The flu (and news of the flu) spread much slower than COVID. The decision to keep dorms open was most likely made with limited information. To put this into perspective: many Harvard/MIT students didn't realize there was a deadly flu until they arrived on campus and were told to turn around. [0] Those students then had to alert any other students or travelers they met on their way home to also turn around. This propagation took a few weeks.
But lets entertain whether or not this was a good decision(it wasn't):
* Impromptu hospitals had to be arranged for at the A.T.O., Delt, Fiji and Theta Chi fraternities within weeks of the flu hitting Palo Alto. [1]
* Administration banned social gathering and unwarranted travel. Students were quarantined on campus and could not leave. Masks were compulsory everywhere on campus. Anyone not complying with the masks guidelines received a fine (this is somewhat less harsh than the police beatings in Boston/Cambridge).
* By October, it was considered a success that only around ten students died.
Meanwhile, not a singular undergraduate from MIT died on campus, and they continued their studies with an accelerated semester the following year. [2][3]
--
Notes:
[0] I've edited this from "flu" to "deadly flu." Initially, a few colleges (MIT included) opted for delaying the semester a few weeks. This led students to believe the flu was not too serious, resulting in students being caught mid-travels before being told how deadly the flu really was. This led to a lot of confusion and the MIT President apologized sometime that Winter in a letter (and later in The Corporation's yearly report).
Wow, nice answer. I genuinely didn't know any of that. This is why I continue to read HN despite the somewhat horrifying partisan turn of a lot of these topics.
Another notable thing about the Spanish flu vs. today. Back then, they had no alternative. They could not deliver their service -- not even a fraction of it -- without having the campus open. Today this is largely not the case. Remote learning sucks but it is doable for most competent young adults.
I think some elements of the "I'm an engineer, this is numbers, I can do numbers, I can do this"-itis seems to flair up quite a lot on HN in particular because it self-selects a certain type of person.
I do like it here but it really makes me laugh sometimes.
The CFR of COVID is less than 0.5%, and in the opinion of many wouldn't be worth the destructive shut-downs even if those shut-downs had the effect of preventing COVID deaths.
The CFR of COVID—and everything else that might be require ICU care—goes way up when hospitals are overwhelmed because the infection rate isn't controlled. CFR isn't a constant.
At my college, it was a bad year when a dozen students died (which can have a negative effect on the mental health of a surprisingly large # of people). With a 0.5% fatality rate, there'd be hundreds of deaths.
2017 flu season: 45 million infections, 61k deaths
2017 death rate: 0.14%
2020 covid: 91 million infections (as of dec 11 2020), 294,535 deaths (as of dec 12 2020)
2020 death rate: 0.32%
Covid is about 2-3 times as bad a bad flu season. The vast, vast majority of people under 60 do not die. There is no reason to shut everything down and ruin businesses, the economy and people's lives. Yes people will die. People die from coal plants, cars, pollution, and many other things that we do not shut everything down for.
"Early data from COVID-NET suggest that COVID-19–associated hospitalizations in the United States are highest among older adults, and nearly 90% of persons hospitalized have one or more underlying medical conditions."
People in this thread: "I just wasted a year of my life not being able to interact with people so for sunk cost this covid stuff must be really bad"
Your numbers are wrong. There are 21 million COVID-19 cases in the U.S., and 350,000 deaths. That's a CFR of 1.67%. You picked the number of worldwide cases and compared it to the number of U.S. deaths.
Wow, it's even more wrong than I thought. Something tells me they're going to keep posting the same debunked statistics under other throwaways regardless of how many times they get called out though...
It’s half-right, and I won’t comment on the policy recommendations.
If you consider the start of this in late March, and look at late July (a four month flu season) then the US fatalities were about 140K. Compiled from Official State Websites, you can check historical data at
So, for the standard four month flu season ending in early August, COVID was roughly twice as bad as a very bad flu season, with per capita death rates varying wildly around the country. So for that period the commenter is basically correct, unless you have a problem with official State health authorities and the CDC. These numbers are right.
It’s now 360K after 9 months and nationwide, according to the same site compiled from Official State websites. With 40 of the 50 States with per capita fatality rates within a factor of two of each other (500-1000 people/death).
So it is back-to-back and twice-as-bad...the very very bad flu season that hasn’t stopped yet and is now pretty evenly distributed nationwide. Not the plague, but not just a very bad flu (for the elderly at least).
The poster never referred to IFR explicitly. I personally prefer old-fashioned per-capita death rates unless I’m modeling dynamics. Neater, cleaner.
From a policy standpoint, deaths still skews towards the very old. Median death age in late 70s in my county. So politics of sending Grandma out of the igloo into the blizzard, and potential confusion of elderly dying with COVID v. dying from COVID still relevant for lockdown policy and the like.
First, GP is nowhere near "half-right". Most egregious is calculating a CFR which is one fifth of the true value (as best we know with the current data). This is much closer to "absolutely wrong" than "verifiably correct", so no, "half-right" is absolutely a stretch in my book. In terms of absolute severity COVID is roughly 10 times deadlier than the flu, so there is no comparison here. And this is before we even begin to talk about the lasting effects of the disease. Suffice to say that there is no argument in terms of severity; COVID is much, much worse than the flu.
