The nightmare that colleges face this fall
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
So a simple model where each case results in R new infections doesn't capture this at all. Instead, networks of infection appear to be like other social networks where some nodes are much more highly connected than other nodes.
The task that colleges face is to ensure that students with large social networks don't infect their contacts and to ensure that large events conducive to infection don't happen. Otherwise, no amount of wiping doorknobs and fogging classrooms with disinfectant will be effective.
I never finished mine, and it took me a long time and a lot more work to catch up to my peers financially. I might never have done it if I didn't get lucky and make a few right choices in my 30a.
Why don't people have millions invested by the time they retire? Because no matter how much money people make (up to a certain point, depending on the person), they spend it. If you give the average high school graduate $150K and tell them to invest it for 40 years, I pretty much guarantee that it will be gone long before the 40 years are up.
To be fair, I don't have millions invested and I'm scarily close to retirement. So I'm not trying to be critical of others ;-)
It does work.
But if you spent all your income, you'll never have money.
Ehhh, yes and no. Plenty of people who bought nice-ish houses in the Bay Area in the '70s and '80s sold them in 2014-2018 and retired outside the bay with a nice extra pile of cash.
You need housing, but you don't need a crazy expensive house in a crazy expensive area.
There is no difference. Incomes have held stagnant for the entirety of those 40 years, despite the transition from people of equal calibre being only high school graduates 40 years ago to being college graduates today. $0 invested at 7% still leaves you with $0.
“How long have you been smoking for?” the colleague asks.
“Thirty years,” says the smoker.
“Thirty years!” marvels the co-worker. “That costs so much money. At a pack a day, you’re spending $1,900 a year. Had you instead invested that money at an 8% return for the last 30 years, you’d have $250,000 in the bank today. That’s enough to buy a Ferrari.”
The smoker looked puzzled.
“Do you smoke?” he asked his co-worker.
“No.”
“So where is your Ferrari?”
- No, I spent it all on $SOMETHING_ELSE
I think that’s the point...
I am a student from Rural India, studying at an "engineering" "college" (obviously in urban area). The minimum cost for getting into engineering degrees is too much for rural income scales here. And the quality of education is PATHETIC (everything is rote learning based and everyone is trying to game the system, because edu system is so mechanical).
Since the formal education is so costly and ineffective[0], many people like me would benefit from a commoditization through online medium. I started learning programming one year before I joined the college in Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) program. And having seen the teaching methods and rat race, I am pretty sure I can learn better if I go on my own. But there are too many stakeholders in the ineffective process, that would prevent such a thing from happening.
But even if they conduct college through online classes for the next year, I would be happy, because I would save on accommodation expenses by staying at home :).
[0] The ineffective four years of education is probably why many people complain about Indian SWEs. The entire thing is rat race for sustaining jobs - then mechanically clearing exams, copying GitHub repos, lying on resumes etc... If all of these people chose their subjects with genuine interest, about only 10% would be studying in CSE and "Indian SWE" would've had a better image worldwide.
Learning from top experts who teach online classes that can be accessed from many institutions while having local tutors would allow students to learn from experts who are good teachers and get in-person help as needed.
For some, MOOCs can be better than live lectures. Many students dare not ask any questions in a lecture room anyway. They can pause to think, review materials if they get a quiz question wrong, and ask questions more openly in the MOOC forum.
In addition, the MOOC system can record student's performance in quizzes and some even have an AI designed to detect cheating, e.g. whether the typing pattern of the user is anomalous.
But MOOCs can't compete with the best live lectures, where students have an opportunity for meaningful discussion, challenging and original projects, and building relationships.
(In case anyone else is as pedantic as me about definitions: yes, there were two kinds of homework. The first was you read something at home, and then discussed it in the next class. The other was you learnt something and when practiced it at home afterwards.)
We don't charge any up-front fees. We only get paid as a share of your income after you graduate (or complete at least 60% of the course) so we have a strong incentive to provide effective tuition.
On a more serious note, at least consider adding a "shameless plug" notice while promoting your own stuff on HN.
I am not really interested in this kind of stuff but looked at it.
> Our 12-week live online training course ....
No, thanks.. that's not the scope of a CS degree. You are promoting something irrelevant here - no offence.
You can guarantee that colleges would fall in line quickly. there would be also attempts to circumvent the charges but those can be dealt with. they could though try to up sell you on amenities you may not otherwise have chosen to pay for but do now through high tuition.
So summary, Federal student loans only apply to programs with set rates per course credit and degrees. fall outside of these degrees; lets be honest there are some degree programs we should never back; and you pay your own way and colleges can charge what they want.
Many having no problem with it does not mean it has happened or that it would work. You are talking about the only other industry in the US with similar cost increases to colleges.
