The Corona Virus

[Rogar Demonblud]

And sickle cell anemia keeps malaria from infecting the red blood cells, denying it a chance to reproduce.

It's like a giant game of Roshambo sometimes.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

If you're counting me among the "we all," then no.

Those the unacountable, independent frats I mentioned earlier? Not without controversy for other reasons, but in my experience the drinking aspect never got out of control (AFAIK, no alcohol poisoning deaths or alcohol-related accidental deaths for decades, if ever.) Why? The students themselves took the necessary steps. They saw themselves as people with a future, so they valued their own lives and the long-term reputation of their groups, so student leadership made it a point to promote a culture of moderate restraint so that more draconian enforcement wouldn't become necessary.

Likewise, as Spacewolf alluded to, there are in fact students out there who care about safety--arguably more than the administration at times

The results are starting to come in and, as expected, university students cannot be trusted to follow guidelines. Because no matter how many "students out there who care about safety--arguably more than the administration at times" there are, it would require all the students to be that way, and when there is an ingrained culture that university is a time to party, even if only a small percentage believe it (and I have my doubts about the "only a small percentage" part), that is enough for a highly contagious virus to explode out of control.

Grey Wolf

[Keltest]

On that note, the students have been back less than a week and two fraternities have already been suspended for violating the social distancing guidelines. Good old Penn State.

The local estimate is 3 weeks, counting this one, before classes are suspended and the students sent back home.

[SaintRidley]

Yes, the blame is on the students, and not the universities doing everything in their power to pretend that face to face is remotely a good idea right now and forcing the issue.

Literally from an email to the students of the university I finished my PhD at:

"Faculty and staff spent countless hours this summer adopting changes to lessen the spread of COVID-19 in the hopes of providing each of us an opportunity to return to campus."

Faculty were nearly unanimous in their opposition to the entire concept of returning to campus and were particularly upset at the university terminating some faculty positions with no notice as a cost-saving measure.

"As you know, universities like ours have recently moved instruction online when students failed to follow CDC guidelines in order to reduce COVID-19 transmission."

That seems like a really big red flag saying that face-to-face is an inherently bad idea right now and the university should be doing online only right now. But this year you've already told students that if we do go back online, they're still going to be assessed their dorm fees and meal plan costs, even if campus shuts down and they're forced back home. There's money to be made.

"You chose to be here, now the choices you make as an individual will determine the outcome for everyone."

Uh-huh. Yeah. The university bears no responsibility here at all. Move-in day caused at least 100 cases here (probably a lot more, but we only have self-reported numbers). But it's not like we're in the only state to not only have no mask mandate but no gathering limit, so everything should be safe. Ugh.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Yes, the blame is on the students, and not the universities doing everything in their power to pretend that face to face is remotely a good idea right now and forcing the issue.

I did not say that. The blame is on everyone that thought that all students could be trusted to follow the guidelines (what the thread I linked to calls "magical thinking"), such as the post I quoted, except obviously only applying to those in a position of authority to put such belief into action.

GW

[Tvtyrant]

Yes, the blame is on the students, and not the universities doing everything in their power to pretend that face to face is remotely a good idea right now and forcing the issue.

Literally from an email to the students of the university I finished my PhD at:

"Faculty and staff spent countless hours this summer adopting changes to lessen the spread of COVID-19 in the hopes of providing each of us an opportunity to return to campus."

Faculty were nearly unanimous in their opposition to the entire concept of returning to campus and were particularly upset at the university terminating some faculty positions with no notice as a cost-saving measure.

"As you know, universities like ours have recently moved instruction online when students failed to follow CDC guidelines in order to reduce COVID-19 transmission."

That seems like a really big red flag saying that face-to-face is an inherently bad idea right now and the university should be doing online only right now. But this year you've already told students that if we do go back online, they're still going to be assessed their dorm fees and meal plan costs, even if campus shuts down and they're forced back home. There's money to be made.

"You chose to be here, now the choices you make as an individual will determine the outcome for everyone."

Uh-huh. Yeah. The university bears no responsibility here at all. Move-in day caused at least 100 cases here (probably a lot more, but we only have self-reported numbers). But it's not like we're in the only state to not only have no mask mandate but no gathering limit, so everything should be safe. Ugh.

The dorms at my old university have air vents that are literally just holes in the walls between crammed rooms. It is like a 20K person cruise ship made of teenagers, reopening is going to infect thousands and probably lead to the death of hundreds. Sicknesses spread through those places like fire in good years, what are they supposed to wear masks in their dorm rooms? Not to mention the closet like rooms have two people shoved into them, the density is staggering.

