51–60 of 70 posts
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.
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, y…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
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 clea…
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 som…
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...
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 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…
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.
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 clea…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all about the Benjamins. If they gave students enough forewarning they could pursue other options.
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. 1: https://registrar.stanford.edu/tuition-refund-schedule