Cornell University – Important updates for faculty and instructional staff | Hacker News Reader

Cornell University – Important updates for faculty and instructional staff

covid.cornell.edu

21 pointsmalshe56 comments

Cornell (Faucci's alma mater) has always been ahead of the curve with COVID. The student culture is more communal than individualistic, the campus is relatively isolated in a small town near the Finger Lakes, and the emphasis is more on academics, rather than partying. Science, rather than fear and politics, has always been a core tenent.

> and the emphasis is more on academics, rather than partying.

[citation needed] My impression has always been that the Greek scene at Cornell is pretty… well, I'll go with "active"

tenet

Updated, thanks for the correction.

This is what a lot of colleges seem to be doing: in-person everything, but vaccinations either required or strongly recommended. Lots of places are also requiring or strongly recommending masks.

Personally this is what I'm hoping for. I'm all for staying safe, but the data shows that if you're vaccinated, even the Delta variant has a very slim chance of causing serious illness. Remote learning doesn't work well for me, and having events being cancelled / heavily regulated / remote is seriously impacting my social life. I don't want to seriously impact my work and social life just for the very slim chance that I'm going to get infected or infect others. Also, there is nothing stronger than the vaccine on the horizon and we have to get back to some semblance of normal eventually.

We do need to keep in mind children and immunocompromised people. But I'm not interacting with children. I do think colleges should offer limited online exemptions for immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable people, but then I'm not interacting with immunocompromisde people either.

Ultimately though, we have to see how this actually plays out for colleges. Because if Delta really is as dangerous as people are saying, or if there is a new variant, there's just no way we're going to avoid another lockdown. Look at what's happening in the South, where most people are unvaccinated - people are trying to pretend Covid doesn't exist, but the hospital system is collapsing and people who would have been alive are dying because there are literally no hospital beds. All I an do is hope that it's not.

> Describe the religious principles that guide your objection to immunization

How about no?

To recap: Cornell to reinstate in-person classes as the norm and will require vaccination.

Two possible exceptions:

1. Medical, will need a doctor to say so in writing

2. Religious, will need to answer in writing to:

    - Explain in your own words why you are requesting this religious exemption.

    - Describe the religious principles that guide your objection to immunization.  

    - Indicate whether you are opposed to all immunizations, and if not, the religious basis that prohibits particular immunizations.

I was surprised to see this. I wonder if the rubric for acceptances and denials would be made public. Once this door is opened, it seems hard to allow any mix of acceptances/denials other than 0/100 or 100/0 without opening up a whole different set of conflicts.

It seems reasonable though? I cannot think of any major world religions against vaccination, yet can certainly understand medical exemption in specific cases.

I'm a long-time NYC resident and there have been numerous controversies over the years regarding religious vaccination exemptions. Some seemed legitimate (from the other person's viewpoint) while other cases I personally know were anti-Vaxxers trying to get religious exemptions (without actually being religious.)

Except, in the second case, how do you decide if someone is being truthful or not w/r/t their rationale?

After a recent Measles outbreak, there was a major push: https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-us-news-health-religi...

I'm personally skeptical of religion in general. There are two religions mentioned in your linked article: Judaism and the Amish religion. That said, Israel has even encouraged Orthodox Jews to take the vaccine. As for the latter, I highly doubt there is any meaningful Amish contingent on campus. Like Cornell, I would also be hard pressed to empathize with an anti-vaxxer claiming religious reasons.

My point isn't that I empathize with any viewpoint, but that on paper it is impossible to decide this. It forces an administrator who doesn't personally know an application to decide their firmness of faith with minimal information.

An Anti-Vaxxer applying under a religious exemption doesn't list "Anti-Vaxxer" on their application.

Maybe true about campus, but there are a lot of Amish and Mennonites up there. Cornell has pretty big Ag and Vetinary schools. Would be surprised if there wasn’t some reachout there.

An interesting thing about the Amish is that they don't generally have a religious objection to vaccines. Low vaccination rates in the past in Amish communities have generally been due to concerns about the vaccines themselves. They might feel that the number and timing of the standard childhood vaccinations would overwhelm the child's immune system, for example.

These beliefs were wrong, but they were wrong due to ignorance not due to stupidity. So when, say, something like measles would break out in an Amish community that had low measles vaccinations the doctors treating it could explain why the reasons the Amish gave for not being vaccinated were wrong, the Amish would understand this, and they'd get vaccinated to help stop the outbreak.

