Also it's not just bars or parties. You also have to worry about other gatherings. If people don't where masks and social distance those can become a problem as well. However, so far people have been mostly responsible with other on campus gatherings.
College students can easily spread it to vulnerable populations.
1. Some live at home.
2. Some will go shopping. Some in places without mask mandates.
3. Older professors and staff (custodial, food services, advisors) will be pressured to work (you probably can't just say "I'm not teaching" without quitting).
4. Some may need to use public transit to get to the school. Again also in some places without mask mandates.
5. And of course, some students are vulnerable. Many schools are not allowing remote work when they open.
Add in dorms being super spreader environments and you've got disasters waiting to happen.
The USA is over 5M confirmed cases now. The CDC estimates that the true infection count is 6x-24x that. So on the order of 30M - 120M Americans have already had it now.
The distribution is uneven. Places that hadn't gotten hit are getting hit now. But on average we are likely close to herd immunity.
This is no longer an exponential thing here. We can't have an OOM more cases. It's mathematically impossible. The worst is over (again, on average). I don't think we explicitly tried to follow a herd immunity strategy but that is what ended up happening.
1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
it makes no sense to limit everyone else
here is where personal responsibility comes into play. If you are concerned stay home. The university and laws should support you.
But the solution is not to punish everyone else, that won't work long term. The sooner people realize that the better. Limiting and collectively taking away people's rights will cause far more trouble long term.
No, it's not being personally responsible. It's collective responsibility.
Personal responsibility in a pandemic is fallacy and idiocy.
Oddly enough I went to ND for grad school, though it was many years ago. The campus was isolated from the surrounding town, but not completely isolated.
If you plot and fit the curve to such an exponential, today you should have ~15 cases. Tomorrow ~25 cases. In one week's time, ~380 cases. ND has ~8600 people attending. To get that many cases should be 14 days from today [0], so August 28th.
If these trends continue as is, then ND won't make it to September before closing down.
Still, the data is sparse.
[0] Day 20 is ~6000 cases, day 21 is ~9400 cases, you can round however you'd like.
The bars should be closed, too.
We should be spending the entire defense budget on paying for people to stay home, stay safe, and to get them what they need; as well as funding as much scientific research as feasible to fight this clear and present danger to our lives and livelihoods.
As we saw in Italy and New York, COVID-19 has the potential to overwhelm hospitals. Officially, almost 170,000 Americans have died. NYTimes estimates that COVID-19 already caused over 200,000 deaths by comparing against the expected number of deaths if we weren't in a pandemic. So yes, COVID-19 is a clear and present danger to our lives.
Source? I didn’t think it was nearly that high.
This doesn't look like a "99.9% asymptomatic" virus:
https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
And that's one of the MOST conservative media outlets in the world.
That is far from true.
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/financial-times-media-b...
I really hope we can make this work because, as an electrical engineer, most of my classes can't be moved online.