1. It’s only fair to compare the retirement amount vs the average marginal increase of salary obtained from having a college degree. Not sure this is a large number these days.
2. Most don’t pay full ride but for those that do it’s hefty. And also, those that can afford it, typically have a lot of money to begin with.
3. I raise this question because unlike the smoker comment, I can determine if I just want to put money away for my kids (in a trust) and give them that lump sum when they are older (not 60 but maybe much older) as opposed to pay for college. I likely won’t do this but for argument sake, if you have a motivated kid, I’d bet they’d find a way to learn what they need to learn.
4. As from the “Silicon Valley” show. “The real value of education is intangible!”. I do think I gained a good amount from college but I think a majority of that was social/independence growth rather than learning. Although, one or two of my computer science courses really got burned in my head and I believe added a ton of value to my way of thinking.
Anyway, original comment was a bit in jest but it’s still an important discussion because I think we should be paying for education and not “branding” which, let’s be honest, is a lot what school is used for - a market-accepted currency for purchasing a good career.
Sure, if you had 150k at age 18 and weren't going to need another cent until you turn 65, you could drop that money in the stock market and wait for riches to come to you. But as it is, you're going to need some kind of job. And while there's a few pleasant careers available without college these days (software engineering being one of them), for most jobs that aren't heavy physical labor or minimum wage drudgery, you're going to need that college degree.
Travel restrictions are probably still going to be around for some time, and the likelihood of getting a part time job to fund it is much lower than usual.
Then, after all this, forget why you even wanted to go to college.
Sounds like a plan.
More importantly, though, you can simply live cheap in parents' basement or whatever, and study, study, study. You don't need a college to learn.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/corona-co...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/24/an-ope...
Why should colleges be expected to be safer than K-8? Why must they resort to impromptu web solutions?
Also, if there's a consensus on risk and response, shouldn't that be coordinated at a central level instead of institutions each making their own calls?
Whereas you can close all colleges for a year, with a much smaller impact.
I'm not talking about coding boot camps, I'm talking about institutions that are more similar to trade schools... Or European universities. All that you need to educate people is a large hall, an instructor, and a whiteboard.
I don't mean to be banal but the business of colleges is not "education". A large hall, an instructor, and a whiteboard is not competitive from the perspective of the customer base, nor is it attractive from the perspective of those who would populate the whiteboard with whatever.
What parents and students pay for is essentially a moderately supervised, branded, summer sleepaway camp experience (full year) filled with nice sounding time-occupying activities and vague, often unfulfilled, and also unaccountable promises that at the end of the camp experience someone will be willing to pay to utilize the time of the student, rather than the student/parents paying to have their time occupied.
There are various ways to creatively package the elements of that experience into a product, but in the "lean" formulations- like Lambda School- there is no real estate, no large hall. Real estate is expensive.
I think what we actually would see- are already seeing- in the closure of the bespoke, idiosyncratic small private colleges likely to die is the chain restaurant version of the bespoke, idiosyncratic small family restaurants that have largely gone by the wayside in American culture.
They will have a consistent brand, will cost maybe a little less, will pay their mostly expendable teaching staff considerably less, with no tenure (though performance bonuses and maybe equity grants for the stars, the way any sensibly managed business operates these days), with a manufactured curriculum delivered consistently across the "franchises" and with lots of entertainment and parent-appealing safety/oversight options, lots of addons for extra fees (semester abroad, anyone?), and some structure around the time-occupying activities that may- no guarantees- lead to eventual employment.
Welcome to Olive Garden, can I take your classroom order please?
Mediocre consistency at scale is how America works.
Cheers.
I do think the operational dynamics of colleges have changed, and the parent comment about the essence of education being someone at a whiteboard in a room- I just don't think that's sufficiently true anymore. It's not what people pay for.
But more to the point-
The Olive Garden analogy is what (I think) will happen. That prognostication is in line generally with the business trajectory that the US solves for.
All businesses are ultimately scaled and financialized.
So- as small private colleges will be the first to fail, their brands and their nostalgia will be picked up by the educational equivalent of restaurant chain operations. Chain operations will produce a product people will pay for- lots of people in the US go to chain restaurants- but the end result is going to be considerably different than what used to be called the college experience.
There is no legal or financial machinery in the US to defend the small. And that's too bad.
Cheers.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ra...
According to a website called “US news”. The US definitely has a few colleges in the top 20 say but so do a few other countries.
Next up, "liberal arts" today is not the same thing as it was a generation ago, and it's debatable whether it's still doing that much except credentialism (Bryan Caplan certainly thinks it isn't). This is not, by the way, a dog-whistle at social justice: I think that college SJ is a symptom of a deeper structural problem with the current university system.
