Covid-19 pandemic

[Hot Pepsi]

Just to provide a slight counterpoint (though I agree on the bad treatment) my daughter went back to the student dorms partly in hope that she'd get to attend classes eventually (not yet) but also because she wanted to be a student again and not stuck in her parent's house all day every day. I fully understand and support her in this

(mind you, her accommodation is free. I may not be quite so understanding if she (or I) was paying through the nose for it)

Yeah, it’s been pretty clear locally that most of the students want to be here. They may not be entirely rational in their behavior, but they want to be here. The number of freshman who deferred and the number of students who decided to take the semester off is larger than usual, of course, but still remarkably small. (In each case, the number went from like 700 last year to 1,300 this year. Out of about 80,000 students total on all campuses).

Even last year, when the university went all online and told everyone to leave, about 5,000 students (out of about 40,000) stayed in town.

There’s a noisy group of faculty and staff that are making all kinds of demands to stop in-person classes, etc, but it’s unclear how many people they represent.

Besides, they are just as biased and committed to objecting to everything the university does as the university is committed to stubbornly sticking to its plan. Neither side really has credibility because neither side will ever admit that what they predicted in August was wrong. And the data so far offer support for both positions. Total cases are high, but hospitalizations are low. The extent to which the students are infecting the wider community is, so far, in dispute among the experts, and the number of students in isolation or quarantine is still well within capacity. For now.

[Fussbudget]

Re: student infections spilling into the wider community, I think this is likely to be more of a concern in the UK than the US because many UK universities are right in the centre of towns and cities, and most students don't live in university accommodation (only about a quarter of them do, usually first years). The majority rent from private landlords, and post-92 universities also have a high proportion of students drawn from the local area who keep living with their parents. Also even uni halls are not all on or near the teaching campus, so you get lots of students using public transport to go to class.

[ursus arctos]

A pattern that is common throughout Europe.

The US is very much an outlier in this respect.

[Hot Pepsi]

True, but the students go to the same grocery stores, the same gas stations, etc. and, of course, the faculty and staff all live in the community. Some of them live an hour away.

[ursus arctos]

That is certainly true of State College and similarly situated campuses, but doesn't necessarily apply to urban universities (the vast majority of European universities are urban, institutions like our land grants universities simply don't exist)

A significant portion of the senior faculty at both Yale and Princeton, for instance, live in NYC, while very few junior faculty at Harvard or MIT can afford to live in Cambridge anymore.

[Hot Pepsi]

Yeah, I understand that the urban setting is even more dangerous in this situation.

But “college towns” are not as self-contained as we might hope. Especially since a lot of the surrounding area kinda got lulled into a bit of complacency in the last few months.



Penn State’s C19 Dashboard lists the hit rate for testing both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. I think the random asymptomatic rate is like 1.2% but the symptomatic rate is more like 25%.

But does the trend in the symptomatic *rate* really reveal anything about the spread of the virus? It seems to me that it mostly just tells us how specific the symptoms are or aren’t and how likely it is that people who don’t really have the symptoms will want a test anyway.

Right?

[ursus arctos]

Absolutely

Students also travel a lot - to other schools, to friends' homes, to their homes on holidays, road trips, etc

[Hot Pepsi]

Well, they are trying to put the kybosh on intercounty travel, but they can’t really regulate it. That’s why even having a limited number of football fans at games is madness. I haven’t heard anyone suggest the B1G plans to let in fans, but I haven’t heard that they won’t either.

But that’s why in person classes here will end at Thanksgiving and all finals will be online. Still haven’t heard about a plan for the next semester. It seemed like everyone sort of hoped/assumed it would be fixed by then.

[Nefertiti2]

There’s a noisy group of faculty and staff that are making all kinds of demands to stop in-person classes, etc, but it’s unclear how many people they represent.

