Notre Dame reports 29 Covid cases 1 week into school
Notre dame did pre matriculation testing to isolate all cases before returning to campus
Unsurprisingly, this method didn’t work and now 29 cases have been spreading Covid through campus for the past week.
UofM is following a similar approach, so I thought it was relevant to post here
August 14th, 2020 at 12:53 PM ^
Indiana University is doing something somewhat more aggressive. It still may not work (and they acknowledge that) but as much thought has gone into their plan as any (with students returning, as a key qualifier) that I've seen:
Surveillance testing for every human (on and off-campus enrollees, faculty, staff) that returns to campus, including those of us who are already here.
Repeat surveillance testing for every student every week.
Additional mitigation and tracking measures, many of them robust but too wordy to share off the top, unless someone asks.
All tests are paid for by IU. It's a preposterously expensive venture -- easily measuring $1-5 MM per week.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:12 PM ^
That seems like a very aggressive and tedious strategy for such a large school. I'd be shocked if they could pull it off
August 14th, 2020 at 1:36 PM ^
The time between testing and getting results is critical. If you have several days between test time and results, you still have a major problem,
As for IU, 1.5 million a week would be a meager sum to pay to keep the campus open for the semester.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:41 PM ^
True. There's some discrepancy still between which surveillance tests will be PCR versus antigen/ELISA based. The former all have a 2-3 day turnaround. The latter come from two camps -- one variety has 15 minute turnaround; the other also has 2-3 day turnaround.
Also, IU is treating turnaround time on these tests as one of its blinking lights for their "Let's shut it down now" decision tree. If the tests results start rolling into a 4+ day turnaround time, that's one of a constellation of considerations that could lead to campus going fully online.
August 14th, 2020 at 2:10 PM ^
Example reference:
https://broadcast.iu.edu/events/IU_webinar_2020-07-30.html?fbclid=IwAR0y7HeRO-SaE1606CK-7N101PnuPGwXdxSAnjv0rGHo3I3eLVu_k88ILnM
August 14th, 2020 at 3:13 PM ^
What is the definition of working? As I think an expectation of zero cases is ridiculous.
August 14th, 2020 at 4:57 PM ^
I'm not the running the show, so you are probably not asking me, but if you are, here's the least ambiguous answer I can assemble:
No COVID-19 deaths or COVID-19 permanent disability on campus would be a perhaps-impossibly rigorous definition of "it's working." A less rigorous definition would be for Bloomington to not become a hotspot that smolders out of control (for itself, the county, the state).
But what I really think they mean by "working" is for campus to stay open, meaning that the wrong constellation of preset "tripwires" won't get tripped.
August 14th, 2020 at 6:22 PM ^
$1,000,000 to $5,000,000 per week? That's quite range there.
August 14th, 2020 at 7:25 PM ^
Given a realistic dose of uncertainty, "anywhere in the low single-digit millions per week" is a tighter range than you lead on.
Frankly, "$1-5 MM/wk" could be narrower than IU or I have any right expressing confidently. We still don't know the final ratio for these tests between antigen/ELISA and PCR formats. And we also don't know the average population to be subjected to these per week.
Excluding shipping and labor, the BD antigen test cost ~$20 each. PCR testing, as you may be aware, has a wider and higher range: $500-2000 per test. As for the testing population, we're talking about tens of thousands and also don't know about the rates of noncompliance or other confounders.
And that's without accounting for the uncertainty around insurance contributions. Insurers won't cover any of the surveillance tests, but they will cover some percentage of symptomatic tests and to various degrees for various patients.
I could have just as easily estimated "400K to $20MM" per week. Instead, with back-of-the-envelope math and laughable application of an 80% confidence interval, I settled on "$1MM to $5MM" per week. It could be wrong, sure, but confidently giving a narrower range is fiction right now.
August 14th, 2020 at 12:55 PM ^
I will be shocked if schools across the country, including Michigan, don't go back to fully online by Halloween this year
August 14th, 2020 at 1:20 PM ^
I just finished setting up the first two weeks labs for an engineering course.
If we make it through those two weeks before a shutdown - I will be very surprised.
August 15th, 2020 at 4:39 AM ^
My intern is going into his junior year at Cal next week. He said his EE lab is already set to be worked from home. That's something I never thought I'd see.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:20 PM ^
Not sure why everybody isn't fully on-line for this semester at least.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:28 PM ^
Money
August 14th, 2020 at 1:35 PM ^
Not sure of the argument for that. Michigan's tuition was raised this semester and we the only thing I got refunded last semester were lab fees
Unless their hope is to make all of their money back on room and board, I don't see a huge difference in revenue in having kids on campus or not
August 14th, 2020 at 1:51 PM ^
If you go virtual, you will lose students. Why pay U-M tuition for online learning? You may as well take a gap year or take classes at Washtenaw. Schools understand this, which is why they are trying to make in-person instruction work.
August 14th, 2020 at 3:20 PM ^
? you are paying for the piece of paper at the end.
August 14th, 2020 at 9:46 PM ^
No, that's only part of it. You're paying for the relationships and network and experiences. And if you're not going to get those, critically as a freshmen when many of our relationships are formed, you should wait a year to start. Take a gap and do something else because you're missing a huge part of what college is.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:54 PM ^
The majority of a college/university’s free cash flow for operating expenses comes from room and board. This is the real reason to push for students being on campus taking primarily virtual courses. Sad but true.
August 14th, 2020 at 11:21 PM ^
Lol, you don't really understand how a University's finances work.
August 15th, 2020 at 2:29 AM ^
Actually, intimately familiar or I wouldn’t have posted. I notice you didn’t counter with an alternative.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:36 PM ^
A forced sense of normalcy.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:55 PM ^
Halloween might be optimistic. I'd be surprised if we got through September at this rate.