The 25% who are going to fail (if the poster two levels above is right) are probably also not the Ivy League. In the UK at least, there are lots of places lower down the league tables who in my opinion could contribute a lot more to the nation if they were good trade schools rather than bad universities. Less sure about the US situation, but I think it was the case until not that long ago that there were ways to power and influence that didn't go through a university - including many examples of past presidents.
I think too many forget the risk of having ~1/4th of your youth population sitting around with no money, no goals and no life.
Its a powder keg and you dont know the likelyhood of ignition or in which direction sharpnel will go.
I would imagine with massive closures and unemployment that supply of summer jobs is close to zero now.
I suppose in our kids generation there is a mitigating circumstance- the wide availability of legal teenage heroin aka video games. Today’s “bread and circus” of inexpensive, endless content and games will keep us placated indefinitely as far as I can tell.
The market value of US endowments in 2016 was $542B, of which 120 of the richest accounted for a whopping $401B or 74% of the total endowment value in the US.[1]
The 26% remainder ($51B) was split between 2832 4-yr degree-granting colleges[2] for an average endowment (excluding the top 120 richest) of ~$19M/college.
Only 4% of 4-yr degree-granting colleges have endowments >$750M.
Speaking as someone building one of those impromptu web solutions- it is a bad situation all around. For many colleges if they do not reopen in the fall they never will again, due to finances. And many are seeing demand from their students to reopen. So it is a matter of survival to do it- in that case it has to be done as safely and with as much consideration for harm reduction as possible. But there is little time and many people are working 24/7 just to get to "impromptu."
In terms of "centralized", the virus is a highly local problem. It spreads and has to be dealt with locally. Nuances unique to each locality dictate the mitigation measures. Hope that helps. Cheers.
College though is a real education, and I want it to be face to face. I (and them) accept the risk, based on what is known today. My 2c.
You’d be surprised all the things you learn k-8.
If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers.
Very much depends on the school district. In many urban school districts, it's better than being in the house, but its hardly enriching.
Nobody is suggesting the end of classroom education. The question is whether doing the best we can with distance learning for a time and postponement of classroom eduction until better treatments and/or vaccines come on line is a better choice. It is really not a big sacrifice to ensure the safety of about 4 million teachers and maybe another million or two staff persons.
Assuming the death rate is optimistically only 0.2%, that is about 12,000 teachers and staff deaths. Ignoring the thousands of other deaths originating from these cases, are you really saying that 12,000 deaths is a realistic price to pay so your child can go back into the classroom NOW rather than next year? Really?
The fact that this would be a very bad choice seems an "obvious fact and not open for debate."
Unless most of your teachers are living in nursing homes, your numbers are way off.
Similarly, whatever factor you apply to count deaths, you can only count deaths above the baseline when considering the change in school policy.
It’s quite far from your side of “obvious fact and not open for debate”, IMO.
Not with that attitude, nope sure isn’t.
It is up for debate. I know for a fact you’re wrong. I was educated outside of any schooling system until the 9th grade. I learned basic math and was a voracious reader. I walked into 9th grade without missing a beat.
I'm not sure this is true. From my own experience studying math, I often heard people remark upon how hard it must be and how only a small subset of people would ever be able to understand the concepts in a graduate level math course. I don't agree with this at all.
In my opinion, the reality is that learning is incremental, and everything new builds upon something that you've previously learned (hopefully). This is particularly true with math. I don't think that I had to work any harder to learn linear algebra in undergrad than I did to learn differential calc in highschool. I think the delta in difficulty between geometry and algebra, pre-calc and calc 1, diff eq and real analysis, is basically the same. But that is only true if you have a solid understanding of whatever came before.
This is of course a minor nitpick with your last point, because I agree with your overall point that k-8 learning is important. I think it's important precisely because of the reasons I mentioned before: you need to have a strong foundation in 'last years' concepts if you are going to succeed in learning this years.
The school system is enormously wasteful of time. It takes about 40 hours to teach a nine year old to read English and about the same time to cover the primary school Math curriculum with a 12 year old.
If we took Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development seriously we wouldn’t spend so much time teaching children things they’ll pick up tens of times faster in three years. I don’t know what primary school would look like if we cared about children learning but it wouldn’t look much like the current system.
ZPD works, but nobody has been able to implement this at-scale, let alone in the K-8 public school system.
Maybe my education was just garbage, but none of the stuff in k-6 was built upon. They threw out my foundation in numbers and handed me a list of valid rules in the form of equations and identities. If you do the quadratic formula, you get the roots. Cos^2 + sin^2 = tan, etc.
I was on the track to math, sure. But that’s because I was good at memorizing useless trivia and utilizing it on tests, not because I was good at math. Same goes for most of my classes. There was one dude that actually got it, but he definitely didn’t get it from our teachers.
