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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Universities are in a difficult position here. You're probably right that someone will sue them for breaking their housing agreement. On the other hand, if they didn't break the housing agreement, and students in the dorms started sickening (or worse, dying), you had better believe the lawsuits would start flying pretty quickly as well.

So, if it's not a question of whether you're going to be sued but on what grounds, you want to do whatever thing will leave you in the best position to defend yourself when the inevitable lawsuits start arriving. And given the medical consensus that social distancing is necessary to protect against coronavirus, if I were a university administrator, I'd much rather be defending myself against charges that I broke a contract than against charges that I recklessly endangered peoples' lives in order to not have to break it.

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>and students in the dorms started sickening (or worse, dying)

Honestly, what percentage of staff and students do you think would be post retirement age? https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

AGE DEATH RATE(c)DEATH RATE(a)

80+ 21.9% 14.8%

70-79 - 8.0%

60-69 - 3.6%

50-59 - 1.3%

40-49 - 0.4%

30-39 - 0.2%

20-29 - 0.2%

10-19 - 0.2%

0-9 no fatalities

So only 16 kids would die, hundreds more suffering permanent scarring to their lungs.

> hundreds more suffering permanent scarring to their lungs

Do you have a source for that?

This is a very good point that deserves discussion. That said, this isn't an either-or situation. Universities could easily arrange temporary off-campus housing for students displaced by the crisis.

They could, but would such housing be appreciably better at protecting from coronavirus transmission than the dorms? They'd likely be just as densely populated, if not moreso. If the university buys a couple of buildings and moves the residents of five dorms into those buildings, they haven't made things better, they've made them worse.

The reason to close the dorms isn't because the dorms themselves are bad in this scenario, it's that packing people closely together is bad in this scenario. The virtue of closing the dorms is that it sends most of the students back home, spreading them out among the general population. Density is the enemy.

I agree that housing density is an issue. However, universities are likely to be subject to lawsuits in situations where they keep dorms open or shut them down. There must be something that can be done here that's better than those two extremes, event if it isn't perfect.

We could:

1. Find alternative housing for some fraction of the students to lower the population density within the dorms--sending 1/3 of students elsewhere reduces population density to ~65% of what it would have been before

2. Retrofit current housing to help minimize spread of disease

3. Allow students to opt-in to remaining at the dorms with agreement to adhere to much stricter health and sanitation standards

4. Allow students to remain with the understanding that they will be quarantined until such a time that they can call be tested

None of these are great ideas, I'm sure, but I can't imagine any of them being worse than the current situation we see these students in.

Dorms tend to have shared bathrooms and common areas.

Easily? How? 8500 students finding alternative housing literally overnight?

Took a stab at addressing this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548989

> if they didn't break the housing agreement, and students in the dorms started sickening (or worse, dying)

IANAL, but I would think that would only apply if they were forcing students to stay, not leave.

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