That was a caveat for some of the examples. Paris and Austrian studies also failed to point at the metro systems as sources of spread. Milan’s reopening of transit didn’t lead to a spike in cases.
I’ve more or less decided that it’s not worth it to go back to the classroom. I’m not going to be the mask police. Teachers inevitably find themselves in situations they don’t expect, and I’ve already decided that’s not going to be me.
If there’s one thing that this epidemic makes clear, it’s that it will be up to each individual to do what they can to survive on their own. The CDC and other health agencies have been corrupted, and can no longer be relied on. Worse, colleges and universities, through years of adopting and embracing the same sort of modern capitalization of higher ed, have now become trapped by these same market forces that have ensnared much of the American economy. Institutions of higher learning became their own microeconomies predicated on ever-improved capitalist economic streamlining and efficiency, often at the expense of tuition-gouged students and wage-deprived faculty and staff. The beneficiaries, of course, were administrators.
And I have every reason to believe that they’re the ones pushing this. They’re pushing us to go back so they can justify some chancellor’s $900,000 (or some football coach’s $10 million) salary. And they want low-ranking teachers and students to be the pawns and infantrymen.
Yeah, uh, fuck that.
If dorms are unoccupied, then the usual room/board revenue is lost. Students can learn online, but if lecture halls aren’t being used, then students are justified in asking for lower tuition. So there will be a lot less money coming in to take care of campus infrastructure, and a lot of people (food service, janitorial, groundskeeping, maintenance, etc.) could end up out of work.
Similarly, athletic events (particularly football and basketball) employ a lot of people and bring in a lot of revenue that helps fund other university programs beyond just those particular sports.
Not saying this to justify reopening campuses against the advice of public health officials - just to point out that the consequences of not doing so are probably more widespread than simply chopping the salaries of a few highly paid officials at the top of the administration.
Sounds good, as far as it goes.
But are these students, once on campus, to be required to stay there: not allowed to go home on weekends or for vacations, not allowed to travel through the rest of the college town?
Because otherwise, seems to me that what will happen is that students, coming to college from a wide variety of places, will bring infection from places that have a lot of it to the college town; and will also spread it to previously uninfected students, who will then go back to their hometowns and spread it there.
Agreeing with all of that.
Moreover, under-25-year-olds are famously below-par when it comes to risk assessment. It’s why their car insurance is higher, and why many hotels and car rental companies won’t rent to them. Put them together on campus, and they’re not likely to be vigilant about mask-wearing, social-distancing, or hand-washing. The infected will transmit it to the uninfected - and you’re right, they will be taking it back to their hometowns. Pretty much guaranteed. Asymptomatic infection rates are higher among healthy young people, so you’ll get plenty of kids/vectors saying “I feel absolutely fine, I’m going home for Thanksgiving.”
You do realize that that is easier said than done, right?
Not only does that mean that you have to have barriers at the front of classrooms, you also have to have separate exits and entrances, separate hallways and separate facilities. No office hours, of course.
You also did not address the issue of students who do not live on campus, or of colleges that do not have on campus housing. Not all colleges are college towns. Some are just colleges in the middle of a city.
Yes, I was already aware of this.
I suppose the real problem is that, like the housing market in the mid-200s, the higher ed marketplace has been over-leveraged for some time. Its economic system was eventually bound to be threatened; it was just a matter of when, and how.
Higher ed has become hyper-capitalized. It’s ridiculous to think that they are the gate-keepers to the middle class, when the reality is increasingly such that they so badly over-burden many graduates with so much debt to the point where they become debt serfs who never quite find a stable foothold in the bourgeoisie. Nor is the problem merely confined to debt serfdom. There’s way, way, way too much emphasis and pressure on faculty to find research grant money.
Not only is this bad in terms of quantitative economics, but it’s also destructive in the sense that higher education’s value system has been transformed, from an emphasis on molding minds to that of producing nonthinking human widgets and cogs to fit into a capitalist machine.
