Too Little, Too Late: HSU Goes Ahead Despite Official Public Health Finding

Dr. Frankovich, Humboldt County Public Health Officer

While my two posts warning of the likely consequences of re-opening HSU appeared here, there was an exchange of several emails between Humboldt County Public Health Officer Dr. Teresa Frankovich and Humboldt State University President Dr. Tom Jackson, which was variously described as "testy"(by Lost Coast Outpost, which obtained the emails as public records) and "salty" (by the Eureka Times-Standard newspaper.)  

After Jackson failed to return her urgent phone call, Dr. Frankovich, Humboldt's public health chief, sent a long email. She ended it with with this summation (with my emphasis added): “I completely understand the enormous impact of this for all involved, including our local community and cannot tell you how much I regret that I do not see any way in which public health can support on-site instruction and dorm living at this time.”

She noted that testing capacity alone was insufficient. "These resources would clearly fall short in meeting demand for a large surge occurring in context of a return of students to dorms and on-site learning at HSU.. Robust testing with fast turnaround is essential to manage cases on campus that will inevitably occur and are very likely to occur quickly as we bring students from across the state to the area, many of whom are coming from places where disease circulation is vastly higher than ours. There will be positive students walking onto campus without question and congregate housing will increase transmission risk enormously. ”

Dr. Frankovich wrote that the return of students could overwhelm the county's current capacity for contact tracing, which the guidelines also required. "While we are managing our current caseload well, we are positioned such that a large number of cases occurring in a short time frame such as return to campus, would be a potential tipping point for overwhelming the system, risking wider spread of the virus."

HSU President Tom Jackson

But it wasn't Frankovich who was testy or salty.  It was Jackson in his email response.  His snark included suggesting Dr. Frankovich read the state's guidelines, which she had in fact quoted in her email, stating that the preconditions for reopening in the guidelines could not be met--the basis for her conclusion that HSU should not bring students back.

 He further accused her of "prejudicial statements" in regard to students from elsewhere as potential carriers, when the publicly available statistics from Public Health clearly show that the recent influx of cases in Humboldt have largely been driven by infections from outside.  And to ignore the data from places like southern California is entirely specious, rhetorical nonsense.

Jackson then threatens the entire community by asserting that if students can't live in dorms they would be released into the community where HSU would have less control over them.  This gives those of us living in neighborhoods into which students are currently returning an eye-opener, as if we needed one.  With the dorms monitored, are these places where the superspreader parties will be?

Jackson absurdly asserted that students are "county residents" even if they've been living hundreds of miles away, and made other rationalizations and arguments that had nothing to do with the Public Health Officer's analysis.  He chastised Humboldt County Public Health for not scaling up its resources sufficiently to accommodate HSU's reopening--the "I am not responsible" defense.

Jackson began his email stating that regardless of Dr. Frankovich's statement, HSU was going ahead with its plans to reopen, and imperiously demanded: "If you have any further plans to use your authority to obstruct this plan..., we must be informed immediately."  He ended his email: "I am copying a number of important individuals so they are aware of this email and its context."  That "important" individuals seems an unusual construction, unless of course you are trying to intimidate a public servant.

 By Dr. Frankovich's end of the week press conference, where for the first time she actually got questions about HSU's reopening,  she acknowledged that HSU's reopening was now a fait accompli and Public Health and the community would have to just make the best of it.

The Times Standard notes that over 200 students have already arrived, and that officially HSU now expects to house 800 students.  There was no number given regarding students to be housed in the community.

HSU is on schedule to be the only CSU school with in-person classes, estimated (according to T-S)  at more than 300.

T-S also notes that half the virus positives registered in Humboldt County this year have come in the past 45 days, and the past week has seen three new hospitalizations.  Most new cases, Public Health previously reported, were from the 20s age group.

This past week California became the first state in the union to surpass 600,000 officially registered covid cases, with as many cases since July 9 as the previous three months.  100,000 new cases were identified in just two weeks.  The death toll has nearly doubled in the past month. More than 1,000 deaths were recorded in just the past week.  California counties report a backlog of more than 300,000 tests.

HSU hurriedly made one important concession--on Friday the university added its own virus testing for incoming students. Before that, it wasn't going to bother. How robust or effective this will be is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't view it with a high degree of confidence.

So without an order from the Chancellor of CSU or an order from the Governor, Arcata and Humboldt County will be endangered by hundreds of outsiders--students and their families--coming in, who may or may not obey masking and social distancing laws--and somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 to 800 students in the dorms and going to class, with an unknown number of other students interacting with them in classrooms and socially, and returning to their housing in the community, interacting with grocery workers and others in Arcata.  But Jackson will get his dorm fees and tuitions.

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?

Nailed It: It's Kamala

President Obama said that Joe Biden "nailed it" with his choice of Kamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate, and of course I agree, having nailed this choice in mid June.  It always made the most sense politically, in terms of winning the election, and in governing.

Biden chose a Black woman, which brings an immediate jolt of energy and excitement.  He chose the most experienced in electoral politics who rivaled any others considered in breadth and extent of governing experience.  He did not lose a Senate seat, for the Democratic governor of California will appoint a replacement for Harris should the ticket win in November.  His choice is 55 years old, and so honors his announced intent to enable the transition to a new generation.  Though Harris has her critics, she has no obvious vulnerabilities to attacks from the AlwaysTrumpers that could stick.

So I greet this choice with a sense of relief and renewed confidence in Biden's acumen.  It also means that she passed the vetting process, which is very intense at this level, and includes the candidate's family.

Kamala Harris and husband after she was sworn in
as U.S. Senator by v.p. Joe Biden

This campaign will be like no other but there should be ample opportunities for Kamala Harris to exhibit those smarts and that smile, with a new story to learn by an eager electorate.  The first glimpses will come on Wednesday, when Biden and Harris appear together, presumably with their families: the very impressive Dr. Jill Biden (and she's Italian!), and Harris' spouse, entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff and his two adult children by his previous marriage, Cole (named after John Coltrane) and Ella (after Ella Fitzgerald.)

Kamala Harris is the child of immigrants, a father from Jamaica, a mother from India (get that birth certificate ready, K.)  Both parents were Civil Rights activists. They divorced, and Kamala and her sister Maya were raised by a single mother. There are tons of highly resonant stories there.

Joe Biden is a familiar figure but at the same time, the Biden haven't yet taken the national center stage.  And Kamala Harris and her family are new faces, with new stories.  In a country suffering from Trump fatigue and maybe a lot of buyer's remorse (as evidenced as well by the latest polling that shows no appetite for third party candidates), the appeal and power of new people to watch could be a big factor.  The campaign for the soul and perhaps the existence of the American republic begins.

Poetry Monday: Losing A Language

Losing A Language

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old remember something they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw

--W.S. Merwin

In one way this is a poem about the literal loss of a Native language. Human languages are dying all over the world--currently estimated at two a month.  Living in Hawaii, W.S. Merwin was especially concerned with Native Hawaiians.  He is interviewed in this documentary series called Language Matters which focuses on Indigenous Hawaiian language, and the people who are working to keep it alive. One of them is Arlene W. Eaton, the elder in the picture above the poem, a Native Hawaiian speaker who was forced to speak only English in boarding school.  For older generations of Native people throughout North America in particular, this is a familiar story.

But this poem can also be read as a testament by any elder in today's fast-changing world, when words of the past or their relevance, even in the dominant language, are disappearing.  It is harder to communicate any accumulated knowledge, especially about change over time.  It is harder to be heard, especially when few listen, and all that knowledge in those words is lost as well.  The loss of a language--literally or metaphorically--detracts from the world, and adds to its loneliness.