate is a really different number than when we are using it to see if enough people are being tested. Everyone is being tested, over and over again.
I’m noticing a fairly quick peak-and-fall pattern in most places that I know well enough to pinpoint a county where a university is located on the NYT maps, and honestly, that seems in line with my general perceptions of how college students socialize – lots of mixing-and-mingling with new people during the first few weeks of the semester, then less and less as the semester wears on, people settle into their friend-groups, and everyone is too busy to party all the time. (Also, in my experience, students will do nearly everything to avoid close conversation with us oldsters who get way too enthusiastic about Chaucer, so I’m less worried than most of my colleagues seem to be about getting infected by a student, but time will tell.)
True AND it can be compared with itself.
It was 2.86% 8/30, now 0.31%. 9/1 there were 230 cases diagnosed; 9/19 there were 13.
University of Illinois was mocked some for their plan designed by physicists which, in the popular understanding of it, didn’t understand students going to parties. (In truth it had modeled going to parties, they just assumed that once infected and diagnosed they’d quarantine.)
That failure got lots of attention.
The drop since? First I knew was my checking for kicks tonight. And while the rise got the University to impose a lockdown on 9/3, the drop began on 9/1 and by 9/5 new cases had fallen from 230 to 37 with falling positivity rates. Clearly that was NOT the result of the lockdown.
Oh yeah, it’s wonderful data and I think it will be super useful. My point is just that anywhere with universal, twice weekly testing is going to have a lower positivity rate than a place where only people who actively seek out a test get sampled.
Anecdotally, my nephew at Univerity of Alabama was apparently pretty sure he had it and he actively avoided being tested.
Isreal is back in lockdown, and they are saying that opening schools (public school, not college) is to blame. I don’t know if they really know what’s led to the increase, though.
Should we use a Trump voice when we read that? Are “they” some of the best people?
Anyway, the most recent strong uptick there dates its start to the last week or so of August. Schools in Israel began a careful reopening of the school year September 1. We’d expect any community wide impact from that two to three weeks later, not two to three weeks before.
No question. And much higher confirmed case numbers likely pretty closely reflective of true infection rates, which are estimated otherwise to be ten times usual confirmed new infection rates or so. Once weekly, like many other universities are doing as well.
The observation remains that it is dropping.
In this case, “they” is a rabbi in Haifa who made a zoom visit to my congregation’s Rosh Hashanah service, and was talking about what the conditions are right now in isreal. She implied it was common knowledge there that they had opened the schools too early.
But, as I said, there are lots of other factors in play.
I hope we see a quick peak and fall. It’s been three weeks since the university opened, and we’re still riding the peak up. All in person classes have been temporarily switched to remote, and one of the dorms is being emptied to make more quarantine rooms. I expect we won’t get a drop until (and if) results of the new campus lock down are seen.
It isn’t even asymptomatic people who don’t know they’re infected getting others sick, but things like people who know they are positive still going out. One article I can’t find now, had the police contact the hosts of a house party who then revealed that everybody who lives in the house had tested positive. Didn’t stop them from holding a raging kegger.
Where you at?