Higher education, if done right, is supposed to create an educated class of people who can function as citizens. But what have we to show for it all? We have a society that promotes the interests of plutocrats over those of utilitarian good. We have a society that rebels against science, buys into conspiracy theories, and doesn’t largely vote. We can’t even be bothered to wear masks during a health crisis. For all the money that’s spent on higher ed, we should be even marginally better than this.
You are completely wrong about that.
First of all, everyone - from birth to old age - has a non-zero risk of death from this disease no matter how healthy they are and how few risk factors.
Second. obesity is unquestionably a risk factor and an obese 10 year old very much has a greater chance of dying from covid than a 10 year of normal weight. Now, is the obese 10 year at as great a risk as someone 50 who is obese? Probably not. But the fat kid is still at risk of severe illness or death.
No, you’re wrong. An obese child has almost no chance of dying from this disease. Why in the world would you say otherwise?
Because information?
Because more information?
How many obese children are ‘almost no’?
CMC
Because even more information?
Czarcasm has helpfully provided the cites that I would have, had I gotten back to this forum before he posted. I urge you to read them and, as your user name says, does a “reality check”.
Between 2/1/2020 and 6/29/2020 there have been 3,118 deaths of children aged 1-14 years in the US. Of those, 19 have been due to COVID, 107 due to pneumonia (non-COVID), and 86 due to influenza. I think it’s consistent to say that obesity likely increases COVID risk in young patients and COVID has not been particularly deadly to children.
Cite (CDC data)
Note: this post is split into two halves, due to the board’s limits on post length.
OK, I have to weigh in here, because while I have no desire to minimize the risk to children, the article that you have cited in this post is fucking terrible.
First, look at the language of the article itself:
My emphasis. Might. Suggest. Suspect. Could. All of them classic weasel terms, right in the first two paragraphs.
And if you continue to read the rest of the article, there’s no hard evidence provided anywhere, especially not in relation to children. If you go searching for the actual studies that form the basis for the article, you’ll find some interesting conclusions, but still nothing concrete regarding the risk to children.
The first study referred to in the article is authored by, among others, “Dr. Jennifer Lighter, …an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at NYU School of Medicine in New York City.” Here’s the study she and her colleagues did regarding age and obesity:
Obesity in Patients Younger Than 60 Years Is a Risk Factor for COVID-19 Hospital Admission
This study does not once mention children, youth, or infants. Its methodology is to group patients into two groups, those over 60, and those under 60, and then look at their outcomes based on their body mass index BMI. They concluded that, even in patients under 60, higher BMI tended to lead to higher rates of admission to acute and critical care. Those with a BMI of 30-34 were about 1.8 - 2 times as likely to need acute or critical care (compared to patients with BMI <30), and patients with BMI of 35 or higher were 2.2 - 3.6 times more likely to need acute or critical care.
There is no further breakdown of age groups, and it’s not at all clear how many (if any) actual children were included in the study. The study draws no conclusions whatsoever about children specifically.
Continued below.
Second part of post.
The second study referred to in the article is “led by Dr. Christopher Petrilli of NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City.” This is a more general study about factors that exacerbate the symptoms and outcomes of COVID-19.
If you look at the data for this one, they don’t include ANY children at all. Scroll down to Table 1, and you’ll see that the age groups are: 19-44; 45-54; 55-64; 65-74; and 75 and older. They do note, in their results, that “one of the chronic conditions strongly associated with critical illness was obesity. Obesity is well recognized to be a pro-inflammatory condition.”
It might be possible to extrapolate from these studies to conclude that obese kids are more likely than non-obese kids to have bad outcomes from a coronavirus infection, but neither of these studies, either together or separately, provides any evidence at all about the effects of COVID-19 on children.
That WebMD piece is just terrible “reporting.”
There’s your reality check, folks.
I can’t speak for others making that point about this not being much harmful to kids (although the danger is not zero to them), the main issue remains that those kids do go back home to transmit what they get in school to parents of the kids and their grandparents. And the teachers and staff at schools are the ones also being put in danger also.
Absolutely. It’s not just about the effects on any particular person, but about the chances of that person infecting other people, many of whom could be much more susceptible to bad outcomes.