9 ms·

The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! There is something important about in-person classes you don't

The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! There is something important about in-person classes you don't really get online and I'd hate to be forced to be online only. We've lost a whole year, to a virus that is nowhere near as deadly as anyone thought it'd be, and it will likely die, or we'll reach herd immunity, long before any virus can be safely manufactured. I feel like a lot of this is fear, hysteria and an completely inability for humans to properly assess risk, mixed with just a plethora of bad and conflicting information.

acalmon 6y ago
How about faculty? Professors are, on average, more than 40 years old. Do you think they should teach in person?
- zbaylin 6y ago
  During lecture at least, students are always at least 6 feet away from the professor. Moving to and from classes is a different story, though.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    6' is nowhere near enough distance to be safe indoors in a room with potentially up to hundreds of other people in it. The virus can stay airborne for hours in enclosed indoor spaces. If you have a lecture hall of 100 people that meets regularly each week, and the people in it aren't wearing good masks, it's practically a guarantee that by the end of the semester everyone there will have gotten it.
    - enraged_camel 6y ago
      Yep. Don't forget about air conditioning, as well as shared facilities such as restrooms, break rooms, cafeterias, and so on.
      - abalashov 6y ago
        And don't forget _bad_ air conditioning / poor ventilation in old buildings, with which universities are replete.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    The 6' rule isn't a magic bubble of impenetrability. It's just a rule of thumb that (1) most people can easily interpret and enforce and (2) is expected to reduce the rate of spread "enough" to make it worth enforcing. Likewise masks don't make you safe, they make you safer, etc...
madiator 6y ago
> inability for humans to properly assess risk Would you be willing to entertain the same thought for yourself?
jacoblambda 6y ago
As somebody who is just wrapping up university, got the coronavirus, and know other young and middle-aged people who got the coronavirus, the virus can both be super mild and super aggressive from one person to the next. I was mostly physically fine but I was miserable for the entire time I had it. One other person who got sick went from that same mild shitty experience I had to not being able to breath in a matter of hours. Older people get it worse but from what I've seen and what I've heard from a family member(they work with COVID-19 patients), it's basically a coin toss whether somebody ends up asymptomatic, gets it mildly, or gets it absolutely brutally. Another thing to consider is that universities will still have to deal with students going out and getting absolutely tattered at bars and parties. We've already seen smaller incidents of this resulting in an explosion of cases. Knowing how university culture is, things will get bad very quickly. Even ignoring the party culture, students will come to class sick out of fear. I've felt bad doing this in the past but the unwritten expectation for classes with attendance is "show up unless you literally can't walk". If you actually reach out to the prof, they'll tell you to stay home but most students will just assume the worst and try to show up. Sorry for ranting a bit but I just can't see universities safely opening up with how the culture is at the moment. Online courses are not nearly as good in most cases (and I say this as someone who generally prefers online or recorded lecture courses) but it'll be a disaster to have in person courses with how things are.
- Jommi 6y ago
  I am trying to understand this comment in this context. The commentor above you talks about the statistical fact that cases under in younger people are not only rarer, but very low chance of getting hospitalized, and an even lower chance of death. You then respond with an anecdote of experience talking about the potential outcomes of this virus. Why exactly is this? Of course there are terrible potential outcomes in everyday actions we take. We might face a car crash, we might get hit by lightning. Why should we treat this matter any different than that? Only difference I see being is that this is infectious, and with the professors usually being of older age, there should definitely be some protections in place. But lets at least shift towards talking about being infectious, and not talking about plainly getting COVID, because the implications of that are on complete different scales of magnitude depending on your personal charasterstics. Also, you seem to talk in your latter parts of the comment about things that are not set in stone. E.g. Class attendance could be made nonmandatory and not affect grades. Also, parties could on campus could be restricted.
tkzed49 6y ago
COVID-19 is causing strokes in young people [1]. While young people are hospitalized at a lower rate, it still happens. Texas, which has until recently been "reopening", with no mask requirements, has a very high rate of infections. Using Travis county as an example, ~30% of cases are in the 20-29 age bracket [2]. It would be disingenuous to imply that young people are isolated from the rest of society and not spreading the disease to older people who are more likely to die. In 2-3 months, 132,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19 complications. The CDC estimates yearly flu deaths at 12,000-61,000 [3]. Further, we are now seeing a huge increase in the rate of cases in states which have had lax distancing and quarantine policy--see Travis county data again for example. Is a year of in-person class worth the risk? Hard to say. No reason to dismiss legitimate concerns as "hysteria", though. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-strokes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke... 2. https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/39e4f8d4acb0433baae6d15a931fa984 https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#... 3. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
- rpiguy 6y ago
  Look there are two groups in the US. A risk taking group that sees the COVID-19 death rate as acceptable and not nearly bad enough to stay locked down. They believe that the purpose of the lock down was to "flatten the curve," particularly the death rate, and not to "stop the virus." The other group wants to "stop the virus" and does not accept the risk of death of others. There is no bridging the gap with data, it is a value judgement. You can't argue someone out of their values. You especially will not be able to convince the risk takers, because they are risk takers, and the mortality of this virus is so low that a huge number of people don't personally know a single person who has died from it. Perception matters a lot. If COVID-19 had a 10% death rate, or killed children like Tuberculosis, you could more easily argue down the risk takers. According to CDC data, 81% of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States are people over 65 years old, most with preexisting conditions. If you add in 55-64-year-olds that number jumps to 93%. For those below age 55, preexisting conditions play a significant role, but the death rate is currently around 0.0022%, or one death per 45,000 people in this age range. Below 25 years old the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.00008%, or roughly one in 1.25 million. These are odds any risk taker would take.