Second, comparing four months at the beginning of the pandemic when the disease was early in its spread vs. four months of endemic flu season (where the flu virus already has a sufficient foothold across a wide swath of the population) is completely erroneous. A much better comparison (though still imperfect) would be to measure across the same time period (December-March) with the same societal mitigations. In the last month, we've seen nearly 80,000 COVID fatalities in the US, so if we want to assume a similar rate over the next 3 months (likely an underestimate given the current upward trend), that's 320,000 deaths. And that's with fairly substantial behavioral restrictions to reduce the spread of the virus. You also neglected to mention that the 2017-2018 flu season was the worst in the last 10 years, where most flu seasons attribute around 40,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. So, even if we decide to ignore the fact that COVID cases are already suppressed due to behavioral mitigations, and me being generous with all of these estimates, at the very least it is four times worse than the worst flu season we've seen in the last 10 years. In reality, COVID unabetted is probably on the order of 10 flu seasons wrapped into one.
Come March we'll have a better estimate of flu deaths for this season, but I wouldn't be surprised if the restrictions see the number of flu fatalities drop below 20k or even 10k. Granting some intellectual honesty, the stats would unfortunately be significantly confounded due to COVID-induced strain on our healthcare system, and the fact that many individuals who would have died from the flu are now dead from COVID instead. But as a loose comparison, I foresee that ~20 times more people will die from COVID this winter than from the flu.
Like you said, policy is a different matter. Obviously it's worth discussing varying isolation strategies so that low-risk populations aren't significantly affected by the lockdown measures, while high-risk groups are isolated and supported. But that is a completely separate discussion. My main concern is with speech that abuses numbers and proliferates a societally-harmful mentality without discussing any of the actual nuances and trade-offs of the issue. As a suggestion for future commenters, if you want to try to compare the harm of lockdown measures versus the harm of the disease, you better make sure that your numbers are accurate before moving on to cost-benefit analysis.
No, literally look at the CDC links I provided. It says "Estimated COVID-19 Infections, Symptomatic Illnesses, and Hospitalizations—United States" - 91 million
The key is estimated. Most covid cases go unreported.
Estimated flu infections per season: ~25,000,000
Confirmed COVID cases last 12 months: ~22,000,000
Estimated COVID cases using 7x reporting ratio (CDC): ~154,000,000
If we compare CDC estimates for both diseases, COVID is 6 times more infectious than the flu. So, CFR doesn't tell the whole story, and it is disingenuous to pretend that it does. I think your original comment calculated an estimated CFR of 0.278% for COVID (253k deaths divided by 91M cases by end of November), while the estimated CFR for the flu is 0.16% (40k deaths divided by 25M cases per season). Using these numbers, the CFR of COVID is 1.7 times that of the flu. But, when multiplied by the infectiousness, it kills 10 times as many people. A comparison of the absolute death toll matches this result:
Estimated flu deaths per season: ~40,000
Confirmed COVID deaths last 12 months: 360,000
Note that the number of COVID deaths is under-representative because several months accounted for a period of low-spread, whereas flu is already endemic in the population. COVID was roughly considered widespread in April, so that's 9 months of full-on proliferation with 356,000 deaths. Extrapolating for the next three months projects ~475,000 deaths from April 2020 thru March 2021. This is probably an underestimate because if the next two months are like December (as projected), we'll hit just over 500,000 deaths. Now, we don't even know how many COVID deaths are unreported, but for the sake of argument we can just pretend that this is negligible.
So, even a modest estimate of projected deaths also confirms that COVID over 10 times deadlier than the flu in absolute terms.
It does spread faster than the flu, but the CFR is not that much different than the flu like you said. I'm not afraid of the flu and most people I know are not. How about instead of shutting down the entire economy and destroying many people's lives, we say to the people that are afraid of it to isolate? The government could have paid for them to receive their groceries through an app. It probably would have been cheaper than the massive amount of money spent trying to get the economy to recover after destroying it. Most of the deaths are in nursing homes so we should have quarantined nursing homes also instead of destroying the entire economy. That probably would have cut the deaths by at least 50%. The average healthy person has nothing to fear from COVID.
I've been to many large parties, I went to 3 Stop the Steal protests (and came into contact with probably 10,000 people easily), I never wear a mask, I take no precautions and I'm fine.
Stanford frosh (freshman) here. What's disappointing about this is not _that_ they cancelled — most of my friends agree that it's the prudent thing to do — but that they waited so long to cancel. For context, classes start tomorrow [0]. One of my friends literally got the news about the cancellation when he landed in SFO yesterday.
Just a few weeks ago, they sent us an email reaffirming their plan to bring us back, yet COVID cases in California have remained relatively flat since then. It's unclear what specifically made them pull the plug. Maybe it was the 43 students testing positive. Maybe it was the rising cases in Santa Clara County. But nine months into the pandemic, it’s hard to see these as surprises.
Personally, I wish they did it two or three weeks ago. Or even a week ago. Or even last week. Just not the Saturday night before classes start. (We got this news yesterday.) The writing was on the wall the entire time — they could have saved everyone (including themselves) a lot of time and effort by just being realistic.
Oh well. Surely there are sides to this I'm not seeing.
[0] Classes do start tomorrow (Jan 11), but most students would move in around Jan 22. A small subset of students (RAs, international students, etc.) have been moving in over the past few days, and they won't be asked to leave.
One factor they might have been considering: it does seem like these covid spikes reach a point, and then calm down. They might have hoped the top of the peak would have come earlier, and they might have been able to announce that it were safe to return. For example, if Cali had peaked a week ago, by the time y'all were set to move in, it would have been relatively safe.