The teaching at colleges has stayed largely the same as it ever has been, with few of the professors actually passionate about transferring the knowledge to the next set of students. You only get a great professor every once in a great while, most of the rest are unintelligible or disinterested. I’m not willing to pay 150k to get one great educator maybe.
With Wikipedia, YouTube science communicators, and videos of actually great lecturers across the years, the knowledge portion of college education is covered for free. The other benefit of college is networking with people who might remember you enough to help you get a job in the future. For many it also increases their exposure to different thought, which is valuable in today’s society. I feel like something should replace college on the social aspects too, as it’s a hugely inefficient system for it right now.
And we ALL knew it was crazy.
We can't magic up new buildings, or new classrooms or lecture halls. We lecture 20+ students in rooms that seat .... wait for it .... 20(ish) students. I have no idea how to social distance in there.
Half students in? How do I teach half a class, then the other half? Do they magic up a second Monday for me to teach in? And half students, they are still less than 2m apart.
Outside? Teaching IT and coding? Huh?
Exams?
Busses?
The car park?
Older / elderly lecturers - especially those in management. What do with they then?
A fair few of our students are nurses so they know the risks and are happy to inform everyone.
I think we'll open and just hope for the best. Some people are going to get sick and there's not much we can do to avoid it. Unless we stop education for a year.
I mean, just compare their priorities.
I always laugh when I see this.
If you shut down all sports, all but something like the 5 top sports universities (and I think I'm being generous--if I remember correctly only UT-Austin is demonstrably profitable) would see a net profit--sometimes significantly so since the coaches are often some of the highest paid employees.
1. This article from 2015 (http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...) puts it at 24. That sounds closer to correct to me.
2. There are substantial knock-on effects for university donations during big years that are not counted in the profit or loss of an athletic department. These benefits are spread wide throughout the NCAA. Winning a championship (even league rather than NCAA), beating a rival, or just making the NCAA tourney in basketball can be a boost.
3. Sustained excellence can change the face of a university in ways that money cannot. The best recent example is the change of the student body at Alabama during Saban’s tenure.
Just some ideas that go beyond sports revenue dollars.
I participate in the research side of universities in various ways and this is exactly how it happens. The bureaucracy is absolutely the enemy when trying to get research done or preventing some arsehole in management from removing a useful service.
I am currently trying to get hired as a research assistant (basically a vague title covering people who do research as part of a lab but without the ambitions of an academic) and lab heads will routinely try to source talent in a way that avoids the official university hiring policy. They do this because the official way is slow, stupid, and gets administration people involved who just get in the way. Not only that, they deal with plenty of university administration already, and they think it is mostly useless or needlessly complicated.
Losing a year of revenue will straight up kill a bunch of universities, just like it would kill most businesses. However, the following year there will still be the same number of 18 year olds who want to go to college as usual, and so surviving universities will grow much bigger.
Bigger universities will grow bigger administrative arms, which will further isolate the leadership from students and academic and enable even more extractive policies, both because increased social distance makes cruelty more thinkable, and because the loss of competition makes it harder for students and academics to find an alternative.
In other words, wiping out a bunch of businesses reduces competition, and less competitive markets are more monopolistic.
That’s by no means certain at all. It’s plausible that many will realise that the degree isn’t as valuable as it once was and pursue a trade instead.
Administrative bloat? Some of it, like the diversity infrastructure, is mandated from without (regulations and/or legal concerns). Some, like vanity recycling programs, will indeed get whacked.
In truth, though, the reforms that would really matter are (1) reduce college loan subsidies to a rational level, and (2) increase state funding of public universities.
If I'd already paid and you refused to refund me, I'd use that gap year to travel to campus, administrators' homes, the lot, and let everyone know that you've stolen enormous amounts of money from hundreds of thousands.
Teenage me has a hell of a lot of energy, health, and time on their hands.
It's so ridiculous an idea as to be absurd. Do you want social breakdown? This is how you get mass riots.
Reading what's facing the US at the moment (I'm British) I honestly worry about whether there will be some sort of military standoff if the government doesn't step up _now_ and put together a coherent plan for the nation.
There are tens of millions unemployed, graduates are entering an economy that's essentially been deleted, and new students are having the knife twisted in them before they've even started.
People need _hope_. I'm angry on behalf of you guys.
Ever since Hong Kong, I've been extra attentive and appreciative of the fact that this may be as close to peace as we will ever see the world again.
This. Right now. This may be as close to peace as we will ever see again.
Never-the-less, I have the utmost hope for project Earth, with or without humans.
So yea, I sort of agree, but I definitely also think the danger is higher than it seems.
I would, however, pay very close attention to Taiwan. That just might be the trigger.
Generally, in an economic downturn people turn to education as a way to better themselves and wait out an economic recovery.