enraged_camel 6y ago
>>The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! Covid has the potential to cause long-lasting organ damage even in young patients. Furthermore, hospital ICU capacities are always a concern. Once ICUs fill up, non-covid patients cannot be treated in intensive care either.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
This[1] tells us 2017-18 was a bad influenza year in the USA with 61,000 deaths, 2018-19 34,000 deaths. This[2] tells us Coronoa deaths in the USA to date are 129,576. How do you reconcile your opinion this doesn't represent a considerable risk with these numbers? 1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html 2. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/us-cases-deaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/us-c...
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  Please bear in mind that these flu deaths occur in a context that includes a large percentage of the population having been immunized via flu shots and lingering resistance from having beaten previous attacks of the flu. The coronavirus on the other hand is moving through a population with until recently virtually no innate immunity and obviously no vaccination measures in place. Taking these into account puts its higher number of fatalities into a bit more perspective (and still leaves us far short of previous estimates about how many people would soon die in the U.S). Overall, globally, based on the latest information, the known number of deaths is well below what many were estimating at the beginning of the year, and we are now several months into this. This is worth keeping in mind too. Also worth noting that the whole world went through two different pandemics in the 50's and 60s in which over 1 million people died worldwide. Things went back to normal quite soon afterwards and much less hysteria about shutting down economies, borders and all social life was evident. (in both of these pandemics over 100,000 people in the U.S alone also died)
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Hey, thanks for the thoughtful response. Yeah, I keep flipping between feeling exasperated by the situation, and then remembering the perspective you've detailed here. Side note, I think you mean adaptive immunity, this is the part of the immune system creates immunological memory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_immune_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_immune_system Innate immunity is the non-specific part of the immune system and includes aspects such as removal of foreign substances, physical and chemical barriers (eg, skin, clotting factors in blood) and other anatomical barriers like the blood-brain barrier. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system#Anatomical_barriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system#Anatomica...
pmoriarty 6y ago
Careless young people have been a major vector for the spread of coronavirus. Many of them might survive, but they're putting the rest of us at increased risk of death. That's not ok.
- nkurz 6y ago
  I think your comment would have been much stronger if instead of "Many of them might survive" you said something more akin to "The overwhelming majority will survive". Falsely weakening it as you did will cause people to distrust the rest of your message, which I feel is accurate as it stands. Why did you choose the phrasing that you used?
- rdtwo 6y ago
  They care about you about as much as you care for them. This is just their way of saying thanks for global warming and all the government debt.
nl 6y ago
Apart from the fact that there is still substantial (if less) risk to younger people the real reason for lock down is to reduce the spread. It's proved impossible - even with very strong measures - to protect at-risk groups by isolation. See both Australia (where a very large number of deaths were in supposedly isolated nursing homes) and Sweden (same).
- _fourzerofour 6y ago
  As an Australian, your second point is hard to vindicate. The total death toll in Australia is 106 as of one hour ago as reported by the state-funded ABC[0]. While it's true that just one of those was a person under the age of fifty[1], and unfortunately I live in the _one_ state that's experiencing a second wave via community transmission and sadly expect these numbers to grow, this isn't comparable with the numbers seen coming out of Sweden. In fact, it's an order of magnitude lower, for a country with more than double Sweden's population, so to suggest that at-risk groups are experiencing a similar level of risk is baffling to me. [0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-06/coronavirus-australia-live-news-covid19-latest-melbourne/12424360 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-06/coronavirus-australia... [1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-data-reveals-how-covid-19-spreads-in-australia/12060704?nw=0#deaths https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-dat...
  - nl 6y ago
    (I'm Australian) 62/106 deaths from COVID in Australia have been in nursing homes[1][2]. The point isn't that Australia hasn't done well (it has!). The point is that even in the best possible circumstances it still proved impossible to keep nursing home patients safe. In Sweden the plan was to keep nursing homes isolated too, and it didn't work there either.[3] [1] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/covid-19-cases-in-aged-care-services-residential-care https://www.health.gov.au/resources/covid-19-cases-in-aged-c... [2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir... [3] https://www.thelocal.se/20200506/coronavirus-what-went-wrong-in-swedens-care-homes https://www.thelocal.se/20200506/coronavirus-what-went-wrong...
newacct583 6y ago
> The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! That "risk" is the personal risk of dying of those particular students. You're not including the people they'll infect. Go check out Georgia's growth curve. One extra case could easily produce dozens of others in a density like that. It absolutely stuns me that after MONTHS of pandemic there are people who still refuse to understand this.
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  Understanding it would entail taking responsibility for actions already taken, and the harm already caused by those actions. People want to be "good". They want to feel that their actions, if not perfect, are at least morally defensible. This seems to lead to a sort of tipping point where once a person has acted in a way that would make them "bad", it becomes easier to construct a new narrative where refusing to wear a mask is heroic and patriotic, than to process the remorse of having made a terrible mistake. And that's especially appealing if there is an entire group of people eager to tell you that you're right and good, in order to reinforce their own worldviews. The bottom line seems to be that in order to lead people back to reality, you need to find a way to let them feel good about their choices. Maybe that means nodding along when they say "The science was unclear. We couldn't have known." I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this for a while now, having relatives in Sweden who just don't seem to take the pandemic seriously. The problem is that their institutions still haven't reached the point of admitting that they were mistaken, so the public can't seem to begin that process either.

