UMass Amherst Prohibits Students from Leaving Dorms for Walks | Hacker News Reader

UMass Amherst Prohibits Students from Leaving Dorms for Walks

nbcboston.com

25 pointssetgree23 comments

These universities are so pathetic.

They've taken every opportunity to make money regardless of safety, but at the same time are quick to lock students in their dorm rooms to "stop the spread".

Why exactly are students doing in dorm rooms in the first place? Because the administration decided "holy shit, we are gonna lose a lot of money unless we get these suckers on campus, paying full tuition".

Was there any point in the last year where living in a dormitory seemed like a safe or good idea? No fucking way.

But now the administrations says "holy shit, we have to do something about covid. I know! I bet if we locked all the suckers in their rooms, no one can say we didn't do anything!"

The dissonance is staggering.

I’m generally a proponent of strict measures. This is performative bullshit that will harm more than it helps.

For the foreseeable future, all UMass Amherst classes will take place remotely, and students in dormitories and off-campus housing are instructed not to leave their residences except for meals, COVID testing twice per week and medical appointments.

Which means they'll be refunding full tuition for anyone who would care to opt-out of the current semester, I presume?

Outdoors are safer than indoors.

This seems far more lucrative than private prisons. The prisoners actually pay to be there!

Prisons have started doing that, too.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/02/illinois-inm...

> A spokeswoman for the Illinois department of corrections, Nicole Wilson, said that an Illinois statute allows the department to “recover from offenders the expenses incurred by their incarceration”. She pointed out that all offenders are required to fill out a comprehensive financial disclosure form, which is reviewed by staff, with any decision to pursue assets made on a case-by-case basis.

"amid covid outbreak, ..." missing from title. It's a control measure to prevent a larger outbreak, and will only last until the 21st.

It’s a bad control measure that may weaken compliance with the good ones.

Half the population is too stupid to see that they need to comply with even the simplest masking, so I'm not confident this here is the reason we're failing to contain this in America.

I (OP) tried to put in the original title, but it was 2 characters over the limit, so I went with the key part (to my eyes). I think everyone knows that the context is covid.

I am outraged by this. We know that Vitamin D boosts immune response; we know that students are unlikely to comply with something so draconian; and we know that being isolated is really bad for mental health. Less coercive methods, like mass rapid testing, are available. I am confused and frightened that so many people seem ready to accept measures like this as necessary and inevitable. It's a shame.

Get a grip man, you're blowing things out of proportion, it's a fucking week long temporary measure due to an outbreak. It's not like they started chaining doors and shooting people for going out. Get a fucking grip.

The context isn't covid. The context is a recent increase in covid cases

This world is getting out of control. All of this madness for a mere 0.017% mortality rate, mostly in older people with existing conditions.

Give me my life back

480k/320M Americans gives a 0.15% mortality rate, and that’s incorrectly including tens or hundreds of millions who haven’t gotten it yet and thus don’t count in CFR/IFR.

Even by the most charitable treatment of your claim it’s off by a factor of 10.

Not for college age students. Which I assume was the ops point. In fact the op may be off by a factor of 10 in the other direction

Is this a troll? Surely a ton of people must a debunked those weak arguments to you by now. Be a lockdown skeptic, fine, but surely you can come up with something smarter than that?

Relax, the submission is a troll.

Why is it a weak argument? As a college student you are about 10 times more likely to die in a car accident. Are they forbidding their students from being in a car?

Of course the risk to the college student is low (although I call bullshit on your 10 times because you probably made that up). Catching the virus does not merely concern yourself; you spread it around everywhere you go if you’re infected. Surely, again as OP, you heard that a thousand time, so why are you ignoring it? I say that as someone who opposes what’s being done to student in the article here.

The mortality rate is roughly 1.7%. You took the result of dividing deaths by cases and added a percent sign instead of multiplying by 100 to get an actual percentage.

That number is actually 0.017 people die for every one person that gets it.

Really not sure why you’re being downvoted, 1.7% is the correct number per Johns Hopkins https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Also if op was trying to cherry pick lower numbers for certain populations that’s silly, like somehow during your college years you never interact with anyone older than 22. Also there’s many more negative outcomes to consider besides simply mortality rate.

IDFK... HN just likes to be weird sometimes. I don't think anyone actually read my entire comment about the obvious math error and just assumed I was siding with them?

With current numbers, 0.017 is not a percentage as someone correctly posted below, 1.7% is correct.

But who's to say there aren't actually 10x more cases than reported?

In any case I still find the numbers ridiculously low and not worthy of the hysteria.

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