Probably all three - travel, self study, read, etc. That's what I'd do. Then again, I'm thinking UK.
The lockdowns here aren't such that you literally can't go outside, and the minimum cost of living (due to our safety nets) really isn't that high for a youngster willing to live on beans.
Education is great. I'll be learning until my brain gives out on me.
But if you want to tell me that my first year of university just became sitting in front of a screen and I'll be paying for it - yeah, sod that, I'll take the tent and the backpack and see you all when people have regained sanity.
In the outside world (including University) people do things like obtaining life long friendships, meeting partners, generally just sniffing the flowers of life.
If I had the pressure of my course and I was stuck in a box I'd go mental before week 3. No comraderie, no friends, nothing, it's all pixels mate. лол.
At this point I see another explosion of coronavirus cases as just math. I mean, it's like stamping out most of a fire so you're left with only a few burning embers, so you say "Great, time to reopen, lets dump these giant bags of dry leaves onto these embers."
Yes, many (most?) people are still staying home where I live, but for many places that have opened up I see zero change in behavior - there were some viral videos last weekend of packed bars and events. I contrast that with other places (like Germany) that actually appear to have a plan in place of how they will be able to open up safely. AFAICT our plan in the US appears to be "thoughts and prayers".
I agree I think a second wave is imminent.
It would get worse, there, too, if people did return to normal and cases spiked. Versus cities that are now in "new normal" and still full of people being much more cautious.
If cases didn't spike - there are those who believe the flattening of case rates isn't a result of behavioral changes but was some hidden factor - then "the new normal" will continue, but you won't be back to the old one.
If cases do spike, "the new normal" will get even less close to the old normal, because more and more people will self-select back into staying home.
Otherwise you have to get a way more coherent government plan to get on top of the spread. Like tracking and finding and isolating cases fast. And doing more to protect the people in essential jobs which are conducive for big outbreaks.
Technically, reopening phase 1 doesn't begin until Monday here.
I pointed out to my kids that sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't, estimate how dangerous a behavior is based on whether or not lots of people are doing it. Especially where there's a delay between the behavior and observable consequences. E.g., smoking cigarettes in the 1930's, or unprotected promiscuous sex in the 1980's, or (I'm guessing) pre-pandemic behaviors right now.
imagine if a terrorist attack killed over 100,000 people in just a couple of months. instead, we're just like "wasn't so bad" after doing hardly anything.
it's an embarrassment in the u.s. to see people in south korea and china returning back to life as almost normal without danger. and the numbers are incredibly damning to the u.s.
By the way, SK just kicked the can down the road, they are continuing to get spikes because they have no herd immunity: "Coronavirus: South Korea closes schools again after biggest spike in weeks" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52845015
i didn't. i said imagine the situation. i'm saying that people would pay attention and treat it seriously.
> Stop pretending that governments can regulate viruses out of existence
isn't that exactly what south korea did?
the point is that there is no excusing the u.s. response to the virus.
> By the way, SK just kicked the can down the road, they are continuing to get spikes because they have no herd immunity
point me to scientific evidence of herd immunity. or any evidence they've kicked the can down the road. look at their graphs and compare them to the u.s. how in the world is their response kicking the can down the road but the u.s.' isn't? that quite literally makes no sense.
You act as if the pandemic is over; the places that never shutdown or had light restrictions largely were hit later and, though they are behind, also haven't flattened the curve (and, many of the places that reopened early and rapidly, rather than gradually, are also seeing rebounds already.) They may not have yet seen overwhelmed hospitals, but a number of places in both of those groups that didn't before are nearing that point now.
> They have nothing under control
i think you have a vastly different definition of "under control" than i do.
> Their population is still vulnerable and has no antibodies.
again, do you have scientific evidence that backs such a claim up? i'm not claiming it doesn't exist, but it'd be nice if people making implications based upon such claims provide evidence for them.
> The U.S. did not have a monolithic response. Many states never shut down, and never experienced overrun hospitals. Many states had light restrictions and never experienced overrun hospitals. Some states sent sick people to nursing homes and then had overrun hospitals
what is your point, exactly?
In general, a contagious virus, like COVID-19, can be stopped in only one of three ways:
(1) by acquiring herd immunity, which for most viruses requires exposure of 30-95% of the population (check HIT values for various diseases in wikipedia; initial COVID estimates are somewhere in 29-80%). Neither SK nor China is there yet. Even Sweden or Belarus are not there yet. Even Africa is unlikely to be there yet.
(2) by completely stamping it out (with aggressive decontamination, quarantines, etc.). Again, neither SK nor China is there (this is obvious, they do not even claim it; see school re-closing in SK, Jilin flare up in China, etc.)
(3) by vaccination. Again, no vaccinations in SK, China or anywhere for this matter.