You're right that such short notice puts students in a tough spot. They can apparently still request pro-rated refunds, [1] but at this point they have signed up for classes and are (or were) excited to start.
It's really unfortunately that you're getting whipsawed like this. With more warning you'd more easily be able to pursue internships or other opportunities. Out of curiosity, would you have been able to take the semester off had you known several weeks ago, vs now?
For context, the number of daily covid-19 cases has roughly doubled in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties over the last few weeks. That growth I imagine is the reason why the University administration pulled the plug :(
> Out of curiosity, would you have been able to take the semester off had you known several weeks ago, vs now?
They extended the leave of absence deadline, so I could still conceivably take the term off. But I don’t think many frosh are doing that. We’ll be off campus for the spring too no matter what (they will prioritize juniors and seniors for graduation), so it makes sense to just do it all remotely.
Where the timing really sucks is on planning off-campus living away from home. I’m not endorsing leisure travel, but the thought of living at home for 6+ more months isn’t great for a lot of us. With classes starting tomorrow, though, it’s going to be tough for people to make arrangements (unless you want to move mid-way through the term, when coursework is heavy).
For what it's worth, rental units (apartments & condos) across the bay have record vacancies due to remote work. That being said:
1) Single Family Home rentals are more rare, due to former SF dwellers seeking more space. (if living with roommates is preferred) SFH near campus tends to be particularly scarce / pricey.
2) Rental terms less than 12 months are rare since landlords prefer stability and want to avoid the financial and temporal cost of re-renting.
3) The commonly available units will likely be pricier than Stanford dorm rooms.
4) The friction involved to rent a regular off campus housing unit (paperwork, security deposit, etc) is more burdensome than the turn key nature of on campus housing.
I imagine virtual-learning college students still prefer to live off campus but in the general area so that they can meet up with classmates off campus?
Pretty irresponsible for Stanford to even initially announce a return to class a month ago, while cases were beginning to spike from thanksgiving in CA. USC in contrast has been online since march and has maintained that this will be the status quo since July. Their announcement to have spring 2021 be online came as no surprise in mid november, on anticipation of the inevitable thanksgiving surge.
It strikes me as very odd that the admins at Stanford weren't looking around at what the rest of California was doing. It also surprised me to read that Bay Area schools were reopening as early as November. Mindboggling, really. LAUSD is remote this year.
>Just a few weeks ago, they sent us an email reaffirming their plan to bring us back, yet COVID cases in California have remained relatively flat since then.
Where "flat" is 30-40k per day, which it has been since the beginning of December.
Compare that to the trough of 3k/day through the summer and the late spring "peak" of 8-10k/day.
Shit is the worst it has been and it isn't going to get better for a while.
They made the right decision, I'm sorry that it was done so late.
I found this story pretty interesting -- on how it's largely the willingness and compliance of the students that sets whether you can keep classes going or not:
Semi on-topic: This site really wants to track me. It doesn't let me read with an AdBlocker, but also doesn't let me read incognito, which was my solution to the first problem. Creepy!
This is pretty sad, the four years of college easily will be the easiest years of socialization and dating a young person will ever have. To have at a minimum two of these years taken from you, is to lose something you'll never get back.
If I were in undergrad right now I would have probably just taken a leave of absence until campus is back open rather than pay full tuition for zoom class.
A lot of schools weren’t allowing deferred enrollment for freshmen or transfers this year. If you’re part of the group that has to pay full tuition, the math gets hard but what would you do for that year? Just play video games for a year at your parents home? That’s essentially what you’d be signing up for most students. I guess you have to ask how long are you willing to put your life on hold. My partner decided to do her schooling online even though she knew it would be one of the worst things ever for her.
A lot of my dating age friends looking for relationships to blossom into marriages are really frustrated right now with the state of affairs. I'm beyond those years but I can appreciate their frustrations with the halting of their searches.
I'm not so sure. There is a quarantine-baby effect as well. People planning to have babies eventually have a strong incentive to do it now as they are home and can't get distracted with many other interim plans.
Yah, I think I read there will be more babies after this period. So running three months back from the middle of the pandemic (say in July) so maybe a lot of April babies? Makes sense, put a fertile man and women together in a confined space and for a prolonged period of time and things will naturally happen.
Out of curiosity and for the sake of comparison- to what extent did other campuses handle the situation similarly or differently? I'm especially curious about Berkeley since they're also a top-tier program in a similar region, but those with insight into any other California campus would also be interesting to hear from.
> Will students be required to take in-person classes or be present on campus?
Students will NOT be required to take in-person classes or be present on campus for the spring semester. Almost all academic offerings, including those with in-person instructional activities, will also be delivered remotely.
Courses that will be offered in-person if public health conditions allow will have remote alternatives so that students can continue to make academic progress.
USC has been online since March and is online for spring 2021. There are a limited number of people living on campus and testing is required after arrival, and the USC hotel has been converted into a quarantine facility; where people in isolation would be delivered meals. Employees and students are told to take a covid test at least once a week, and since this test is processed by USC themselves turnaround is within 24hrs. USC has received doses of the vaccine already and is vaccinating groups in 1A within their medical community. 1B will include essential employees with on site business and those older than >75 within the university community, and this will begin as soon as the county health authority authorizes it.
For some schools it might be possible to have full in-person classes safely. I think Caltech could do it, and maybe MIT. Maybe Harvey Mudd, too. Oh, and probably the US military academies.