acalmon 6y ago

How about faculty? Professors are, on average, more than 40 years old. Do you think they should teach in person?

zbaylin 6y ago
During lecture at least, students are always at least 6 feet away from the professor. Moving to and from classes is a different story, though.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  6' is nowhere near enough distance to be safe indoors in a room with potentially up to hundreds of other people in it. The virus can stay airborne for hours in enclosed indoor spaces. If you have a lecture hall of 100 people that meets regularly each week, and the people in it aren't wearing good masks, it's practically a guarantee that by the end of the semester everyone there will have gotten it.
  - enraged_camel 6y ago
    Yep. Don't forget about air conditioning, as well as shared facilities such as restrooms, break rooms, cafeterias, and so on.
    - abalashov 6y ago
      And don't forget _bad_ air conditioning / poor ventilation in old buildings, with which universities are replete.
- newacct583 6y ago
  The 6' rule isn't a magic bubble of impenetrability. It's just a rule of thumb that (1) most people can easily interpret and enforce and (2) is expected to reduce the rate of spread "enough" to make it worth enforcing. Likewise masks don't make you safe, they make you safer, etc...

madiator 6y ago

> inability for humans to properly assess risk Would you be willing to entertain the same thought for yourself?

jacoblambda 6y ago

As somebody who is just wrapping up university, got the coronavirus, and know other young and middle-aged people who got the coronavirus, the virus can both be super mild and super aggressive from one person to the next. I was mostly physically fine but I was miserable for the entire time I had it. One other person who got sick went from that same mild shitty experience I had to not being able to breath in a matter of hours. Older people get it worse but from what I've seen and what I've heard from a family member(they work with COVID-19 patients), it's basically a coin toss whether somebody ends up asymptomatic, gets it mildly, or gets it absolutely brutally. Another thing to consider is that universities will still have to deal with students going out and getting absolutely tattered at bars and parties. We've already seen smaller incidents of this resulting in an explosion of cases. Knowing how university culture is, things will get bad very quickly. Even ignoring the party culture, students will come to class sick out of fear. I've felt bad doing this in the past but the unwritten expectation for classes with attendance is "show up unless you literally can't walk". If you actually reach out to the prof, they'll tell you to stay home but most students will just assume the worst and try to show up. Sorry for ranting a bit but I just can't see universities safely opening up with how the culture is at the moment. Online courses are not nearly as good in most cases (and I say this as someone who generally prefers online or recorded lecture courses) but it'll be a disaster to have in person courses with how things are.

