Yes, they can, and do. And they are overwhelmingly likely to have nothing more than a mild illness. The danger has been drastically exaggerated.
In the US, fewer than 300 people under the age of 25 have died from Covid:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Moreover, when you look at the data, nearly all of those deaths have significant co-morbidities.
So even assuming that the personal danger is acceptable (which isn't a given; 300 deaths sounds like a horrible and avoidable tragedy to me) death figures among healthy 20-somethings don't capture the full risk of keeping a university open.
Well now you're shifting the goalposts.
The comment was that the students are at risk. Someone shows you that they're not at risk, and you pivot to danger to "townsfolk".
Here's the thing: those students don't just disappear, and they don't stop interacting with other college-aged students, townsfolk and employees simply because they're not at school. And if you want to protect parents, shipping their kids off to live on their own seems like a better way to do that than to have those kids living at home.
(As far as "avoidable tragedies" go: during the same period that those 300 kids died of covid, literally thousands died of all other causes. More died of accidents than died of Covid. I think it's time to admit that your sense of concern is mis-calibrated.)
Assuming they're not stupid, evil, or politically conservative, the students are probably concerned about the risk of spreading the illness and the attendant harm that could cause, as well as what it could do to themselves.
Is it a human right to have a job, venture to the grocery store, and see friends and family?
Now there could be debate about whether that new number is "acceptable" or not. But we shouldn't use the success of the quarantine-like policies to argue that quarantine-like policies are unnecessary.
This is an assumption, and it's a bad one. The paucity of deaths in young people is true around the world, regardless of lockdown policy. Sweden, for example, does not have a higher proportion of young people dying.
It is well established that physical distancing limits the spread of virus transmitted via respiratory droplets. If you refute that, I would require significant peer-reviewed literature on your side. https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...
It is also irrefutable that contracting COVID-19 carries risk - especially for high-risk individuals with comorbidities (yes, even young people)
Combined, I don't see how you can come up with a hypothesis where getting people together would somehow be equally as safe as keeping people apart.
Again, this is just one aspect that policy makers have to consider. There is also the economy, mental health, etc. I think having those discussions is very interesting - how much should we protect our health vs our way of life? There are very valid arguments against continuing the shut-down.
But acknowledging that social practices directly impact virus transmission is a necessary step to have meaningful discussion.
What assumption is that? I stated a fact that you can verify with a Google search.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...
Can you respond to the rest of the comment?
The study you provided does not support your claim that physical distancing works as it is implemented in the US (6 feet of separation).
> We found that the evidence base for current guidelines is sparse, and the available data do not support the 1- to 2-meter (≈3–6 feet) rule of spatial separation. Of 10 studies on horizontal droplet distance, 8 showed droplets travel more than 2 meters (≈6 feet), in some cases up to 8 meters (≈26 feet).
It's also likely Covid is spread by aerosols. There needs to be more research but it is very likely based on the details of superspreader events.