But with COVID the Amish are giving the same stupid reasons that the social media disinformation campaigns are giving. That raises the question of where they got those reasons from.

Are there a bunch of Amish with smartphones surreptitiously hidden at the bottom of their sock drawers who sneak out to the barn to furtively access social media?

There are a few Christian sects against vaccination in general, but the only one most people are likely to have heard of is the Church of Christ, Scientist (not to be confused with Scientology, which has no problem with vaccination).

Some object to specific vaccines if they are made in particular ways, such as ways that involved tissue from aborted fetuses.

You might expect Judaism and Islam to both object that vaccines that use pork products (porcine gelatin for example), but they are both OK with it.

Here's some information on specific religions [1].

[1] https://www.vumc.org/health-wellness/news-resource-articles/...

> Faculty are not required to provide remote access or record lectures

I don't understand this. Harvard Medical School has the same policy (or rather, none of the lectures are recorded).

Why are schools asking students to choose between the health of their peers vs their grades and their potential futures? Even responsible people can get exposed to COVID, and this would be punishing students that decide to not endanger their peers.

This is why unlimited sick days make sense in big tech companies: if you're sick, please don't spread it to everyone else in the office.

The article also points out that only 1/4 of the classrooms are A/V-equipped. It might be a cost thing.

Yeah, webcams are prohibitively expensive for a University.

No. This is because remote learning makes these institutions obsolete and they're going to continue throwing their reputation around to try to prevent that.

Yeah exactly, because the only power of a university is that they keep the material they teach top secret. Just imagine if you could just go into a store and buy textbooks! What a crazy world that would be! Everyone would be a genius and have every degree imaginable!

That's the way its treated though; everyone assumes you don't know what you're doing if you haven't been to university because there's some top-secret stuff there that you couldn't have possibly found somewhere else.

Here’s a clue: _finding_ the material isn’t the problem.

Cornell already had a full school year last year without any breakout cases, proving that this isn't the real trade-off being made. If individual students get sick, of course, there are accommodations, but they are not to the detriment of the community as a whole being shut out of learning.

Schools historically have had vaccine requirements. For some reason (for better or worse), requiring students to have yet another vaccine feels more reasonable than a private company mandating it for its employees.

>> feels more reasonable than a private company mandating it for its employees.

Lol. As universities take money from students this more like the company requiring its customers to be vaccinated. Whatever gets needles in arms imho.

Sure, so the power dynamic is in students' favor to push back on something unreasonable, unlike with employees.

Leaving a job is easier than leaving a University IMO. Most don't accept transfers (especially when you've gotten to the 300/400 level classes.)

>> Cornell already had a full school year last year without any breakout cases, proving that this isn't the real trade-off being made

Could you elaborate on "full school year"? Honestly curious as a Cornell alum.

The Cornell Daily Sun mentions that many classes were fully virtual for those opting on-campus and that many students did school remotely for the year.

https://cornellsun.com/2020/10/14/remote-students-reflect-on...

The Academic Year notice was vague about open/shut: https://finaid.cornell.edu/academic-year-2020-2021-statement...

This year the main variant of COVID in the US is the delta variant which has an R0 of around 7. The main COVID variant last year in the US had an R0 of around 3. That makes staying COVID-free this year is much more difficult.

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Where are you getting your numbers from? That's way higher than what I've seen reported anywhere else and sounds quite off.

Institutions like this are profitable because of the status quo. Recorded lectures and remote learning threaten them to a great degree and they might not be able to afford all those overpaid administrators.

Go ahead and try to find Stanford CS lectures on the internet that aren't the annual Christmas ones.

If business was the main motivator, why would restaurants be operating any differently?

Restaurants don't hold lectures? You're going to have to rephrase what you're saying.

Stanford actually makes money from paid online courses offered through its Center for Professional Development, so that might be a reason why free lecture videos are harder to find.

However, besides the paid offerings, there still seem to be a number of free Stanford courses offered online via edX and listed at online.stanford.edu, and several lecture sequences are still available on youtube (intro CS sequence, AI, algorithms...) Several course web sites offer their written materials online as well (e.g. cs107e.github.io).

