HSU and Universities Reopen: A Covid "Recipe For Disaster"

Colleges "welcoming back" students are already losing control.  5,500 students returning to North Carolina and beginning big parties "the next day" is just one example.

Some civic leaders are starting to speak out:

Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker called the University of Virginia’s plan to bring students back to campus a “recipe for disaster,” one of many local officials expressing concern that they are essentially powerless in preventing college students from spreading Covid-19 and their towns will be left “cleaning up the fallout.”

That pretty much says it.  While a number of universities are suddenly stopping the need for students to return by going digital, others are taking advantage of attention to controversies over reopening K-12 to sneak their students back and reap the fees.  Despite all the "innovations" that look like they will make campus life very strange and stressful, the pattern is the same most everywhere: universities reopening without sufficient testing are placing the responsibility for preventing virus spread mostly on students.  And when the predictable happens, the universities will simply blame student non-compliance, and pocket the fees.

Here on the North Coast it seems to be pretty much a fait accompli, with complete silence from local media and public officials.

And yet (I repeat):

Cancel College is the title of a piece in the Atlantic, subtitled Reopening universities will accomplish little and endanger many, by contributing writer Yascha Mounk:

Noting that many colleges will be bringing students back in the next few weeks, "if colleges go ahead, they will endanger the lives of students, staff, faculty, and those who live in the surrounding communities. Reopening colleges is the wrong thing to do." Noting that many universities have come up with innovative plans to respond to the Covid crisis dangers, But these plans all founder on the same basic problem: Most college students are at an age when the urge to socialize is especially strong. Whatever the rules may say, young people will have parties, hook up, and leave campus to have fun."

"And the consequences if—or rather when—the coronavirus starts to spread will probably be disastrous. As a Harvard University official told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell back in March, “The dorms are cruise ships.” Even if sophisticated testing uncovers a case of COVID-19 within a few days of a student contracting it, that student is likely to have come into contact with dozens of others in the intervening days."

And here is the point I've been trying to make about Humboldt State University (where, by the way, there will be no testing) importing up to a thousand students into the city of Arcata, with a non-student population of perhaps 7,000:

"If colleges reopen, kids from parts of the country with high case counts will, inevitably, travel to parts of the country with low case counts—and bring their home-state problems with them. This is why the biggest threat posed by reopening colleges is not to students, faculty, or staff, but to the surrounding community."

This is the chief danger here--students in the precise age group now harboring the most infections, coming from parts of California with much higher infection rates (HSU has recruited heavily in southern California.)  Most of them will live together in dorms, with many opportunities for super-spreading, while others live in the community, and they all socialize together.

 All this, despite the fact that there will be only a few in-person classes any of them can attend.  The California State system is entirely virtual this fall semester--only cash-strapped HSU sought and received permission for a few labs and other in-person classes.  Still, most of these students can do most or all of their classwork from hundreds of miles away.  They just wouldn't be paying for dorm rooms.

So it is astounding to me that this is not a local issue. No public official to my knowledge has questioned it. The local media, such as it is, has not raised it in any significant way.  Public Health and government have nothing to say about it, but then, they are never asked.

Meanwhile, HSU students are already arriving.  I've seen clusters greeting one another on the street, none wearing masks and with no physical distancing.  What could possibly go wrong?