So coronavirus is not "under control" anywhere. We might just accept that and focus on some other things that would be just as nice to get under control: heart disease, cancer, opioid addiction, etc. Just my 2c.
For example, many countries kept mandatory smallpox vaccinations long after the disease was eradicated within their borders because otherwise a single traveler can wreak havoc. Check for example smallpox reintroduction to Yugoslavia in 1972 by a single pilgrim. A quick martial law and quarantines helped contain it, but even then it caused, according to Wikipedia, 175 infections and 35 deaths.
If COVID-19 is as virulent as it is claimed to be I would not bet on NZ staying COVID-free after travel restarts. My 2c.
Japan and China both managed to regulate the virus out of existence with more success than we have had at stopping terrorist attacks, doesn't seem like all that bad of a comparison to me.
Herd immunity kicks in at somewhere around 60-75% recovered, IIRC.
Unless the asymptomatic infection rate is at least an order of magnitude higher than anything remotely suggested, there's no possible way the US is approaching herd immunity. We're not even to 5% infected, let alone 50%.
Any amount of immunity or resistance within the population will reduce the effective reproduction rate of the virus. This effect becomes more significant as the immunity rate increases.
Herd immunity is a colloquial term which refers to the point where there's so much immunity that the effective reproduction rate <1 and new infection clusters die out. The percentage of the population which needs to be immune to get R<0 depends on many factors, consider that many countries have managed to achieve this with near zero population immunity.
For example - if we imagine a hypothetical society which could indefinitely maintain measures like social distancing and mask wearing, the effective reproduction number will be low to begin with; the population immunity required to get to R<0 will therefore be lower.
Please start here before spreading additional misinformation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
Flagged.
When did the first wave even end?
The universe tends toward maximum irony. If I had a nickel for every time I heard some variant of "That won't happen here"...
These aren't "I want a house with 3 stories and I can only build two" style liberties. These are the "if I don't have these I literally do not have any liberty" incursions on liberties. The important ones.
On average, stricter measures seem correlated with higher mortality, not lower. That doesn't mean the measures kill people, just that governments don't tend to impose them until stuff gets bad. It's very difficult to disentangle the effects of the intervention from the effects of the pre-existing environment.
It's also disingenuous to include New York because it was the initial epicenter on the Western hemisphere and the majority of those dead were infected before complete lock down procedures could be implemented or from unavoidable close contact with family or building tenants.
There's a lot we don't know here. I wish people would admit and accept that, instead of looking for false confidence, finding it, and then arguing with people who found a different falsely confident answer.
According to Worldometer Japan has tested ~284k people while New York and California have combined tested almost four million despite together having half the population of Japan. Last time I saw excess mortality statistics a few weeks ago they were lagging with several prefectures missing and bad normalization for aging and other factors.
Assuming the numbers are accurate, I'm more interested in how South Dakota and Wyoming are doing so much worse than Japan with such a low population density. I suspect the answer lies in the crumbling rural health infrastructure.
> There's a lot we don't know here. I wish people would admit and accept that, instead of turning this into yet another polarized political debate.
Mortality, population density, and basic division are not political and if by themselves they're polarizing, then we're too far gone already.
So what could South Dakota and Wyoming's public health system be doing that's worse than Japan? I don't know the answer, but it's not clear to me at all that the difference is in their government responses vs. some aspect of their initial situations.
I gave deaths per capita because that's the probability that someone in that state will have died of coronavirus, which is what most people care about directly. Your (deaths/people)/(people/area) has no corresponding direct significance. To then call that "the relevant number" overstates the importance of population density, and also models population density badly when it's non-uniform (as you note for NYC). I agree that population density is an important factor, just not as determinative as your post would seem to imply.
Oh, and looks like you quoted my post before I edited it, sorry. But I believe false confidence is polarizing and would like to see less of it, as uncomfortable as the true uncertainty may be.
I'm saying I believe their numbers are inaccurate because they're undertesting and stats I could use to validate them (overall number of deaths to calculate seasonal excess mortality) are also currently inaccurate for unrelated reasons. I agree that the number of deaths will be impossible to hide in an open society like Japan but for bureaucratic reasons it will take a while to compile and validate those stats before normalizing them enough to compare between years let alone nations. Until then, I'm not convinced and any argument based on Japan as an example is also suspect.
> To then call that "the relevant number" overstates the importance of population density, and also models population density badly when it's non-uniform (as you note for NYC).
Uhm, what? Deaths per million lumps Wyoming in with New York City, making it even less accurate to what people care about. Manhattan will not be reopening on the same schedule as some town on the outskirts of Fargo. Someone in the middle of a dense city does not face the same risk as someone whose closest neighbor is 2 miles away. Also, it's a virus. There's almost a century of medicine and public health expertise that shows that all things being equal, density is the dominant factor.