Neither paid nor free online courses are a threat to Stanford's (or any major research university's) business model of selling expensive education and credentials to students and their parents, and expensive (though cheap and very underpaid relative to industry) research to the government, or to other lucrative "university" businesses such as professional sports, medical services, property ownership of retail and industrial parks, etc..

Can you get a degree from them online though?

Let's be honest here... there are a lot of better lectures and books than college gives you available online, and with some piracy, even free.

Colleges now give you three things:

- access to college stuff, from professors to machines, labs, etc

- access to peers (networking)

- valid diploma that you can use to find jobs.

Scroll down to the "temporary accommodation for students" section. It seems to address these concerns.

>> our on-campus vaccination rate of 94% is higher than those other instances.

My work just had a "breakthrough" case. We are 100% vaccinated (military, no holdouts) but a fully vaccinated and healthy person nevertheless got symptoms and tested positive. They were better in a couple days but the incident is making us all think about any return to "normal" work. We may be safe, but none of us want to become a Delta carrier. (Funny story, their post-vaccine symptoms felt worse than their later experience with having actual covid.)

I agree and I feel like they are assuming that vaccination grants 100% protection against Covid-19.

It depends on the definition of protection. I think vaccination does give 100% protection from an individual being killed by covid. But there are people who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons and nobody wants to be the person who spreads it to them.

The number of vaccine breakthrough cases leading to deaths is rather low, but not zero. There have been hundreds of them in the US:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...

In the real world, 99.99% protection from a risk is 100%. This is medicine, not particle physics.

Saying 100% is a bad idea, because an endless stream of people are going to tell you it's not 100%.

Look back at previous HN conversations about anyone claiming their software is 100% fault tolerant, or that their datacenter has 100% uptime.

Saying anything about covid seems bad on HN. Just look at all the perfectly reasonable discussions that have been downvoted into grey status. Something organized must be happening.

Well, you could do your part by stopping saying 100%.

In the real world, the vaccines don't provide anywhere near 99.99% protection. There are some misleading stats which claim 99.9% protection, but the trouble is that they do stuff like including a whole bunch of deaths from the winter wave which ended before vaccines were generally available and ending before the recent Delta wave. Realistically you might be able to expect somewhere around 90% reduction in the risk of death which isn't nothing but also isn't close to 100%.

But it's only dangerous to be a carrier when you are amongst the unvaccinated, and those people have now made a conscious choice to expose themselves to the virus. At what point do we stop being responsible for other peoples' choices?

The exception is obviously the immunocompromised, but hopefully the booster shots will help to provide that group with some lasting immunity.

>>amongst the unvaccinated, and those people have now made a conscious choice to expose themselves to the virus.

What about those with immunological disorders that cannot handle any vaccination? What about the children?

Vaccines may not provide a good protection against getting and transmitting the virus, but if they provide a very good protection against any complication (which we know they do - even against known variants), why can't we return to normal? If it is downgraded to effectively a minor cold, why can't we live with it?

Let's say you have a child under 12 and an elderly immune-suppressed person in your house, the first of which can't be vaccinated and the second doesn't have much of a reaction to the vaccine. You, vaccinated, return to normal, and catch Delta. You are asymptomatic. You go home, and infect the child and the elderly person.

You can say that of any other disease.

During a pandemic [of that disease]? You bet you can!

[Edit: added a clause]

We'll probably all become Delta carriers eventually. It's highly contagious enough that any infection control steps you take are likely just delaying the inevitable. At some point we'll have to accept that reality and go back to normal, just like the human race has done with every previous pandemic for thousands of years. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing bad outcomes.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

i agree with this, but delaying enough may get us to a vaccine for delta without having to get delta. i wish more vaccinated people would get tested and participate in studies so we had a better idea of what the risk level is for long term organ damage. i'm assuming it's significantly lower, but i dont have anything to back that up with.

There will always be another variant. Most regular people aren't willing to put their normal lives on hold indefinitely in the hope that better vaccines might be available at some unknown point in the future. That's just human nature.

Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing bad outcomes.

The probability of getting post-Covid syndrome even after a mild case is ~ 20 %. Immunity against coronaviruses seems to last about a year. So in the present regime there's a 1-in-5 chance every year of having to deal with Covid sequelae, incidence rising, presumably, with age.

That's not acceptable. We need other interventions, like better ventilation, smaller gatherings & so on.

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