Here's how I imagine it could work at Caltech.
1. For undergraduates, give everyone a rapid response COVID test when they arrive. Anyone who fails is quarantined until they are no longer infectious.
2. Once an undergraduate is cleared to move in, they must not leave campus for the rest of the term. This should be fairly easy. When I was there, most people only had to leave on weekend, because food was only served as part of your room & board contract during weekdays. That could be extended to cover weekends during COVID. Most other things that we used to leave campus for back then are now readily obtain online for delivery.
It is #2 that I think would be problematic at many schools. I recall that earlier in the pandemic some told students to not leave campus but they were not obeyed.
At Caltech, every undergraduate could understand the science and the mathematical models behind the policy, and see that it is correct. Also, violating the policy after you agreed to it would probably be seen as an honor code violation, which the students take very seriously.
Same for MIT and Harvey Mudd on the science aspect, although I'm not quite sure about MIT. MIT does offer undergraduate degrees in quite a few fields that aren't STEM, such as music, theater arts, global studies and languages, and several others, and I'm not sure how much STEM people in those majors have to take. (Caltech has non-STEM degrees too, such as English, but they still have to take the same calculus, physics, and chemistry that STEM majors have to take--when I was there that was two years of calculus and two years of physics and I think a year of chemistry, although I believe now it is just one year of calculus because nowadays almost everyone has had high school calculus).
For the military academies I assume the students would stay in line because they could be ordered to, and obeying orders is a big deal at those places.
3. OK, we've got a COVID free collection of undergraduates. But to have in-person classes we need someone to teach them. Professors don't usually live on campus, so the "once verified as clean never leave" approach won't work for them.
This could probably be handled by having professors on days they are teaching take a rapid response test in the morning, early enough to have results before their first class.
4. For graduate students that live on campus and are not married (or are married but their spouse is also a graduate student at the same school), a similar approach to that for undergraduates could work.
These graduate students could also handle much of the teaching of undergraduate classes, reducing the need for professors to come in.
5. For researchers not involved in teaching, and other staff, you could probably arrange so that they and the students (undergraduates plus whatever graduate students are serving as teachers) do not come in contact.
6. Reorganize classes as far so they are done Hogwarts style. Have separate classes for students living in Ricketts House, Dabney House, Blacker House, and so on.
Couple this with regular testing. The idea is that if someone in one house does get COVID, you find it with the rapid testing, and you can quarantine that house. Since they only have classes with members in their own house, there is a good chance this will catch it before they have spread it to the other houses.
However, just because it might be doable doesn't necessarily mean it is worthwhile.
It would take a lot of planning and a lot of schedule manipulation and choreographing movements around campus to make it so if someone does get it, it is found out before they had spread it beyond a well defined sub-population that is easily quarantined. That might require too much control, except maybe at the military academies.
I'm a student at a much smaller university than Stanford. I can tell you with confidence your statement of students not leaving campus once they move in cannot work. For one, consider the students who live in off-campus apartments. How are they going to get food? At my school, meal plans cost a crapton of money, and it's a lot cheaper to just buy groceries and cook for yourself.
Even if you forbade those students from coming to campus, how would you prevent students from leaving? Barricade them in? Our shortened fall break heavily encouraged students to stay on campus, but so many people left to see their families. It's not realistic.
So I attend Vanderbilt, who invited everyone to attend in person in the Fall and now will do the same in Spring.
The university is doing 1), as well as 2) to an extent by cancelling spring break.
Interestingly, they haven't opted to do pre-arrival testing giving the following justification:
> Based on the lessons we learned last fall, we expect students’ highest risk activities prior to returning to campus are likely to be traveling to campus and engaging in social activities before classes begin, so efforts will focus on arrival testing and a shelter in place protocol.
We will however have biweekly covid testing throughout the sem, which should be quite effective I think. For Fall, it was only weekly, which meant someone who got infected right after their test would not know until a week later.
School's like Notre Dame have done surprisingly well by just having regular COVID testing for students. After they had thousands of students rush the field after a football game, I don't think they had a single COVID case.
I'm a bit skeptical with how much faith you put in those pursuing STEM degrees. There may be some correlations, but I think the delineation between "STEM and non-STEM" is oversold. Just because someone understands the correct thing to do re: COVID doesn't mean they'll actually do it
For me, this superiority complex heavily tainted the open campus, freedom of thought feel colleges strive to represent. Constant bragging about whose curriculum is more challenging is one thing, but suggesting without a whiff of substantiation STEM majors wont spread covid as much because they "understand the science and mathematical models"?
I feel like I'm back in the school library trying to focus on my work while some loud, insufferable 20 year old with zero work experience two tables away decries sociology majors.
> I feel like I'm back in the school library trying to focus on my work while some loud, insufferable 20 year old with zero work experience two tables away decries sociology majors.
Things have changed. The sociology majors are neck-deep in cultural Marxism, so STEM majors do have something to mock.
> Once an undergraduate is cleared to move in, they must not leave campus for the rest of the term. This should be fairly easy.
Maybe CalTech is very different, but I truly cannot imagine this at MIT. Students go out and party, even at top programs that have a disproportionate number of "traditionally nerdy" people.
