
Cambridge University: All lectures to be online-only until summer of 2021 - timthorn
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-52732814
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tonyedgecombe
If I was a student about to start I'd probably delay for a year on this news.

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thu2111
That seems extreme given that in Switzerland almost everything is now
reopened. The UK has it worse but mostly because of care homes; for
universities there surely no difference given the virus didn't affect the
young.

I wonder what Cambridge students think of that. I'd be pretty furious.

~~~
joe5150
Students are generally pretty young, but staff and faculty are not.

~~~
thu2111
But something like 90% of the deaths are over 65s, so the vulnerable
population is retired anyway.

And that's ignoring the whole of/with confusion, so the numbers are certainly
much lower than that. E.g. I was told my former nanny died of COVID during
this crisis. But she was 95 and had previously had a stroke, so, it's kind of
arguable what the final cause really was. It had to be something, at that age.

And anyway, are the staff also going to stop researching completely until
2021? Somehow I am skeptical of this!

~~~
dragonwriter
> But something like 90% of the deaths are over 65s

Eyeballing the CDC numbers, it looks closer to 80% of deaths; also, deaths
aren't the only serious adverse impact.

> And that's ignoring the whole of/with confusion

The of/with confusion you describe, to the extent it might really be an issue
of significance, would further _reduce_ the share of COVID-19 deaths that come
from the over-65 group, since the of/with confusion would be higher in that
group than younger groups, as your own description (“it had to be something at
that age”) implies, further undercutting the point you try to make with your
exaggerated description of the concentration of deaths in the over-65 age
group.

Also, in any case, its not at all uncommon for people to work past 65,
especially in fields that aren't particularly physically arduous; over-65 does
not imply retired, even approximately.

~~~
thu2111
As nearly all deaths are in the over-65 age bracket, reducing them
significantly (to account for of/with confusion) just means it isn't
especially dangerous to anyone regardless of age, relative to other risks. It
thus doesn't undercut my point - that students may well be rather upset about
this given that there are many risks involved for lecturers in just driving to
the lecture theatre in the first place, for instance. It's all about relative
risks.

Hence the pertinence of the question: do Cambridge academics plan to also stop
going into labs and doing research? Or just (in effect) stop teaching.

~~~
dragonwriter
> As nearly all deaths are in the over-65 age bracket

They aren't. ~80% isn't “nearly all”.

> reducing them significantly (to account for of/with confusion) just means it
> isn't especially dangerous to anyone regardless of age

No, it doesn't. If the deaths in that group were 50% overcounted due to
if/with (ignoring that all the serious analysis suggest official death counts
are under, not over, counts), and 25% in all other groups, it'd still be
dangerous (with 55% of the death count) and much less focussed on the over-65
category (8:3 over/under-65 instead of 4:1)

~~~
thu2111
The numbers I've seen are different: more like 90% over and more importantly,
something like 80%-90% of cases with confounding co-morbidities (the original
Italian figure was something like 12% of people with no co-morbidities).

I mean I think you need to review the data because your argument is just
strange. Look at the EuroMOMO data for instance:

[https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/](https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-
maps/)

In the 16-64 age group excess death per week went up by a total of about 1000
more excess deaths for _multiple European countries aggregated_ than e.g. the
flu season of 2017 or 2018. The total population in these graphs is over 100
million so this is practically meaningless, it's not a sign of any kind of
danger. The numbers don't start getting (relatively) big until the 65+ age
group, and even then, they're still not big relative to the actual population
sizes in question. Only prior flu seasons.

That's excess death. W.R.T. deaths coded as COVID there's also the somewhat
newer problem of nonsensical COVID death reports, caused by repeatedly relaxed
standards for reporting. At first you needed to have clearly died of the
disease. Then anyone who tested positive and died was reported as a COVID
death, leading to stories of "COVID deaths" of people with terminal leukemia,
alcohol poisoning, etc. That's the of/with issue we're discussing. Then the
standards were relaxed again to allow mere suspicion of COVID to be reported
as a COVID death. This has been happening around the world, e.g. in France:

[https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-
nomb...](https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-nombre-
officiel-de-morts-en-france-est-il-surestime/502/)

"a positive case in a residence immediately transforms all of the people in
the residence into "confirmed cases", which will therefore be counted in
COVID-19 statistics .... if a resident (or an employee) coughs, all the
occupants of the residence become “possible cases”, and are counted in
COVID-19 statistics."

In the USA it's even worse - hospitals started being paid more money if deaths
were coded that way; at a time when they badly need the money.

So the numbers here are really quite meaningless but what we can say, is that
neither Cambridge staff nor students are in any great danger from this, unless
they are really quite old but by then of course, many different diseases and
problems are a danger to them and simply tripping on the steps of the lecture
hall could also create a dangerous situation. So they would need to be quite
careful even in normal times.