Jommi 6y ago
I am trying to understand this comment in this context. The commentor above you talks about the statistical fact that cases under in younger people are not only rarer, but very low chance of getting hospitalized, and an even lower chance of death. You then respond with an anecdote of experience talking about the potential outcomes of this virus. Why exactly is this? Of course there are terrible potential outcomes in everyday actions we take. We might face a car crash, we might get hit by lightning. Why should we treat this matter any different than that? Only difference I see being is that this is infectious, and with the professors usually being of older age, there should definitely be some protections in place. But lets at least shift towards talking about being infectious, and not talking about plainly getting COVID, because the implications of that are on complete different scales of magnitude depending on your personal charasterstics. Also, you seem to talk in your latter parts of the comment about things that are not set in stone. E.g. Class attendance could be made nonmandatory and not affect grades. Also, parties could on campus could be restricted.

tkzed49 6y ago

COVID-19 is causing strokes in young people [1]. While young people are hospitalized at a lower rate, it still happens. Texas, which has until recently been "reopening", with no mask requirements, has a very high rate of infections. Using Travis county as an example, ~30% of cases are in the 20-29 age bracket [2]. It would be disingenuous to imply that young people are isolated from the rest of society and not spreading the disease to older people who are more likely to die. In 2-3 months, 132,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19 complications. The CDC estimates yearly flu deaths at 12,000-61,000 [3]. Further, we are now seeing a huge increase in the rate of cases in states which have had lax distancing and quarantine policy--see Travis county data again for example. Is a year of in-person class worth the risk? Hard to say. No reason to dismiss legitimate concerns as "hysteria", though. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-strokes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke... 2. https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/39e4f8d4acb0433baae6d15a931fa984 https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#... 3. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

rpiguy 6y ago
Look there are two groups in the US. A risk taking group that sees the COVID-19 death rate as acceptable and not nearly bad enough to stay locked down. They believe that the purpose of the lock down was to "flatten the curve," particularly the death rate, and not to "stop the virus." The other group wants to "stop the virus" and does not accept the risk of death of others. There is no bridging the gap with data, it is a value judgement. You can't argue someone out of their values. You especially will not be able to convince the risk takers, because they are risk takers, and the mortality of this virus is so low that a huge number of people don't personally know a single person who has died from it. Perception matters a lot. If COVID-19 had a 10% death rate, or killed children like Tuberculosis, you could more easily argue down the risk takers. According to CDC data, 81% of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States are people over 65 years old, most with preexisting conditions. If you add in 55-64-year-olds that number jumps to 93%. For those below age 55, preexisting conditions play a significant role, but the death rate is currently around 0.0022%, or one death per 45,000 people in this age range. Below 25 years old the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.00008%, or roughly one in 1.25 million. These are odds any risk taker would take.

enraged_camel 6y ago

>>The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! Covid has the potential to cause long-lasting organ damage even in young patients. Furthermore, hospital ICU capacities are always a concern. Once ICUs fill up, non-covid patients cannot be treated in intensive care either.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

This[1] tells us 2017-18 was a bad influenza year in the USA with 61,000 deaths, 2018-19 34,000 deaths. This[2] tells us Coronoa deaths in the USA to date are 129,576. How do you reconcile your opinion this doesn't represent a considerable risk with these numbers? 1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html 2. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/us-cases-deaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/us-c...