August 14th, 2020 at 2:30 PM ^
WHAT Halloween this year? I'll see myself out.
August 14th, 2020 at 8:27 PM ^
And to add insult to injury, Halloween this year is on a Saturday and we missed it being on a Friday because of leap year.
August 14th, 2020 at 3:12 PM ^
I will be shocked if schools across the country, including Michigan, don't go back to fully online by Halloween this year
Agreed. And all they will have accomplished is killing people for tuition dollars. I still have no answer from WMU about how they plan to close (in the likely event that it is required) and deal with sick students quarantined on campus.
August 14th, 2020 at 3:12 PM ^
I will be shocked if schools across the country, including Michigan, don't go back to fully online by Halloween this year
Agreed. And all they will have accomplished is killing people for tuition dollars. I still have no answer from WMU about how they plan to close (in the likely event that it is required) and deal with sick students quarantined on campus.
August 14th, 2020 at 3:32 PM ^
My daughter was set to attend Oregon State as a freshman (it was the best value for us for an engineering school- great college town)
I decided yesterday to keep her home and chose the online option with a partnership program they have with our local community college.
She still keeps her scholarship. Just didn't make sense to pay for a dorm when I knew they would all be sent home eventually. Didn't make sense to pay high prices for Oregon State classes when they are on line so we are just going to do the minimum number of OSU classes to keep her scholarship. The community college classes are cheaper and they still count towards her degree. I feel very fortunate that Oregon State gave us so many options considering the circumstances.
So yea, I agree with the board... it's going to all end up on line anyway.
August 17th, 2020 at 5:17 PM ^
That’s a great option. Congratulations on picking an ethical school and making a great decision.
August 14th, 2020 at 4:59 PM ^
Honestly, if courses are going to require social distancing that prevents group work and professors are expected to stay behind a barrier, you might as well just go fully online. You're already eliminating the advantage of in-person instruction at that point.
August 14th, 2020 at 6:57 PM ^
Not quite. In-person for this teacher means not only seeing faces, but gauging individual understanding, feelings, uncertainty, a light-bulb moment, all of which factors into what I saw or ask next. Or if I stay silent to let a moment brew. No two classes of mine were ever the same, even when they covered the same material.
In-person also means getting a sense of the feeling of the group in the room.
Online and socially distant only work the same for teachers (and students) who think education is a simple transfer of information.
August 14th, 2020 at 7:56 PM ^
Yeah, and those are all very important parts of education. With that said, I think you're talking about poorly taught online courses. A well-built online class with a community of inquiry and constructivist pedagogy can lead to very deep meaning construction that goes beyond the simple transfer of information. The issue is thinking that instruction has to be delivered the same way in an online course as in an in-person course. It doesn't. Good online instruction looks different.
August 14th, 2020 at 12:57 PM ^
Are they doing mandatory testing for students? 348 tests since students started moving back seems much too low.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:01 PM ^
Crazy. How serious are the cases? Are the hospitals in the area overwhelmed?
August 14th, 2020 at 1:07 PM ^
Martavious does not endorse this post.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:10 PM ^
Why the downvote? This is a fair question.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:14 PM ^
It's not a fair question. It's the typical bs attempt to say that as long as cases are asymptomatic or minor and that hospitals aren't overwhelmed, then the cases don't really count
August 14th, 2020 at 1:16 PM ^
I won’t speak for the one asking, but in my opinion this point assumes a lot.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:20 PM ^
I would disagree. It is the most important question do determine the severity of the virus. In fact it is the exact method used to determine the severity of the seasonal flu. Of all of the people tested 99.96% survive and that's all ages groups, whittle that down to college age and it's in the 99.9 percentile. Statistically the ND students had a better chance of being killed in a car accident on the way back to campus than they do of dying of COVID
August 14th, 2020 at 1:24 PM ^
"Statistically the ND students had a better chance of being killed in a car accident on the way back to campus than they do of dying of COVID"
You're like a right wing talking point machine
August 14th, 2020 at 1:27 PM ^
Since when did statistics become political? Numbers are numbers, they don't care if you're communist, liberal, conservative, etc. They're numbers.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:35 PM ^
Comparing deaths from car accidents to deaths from an airborne virus with no effective treatment or vaccine is like comparing apples to basketballs
August 14th, 2020 at 1:40 PM ^
Incorrect. You compare risks. That's what you're comparing, what is the risk if I do "X". Doesn't matter what "X" is.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:42 PM ^
But it does matter what X is...
August 14th, 2020 at 1:48 PM ^
Why? X is being measured by what it's risk is for the individual. A 13 year old driver is accepting more risk than a 30 year old driver if using driving experience as the main factor. A 75 year old with co-morbidities is accepting more risk at Meijer than a healthy 23 year old when it comes to COVID. I tell my 75 year old mother all the time, that's not an acceptable risk for her.
August 14th, 2020 at 2:38 PM ^
Car accidents aren't contagious
August 14th, 2020 at 2:00 PM ^
Please tell me the rate of risk for having long term cardiovascular or respiratory illness from driving a car. Then we can discuss what is more safe.
August 14th, 2020 at 1:36 PM ^
"Since when did statistics become political?"
Me, channeling my inner nerd and paraphrasing from Endgame: "Gosh HHW, it's 2020. We haven't caught up in a spell, have we?"
August 14th, 2020 at 1:59 PM ^
Ha! A man can dream can't he?
August 14th, 2020 at 1:39 PM ^
You might be interested in this fine book. My orgo professor back at Michigan had us read it. It was written in the 1950s but remains extremely relevant today. Statistics didn't "become" political, they've always been political.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728