Financially, they say:
> We understand that being asked to leave campus may pose a serious financial hardship for certain individuals. Students will receive a follow up communication on this matter.
It’s unclear what their solution is, but they seem to have thought about it...
Was evicting a large populace a good idea? Aren't there other options?
The situation is unsettling. Realistically MIT made the right broad decision here, I think we can all agree on that. Classrooms (most of them) are an inherently remotable environment. Lecture halls and giant shared dormitories and shared meal facilities are just not a safe environment in a pandemic.
They made the right call. Demanding that they do it with perfect bureaucratic finesse is a bit much. Over the coming months, all of us are going to be asked to undergo some hardship, there is no getting away from that. And realistically that hardship not going to be distributed fairly. We all need to do the best we can and help where it's possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_T...
That's not to say the Institute isn't corrupt, evil, and horrible in other ways, but this is not one of the ways in which it's evil. The badness mostly starts with higher-ups and schemes in the many millions of dollars.
That kind of badness tends to corrupt entire organizations if left unchecked.
> Please note: Any student who is permitted to stay may be required to relocate to another building on campus.
A campus full of runny noses for a couple weeks? These are overwhelmingly young people of which the vast majority would be perfectly fine.
What's the typical age of the students parents?
What would happen if a good 5% of them have more than a runny nose, end up in intensive care and there is a shortage of beds?
Go read up for a bit on what is happening in Italy, then check where your country is and advance 4 weeks. See if you still think 'runny noses' is a good analogy.
Risk = impact times likelihood.
I hear people say that all the time of all sorts of places, but what does that mean? Does Boston have (beyond some baseline) more respiratory aid machines than other places? More virus or respiratory system specialists? Better or more nurses? If they do, why? It doesn't matter if they have a bunch of world class brain surgeons. I'd imagine the area would have roughly the same level of materials and skills in this specific domain that other big developed areas have. I wonder what makes people so sure about the specific capabilities of all the areas they claim to be (much) better than other areas.
shrug. The position you need to defend, the matter under discussion, in this case is: how does that relate to them being better equipped to deal with this specific virus/outbreak/pandemic/situation?
The correct method of action here is to tell professors to stay home and students to stay put. Not to tell students to leave and travel! That's absolute madness.
Most students are going to be traveling home in May anyways - moving this to now, while the risk of students being infected and asymptomatic seems like the lesser of the 2 evils.
Is it a good idea to send a campus of young potential carriers from an emergency zone [0] to the rest of the nation, if not the world? MIT and Harvard may be setting a precedent in the world's largest college town that the status quo is to send thousands of travelers from a disease epicenter to lesser-affected areas. I'm genuinely concerned - not for my health as a student, but for how I might be impacting the health of the geographies I'm returning to. Am I misguided in this?
[0] https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/03/10/coronavirus-latest-ma...
Right now the chances of many of them being infected are still relatively low. Give it a few weeks and it is pretty much a certainty.
That said, I really do believe there could be several potential carriers on campus. Here are some reasons why:
(1) There were still large events and gatherings, like the Bitcoin Expo.
(2) Especially notable, large lectures were not canceled until very recently.
(3) Testing has been incredibly hard to do via campus medical services. If cases are identified later, I'd imagine it'd be under-reported since students are young and testing is hard.
(4) The carrier who was on campus a few weeks ago was in a very high-traffic building (MIT Sloan) and there was no timely warning of this.
But yes, I do actually see the merits of early dispersion now and understand the point you're getting across.
Also the bit about being no worse than the flu is not true for any age group.
It does appear to be true for the very young (ages 0-9), who are at relatively high risk from flu (especially <2), but at shockingly low risk at dying from COVID-19. Admittedly not the population in consideration here.
As long as there is no vaccine this is going to be a huge exercise in resource allocation.
This is all about getting rid of a huge tsunami of people for which there would be no care. Once the situation normalizes or there is a vaccine it all changes. But right now we are simply utterly unprepared to deal with this at this scale, and fixing that will take time. Even high risk individuals need to eat, and need visitors. Quality of life, especially for people in such high risk groups is already hit hard, the least we can do is to try to make it easier for them to get the care they need should it get to that, at relatively little expense to the rest of us.
(btw some of the MIT dorms have storage space in the basement)
And by that time, most of the student body (with who knows how many asymptomatic carriers) will have been widely dispersed.
But you've got to get people out of environments where it is going to spread extremely quickly, like communal living in dorms, just the same.