One that got lots of press for a house party like that was at Miami University of Ohio. That where you’re at?
7 day rolling daily average there has been steadily dropping for three weeks.
University of Colorado Boulder. Here is the campus Covid dashboard. If nothing else, the administration is being transparent.
This is the problem with lumping College numbers in with everything else. These communities are very different from everything else. Esp lower education.
College life is all about close quarters interactions and the frequent and copious exchange of bodily fluids amongst people who just don’t give a damn. (I remember it fondly!)
Their peaks and valleys have no correlation to the “real” world.
It does, however, indicate that restarting college athletics couldn’t possibly make it any worse for that community!
So checking out that dashboard (thank you for the link) … three days in a row of drops in daily surveillance monitoring and possibly peaked on diagnostic test positives.
Maybe maybe not and complete week on week definitely up. And they just locked down what, today? yesterday?
If, IF, this is the start of a drop after three weeks of rise and before any new switch to remote could have had an impact, (similar to the courses at U Wisconsin Boulder, U Illinois Champaign Urbana, and Miami of Ohio), how would you interpret it?
They grounded (my word) the students last Wednesday night, and all in person classes stop this coming Wednesday. Only a few labs and such were in person, and most lecture classes were remote anyway, so it isn’t going to be a big change for most students and faculty.
Given that 3 of the highest positive test count days occurred in the last 4 reported days I would not predict this is a peak. I hope the peak is soon, but we won’t know for two or more weeks.
Universities are a different environment from the general community, but I also think it will be very difficult to keep community spread low if the virus is exploding on campus. Lots of those college kids are also restaurant and retail workers, not to mention customers. At some point there will be spill over. The governor does not want to send the students home, because that will just send the infected all over. At least now they’re contained, and many are in the quarantine dorms.
Two days later and the pattern for on-campus positive PCRs is 130, 94, 94, 53. Then last being the lowest number since 9/10. The last several days of surveillance positive numbers have been 182, 103, 83, 48, 68, 50. It minimally no longer looks like “still riding the peak up”, and it may be prudent to wait a few more days, but it begins to look like U Colorado Boulder is following the same fairly quick peak and fall that the others have, before the switch to remote could have had an impact.
I am sure there will be exceptions but it does seem to be the common pattern, don’t it?
I again ask: assuming that the past the peak pattern continues here as well, how do you interpret it?
My interpretation is that in the first few weeks many of the people who are going to behave dangerously quickly get infected. After the burst of infections perhaps other people are scared straight. Perhaps as normally happens, a few weeks into school the parties reduce as people are busy with classes, so there are fewer large spreading events. Perhaps the people behaving dangerously are all too sick to continue partying. Maybe all the infections have created mini herd immunity among the house party set. Maybe the most susceptible individuals are getting infected early, and the rest have some natural resistance, reducing the spread once those are all who are left.
I can come up with hypothesis all day, what I don’t have is data to suggest which are more or less likely. I hope that somebody has the data, and can use that to figure out what happens that causes the peak and drop pattern.
Some very reasonable hypotheses generated.
Some other interpretations I’d suggest.
The tendency that many have had to point to a few university’s initial peaks and to conclude that opening colleges has clear and obvious impact and is a huge bad thing may be unfounded. It is not so clear and not so obvious.
Timing of the fairly quick fall back down is such that shutting down classes and going to more remote cannot be associated with improved numbers in any cause/effect manner.
Also specific to the bit that started this tangent off - the two days of very low volume testing that had 20% positivity rate in UW-Madison got lots of press (20% positivity! Oh No!), as did the rise in cases there in general. The fact that those two days numbers were a misrepresentation of their positivity rates overall did not. The fact that real positivity rates there have consistently dropped and are now consistently relatively low and that case numbers have continued to drop as well (from 385 daily peak to 23 latest) is not getting much attention. The general pattern in places that have had initial surges to have them drop quickly as well is not getting much attention. I interpret that as some ignoring that which fails to meet the conclusions they prefer but seeing anything that is consistent with what they want to believe.
If there are colleges that aren’t open, the lesson to take is that the students can’t be trusted to behave safely. The response may be to open, but to take measures to prevent the initial peak.
At least here, the shutdown of classes is not intended to improve numbers. The initial peak was not due to classes, so shutting them down wouldn’t be expected to decrease spread, though it is intended to prevent it from increasing. Shutting down in-person activity is to protect those who are not infected from the people who are infected. We know many of the people attending those classes were exposed or infected, but we don’t know exactly which ones, so the whole thing closes for a few weeks.
If other schools are handling it like here, the positivity numbers won’t be comparable to community positivity numbers. The students here have monitoring tests several times each week. PCR tests are then done to confirm a positive result on the monitoring result, or when somebody has symptoms. Community testing is going to include people like me. I got tested prior to a medical procedure that required a negative test, but the procedure was unrelated to any COVID symptoms, and requiring the procedure was independent of my COVID risk. For purposes of positivity I was a random control.