Further, students aren't the only people present. Faculty exist, and some of them can bring Covid into the bubble. Administrators and staff exist, and some of them can bring Covid into the bubble. Once a few students are infected the "don't leave campus" plan does not achieve much of anything. You mention daily tests, but you can be infectious before a test is positive. And faculty will throw a fit about this.
> At Caltech, every undergraduate could understand the science and the mathematical models behind the policy, and see that it is correct.
There are STEM faculty at top universities who can't seem to understand the basics of how the pandemic functions. I cannot possibly imagine that every single 18-year-old who is smart and interested in science is going to be able to resist the enormous amount of misinformation about the pandemic and stay-at-home orders.
> Same for MIT and Harvey Mudd on the science aspect, although I'm not quite sure about MIT. MIT does offer undergraduate degrees in quite a few fields that aren't STEM, such as music, theater arts, global studies and languages, and several others, and I'm not sure how much STEM people in those majors have to take.
This is crossing a STEMlord line for me. Where my wife works, her department (in the humanities) has more teachers choosing to teach online than the computer science and physics departments. I think you are enormously quick to treat fresh out of high school engineering students as rational actors and everybody else as ignorant buffoons.
> Maybe CalTech is very different, but I truly cannot imagine this at MIT. Students go out and party, even at top programs that have a disproportionate number of "traditionally nerdy" people.
It is possible things have changed substantially over the years, but when I was there and definitely for quite a long time after, attending parties outside of campus was very rare at Caltech. Parties on campus were not common either, and most of them were parties within a house.
Caltech undergraduate life is kind of like being in a science monastery. It's not merely a school of nerds. It's a school of the people who nerds think are too nerdy.
On the STEM vs. non-STEM issue, I'm not treating "fresh out of high school engineering students as rational actors and everybody else as ignorant buffoons".
Everyone, without exception, needs to rely on expert opinion in some matters. No one has the time and capacity to become expert themselves in all fields that are relevant to all important decisions we have to make in our lives.
Sadly, in many of the areas where we have to rely on experts there are many with financial or ideological interests in getting people to not listen to the experts. This results in people being presented with conflicting opinions all purporting to be from or backed by experts in the relevant areas.
One of the best ways to resolve such a situation is, if you can do it, is to learn enough about the subject yourself to be able to look at the same information and methods that were used to produce the conflicting opinions and determine which came from actual experts and which did not.
In this one very particular area, namely determining if a particular set of behavioral rules and procedures to prevent a particular community from getting COVID and to limit its spread within that community if it does get in is scientifically justified, STEM students are going to be more likely to be able to do the type of evaluation described in the prior paragraph than are non-STEM students.
Would you say I'm being a "STEMlord" if I said Caltech students were more likely than, say, students in Julliard's piano bachelor's degree program to be able to evaluate evaluate whether someone making a claim about the theoretical upper limit on the efficiency of a classical thermodynamic engine is correct?
It works the other way, too. There are plenty of areas where I'd expect that Julliard piano student to be way better than any Caltech student at evaluating conflicting purported experts. It is just that those areas don't happen to be relevant to the specific problem of convincing a group of people that specific anti-COVID measures are correct.
> Would you say I'm being a "STEMlord" if I said Caltech students were more likely than, say, students in Julliard's piano bachelor's degree program to be able to evaluate evaluate whether someone making a claim about the theoretical upper limit on the efficiency of a classical thermodynamic engine is correct?
If I personally knew a bunch of Julliard students who did a better job at this than Caltech students, then I'd certainly ask for some actual data backing up your claim. I see no reason why a freshmen majoring in CS is more likely to make healthy pandemic choices than a freshmen majoring in history.
My reading of the campus environment prior to March was that, aside from any pandemic concern, Stanford was not prepared for the heightened level of student and community activism on campus coming into 2020, and the transformation of the formerly bucolic evergreen village into a high-rise arcology, was probably making a lot of people nervous.
Would it be a really cost prohibitive thing to begin to mass produce PPE of the highest grade, like the stuff healthcare workers use who are treating covid cases in the ICU with? It'll look totally zany but going into class wearing a bunny/hazmat suit with positive pressure filtered air and the whole shebang could be worth it for those willing to go out on a limb? What about just forming local communes where everyone stays on the compound and mutually agrees to have some up front testing and quarantine and then when you pass the bar can move freely in the commune. Are either of those feasible?
Its highway robbery for universities to charge the same tuition for "remote learning" that they do for in-person schooling. The dozen or so hours of academic instruction is only a fraction of the college experience that one pays for. Socialization, library access, gym access, athletics, dining services, student clubs and a whole other host of services and facilities that are denied to students during "remote learning" represent substantial value that students are paying for but no longer receiving. This is even more egregious when many students are going deeply into debt in order to pay their tuition.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadBut lets entertain whether or not this was a good decision(it wasn't):
* Impromptu hospitals had to be arranged for at the A.T.O., Delt, Fiji and Theta Chi fraternities within weeks of the flu hitting Palo Alto. [1]
* Administration banned social gathering and unwarranted travel. Students were quarantined on campus and could not leave. Masks were compulsory everywhere on campus. Anyone not complying with the masks guidelines received a fine (this is somewhat less harsh than the police beatings in Boston/Cambridge).
* By October, it was considered a success that only around ten students died.
Meanwhile, not a singular undergraduate from MIT died on campus, and they continued their studies with an accelerated semester the following year. [2][3]
--
Notes:
[0] I've edited this from "flu" to "deadly flu." Initially, a few colleges (MIT included) opted for delaying the semester a few weeks. This led students to believe the flu was not too serious, resulting in students being caught mid-travels before being told how deadly the flu really was. This led to a lot of confusion and the MIT President apologized sometime that Winter in a letter (and later in The Corporation's yearly report).
