Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

Well it is Operation Warp Speed.

Something is definitely warped.

I know we talk a bit about the fatality rate, but I wonder how much time gets knocked off of your life just having it. In this episode, there is evidence of heart damage and inflammation after infection, though there are too many questions about why or how it happens:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/evidence-slowly-building-fo...-covid-19/

I found this article interesting - some new discoveries showing that bradykinin storm might be causing some of the symptoms seen in covid.
https://elemental.medium.com/a-supercomputer-analyzed-covid-19-and-...cb8eba9d63

Just an update from our little corner of Ohio; life on a small college campus.

First, the best decision I made for myself was choosing to go back to teaching live (we were given a choice of that or going 100% online). Yes, it's a hybrid model which at first seemed cumbersome, but we are midway through week 4 of our fall semester, and I have definitely found a groove to the new normal.

I have yet to see even one student on our campus violate the mask protocol, or even complain about them or the current situation. That is, everyone seems to be of the same mindset: 1) it's so good to be back, and 2) no one wants to be "that guy" that ruins everything. I get that the headlines catch the idiots (mainly on large hard-to-control campuses) that just can't help themselves from having large keggers, but that is far detached from our reality here. In fact, the one well-known mask violation on our campus was actually a professor (non-tenure track but full time) who thought he could be the "cool prof" who told students it was OK if they didnt wear masks in his class. His own students turned his ass in the same day.

So 4 weeks down, 10 to go to the finish line...and we have only 3 "active" cases on our campus, 1 of which will go to "recovered" status this Thursday.

I've seen a lot of anecdotes about small schools generally having better results, and some have going to great lengths to test everyone frequently, which I'm sure makes a huge difference.

I've long believed that we were at an advantage being a smaller (2500 students) campus; the student body is relatively tight-knit and residential, and we also have an "advantage" of not having a larger urban/downtown bar/club scene for our students to go to.

That said, we are not doing regular testing of anyone in particular; the protocol for us is if you show symptoms of anything, you 1) go to quarantine, and 2) get tested, and you don't return until you get at least two negative results (with no positives). I've had at least 7 students go through this so far, with all but one testing negative.

As you all know, my kid is at the U.

17,000 kids and they just started bi-weekly testing of the entire on-campus population this week in addition to all the standard daily symptom checking and basic distancing, masks and such they'd been doing. Plus, they're requiring (and giving) the flu vaccine for everyone.

They have a decent COVID dashboard too.

I see your fancy "Power-5" dashboard and call with our own NCAA Division 3 dashboard...

That said, I like all the fun charts and graphs. Jelaous.

Testing is interesting on college campuses. Lots of variations. University of Illinois has done more Covid tests since July 6th (304,740) than the State of Montana has done ever (289,368).

https://covid19.illinois.edu/on-campus-covid-19-testing-data-dashboard/

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testing-by-state-chart-of-new-cases/

Broad Institute (partnership between MIT and Harvard) is running tests for about 100 colleges and universities in New England and New York. Last week, they performed about 5% of the tests that were run in the entire US.

http://wesleyanargus.com/2020/09/11/wesleyan-contracts-broad-instit...to-campus/

Some of those schools are testing every student once, twice or three times per week. Other schools are sampling asymptomatic students and some only testing students with symptoms. Reporting/dashboards are all over the map as well.

Just a quick follow-up to the on-campus testing.

My son had his first COVID test yesterday. He had it done around 11:30 am and had the results (negative) by 10pm. So not only are they testing everyone in a two week cycle, they're pumping out same day results. Seems pretty aggressive.

That's pretty great. If asymptomatic people are responsible for much of the spread, knowing who they are can make a huge difference.

Colleges provide an interesting experiment (or really series of them). On a given campus you have X% of students, faculty and staff who will distance, mask and limit contacts and Y% who will not (or at least take each of those much less seriously). What you expect to see are many/most/all in the Y% getting Covid. At that point, there is some level of immunity in that group (yes we do not know how much or for how long but it is there -- if its not we are wasting our time thinking about vaccines). The X% will continue to distance/mask/limit contacts protecting themselves (though likely not totally) from risks.

There is also an element of low hanging fruit. Not everyone is equally susceptible to infection. People getting it will by definition be those more susceptible leaving the less susceptible uninfected.

All of that effectively reduces R0 substantially as a campus.

At that point, testing will help but I am not sure how critical it is. At least not if you continue with the preventive steps. Though it won't hurt.