@MandaJo and I have had the same discussion about positivity rates and I again completely agree that campus rates are of a different bucket. Their positivity rates can only be compared to their own trends, but are meaningful there.
The flip side also remains true: campus confirmed infection rates are also of a separate bucket. Comprehensive testing means fewer casesnot ever diagnosed. One should compare those to their own trends but not compare to rates outside of the campus or dump them into the same bucket without caution.
That is exactly what the public school district here decided. They have set 50/100,000 as the community rate necessary for return to school. The county rate is closer to 200/100,000, though. They’ve decided that because the community rate is below 50/100,000 when excluding the university, that they will still start in-person public school.
The county has also decide to ban all gatherings for people 18-22, and mandatory stay at home orders for 36 problem addresses. They do need to get the university related spread under control, because given time it will spread to the community. The latest data shows only 21 positive test results for 9/23. That is very low compared to the previous week. Hopefully that means the spread among students has slowed down, and now it’s a matter of waiting out the existing infections.
Parents Knowingly Sent Kids With Coronavirus to School, Wisconsin Officials Say
“The health department has worked with school districts since spring to make a plan to reopen,” Kirsten Johnson, Washington-Ozaukee public health director, told NBC News. “Never in a million years did we imagine or think to account for parents deliberately sending their sick or symptomatic child to school.”
Any teacher could have told them that parents send their kids to school sick all the damn time.
It happened all the time before the pandemic, sending sick kids to school. Why wouldn’t it happen now?
The NBC article is not very clear. Here is the same information from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. There have been three identified cases in which parents sent in kids not sick but knowing that they had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Pretty abhorrent. Not just sending in a kid with a runny nose.
Still across a whole state? In which nearly half will vote for someone who mocks wearing masks and any mitigation efforts? Being shocked by that is still pretty naive. Maybe shocked that it is so few.
The other bit of it, the refusing to volunteer that their child was in some way sick, or to get tested, is a different thing. How many adult workers dependent on the hours worked do you think have done the very similar - gone in with a little cough, a mild sore throat, some diarrhea the night before, or a slight fever and headache? More than a few I am sure. Given that many schools are having ANY symptom, no matter how minor and brief, equal out for ten days or negative test result, for child and sibs, there is some disincentive to being completely forthcoming.
I am having to see and write notes for things like a breast-fed baby who had their every three day diaper blow out in daycare and needed testing or note or out for ten days because of “diarrhea”.
FWIW many of us peds are following this clinical guidance. Not everybody with any minor symptom needs a test. And everyone, universally, including the symptom-free, should be considered as potentially contagious. Very little doubt that some of the symptom-free non-exposed no-reason-to-think-sick kids and teachers are infected and potentially contagious.
A Perspective published in last weeks Science.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/18/science.abd6165
The whole thing is worth a read but some bits to share as a teaser.
Money quote:
Lead author is of the Oxford Vaccine Group.
College-aged people also saw a large increase in the number of infections. Increased testing likely played a part but was not the only factor attributable to the increase.
From about a week ago,
Here’s the dashboard they used in the article. I can’t figure out how to change the date unless there’s only one two week time period in the model, and that was two weeks ago.
A little earlier in the month of September. This is more of an overview of the infection rates in schools in different countries. The previous article is about US schools.
White House pressured CDC on reopening schools, officials say
By Ben Tracy, Weijia Jiang, Grace Segers
Updated on: September 29, 2020 / 7:30 PM / CBS News
Washington — Top White House officials over the summer pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to downplay the risk of the coronavirus among young people and encourage the reopening of schools, according to two former CDC officials who were at the agency at the time.
The New York Times first reported that White House officials, including aides in Vice President Mike Pence’s office and Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, were involved in trying to circumvent the CDC to promote data that showed the spread of the virus was slowing. The former CDC officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told CBS News that the information in the Times report was accurate.
Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Pence who worked on the White House coronavirus task force, told the Times that she was repeatedly asked by Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, to produce more data showing a decline in cases in young people. Troye left the White House in August and has since become a vocal critic of the president and the administration’s coronavirus response.
Our province has seen a big upsurge in daily cases (700/d) but a pretty small increase in deaths and ICU admissions - with most cases now in younger people below 40. High schools are going okay with maybe a third of students remote and some schools (I think) alternating days. Universities are largely remote - at most, 25% of stuff is in class, minimal gym, no in person clubs.
Our region has a very modest number of daily cases (10/d), indoor masking, people respecting social distancing. This hasn’t stopped widespread blame of the university students. Generally, they are not to blame here. They are usually following the guidelines. But it is easy to blame the students despite the inevitable increase in cases in the second wave.
Opening schools was the right thing to do here. People are trying. I do not foresee Ontario hospitals being overwhelmed.