Stanford Considering Possibility of Reopening Campus in 2021
“That is something that is being contemplated. It is not impossible; it is not crazy”
Boston University is also entertaining this idea. Seems like a drastic measure.
Campus Reform reports:
Stanford provost flirts with 2021 return to campus
While many universities have closed for the remainder of the spring semester and are contemplating when to begin classes again, Stanford University hasn’t eliminated the possibility of not beginning until winter 2021.
At a White House press briefing on April 8, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director and White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci said he “fully expects” schools to “reopen” in fall 2020.
A growing number of college administrators, however, aren’t so sure…
Stanford’s first spring quarter Faculty Senate virtual meeting discussed plans Thursday on paying employees/workers and a “budget” loss of $200 million. The question of when “the academic year” would begin was brought to attention.
“We have about five or six different scenarios about different ways of approaching this, with pluses and minuses being discussed all the time,” Rodrigue, co-chair of the Fall Planning Task Force said.
Provost Persis Drell confirmed that one of the possible “scenarios” was Stanford starting the academic year start in the winter quarter.
“That is something that is being contemplated. It is not impossible; it is not crazy,” she said.
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Comments
Honestly, they could all open tomorrow. College kids are far more likely to die of alcohol poisoning than covid when school is in session. Professors can lecture through masks, as evidenced by all the learning done in operating rooms each day.
Time for the Dems to just admit that this was their third and final failure to defeat Trump. They never learned the concept of that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
The main problem with opening schools in the middle of this is that they’ll eventually go home and bring the infection to their families. But by Labor Day, 8 months after widespread infections started in America, I expect we’ll be far past the point where most people have already been exposed, and there will be no reason to protect anyone who is not especially vulnerable from catching the virus and gaining some level of immunity.
Nearly all epidemics follow an S-shaped curve – a near-exponential rise initially, but as the proportion of the population that is already exposed (and resistant to the disease, recovered and at least temporarily immune, or dead) rises, the curve bends to approach a flat line with everyone exposed.
I’ve been closely following the data in Michigan. In southeast Michigan (around Detroit and Ann Arbor), we seem to be just past the middle of that curve, which may have been stretched out after mid-March by the lockdown. New known COVID-19 cases peaked the first week in April; this data is distorted by a rapidly increasing number of tests administered since March 19, so the real peak may have been earlier. Deaths have probably just peaked, but since deaths lag the infection by weeks, it’s not clear yet. The smaller cities and rural areas of Michigan are are still on the beginning of this curve, but it is quite predictable that the infection will spread slower in less crowded areas. It seems clear now that Detroit will survive this, and the rest of the state will do better than Detroit, and probably should have never been locked down in the first place.
I expect that NYC and any other cities that were infected in early January are following the same path as Detroit, while rural America will follow a similar path to rural Michigan.