--
Sources:
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2018/03/15/100-years-ago-t...
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2020/3-questions-archivist-nora-murphy-...
[3] MIT Archives & Distinctive Collections
I do like it here but it really makes me laugh sometimes.
The CFR of COVID—and everything else that might be require ICU care—goes way up when hospitals are overwhelmed because the infection rate isn't controlled. CFR isn't a constant.
2017 death rate: 0.14%
2020 covid: 91 million infections (as of dec 11 2020), 294,535 deaths (as of dec 12 2020)
2020 death rate: 0.32%
Covid is about 2-3 times as bad a bad flu season. The vast, vast majority of people under 60 do not die. There is no reason to shut everything down and ruin businesses, the economy and people's lives. Yes people will die. People die from coal plants, cars, pollution, and many other things that we do not shut everything down for.
"Early data from COVID-NET suggest that COVID-19–associated hospitalizations in the United States are highest among older adults, and nearly 90% of persons hospitalized have one or more underlying medical conditions."
People in this thread: "I just wasted a year of my life not being able to interact with people so for sunk cost this covid stuff must be really bad"
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden-averted/2017-2018.htm
https://archive.is/knguz
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6915e3.htm
If you consider the start of this in late March, and look at late July (a four month flu season) then the US fatalities were about 140K. Compiled from Official State Websites, you can check historical data at
https://covidtracking.com/data
The 2018 flu season was 80K fatalities.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/health/flu-deaths-2017--2018-...
So, for the standard four month flu season ending in early August, COVID was roughly twice as bad as a very bad flu season, with per capita death rates varying wildly around the country. So for that period the commenter is basically correct, unless you have a problem with official State health authorities and the CDC. These numbers are right.
It’s now 360K after 9 months and nationwide, according to the same site compiled from Official State websites. With 40 of the 50 States with per capita fatality rates within a factor of two of each other (500-1000 people/death).
So it is back-to-back and twice-as-bad...the very very bad flu season that hasn’t stopped yet and is now pretty evenly distributed nationwide. Not the plague, but not just a very bad flu (for the elderly at least).
The poster never referred to IFR explicitly. I personally prefer old-fashioned per-capita death rates unless I’m modeling dynamics. Neater, cleaner.
From a policy standpoint, deaths still skews towards the very old. Median death age in late 70s in my county. So politics of sending Grandma out of the igloo into the blizzard, and potential confusion of elderly dying with COVID v. dying from COVID still relevant for lockdown policy and the like.
First, GP is nowhere near "half-right". Most egregious is calculating a CFR which is one fifth of the true value (as best we know with the current data). This is much closer to "absolutely wrong" than "verifiably correct", so no, "half-right" is absolutely a stretch in my book. In terms of absolute severity COVID is roughly 10 times deadlier than the flu, so there is no comparison here. And this is before we even begin to talk about the lasting effects of the disease. Suffice to say that there is no argument in terms of severity; COVID is much, much worse than the flu.
Second, comparing four months at the beginning of the pandemic when the disease was early in its spread vs. four months of endemic flu season (where the flu virus already has a sufficient foothold across a wide swath of the population) is completely erroneous. A much better comparison (though still imperfect) would be to measure across the same time period (December-March) with the same societal mitigations. In the last month, we've seen nearly 80,000 COVID fatalities in the US, so if we want to assume a similar rate over the next 3 months (likely an underestimate given the current upward trend), that's 320,000 deaths. And that's with fairly substantial behavioral restrictions to reduce the spread of the virus. You also neglected to mention that the 2017-2018 flu season was the worst in the last 10 years, where most flu seasons attribute around 40,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. So, even if we decide to ignore the fact that COVID cases are already suppressed due to behavioral mitigations, and me being generous with all of these estimates, at the very least it is four times worse than the worst flu season we've seen in the last 10 years. In reality, COVID unabetted is probably on the order of 10 flu seasons wrapped into one.
Come March we'll have a better estimate of flu deaths for this season, but I wouldn't be surprised if the restrictions see the number of flu fatalities drop below 20k or even 10k. Granting some intellectual honesty, the stats would unfortunately be significantly confounded due to COVID-induced strain on our healthcare system, and the fact that many individuals who would have died from the flu are now dead from COVID instead. But as a loose comparison, I foresee that ~20 times more people will die from COVID this winter than from the flu.
Like you said, policy is a different matter. Obviously it's worth discussing varying isolation strategies so that low-risk populations aren't significantly affected by the lockdown measures, while high-risk groups are isolated and supported. But that is a completely separate discussion. My main concern is with speech that abuses numbers and proliferates a societally-harmful mentality without discussing any of the actual nuances and trade-offs of the issue. As a suggestion for future commenters, if you want to try to compare the harm of lockdown measures versus the harm of the disease, you better make sure that your numbers are accurate before moving on to cost-benefit analysis.
The key is estimated. Most covid cases go unreported.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
So, even a modest estimate of projected deaths also confirms that COVID over 10 times deadlier than the flu in absolute terms.
I've been to many large parties, I went to 3 Stop the Steal protests (and came into contact with probably 10,000 people easily), I never wear a mask, I take no precautions and I'm fine.