Besides, they are just as biased and committed to objecting to everything the university does as the university is committed to stubbornly sticking to its plan. Neither side really has credibility because neither side will ever admit that what they predicted in August was wrong. And the data so far offer support for both positions. Total cases are high, but hospitalizations are low. The extent to which the students are infecting the wider community is, so far, in dispute among the experts, and the number of students in isolation or quarantine is still well within capacity. For now.

I don’t understand. What did those wanting to move teaching on line predict in August that is „wrong“?

[Snake Plissken]

Stockport back into lockdown. I suspect that the Tory MP for Hazel Grove* who was very prominent in getting an incredibly localised exemption to the Manchester lockdown won't be crowing about this after the cases per 100k went from 12 to over 70.

*Who, by the way, seems to get into the Guardian** whenever he wants whereas the Labour MP for Stockport can't
** The North of England correspondent lives in... Hazel Grove!

[Lang Spoon]

That the correspondent who gives free advertising to some Brexity pizza joint?

[longeared]

Government admits to not assessing the impact of 10pm pub closures and not discussed by SAGE. Whodathunkit, eh? Sounds more like they've been nobbled by scientists wanting to push long standing anti-alcohol agendas. (hello John Edmunds, hello Graeme Medley)

[Moonlight Shadow]

Government admits to not assessing the impact of 10pm pub closures and not discussed by SAGE. Whodathunkit, eh? Sounds more like they've been nobbled by scientists wanting to push long standing anti-alcohol agendas. (hello John Edmunds, hello Graeme Medley)

Indeed, they should be closed, period. Every study of clusters indicate those places as the highest risk setting there is...

[Nefertiti2]

https://twitter.com/doctor_oxford/status/1309756246321438721?s=21

theCombination of corruption incompetence and techno arrogance has been disastrous

[Balderdasha]

Canada has reached over 150,000 cases and 9,255 deaths. Its death rate of 245 per million population remains lower than most of the rest of the Americas.

[Balderdasha]

The Philippines is the 21st country to report more than 300,000 cases, and has recorded 5,284 deaths.

[Balderdasha]

Poland has now reported more cases than China (nearly 86,000) and 2,424 deaths.

[Balderdasha]

Romania has now reported more deaths than China (4,687) and 121,000+ cases.

[ad hoc]

I caught a news story on the radio today that said that Romania's death rate is something like 28/million whereas most of the rest of the EU is closer to 5. I haven't had the chance to investigate this shocking and worrying statistic further

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Blackpool goes into stricter lockdown along with the rest of Lancashire. It was ludicrous that it had been let off to begin with, especially as all it led to was the whole of Lancashire piling into their cars and heading up the M55 for a piss-up on the front.

[Balderdasha]

I caught a news story on the radio today that said that Romania's death rate is something like 28/million whereas most of the rest of the EU is closer to 5. I haven't had the chance to investigate this shocking and worrying statistic further

Doesn't seem entirely accurate. Romania's death rate is 244 per million. 16 European countries have a worse death rate, including Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Ireland, and lots of little countries.

There are plenty of countries where the death rate is not so high. Hungary is on 76 deaths per million. Norway is on 50 deaths per million. Latvia is on 19 deaths per million.

[Snake Plissken]

That the correspondent who gives free advertising to some Brexity pizza joint?

Yes.

On Blackpool. I think that was due to some rule around councils making decisions and them being a Unitary Authority. Though might be mixing that up with somewhere else.

[ad hoc]

Doesn't seem entirely accurate. Romania's death rate is 244 per million. 16 European countries have a worse death rate, including Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Ireland, and lots of little countries.

There are plenty of countries where the death rate is not so high. Hungary is on 76 deaths per million. Norway is on 50 deaths per million. Latvia is on 19 deaths per million.

Thanks. I must have heard it wrong (or more likely mistranslated)

[Diable Rouge]

Grim - 5 deaths in Ireland today, though the case numbers (248) are slightly down.

[Balderdasha]

Another 6,042 new cases in the UK today. Making 38,919 new cases in the last week.