I thought ending quarantine is what people cared about. Your false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US is not helping. Population density is why NYC and Wyoming aren't comparable yet you're trying to compare another country.
And I'm not sure what you think is my "false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US"? I certainly don't believe Japan's response would work equally well in NY, considering that NY applied stricter measures and ended up with 200x the death rate. I believe the susceptibility of individual regions to the coronavirus varies greatly with factors we don't yet understand, including population density, cultural and behavioral factors, weather, maybe air pollution, maybe genetics. I'd guess these factors explain much more of the variation in mortality by region than variation in the governments' responses, though I'm not sure.
And you're missing my point about deaths per capita. That's an intrinsically meaningful number, because people care about the probability that they die (or get seriously sick, etc.). Other numbers are valuable only to the extent they predict something people intrinsically care about. Population density is one such input to the prediction, but it's clearly not the only factor, and your simplistic focus on that isn't useful.
There are a thousand factors but my bet is that Japan experienced SARS firsthand and just like South Korea or Vietnam, they learned their lesson. It became the epidemic case study for public health officials and doctors in the entire region (and Canada). Regulators went out of their way to make reporting easy and doctors were all trained to look for and treat viral respiratory diseases early. Wearing masks went from being an oddity to wide spread cultural acceptance. For those reasons, you can't compare the effectiveness of measures in California to those in Wyoming using Japan as a measuring stick.
There are far more differences between Japan and California than there are between California and Wyoming. The latter share their language, the majority of their healthcare regulations, political differences, the CDC, and so on. Right now, traveling from Japan to Wyoming is practically impossible but traveling from California to Wyoming is a medium length road trip or one hop in a a tiny plane with zero enforceable travel restrictions.
> Even if Japan's death count is understated, there is zero chance that all of Japan's medical staff and press have somehow failed to notice and report NYC-level mortality.
I'm not an expert on Japanese culture but I've got enough first hand experience to know that is a failure of imagination and the definition of false confidence. Read about Tepco, the Japanese nuclear regulators, and the series of unfortunate events that led to Fukushima containment failures. It was a systemic failure that shares many parallels to Japans's coronavirus response.
> And I'm not sure what you think is my "false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US"? I certainly don't believe Japan's response would work equally well in NY, considering that NY applied stricter measures and ended up with 200x the death rate.
You (imo) falsely believe that Japan's death rate is accurate (let's wait a few months for accurate general morality). You also falsely believe that their death rate can be used to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of measures in the United States. I'm not sure about the former but certain about the latter. New York had "stricter" measures based on cultural expectations that were practically cultural norms in Japan. There is simply no baseline or control group possible between the two demographics.
> I'd guess these factors explain much more of the variation in mortality by region than variation in the governments' responses, though I'm not sure.
There is less variation within nations than there is between them. That's why they became nations instead of going to war amongst themselves (modulo some geopolitics that apply to the Middle East and the Balkans, not Japan).
> And you're missing my point about deaths per capita. That's an intrinsically meaningful number, because people care about the probability that they die (or get seriously sick, etc.). Other numbers are valuable only to the extent they predict that. Population density is one input, but it's clearly not the only factor, and your simplistic focus on that isn't useful.
People care about ending the quarantine. The quarantine will end based on public health policy. Public health decision makers aren't basing their decision on deaths per capita, they're basing them on localized deaths per capita, which depends on the density in each city, metropolis, and states.
I honestly don't even know what point you're trying to make. Are we trying to end the quarantine or are you trying to make some ideological point?
So I'm asking why they're different. You make a lot of statements, most of which are true but which don't specifically explain that difference. For example, you state that Japan's doctors have experience with SARS, and they do; but how is that helping stop the spread? What are they doing that Americans should copy? It's not the contact tracing, except for that ~20% reduction in R at best--and if deaths are undercounted, then they're missing an even greater share of the infections.
And then you seem to say that Japan and NY can't be compared anyways because they're so different? I agree they're different in many ways; so why not think about all those factors, and what we can learn from them? Would a heavy public campaign training people to correctly use masks (and enforcing their use) have brought us to Japan-level mortality with a Japan-level lockdown? Imagine the lives (and jobs, and hours of children's education) that could have been saved if yes. I agree that Japan has very different cultural norms, and those might explain much of the difference. So what are those norms, and how can we adopt them?
Or maybe the dominant factor is neither masks nor lockdowns but weather, and there's nothing in our response that could have helped? Maybe it's something about our speaking habits, and language really does directly make a big difference? That last one is deliberately outlandish, but I'm not even totally sure it's false.
The point I'm trying to make is that we know very little about this disease, and what we do know is confusing and contradictory. Unfortunately, most people seem to have latched onto preferred simple explanations, disregarding the evidence that doesn't support them. Given the earliness of our knowledge here, I believe that's likely to cause important opportunities to control the disease to be missed, and therefore harmful.