Just a few weeks ago, they sent us an email reaffirming their plan to bring us back, yet COVID cases in California have remained relatively flat since then. It's unclear what specifically made them pull the plug. Maybe it was the 43 students testing positive. Maybe it was the rising cases in Santa Clara County. But nine months into the pandemic, it’s hard to see these as surprises.
Personally, I wish they did it two or three weeks ago. Or even a week ago. Or even last week. Just not the Saturday night before classes start. (We got this news yesterday.) The writing was on the wall the entire time — they could have saved everyone (including themselves) a lot of time and effort by just being realistic.
Oh well. Surely there are sides to this I'm not seeing.
[0] Classes do start tomorrow (Jan 11), but most students would move in around Jan 22. A small subset of students (RAs, international students, etc.) have been moving in over the past few days, and they won't be asked to leave.
1: https://registrar.stanford.edu/tuition-refund-schedule
For context, the number of daily covid-19 cases has roughly doubled in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties over the last few weeks. That growth I imagine is the reason why the University administration pulled the plug :(
They extended the leave of absence deadline, so I could still conceivably take the term off. But I don’t think many frosh are doing that. We’ll be off campus for the spring too no matter what (they will prioritize juniors and seniors for graduation), so it makes sense to just do it all remotely.
Where the timing really sucks is on planning off-campus living away from home. I’m not endorsing leisure travel, but the thought of living at home for 6+ more months isn’t great for a lot of us. With classes starting tomorrow, though, it’s going to be tough for people to make arrangements (unless you want to move mid-way through the term, when coursework is heavy).
1) Single Family Home rentals are more rare, due to former SF dwellers seeking more space. (if living with roommates is preferred) SFH near campus tends to be particularly scarce / pricey.
2) Rental terms less than 12 months are rare since landlords prefer stability and want to avoid the financial and temporal cost of re-renting.
3) The commonly available units will likely be pricier than Stanford dorm rooms.
4) The friction involved to rent a regular off campus housing unit (paperwork, security deposit, etc) is more burdensome than the turn key nature of on campus housing.
I imagine virtual-learning college students still prefer to live off campus but in the general area so that they can meet up with classmates off campus?
(I'm an alum. Not impressed with how this has been handled.)
It strikes me as very odd that the admins at Stanford weren't looking around at what the rest of California was doing. It also surprised me to read that Bay Area schools were reopening as early as November. Mindboggling, really. LAUSD is remote this year.
Where "flat" is 30-40k per day, which it has been since the beginning of December.
Compare that to the trough of 3k/day through the summer and the late spring "peak" of 8-10k/day.
Shit is the worst it has been and it isn't going to get better for a while.
They made the right decision, I'm sorry that it was done so late.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/world/asia/singapore-coro...
I'd like to see what happens.
> Will students be required to take in-person classes or be present on campus?
Students will NOT be required to take in-person classes or be present on campus for the spring semester. Almost all academic offerings, including those with in-person instructional activities, will also be delivered remotely. Courses that will be offered in-person if public health conditions allow will have remote alternatives so that students can continue to make academic progress.
Here's how I imagine it could work at Caltech.
1. For undergraduates, give everyone a rapid response COVID test when they arrive. Anyone who fails is quarantined until they are no longer infectious.
2. Once an undergraduate is cleared to move in, they must not leave campus for the rest of the term. This should be fairly easy. When I was there, most people only had to leave on weekend, because food was only served as part of your room & board contract during weekdays. That could be extended to cover weekends during COVID. Most other things that we used to leave campus for back then are now readily obtain online for delivery.
It is #2 that I think would be problematic at many schools. I recall that earlier in the pandemic some told students to not leave campus but they were not obeyed.
At Caltech, every undergraduate could understand the science and the mathematical models behind the policy, and see that it is correct. Also, violating the policy after you agreed to it would probably be seen as an honor code violation, which the students take very seriously.
Same for MIT and Harvey Mudd on the science aspect, although I'm not quite sure about MIT. MIT does offer undergraduate degrees in quite a few fields that aren't STEM, such as music, theater arts, global studies and languages, and several others, and I'm not sure how much STEM people in those majors have to take. (Caltech has non-STEM degrees too, such as English, but they still have to take the same calculus, physics, and chemistry that STEM majors have to take--when I was there that was two years of calculus and two years of physics and I think a year of chemistry, although I believe now it is just one year of calculus because nowadays almost everyone has had high school calculus).
For the military academies I assume the students would stay in line because they could be ordered to, and obeying orders is a big deal at those places.
3. OK, we've got a COVID free collection of undergraduates. But to have in-person classes we need someone to teach them. Professors don't usually live on campus, so the "once verified as clean never leave" approach won't work for them.
This could probably be handled by having professors on days they are teaching take a rapid response test in the morning, early enough to have results before their first class.
4. For graduate students that live on campus and are not married (or are married but their spouse is also a graduate student at the same school), a similar approach to that for undergraduates could work.
These graduate students could also handle much of the teaching of undergraduate classes, reducing the need for professors to come in.
5. For researchers not involved in teaching, and other staff, you could probably arrange so that they and the students (undergraduates plus whatever graduate students are serving as teachers) do not come in contact.
6. Reorganize classes as far so they are done Hogwarts style. Have separate classes for students living in Ricketts House, Dabney House, Blacker House, and so on.
