
Students are returning to US universities in a unplanned pandemic experiment - sohkamyung
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02419-w
======
Pfhreak
It's tragic that the US has politicized this pandemic and decided that rolling
the dice with student lives is the right outcome.

~~~
m0zg
It could be "the right outcome". Consider the facts. Very, very few young
people die from this, almost none. Median age of those dying is something like
80. The virus is now endemic - it's never going away. We are not guaranteed to
have a vaccine, in spite of the valiant efforts by multiple companies -
there's no vaccine against any other coronavirus, and it's not for the lack of
trying. Hospitals are not overloaded right now. They likely will be, come late
fall/winter. So one could argue that transmission among the young, mostly
healthy people off peak of hospital capacity constraints is not the worst
thing that could happen. Done right, in fact, such transmission could be our
"get out of jail free" card, as long as we properly isolate the sick and the
elderly and maintain some semblance of hygiene and social distancing for those
at moderate risk.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
> there's no vaccine against any other coronavirus, and it's not for the lack
> of trying.

It wasn't economical to develop those. So far, coronaviruses were responsible
for either common colds (small impact) or MERS/SARS (which were quickly
contained to their region).

We're now facing one with a global scale, and high impact (to society & the
economy). Governments will pay for those vaccines to be developed, deployed
and used. And if it isn't as effective and needs to be reapplied every X
years, so much more economical incentive to develop a vaccine.

~~~
m0zg
> It wasn't economical to develop those.

It was, if you run the numbers. There's over a billion of cases of common cold
in the US alone every year, people have it 3-6 times a year, every year. The
economic loss is insane. If you want to target just the coronaviruses for
starters, 20% of common cold is caused by them. People with comorbidities and
weak immune systems die from common cold too. And yet we don't have a vaccine.
Nor do we have a vaccine against HIV for example. Vaccines are hard to do for
some things, and C19 could easily be one of such things. What I find
especially pernicious is that people don't realize that it's _not going away_,
ever. It's going to be seasonal now.

------
jurassic
A lot of universities may never reopen if they don't bring students back this
year. It's not surprising they're choosing to cash the tuition checks as long
as that remains a legal option.

~~~
Gibbon1
People are worried about what's going to happen when schools reopen. I'm not
because it'll blow up within a week. It's just not going to happen.

~~~
HarryHirsch
UNC Chapel Hill is back on-line after a week of in-person instruction. Four
clusters in dormitories. That was fast.

------
AtlasBarfed
The only possible good thing is it collects a large number of highly resistant
young people to speed herd immunity.

But really this is just greedy colleges being greedy.

------
rawfan
If universities were tax funded, they wouldn't have to endanger their students
now (and costs would be way lower, of course, as they are in the rest of the
world).