[Vinyadan]

Yes, the blame is on the students, and not the universities doing everything in their power to pretend that face to face is remotely a good idea right now and forcing the issue.

What I don't get is what sort of respectability these people expect to have when all is said and done. They are supposed to be the bleeding edge of our civilization, but they have a lot of trouble acting like scientists.

EDIT: I assume that the decision was taken from up above, but the image is still going to be that of the university as a whole. Can you imagine, for example, a university at the forefront of virology that shot itself in the foot by causing a pandemic on its grounds?

[Rockphed]

When we treat college students as children rather than adults them behaving like children is the inevitable result. Considering that many universities have institutionalized excusing misbehavior by students as "kids will be kids", expecting their students to behave like men and women was a big ask. And no, I don't think that the various plans espoused above would help. At some point people need to either accept that 18-year-olds are adults, and treat them like adults all the time, or they need to accept that people under the age of 26 are children who need their hands held at all times.

[Tvtyrant]

When we treat college students as children rather than adults them behaving like children is the inevitable result. Considering that many universities have institutionalized excusing misbehavior by students as "kids will be kids", expecting their students to behave like men and women was a big ask. And no, I don't think that the various plans espoused above would help. At some point people need to either accept that 18-year-olds are adults, and treat them like adults all the time, or they need to accept that people under the age of 26 are children who need their hands held at all times.

The whole point is to ease the transition though? If you just extend childhood out then you will be doing the same thing at 26 you would have been doing at 18. Slowly increasing the pressure and responsibility so they don't crack when they work 12 hour workdays taking angry phone calls or 80 hour work weeks as public defenders takes time.

[warty goblin]

The dorms at my old university have air vents that are literally just holes in the walls between crammed rooms. It is like a 20K person cruise ship made of teenagers, reopening is going to infect thousands and probably lead to the death of hundreds. Sicknesses spread through those places like fire in good years, what are they supposed to wear masks in their dorm rooms? Not to mention the closet like rooms have two people shoved into them, the density is staggering.

I spent a couple years living in dorms, and the idea of maintaining meaningful social distance in them is laughable. My last two years I had a single room, passively hated everything to do with college life, and avoided people as much as humanly possible, and I still can't see it working. It's too dense, and there are inevitable spaces where people will necessarily bunch up; the bathrooms, laundry rooms, stairs, etc.

What I don't get is what sort of respectability these people expect to have when all is said and done. They are supposed to be the bleeding edge of our civilization, but they have a lot of trouble acting like scientists.

This isn't coming out of the faculty, let alone the science faculty. This is 100% college administration, and college admin is a long way from the bleeding edge of anything.

To be vaguely fair to the admins, the way the finances work, they can't really move to fully offline. Nobody will pay as much for that as in person, and thanks to years of budget cuts state universities really need that tuition cash, particularly from lucrative out of state and foreign students.

Of course there's enormous swaths of unneccessary administration in a modern university, particularly in a remote learning scenario. But the iron law of institutions dictates that it's better for the university beaurocracy to blame the students than seriously trim itself back.

[veti]

Of course there's enormous swaths of unneccessary administration in a modern university, particularly in a remote learning scenario. But the iron law of institutions dictates that it's better for the university beaurocracy to blame the students than seriously trim itself back.

If you want the bureaucracy to be more efficient, a good first step would be to treat the bureaucrats as actual people whose time is valuable and whose work matters. As it is, it's common - it's practically assumed - that, for instance, the poor nebbish whose job is to draw up the faculty timetable, will have to do the same set of courses four times over because the academic staff will simply ignore his increasingly frantic requests for the information he needs, until it's too late. After all, why should they consider a lowly admin?

Which means, of course, that he's only doing - at most - one-quarter of the volume of work he's capable of. Probably much less, in fact, because this sort of status is not great for morale.

University procedures, top to bottom, are designed on the basis that the academics demand stuff and it's the job of the administrators to provide it, no matter how unreasonable. For an admin to say something like "no, you just can't bring an anaconda into the lab" is a career-limiting move.

So actually, I don't believe administrators have anything to say in whether courses should be taught face to face. More likely it's a combination of politics and finance.

[Ibrinar]

Random thought: The distribution of known/reported covid death is impressively unequal. The top 12 per capita death leaders (12 because two have a population way south of a million) have a combined 528k of 838.5k deaths (63%) with only
922 million of 7200 million people (13%). Or to put it in chart form https://ibb.co/YbZxv73 (I ordered countries by per capita death, and then plotted cumulative death against cumulative population). Personally I assume part of it is that reporting/tracking quality is likely pretty unequal too but we will only get numbers for that as retrospective estimations.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The U.S. now has a confirmed case of reinfection, found on a test at a Nevada lab. Which means that the math that says antibodies only hang around for 4-5 months is unfortunately probably right.

