Cautious, but sensible; here is his take on how to reopen in the fall:
I don’t think it’s going to be one size fits all. I think it’s going to depend on the location of where the particular university or place of higher education is, what the demography of the students is, where they’re coming from. All of these things have to be taken into account.
A number of presidents of universities have been in discussions with us at the task force, with the vice president and with others, talking about creative ways where they could continue the education and yet safeguard the safety and the health of the students. There are a variety of models.
One of the models has been to essentially test all the students before they come in, just so that you know what the baseline of infection is. Test them both to see if they’re actually infected with tests for the virus, as well as — depending upon the technology at the time — antibodies to see if they had been previously exposed.
But one of the things that I have heard — and I’m not necessarily saying I’m advocating it because I think it’ll be appropriate variably depending on where you are — is to get at least a baseline and intermittently survey the students. By baseline, meaning you know when you start on Day 1 what you’re dealing with and intermittently do random surveillance every couple of weeks or what have you. You have to have the capability when students get infected, which they will, to then get them to a situation where they would be able to be comfortably isolated if in fact they’re just waiting out a relatively mild infection. Or, if they get ill, to have the health care available for them.
As this IHE article confirms, it is likely that there will be more than enough testing available by fall, although the cost may be prohibitive for some schools.
Less cautious and sensible was this opinion piece in IHE by two philosophers (Irina Mikhalevich [Rochester Institute of Technology] and Russell Powell [Boston University]). There are a lot of dubious factual claims in this piece, but this guilt-by-association smear was astonishing:
[S]ome universities continue to operate according to an outdated picture of the disease: e.g., that COVID-19 is like the flu, that the majority of those infected experience only mild symptoms, that otherwise healthy young people and children are unharmed, that only the lungs are affected, and that the disease is reliably symptomatic. Many of these same characterizations are currently being pedaled by neo-Confederate quarantine protesters, antivaxxers, climate change deniers and others who aim to distort public perceptions of the pandemic and erode the epistemic authority of medical science.
Not one bit of evidence is presented of any universities operating on such assumptions, and none of the universities whose plans we have noted over the past few weeks make these assumptions. Note that the link supposedly showing a risk for "otherwise healthy young people" concerns strokes in people "under age 50," the youngest being 33, rather older than most college students. As noted previously, when it comes to 18-22-year-olds, flu appears to be more lethal than COVID-19, although fatal cases are rare in both instances. Data from New York indicates that of the 86 people ages 20-29 who died of COVID-19 statewide (accounting for less than half of one percent of deaths due to COVID), 13 had hypertension, 20 had diabetes, 4 had kidney disease, 7 had cancer, and 2 had had a stroke. None of this is at all reassuring for those with any of these conditions, but it does suggest that the typical 20-year-old faces a miniscule risk of death. (Matters are different for faculty, of course, as Dr. Fauci discusses, and there will no doubt need to be more accommodations for faculty, depending on age and health status.)
The strongest point Professor Powell and co-author make is the following:
Universities with large student populations and capacious class enrollments are essentially cruise ships on steroids, as far as an acute respiratory pathogen like the new coronavirus is concerned. The idea of sending faculty members outfitted in makeshift PPE into crowded lecture halls and small seminar rooms with coughing students is frankly unconscionable. The virus is poised to tear through our student and faculty bodies just as it is now ravaging nursing homes, prisons and meatpacking plants.
There is, indeed, the potential for disaster, as we've seen in some of these other places. But no school is proposing "sending faculty members...into crowded lecture halls and small seminar rooms with coughing students...." All the schools are proposing to reduce capacity in classrooms, requiring students to wear masks, testing students, and certainly isolating those with symptoms, like those coughing! Even in the cases of the most notorious cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, 83% of the passengers and crew did not get infected, and about 1% of those infected died (this in a population that skews much, much older than a college campus).
ADDENDUM: In Illinois, with 12.5 million people and more than 4,700 deaths, there were 9 people ages 20-29 who died, and only one fatality among those under the age of 20.
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