Couple this with regular testing. The idea is that if someone in one house does get COVID, you find it with the rapid testing, and you can quarantine that house. Since they only have classes with members in their own house, there is a good chance this will catch it before they have spread it to the other houses.
However, just because it might be doable doesn't necessarily mean it is worthwhile.
It would take a lot of planning and a lot of schedule manipulation and choreographing movements around campus to make it so if someone does get it, it is found out before they had spread it beyond a well defined sub-population that is easily quarantined. That might require too much control, except maybe at the military academies.
Even if you forbade those students from coming to campus, how would you prevent students from leaving? Barricade them in? Our shortened fall break heavily encouraged students to stay on campus, but so many people left to see their families. It's not realistic.
The university is doing 1), as well as 2) to an extent by cancelling spring break.
Interestingly, they haven't opted to do pre-arrival testing giving the following justification:
> Based on the lessons we learned last fall, we expect students’ highest risk activities prior to returning to campus are likely to be traveling to campus and engaging in social activities before classes begin, so efforts will focus on arrival testing and a shelter in place protocol.
We will however have biweekly covid testing throughout the sem, which should be quite effective I think. For Fall, it was only weekly, which meant someone who got infected right after their test would not know until a week later.
I'm a bit skeptical with how much faith you put in those pursuing STEM degrees. There may be some correlations, but I think the delineation between "STEM and non-STEM" is oversold. Just because someone understands the correct thing to do re: COVID doesn't mean they'll actually do it
Regular testing is great, but it needs to be coupled with effective contact tracing to curb spread.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/notre-dame-coronavirus...
"STEM undergrads > non-STEM undergrads"
For me, this superiority complex heavily tainted the open campus, freedom of thought feel colleges strive to represent. Constant bragging about whose curriculum is more challenging is one thing, but suggesting without a whiff of substantiation STEM majors wont spread covid as much because they "understand the science and mathematical models"?
I feel like I'm back in the school library trying to focus on my work while some loud, insufferable 20 year old with zero work experience two tables away decries sociology majors.
Things have changed. The sociology majors are neck-deep in cultural Marxism, so STEM majors do have something to mock.
Maybe CalTech is very different, but I truly cannot imagine this at MIT. Students go out and party, even at top programs that have a disproportionate number of "traditionally nerdy" people.
Further, students aren't the only people present. Faculty exist, and some of them can bring Covid into the bubble. Administrators and staff exist, and some of them can bring Covid into the bubble. Once a few students are infected the "don't leave campus" plan does not achieve much of anything. You mention daily tests, but you can be infectious before a test is positive. And faculty will throw a fit about this.
> At Caltech, every undergraduate could understand the science and the mathematical models behind the policy, and see that it is correct.
There are STEM faculty at top universities who can't seem to understand the basics of how the pandemic functions. I cannot possibly imagine that every single 18-year-old who is smart and interested in science is going to be able to resist the enormous amount of misinformation about the pandemic and stay-at-home orders.
> Same for MIT and Harvey Mudd on the science aspect, although I'm not quite sure about MIT. MIT does offer undergraduate degrees in quite a few fields that aren't STEM, such as music, theater arts, global studies and languages, and several others, and I'm not sure how much STEM people in those majors have to take.
This is crossing a STEMlord line for me. Where my wife works, her department (in the humanities) has more teachers choosing to teach online than the computer science and physics departments. I think you are enormously quick to treat fresh out of high school engineering students as rational actors and everybody else as ignorant buffoons.
It is possible things have changed substantially over the years, but when I was there and definitely for quite a long time after, attending parties outside of campus was very rare at Caltech. Parties on campus were not common either, and most of them were parties within a house.
Caltech undergraduate life is kind of like being in a science monastery. It's not merely a school of nerds. It's a school of the people who nerds think are too nerdy.
On the STEM vs. non-STEM issue, I'm not treating "fresh out of high school engineering students as rational actors and everybody else as ignorant buffoons".
Everyone, without exception, needs to rely on expert opinion in some matters. No one has the time and capacity to become expert themselves in all fields that are relevant to all important decisions we have to make in our lives.
Sadly, in many of the areas where we have to rely on experts there are many with financial or ideological interests in getting people to not listen to the experts. This results in people being presented with conflicting opinions all purporting to be from or backed by experts in the relevant areas.
One of the best ways to resolve such a situation is, if you can do it, is to learn enough about the subject yourself to be able to look at the same information and methods that were used to produce the conflicting opinions and determine which came from actual experts and which did not.
In this one very particular area, namely determining if a particular set of behavioral rules and procedures to prevent a particular community from getting COVID and to limit its spread within that community if it does get in is scientifically justified, STEM students are going to be more likely to be able to do the type of evaluation described in the prior paragraph than are non-STEM students.
Would you say I'm being a "STEMlord" if I said Caltech students were more likely than, say, students in Julliard's piano bachelor's degree program to be able to evaluate evaluate whether someone making a claim about the theoretical upper limit on the efficiency of a classical thermodynamic engine is correct?
It works the other way, too. There are plenty of areas where I'd expect that Julliard piano student to be way better than any Caltech student at evaluating conflicting purported experts. It is just that those areas don't happen to be relevant to the specific problem of convincing a group of people that specific anti-COVID measures are correct.
If I personally knew a bunch of Julliard students who did a better job at this than Caltech students, then I'd certainly ask for some actual data backing up your claim. I see no reason why a freshmen majoring in CS is more likely to make healthy pandemic choices than a freshmen majoring in history.