[sihnfahl]

Personally I assume part of it is that reporting/tracking quality is likely pretty unequal too but we will only get numbers for that as retrospective estimations.

I would also suggest other scenarios that would hinder said statistics gathering:

1) Quality of testing - too many false negatives / positives as a result of equipment malfunction, test limitations, technician unfamiliarity with the test, and any combination thereof.

2) Differences in what constitutes a 'coronavirus-related death'. Criteria would have to be identical across the board for like comparisons.

3) Deliberate obfuscation by authorities to suppress the true numbers of cases being reported. Reasons vary, of course.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The U.S. now has a confirmed case of reinfection, found on a test at a Nevada lab. Which means that the math that says antibodies only hang around for 4-5 months is unfortunately probably right.

On the other hand: the multiple (/handful of) cases of reinfection found worldwide do not have to represent the general case. For starters: so far they're a tiny fraction of the total number of infected people. With this many cases you will always find flukes. They don't have to be flukes, but they could be. The Belgian case on top of that was someone with a preexisting condition/weak immune system, the Dutch case was someone who had had a very mild infection the first time. (Or was it the other way around? Remembering the news is hard.) It might just be a small portion of the population that's vulnerable to reinfection. And even if it isn't immunity could still build up over multiple infections, similar to how with some vaccines you need to get a second or third shot for proper long term protection.

The reinfections are interesting, and potentially worrying. But they're not a full realization of the worst case scenario quite yet.

[Rockphed]

On the other hand: the multiple (/handful of) cases of reinfection found worldwide do not have to represent the general case. For starters: so far they're a tiny fraction of the total number of infected people. With this many cases you will always find flukes. They don't have to be flukes, but they could be. The Belgian case on top of that was someone with a preexisting condition/weak immune system, the Dutch case was someone who had had a very mild infection the first time. (Or was it the other way around? Remembering the news is hard.) It might just be a small portion of the population that's vulnerable to reinfection. And even if it isn't immunity could still build up over multiple infections, similar to how with some vaccines you need to get a second or third shot for proper long term protection.

The reinfections are interesting, and potentially worrying. But they're not a full realization of the worst case scenario quite yet.

Adding on, what is the false alarm rate on the test? Because it is entirely possible for one (or both) of the tests to be a false alarm, and any test that doesn't have a false alarm rate has way too high of a missed detection rate to be useful. I've heard 3% bandied about as the false alarm rate for most tests, but I haven't seen anything official about it.

[Ibrinar]

One of the recent cases https://www.livescience.com/coronavi...firmed-us.html included the researchers comparing the genes of both infections and finding differences, so that one likely isn't a case of misleading test results.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Adding on, what is the false alarm rate on the test? Because it is entirely possible for one (or both) of the tests to be a false alarm, and any test that doesn't have a false alarm rate has way too high of a missed detection rate to be useful. I've heard 3% bandied about as the false alarm rate for most tests, but I haven't seen anything official about it.

One of the recent cases https://www.livescience.com/coronavi...firmed-us.html included the researchers comparing the genes of both infections and finding differences, so that one likely isn't a case of misleading test results.

That's basically how I heard it as well. They test for the virus using a PCR test, which is like the "DNA fingerprinting" on a cop show, but with RNA in this case (which for the specific purpose of this comment is basically the same thing). The test shows the fingerprint of the virus' RNA, which is how they know you have it. In these cases the new test shows the fingerprint of a different strain of the virus than the old one. (This is all a really big oversimplification, the fingerprint used on a cop show is based on multiple sequences of DNA that are very common to humans but vary in length, imaged by gel electrophoresis, while a positive coronavirus test is more about whether a piece of RNA gets copied at all.)

I hadn't heard about that error rate. That's pretty high for false positives on a PCR test honestly, 3%. My suspicion is this number is more about the rate of false negatives, and that the rate of false negatives is much higher than the rate of false positives. A false negative is not finding the virus is a patient that does carry it. For a false negative result to occur you just need to not get enough virus particles on the swab or damage their DNA somehow. For a false positive result, finding virus RNA where there is none, you pretty much need to contaminate the sample with Covid-19. The chance of for instance a different virus containing a similar enough piece of RNA to result in a match is mathematically almost non existent* (although biology has a trick or two to increase odds like that sometimes).

