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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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