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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

All the students are going to be sent home soon to visit their old folks at Christmas, what could possibly go wrong?

Yes, an absolute disaster and they're going to blame it on Xmas instead of the actual cause, sending the students home. And then, they're going to let them go back again 2nd week of January :'(.

And not a single newspaper is reporting about it. The media should be shouting from the rooftops day after day that the 2nd wave was caused entirely by universities reopening and yet instead they regurgitate these releases from ONS blindly.

We could have reopened schools and accepted the small increase in actual cases, kept unis online only. But by reopening schools and universities, with the two events so close to each other they compounded and caused the 2nd wave.

As a small ray of hope, I know people who work in both the unis here in Notts and they're taking it very seriously and doing mass testing before they send them home, as well as staggering them being sent back. Hopefully other unis are too.

I've heard that one of the reasons Notts infection rate shot up so high compared to nationwide is because Nottingham University were aggressively contact testing with their own labs and found many more asymptomatic cases than the national government's shambolic track and trace system is presently achieving.

That's interesting - your final paragraph implies that there's a perverse incentive for local authorities to discourage testing to avoid being locked down..

Thats really interesting, but I dont see how staggering helps. Seems better to use entry/exit quarantine. Like, online learning during the first week and last week of the semester.

Staggering helps a bit as it will mean some people who were asymptomatic become symptomatic before they go home, and they can't realistically police a quarantine of something like 60,000 - 80,000 students, of which something like 70% live off campus.

I'm not sure of the exact figures, I think Nottingham Uni has like 45k students and Nottingham Trent has about 25k.

The other thing is that the official "Nottingham City" boundary is actually quite small and has only 320k residents and I'd happily bet at least £50 that the official government figures don't include the students as residents which is why Nottingham has such a high "cases per 100,000" because the true population count is something like 25% higher than the the "official" one, artificially inflating the proportional cases count.

I think the UK government realised its mistake, and is trying to unwind it as safely as possible.

"From 3 December to 9 December, which will be known as the ‘student travel window’, students will be allowed to travel home on staggered departure dates set by universities, who will work with other institutions in the region to manage pressure on transport infrastructure.

The student travel window will mean students can travel having just completed the four-week period of national restrictions, reducing the risk of transmission to family and friends at home.

Universities should move learning online by 9 December so students can continue their education while also having the option to return home to study from there."

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/christmasguidance-set-out...

This is great. I like that the policy is named the ‘student travel window’ rather than ‘staggering’, which would be a good overall summary.

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