Hacker News Reader

Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the significant question of whether you can just kick people out of the place they paid to live with no notice, is it a good idea from a public health perspective? If you have a large population of mostly healthy young people who might carry the virus with few or no symptoms, is telling them all to leave and inevitably travel to other communities even wise?

My uninformed, cynical fear is that these moves are based on someone in the school administration worrying that the school will be somehow liable if students start becoming ill while in student housing. Maybe kicking out the students isn't the "right" thing, but is a defensive posture to make sure that when people get sick, they do it off campus.

View on HN

I don't know about you, but I lived in dorms as a college student for four years, and in my experience they were an absolute breeding ground for illness. Waves of cold and flu would periodically rumble through them, and everybody you knew would just be sick for a couple of weeks. It was so common that you just got used to it.

And those were just your ordinary everyday illnesses! Now imagine how widely a virus that's two to five times as transmissible as flu would circulate through a dorm environment. It ain't pretty. And while those infected dorm residents themselves might be young and healthy enough to not have the infection be life-threatening, they could then carry it out of the dorms to all the other non-students they interact with every day, lots of whom aren't so demographically fortunate.

Closing the dorms is the right thing to do.

That seems more like the best response would be to quarantine dorm residents at the first positive test, and maintain it until all cases that came up resolved. Only exception is medically necessary transport to a hospital for ICU care if needed.

Kicking the students out just risks making a larger pool of uncontrolled carriers.

Anybody in the school administration consult anyone with ANY medical experience before jerking the knee?

> That seems more like the best response would be to quarantine dorm residents at the first positive test

This assumes that reliable testing kits are widely available, which in the United States they most certainly are not.

> Kicking the students out just risks making a larger pool of uncontrolled carriers.

We've seen from the experiences of the cruise ships where coronavirus cases have emerged that the virus transmits through densely packed groups of people at disproportionately high rates. Whereas the experiences of China and South Korea indicate that putting distance between people can significantly retard transmission.

In this context, a dorm is effectively a cruise ship made of cinderblocks. The solution isn't to lock the passengers in together, it's to get them off the ship and spread them out as far as possible.

Lots of universities have dorm rooms that are shared by multiple students, and many dorm rooms do not provide any type of kitchen or cooking facilities. I don't think that's a remotely feasible solution.

The entire premise is communal living. Shared toilets, showers, kitchen. Quarantining a dormitory would just be leaving everyone inside to get sick and recover, which does not sound humane.

All the dorms I've lived in or seen have no where near the kitchen facilities to actually cook for the whole dorm inside the dorm they were all fairly regular sized kitchens for a 2-3 bedroom apartment at best and didn't have a set of communal pots etc. in the rare case you wanted or needed to cook you provided everything.

I admit I've never lived in or visited any typical dormitories, so I'll agree that doesn't sound workable.

Consider my parent post voided (but past edit window).

Agreed. You could probably accomplish the same thing by strongly encouraging students to go home to their parents or some other location if they can (dorm occupancy would probably drop by 1/2 or more) while allowing those that can't to stay.

> If you have a large population of mostly healthy young people who might carry the virus with few or no symptoms, is telling them all to leave and inevitably travel to other communities even wise?

Also: stress, like having to leave your home and travel to wherever else you can stay, or like being literally homeless because you don't have anywhere else you can stay, can severely weaken your immune system, as can sleeping on the streets.

The only real solution for a lot of these kids would be to bunk up, two, three, five, ten to a home, which is vastly worse for containing infection than letting them stay in their dorm rooms (assuming people are being careful).

Right now it's spring break at many colleges, and in many others it's right around the corner. Students will disperse everywhere and will go partying, someone will catch it somewhere. If coronavirus isn't on campus yet it'll be two weeks after spring break ends. They'll have to shut down the university once the first cluster of cases appears (three weeks after end of Spring Break), and then everyone goes home and spreads it in their hometown.

There is much pressure on administration from faculty now, some of whom have an actual risk of dying, to close down teaching activities. What will also happen is that some faculty members will refuse to teach because of justified fear of catching deadly disease. Best to do an orderly shutdown now than panic a month from now.

> is it a good idea from a public health perspective?

Keep in mind that many of these students would need to travel at the end of the term anyways. There are benefits to shifting that travel sooner in time, especially since they're mostly-healthy right now. Get the traveling done while it's low risk, on the assumption that risk will increase over time.

Just to be clear, while young people like this are going to have a much lower rate of severe illness or death, it's not going to be zero. Even if we are optimistic about the death rate it still would be feasible to see a dozen students dead and several times that hospitalized out of a campus population of 10,000.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com