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In which I question the wisdom of university shut-downs, and other coronavirus items

In which I question the wisdom of university shut-downs, and other coronavirus items

Last updated on: March 11, 2020 at 12:05 pm by Jane the Actuary

In which I question the wisdom of university shut-downs, and other coronavirus items 2020-03-11T12:05:13-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHarvard_Yard%2C_Harvard_University.JPG; By Daderot. (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

First:

In the news today:

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are urging students to stay home and will conduct classes online as the number of coronavirus cases grows in Massachusetts.

MIT said all classes are canceled for the week of March 16 through March 20. Online instruction, which some units are already experimenting with this week, will begin for all classes on March 30, and continue for the remainder of the semester, MIT said.

Undergraduates should not return to campus after spring break, MIT said. Undergraduates who live in an MIT residence or fraternity, sorority or independent living group must begin packing and departing March 14, and undergraduates must depart from campus residences no later than noon on March 17.

Classes will continue this week as the school prepares for the transition, MIT said.

Harvard said Tuesday morning that it will transition to online instruction for all graduate and undergraduate classes by March 23. Students are asked not to return to campus after spring break.

All students will be required to move out of their Harvard dorms by Sunday at 5 p.m.

Is this wise?

Yes, I understand the premises of “social distancing” and the benefit of removing oneself from physical contact with others. I get that large gatherings pose increased risks of spreading the Covid-19/coronavirus, and classrooms, especially large lectures, certainly qualify as “large gatherings.”

But what is also not a good idea is travelling, and spreading the disease from one spot to another, however unknowingly.

After all, here’s another story, this from the Chicago Tribune:

Health officials in Illinois and Missouri are trying to track down people who came in close contact with a St. Louis-area woman who tested positive for the coronavirus after flying into O’Hare International Airport, staying with a friend here, then taking an Amtrak train to her home last week.

The woman, in her 20s, flew into O’Hare on Monday and took an Amtrak train to St. Louis on Wednesday, according to Missouri and St. Louis County officials. Officials did not say where she stayed in the Chicago area, or how she got to Union Station to board the Amtrak 303 train.

The woman is an Indiana University student who had been studying abroad in Italy, which has been the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak of the virus with more than 7,300 people infected. The country is attempting to lock down 16 million people — more than a quarter of its population — for nearly a month to halt the spread.

Now, I have not yet heard of any such shutting-down university being in a location with significant Covid cases. But it still seems unwise to be moving so many young people across the country, when it should be just as feasible to have students self-isolate (yes, in pairs) in their dorms, or at least to have the ability to choose to do so, paired with a simplified meal service on a to-go basis.

Second, this piece from Reason is recommended reading: “How Government Red Tape Stymied Testing and Made the Coronavirus Epidemic Worse.”

It’s a summary of a New York Times article on a researcher’s attempt to test for the virus in Seattle; since the protocols around research studies are extensive, she was shut down. Reason quotes the Times:

The Seattle Flu Study illustrates how existing regulations and red tape—sometimes designed to protect privacy and health—have impeded the rapid rollout of testing nationally, while other countries ramped up much earlier and faster. Faced with a public health emergency on a scale potentially not seen in a century, the United States has not responded nimbly.

One particular frustration of our government’s CV response is that it’s extremely difficult to untangle in the daily reporting, government screw-ups due to red tape and bureaucracy vs. Donald Trump-specific screw-ups. And this is more than merely a matter of whether Trump is getting blamed fairly or unfairly — understanding what’s going wrong is a part of getting things right, both going forward, now, and in future instances, and a knee-jerk “it’s Trump’s fault” reaction could well mean that attention is not paid to issues of red tape, either in public discussions or in those bureaucracies.

Third, let’s talk about schools.

Should schools be closed? I don’t know, and I don’t have a great discussion-starter link. Certainly, some countries are doing exactly this, though whether it’s a necessary precaution or going overboard, I don’t know. In some instances, closing schools simply seems like less of an issue than elsewhere — that is, in countries where there are fewer mothers in the workforce depending on their children’s schools to serve as daycare. In the US, in contrast, to close schools would be massively disruptive. Only a small portion of jobs are “telecommute-able”; in other instances, where there is no at-home parent already, children would go unsupervised or parents would need to leave their jobs — or communities would need to cobble together some sort of alternate care arrangements, similar to what happened in the case of the recent Chicago teacher’s strike.

One alternative suggestion I’ve seen that makes some sense to me is simply to make schools optional, and have them function as daycares — that is, “send your kids if you need to, but there will be no instruction your kids will miss if they stay at home.” Or adopt a hybrid of at-home teaching, with kids going to school for supervision and wifi. Then schools, with reduced numbers, could keep kids separated, check for symptoms, watch hand-washing, etc. Would this work? Or would there be few enough parents willing to keep their kids at home, given the added work of supervising them?

And at the same time — so far as I understand, we don’t really know how long a ride we’re in for. Will the virus taper off as summer hits? Will it take until a vaccine is developed (and fully tested and mass-produced)? For how long can we shut down our economy (by which I don’t just mean the issue of jobs but the need to produce the necessities of life — food, energy, etc.)? For how long can we reasonably shut down our children’s education? Yes, there are people making the argument that the faster we act, the better. But there’s presumably a limit to how long we can reasonably engage in such a dramatic shut-down, no?

And that’s all I have, for the moment. Mostly I’m just watching to see what happens. How about you?

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