So these results are probably pretty reliable, at least reliable enough that not all (handful) of these cases are a mistake.



*A primer for a PCR test is often around 20 bases long. There are four different bases used in RNA, so the odds of the primer matching on a random 20 bases long piece of RNA are 1/4^20~1 in a trillion. The human DNA for comparison is about 6.4 billion bases long, which gives 12.8 billion places where a 20 bases long primer could try to bind, which already gives us only about a 1% chance of a hit (to an RNA transcription of human DNA) before applying any other factors. In reality the human DNA contains a lot of repeats, making the number of unique 20 base long spots much lower than 12.8 billion, most of our DNA does not really ever get transcripted into RNA anyway and, most importantly, a PCR test uses two primers which have to bind on opposite strands at a relatively small distance from each other in the right direction. I don't quite know how to calculate the odds of that happening randomly, it's not quite as simple as saying it's [1/(4^20)*(4^20)=a septillionth, ans*13 billion=still around a onehundredquadrillionth], but it's going to be a pretty small number. So the chance of a random match with either out own RNA or the RNA of another virus (or bacterium) present in the test location is pretty negligible, or at any rate should be much lower than 3%.

[Rogar Demonblud]

And now the University of Alabama has 1200+ confirmed cases, having reopened I think 17 days ago. Can you confirm that Peelee?

[Peelee]

And now the University of Alabama has 1200+ confirmed cases, having reopened I think 17 days ago. Can you confirm that Peelee?

I cannot; as I'm not a football fan, I tend to avoid Tuscaloosa like the plague. That being said, yeah, that sounds like UA.

ETA: Yep, sounds like UA alright. UAB and UAH I trust. The flagship "school"? That one exists to hold up a football program and a social group. And whatever endangers those two, the administration is going to bend over backwards to block.

[Ibrinar]

A few days ago they were only at 500 something and telling faculty to keep it quiet, obviously that didn't work very well
https://www.ajc.com/news/university-...BEF3A6YAVMPRE/

[Rogar Demonblud]

At some point the idiots in power will have to realize that you just can't cover up something like this. The governor in SD is apparently tying herself in knots trying to pretend there aren't 300 confirmed cases and climbing tied to the Sturgis rally.

[snowblizz]

. The flagship "school"? That one exists to hold up a football program and a social group. And whatever endangers those two, the administration is going to bend over backwards to block.

It's funny, someone couple posts up asked how come universities with their label of science can act so unscientifically, and my immediate thoguht was, "most American universities are a scam to keep a football team going anyway".

That the highest paid person in a vast majority of US states is the main university footballteam manager says a lot of where priorities lie in the US education/university system.

The cutting edge up science is a thin wedge tacked onto a blunt mallet of sportsindustry.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

It's funny, someone couple posts up asked how come universities with their label of science can act so unscientifically, and my immediate thoguht was, "most American universities are a scam to keep a football team going anyway".

I wouldn't call it a scam as such, but it is true that over the last N years (~50?), those US universities have morphed from institutions of specialized learning with a home team to a sports team which pays its players with a university degree rather than money, in the same way that, say, Apple has gone from a computer manufacturer to a phone manufacturer who sells computers on the side, or Marvel has gone from a comic printing company to a movie maker who road-tests future stories in comic format.

Grey Wolf

[sihnfahl]

I wouldn't call it a scam as such ....

Sports are Big Bux.

So not so much a scam, but a guaranteed way to bring in cash.

Sciences are a quiet moneymaker ... when they pan out. Otherwise, a money consumer.

Sports ... as long as you have a good team, win or lose a game, they get good income. People come to watch.

[Peelee]

Sports are Big Bux.

So not so much a scam, but a guaranteed way to bring in cash.

Sciences are a quiet moneymaker ... when they pan out. Otherwise, a money consumer.

Sports ... as long as you have a good team, win or lose a game, they get good income. People come to watch.

The vast, vast majority of college sports teams lose money.

[warty goblin]

The vast, vast majority of college sports teams lose money.

And even the teams that make money usually do not a lot more than cover every other athletic program at the school. Intra-collegiate athletics is basically socialized support for sports fans' hobbies.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

The vast, vast majority of college sports teams lose money.

Does this include the money they get from the PR the team provides bringing in donations from rich people wanting buildings named after them?

GW

[Rogar Demonblud]

There aren't that many buildings on a campus. No, the real make or break is what the school's share of the media dollars works out to, and the NCAA has a reputation for glomming onto the bulk of it.

[Peelee]

And let's not forget, mustn't pay the players. Oh, how I'd clutch my pearls if the people doing all the actual work got fairly compensated.