shadowprofile77 6y ago
Please bear in mind that these flu deaths occur in a context that includes a large percentage of the population having been immunized via flu shots and lingering resistance from having beaten previous attacks of the flu. The coronavirus on the other hand is moving through a population with until recently virtually no innate immunity and obviously no vaccination measures in place. Taking these into account puts its higher number of fatalities into a bit more perspective (and still leaves us far short of previous estimates about how many people would soon die in the U.S). Overall, globally, based on the latest information, the known number of deaths is well below what many were estimating at the beginning of the year, and we are now several months into this. This is worth keeping in mind too. Also worth noting that the whole world went through two different pandemics in the 50's and 60s in which over 1 million people died worldwide. Things went back to normal quite soon afterwards and much less hysteria about shutting down economies, borders and all social life was evident. (in both of these pandemics over 100,000 people in the U.S alone also died)
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Hey, thanks for the thoughtful response. Yeah, I keep flipping between feeling exasperated by the situation, and then remembering the perspective you've detailed here. Side note, I think you mean adaptive immunity, this is the part of the immune system creates immunological memory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_immune_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_immune_system Innate immunity is the non-specific part of the immune system and includes aspects such as removal of foreign substances, physical and chemical barriers (eg, skin, clotting factors in blood) and other anatomical barriers like the blood-brain barrier. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system#Anatomical_barriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system#Anatomica...

pmoriarty 6y ago

Careless young people have been a major vector for the spread of coronavirus. Many of them might survive, but they're putting the rest of us at increased risk of death. That's not ok.

nkurz 6y ago
I think your comment would have been much stronger if instead of "Many of them might survive" you said something more akin to "The overwhelming majority will survive". Falsely weakening it as you did will cause people to distrust the rest of your message, which I feel is accurate as it stands. Why did you choose the phrasing that you used?
rdtwo 6y ago
They care about you about as much as you care for them. This is just their way of saying thanks for global warming and all the government debt.

nl 6y ago

Apart from the fact that there is still substantial (if less) risk to younger people the real reason for lock down is to reduce the spread. It's proved impossible - even with very strong measures - to protect at-risk groups by isolation. See both Australia (where a very large number of deaths were in supposedly isolated nursing homes) and Sweden (same).

_fourzerofour 6y ago
As an Australian, your second point is hard to vindicate. The total death toll in Australia is 106 as of one hour ago as reported by the state-funded ABC[0]. While it's true that just one of those was a person under the age of fifty[1], and unfortunately I live in the _one_ state that's experiencing a second wave via community transmission and sadly expect these numbers to grow, this isn't comparable with the numbers seen coming out of Sweden. In fact, it's an order of magnitude lower, for a country with more than double Sweden's population, so to suggest that at-risk groups are experiencing a similar level of risk is baffling to me. [0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-06/coronavirus-australia-live-news-covid19-latest-melbourne/12424360 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-06/coronavirus-australia... [1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-data-reveals-how-covid-19-spreads-in-australia/12060704?nw=0#deaths https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-dat...
- nl 6y ago
  (I'm Australian) 62/106 deaths from COVID in Australia have been in nursing homes[1][2]. The point isn't that Australia hasn't done well (it has!). The point is that even in the best possible circumstances it still proved impossible to keep nursing home patients safe. In Sweden the plan was to keep nursing homes isolated too, and it didn't work there either.[3] [1] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/covid-19-cases-in-aged-care-services-residential-care https://www.health.gov.au/resources/covid-19-cases-in-aged-c... [2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir... [3] https://www.thelocal.se/20200506/coronavirus-what-went-wrong-in-swedens-care-homes https://www.thelocal.se/20200506/coronavirus-what-went-wrong...

newacct583 6y ago

> The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! That "risk" is the personal risk of dying of those particular students. You're not including the people they'll infect. Go check out Georgia's growth curve. One extra case could easily produce dozens of others in a density like that. It absolutely stuns me that after MONTHS of pandemic there are people who still refuse to understand this.

vladTheInhaler 6y ago
Understanding it would entail taking responsibility for actions already taken, and the harm already caused by those actions. People want to be "good". They want to feel that their actions, if not perfect, are at least morally defensible. This seems to lead to a sort of tipping point where once a person has acted in a way that would make them "bad", it becomes easier to construct a new narrative where refusing to wear a mask is heroic and patriotic, than to process the remorse of having made a terrible mistake. And that's especially appealing if there is an entire group of people eager to tell you that you're right and good, in order to reinforce their own worldviews. The bottom line seems to be that in order to lead people back to reality, you need to find a way to let them feel good about their choices. Maybe that means nodding along when they say "The science was unclear. We couldn't have known." I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this for a while now, having relatives in Sweden who just don't seem to take the pandemic seriously. The problem is that their institutions still haven't reached the point of admitting that they were mistaken, so the public can't seem to begin that process either.