And following up to note the above is wrong--assuming heterogeneous spread (most patients infect no one, but a few super-spreaders infect many), contact tracers will naturally find those super-spreaders disproportionately, with disproportionate benefit. I still doubt that's the dominant difference, though.
No, it wasn't, Seattle was.
The post I responded to specifically said initial epicenter. The post claimed that it was "disingenuous" to include NYC in statistics because, since they were the "initial epicenter", they basically didn't have any warning. Since NYC was not the "initial epicenter", this claim is false; they did have warning and it is perfectly fair to include them in statistics.
New York saw the curve decline start consistently in the beginning of May. Metrics are defined for reopening and that is in progress.
Armchair quarterbacks get the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but at the time the scope wasn’t understood and officials were worried about the impact of shutting down school breakfast/lunch programs, etc.
Places like South Dakota and Wyoming are lucky, there’s less people in those states than in my upstate NY county, and they aren’t big travel hubs. No surprise there. With other places, you should hold judgement until time has passed, the data is pretty awful in places like Florida. With political factors involved, you won’t know impacts until you have good vital record data re deaths.
The liberty argument is bunk, protecting the general welfare of the people is a core tenet of US governance. We were headed to a recession already and may be heading to a depression, but the rationale behind the lockdowns was the preserve life, and it worked.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-sent-recovering-corona...
I am not saying we should not "take coronavirus seriously" as you say. I do. But after taking it seriously I still see the current lockdowns in the US as counterproductive. Even if we could get this genie back into the bottle 3 months ago (which is not a given), you cannot now. Many states are open and people travel. Instead of forcing wide lockdowns we should focus on supporting those at high risk or worried and let others back to leading normal lives.
My 2c, no offense intended.
If your family lives in elder supportive housing, there has been plenty of no visitor policies. Regardless, if you don't live in the same house with your family, visiting them may not be following the policies.
Without those things, we risk the NYC/Italy situation where the health systems locked up and you had mass death from COVID plus excess deaths due to the overwhelming hospital demand.
The risk factors are pretty widely applicable. The strategy of old people, overweight men, etc getting “support” isn’t going to work.
I could list commonly worn clothes and shoes that are more uncomfortable then mask.
I feel like that needs to be WHEN not IF. It's not an easy decision and I'm glad I'm not in any position to make it. But certainly, it's when, not if.
Unfortunately history so far has shown that tuition is surprisingly immune to what I would consider severe shocks to the rest of the economy. So I watch in shock as the price continues to skyrocket...
The university I went to (USC) required that all students had to either submit proof of insurance or pay additional fees as part of their tuition to join the university's health plan. Not having health insurance was not an option if you wanted to enroll.
(This was about 15 years ago, though I just checked and they still have this policy.)
Maybe slightly more, but not drastically so. About 15 per 100,000 college students die each year from alcohol --- poisoning, motor vehicle accidents, other alcohol-related accidents. Compare to a death rate of about 30 per 100k people aged 18-35 infected with COVID-19 (and it's much lower in the 18-24 set than the entire 18-35 group, but we don't have a good number for how much lower).
And it's not like 100% of students are going to catch it in an academic year (some have already had it, herd immunity, etc).
I worked as an RA - it was my job to enact policies addressing various risks facing the student body - and my perception is that extreme overreaction was the norm.
But then you act as if I said they were all alcohol poisoning, when I was pretty explicit about the number.
Fatal alcohol poisoning (actually this is a number for unintentional poisoning in which alcohol is involved, so it's a tad broader than pure alcohol poisoning) in college is about 4 per 100,000 annually, for clarity. It is possible that the COVID-19 death rate could be lower than this in the college student cohort for 2020-2021.
> and if the incidence were anything like 15 out of 100000 college students per year, the news would be full of such stories.
K.
Your point re: colleges with few students with cars is a good one, but survey data indicates that more college students aged 18-21 and 21-24 drive under the influence than the general population 18-21 and 21-24.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2020/05/29/cor...
The US military initially barred any coronavirus survivor from enlisting, for life, regardless of how long ago or their current health. That's something they never considered doing for the flu. They've since walked back on that, and I can't help but wonder if it's because they realized it would exclude too much of their potential recruitment pool.
The vast vast vast majority of young people with coronavirus don't have any of those long-term side-effects. Most of them don't get more than the sniffles, if any symptoms at all.
If you've looked at the anecdotes about how readily the virus spreads, you'll realize that avoiding people until a vaccine is ready is ridiculous. The public health plan, all along, has been for most people to get the virus, but at a slower rate ("flatten the curve"). Being this deathly scared of the virus for that long just isn't a feasible plan.