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MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

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Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#241

Post by gowld »

chrisco255 wrote: post #129
jacquesm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young adults interact with people who are not young adults. Young adults that need not be ill might end up in an ICU unit that an older person with a weaker immune system could have used to their advantage. As long as there is no vaccine this is going to be a huge exercise in resource allocation.

Wouldn't it make sense for high risk individuals to self-quarantine and for the rest of society to carry on? There may not be a vaccine for at least another year. They've never successfully produced a vaccine for any coronavirus, whether that's SARS or the common cold.

High risk individuals in a Kirkland WA nursing home were self quarantined until an outsider came in and infected them.

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#242

Post by majos »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #80
909832 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some data on the economic background of MIT students: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

This is interesting data I hadn't seen, thanks. Intuitively its a little bewildering to see the Median family income of someone from MIT be around the same as someone from UNC (a school I got into) - I wonder how the median incomes of international admits factor in. The bottom 20% of US incomes is between $0 to $25k a year for a household - call me a skeptic but I think its unlikely ~58 (938 x 6.2%) people came from…

Confused, you think it’s just too improbable to believe that MIT admitted 60 kids whose parents make <25k yearly? MIT can cherry pick the highest achieving kids in pretty much any national, heck even global, cohort. It seems reasonable to me that there are (way more than) 60 such kids.

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#243

Post by AnimalMuppet »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #203
wegs wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now here, you have to consider who is making the decisions. The president of MIT was born in 1950. The Chairman of the Board was class of '73. Virtually everyone in senior leadership are in categories with 10+% mortality rates. I'm not cynical about everything about the Institute (see my other comments, correcting cynical theories), but this is a place where I know many of the personalities involved personally, and I…

High-risk individuals should be quarantining themselves. It'd be a far more effective strategy than any other measure.

But then in this situation, who is going to teach the classes?

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#244

Post by dragonwriter »

generationP wrote: post #144

> Undergraduates who live in an MIT residence or fraternity, sorority or independent living group (FSILG) must begin packing and departing this Saturday, March 14. We are requiring undergraduates to depart from campus residences no later than noon on Tuesday, March 17. This is strange. Isn't the travel they are forcing quite possibly a cure worse than the disease? And are they really expecting students (many of them…

> In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway?

They are worse for MIT’s apparent COVID-19 policy of cancelling as much on-premise work and study as possible, since dorms have non-zero labor requirements. Student return-home living arrangements may also have that feature, but it's probably not MIT’s problem, and in any case student return home probably has less marginal effect on the requirements for non-family labor at their home than their impact at MIT.

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#245

Post by [deleted] »

gburdell3 wrote: post #169
IAmGraydon wrote: post #122

The real reason behind such a move is the culture of litigation in the US. Someone made your coffee too hot? Sue them. Someone stepped on your toe? Sue them. In this case, everyone is ducking for cover because they don't want to be the focus of a lawsuit that claims they didn't do anything to prevent the spread of the disease. The people who make these decisions at MIT are not unintelligent. They have all the resourc…

> Someone made your coffee too hot? Sue them. I don't necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment here, but I always feel the need to point out that this is a really bad example of a frivolous lawsuit. That lady's car didn't have cupholders, which was pretty common on '90s cars, and the coffee was hot enough to fuse her labia together. You can look up pictures; it wasn't pretty. She also only sued for medical da…

[deleted]

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#246

Post by cactus2093 »

perl4ever wrote: post #225
smacktoward wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be "legally habitable" under the normal building codes, but those codes don't take into account the circumstances of a pandemic disease. MIT has contracted with these students to provide them with housing. Part of their normal obligation under those contracts would be to provide them with housing that offers a reasonably healthy environment. MIT will have by now heard from a lot of Highly Credentialed Expert…

"Yes, it'll suck for the kids, but not as much as drowning in their own fluids would." I keep reading that the casualty rate for young people is miniscule. It's the nursing homes that are being decimated, no?

Hospitalization rate for young people is small but not insignificant, and as Italy is now experiencing if the number of cases overwhelm the healthcare system then many of those who need to be hospitalized will die.

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#247

Post by AnimalMuppet »

saagarjha wrote: post #64
akhilcacharya wrote: post #44

It's interesting that Harvard and MIT have done this. UW makes a little bit more sense, but the scale of the known outbreak in Cambridge isn't nearly as large at the moment (I live in Kendall Square and work next to MIT). Interestingly, UMass Boston still hasn't done this despite having a student confirmed with it a few weeks ago. I wonder if the administrations believe Columbia/Stanford/MIT/Harvard students deserve…

I think it’s interesting that private schools made this decision earlier.

Cynically, I wonder how big a role the fear of lawsuits is playing. Private institutions might be more sensitive to that possibility than state-run schools.

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#248

Post by majos »

whiddershins wrote: post #62

There are an overwhelming number of comments here assuming this policy is enacted in such a way that it ignores the challenges of underprivileged students. Who are these commenters. Why do they assume this. What is going on. MIT (and many other higher education providers) seem to be trying to preempt the spread of a disease. If someone has specific, concrete, information about someone who is harmed by this and whose…

At least one Harvard undergrad has pointed out concrete flaws in implementation of this policy, and how it affects him personally [1].

That said, I also sympathize with administrators, who had to pick a course of action in a chaotic environment and make it work.

[1] https://twitter.com/hakeemangulu/status/1237367253374398465

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#249

Post by rsynnott »

iokanuon wrote: post #205
kyeb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead? The dorms have shared bathrooms, often shared rooms with doubles, triples, and quads, and shared living spaces (lounges, study rooms, laundry, etc.) in addition to the dining halls. Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way t…

>Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. There's a big demand because universities are packed with students that don't cook for themselves. Why hasn't the same happened to the US then?

American universities are often basically in the middle of nowhere.

Re: MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester

#250

Post by nemothekid »

CydeWeys wrote: post #209
iokanuon wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. There's a big demand because universities are packed with students that don't cook for themselves. Why hasn't the same happened to the US then?

There are plenty of fast food places/corner stores/restaurants/groceries in Cambridge within walking distance of MIT dorms. So the "no way to eat" part is a bit dramatic.

I don’t know how much dining hall food costs or if it’s prepaid but you are talking about eating out for every meal on a students budget.

The point about bringing up the dining hall is they can’t go to the grocery store because they have no way to cook (and maybe even store) the food they bought.

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