Values of X and Y greatly impact the analysis. So too does the isolation levels of campuses. Some campuses are more isolated than others. Though the students should be more isolated (campus verus non-campus areas - students tend to hang with fellow students and near campus venues) than faculty/staff (who go home to their own family and friend groups which may/may not be near campus). Would expect higher percentage of faculty/staff to be in X than students thus offsetting at least somewhat the reduced level of isolation for faculty/staff.

There is a lot of data being gathered by colleges. Not sure if anyone will try to gather all of it and analyze it though.

I have a hard time believing that X and Y are that insulated from each other. I mean, if you have a class of 10 people, there's a good chance that a lot of X's are having sustained close contact with at least one Y.

There was that article on heterogeneity that was circulating a month ago that speculated that herd immunity could be reached with as low as 40% infection rate if it was the most susceptible and connected 40% of the community. It would be great if college campuses could prove this.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/846

In the class you will be distanced and wearing a mask. So risk of interactions with Xs and Ys is reduced. And on a lot of college campuses right now its a mix of in person and online classes. Online classes don't have any in person contacts.

Xs will tend to hang out with Xs. Ys with Ys. I know several people who say either that everyone they know at their college has it or no one they know has it (some of the latter is because of no testing presumably but its not all campuses). Don't think that is an accident or random. Small sample size though no doubt.

And ultimately its a mix of groups of people taking precautions and other groups having immunity. May well be the case even with a vaccine. No one is expecting any vaccine that will be 100% effective. Certain at risk groups may well continue with precautions even post vaccine.

Wouldn’t it be nice if at least some of the money, time and effort being spent on the vaccine effort instead were directed towards a cheap, reliable, “instant”-result contagion test? Finding all the people who have the virus is great for statisticians and epidemiologists, but in the real world the only thing we really care about is finding the people who are contagious -that is, actively shedding virus - and getting them isolated for 11 days. More important such a test would reveal whether asymptomatic spread is truly happening or not; at the moment all the evidence either way is circumstantial. That’s how we get back to “normal”. Not with tests that find evidence of the minutest trace of virus RNA and deliver results long after the contagion period is over...

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

I posted this in another thread re tests being akin to a vaccine.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/08/cheap-daily-covid-te...o-vaccine/

Lots of things to consider. Effective vaccine would be better because you only administer once (or maybe twice) rather than repeated tests. But we don't know how long the protection from a vaccine will last. And Covid doesn't appear to have a season so depending on the length of time a vaccine protects, people may need multiple vaccines each year (times 2 if given vaccine requires 2 doses). But also key at this point we do not have a safe and effective vaccine so given the choice between rapid tests that could function as a vaccine versus an actual vaccine isn't a real choice at this point.

Sweden shows lockdowns were unnecessary - an editorial

A few of my co workers and I are in a group message discussing this. Just thought I'd share it here to see what everyone thinks

Edit - I don't agree at all with anything the Washington Examiner puts out. But our little group of left leaning and like minded co workers has made a conversation out of it, so I wanted to throw it out there

The article seems to suggest that buying time while waiting for a vaccine is not the strategy we are employing or not a valid strategy. It also glossed over the benefits of keeping hospital admissions below hospital capacity and buying time to find effective treatments and precautions. So what I read was, "If you take away the benefits of having prolonged lockdowns, there are no benefits to prolonged lockdowns."

Also, just like how I was totally confused two weeks after Arizona, Florida, and Texas reopened and showed no movement in case counts (which obviously came about two more weeks after that in spades), maybe it's a little premature to a) assume they won't get a second wave and b) that it is because of their "no lockdown" strategy.

It's also worth noting that their per capita deaths are in line with Spain, UK, and Italy and still somewhere between 50% and 100% higher than most of the other European countries and almost 6x higher than Germany. So again, "if you ignore all the people who've died already, there will be less death."

I'm not saying this is definitely incorrect. I'm just wary of becoming one of the people who pointed at Arizona, Florida, and Texas two weeks after they reopened and said, "These states are geniuses!"

The headline for the Examiner piece is clearly designed to divide and tantalize, but all you need to know from it is this:

Sweden encouraged people to work from home, made university courses remote, and banned meetings of more than 50 people but otherwise trusted its citizens to use their common sense.

I mean, the cultural differences alone can likely account for US outcomes versus virtually all other nations.

It probably doesn't matter now. Isolation as a tactic is probably not necessary with the information we have now, but only if we do all of the other things. It seems pointless now to argue about it.

If things get ugly going forward, I can almost promise it will be because of disregard for social distancing in smaller settings. I see it already in my neighborhood with the pool parties. And there is zero guidance about how we conduct ourselves during the holidays.