Today's Colleges Update

Insider.com is not maintaining and updating a list of all colleges with problems.

There are numbers now for East Carolina: 17 students in isolated from a cluster in a dorm.

Colorado College has quarantined a dorm (over a single positive test). 

The University of Kentucky has 189 people in quarantine.

Iowa State has 175 students in isolation. 

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It's not clear how each school uses the terms isolation and quarantines, but at ISU "About half of the students are isolating in isolation rooms provided by the department of residence" presumably in isolated dorms too. I mention this because UNC ran into a problem when all its isolation rooms were essentially filled by Monday evening. 

It sounds as if ISU actually isolated all the people it says are isolated, they would be having a UNC-style problem.

But ... hmmm ... it seems like these places aren't being exactly clear or forthcoming or consistent about their numbers. Go figure.

Auckland News

I'm mostly posting these because the American legacy media seems to be awfully short on ... actual human reporters ... to cover news.

Auckland still has a problem: 6 new cases today.

They now have 5 hospitalizations from this outbreak.

They still have zero idea of the source. Do note that New Zealand quarantines everyone that comes into the country, and does have some cases that way. But the new outbreak popped up in the community with no connection to anywhere. Check out this chart:

The sense in which New Zealand had been doing well is the big gap between red spikes.

Please note that you need to be really careful with this chart because it is stacked. The most recent red spike looks like it's hit the 12-14 range in new daily cases. To compare this appropriately to the big spike in March, you need to get the number for the top of the red peak, say 76, and subtract out the blue peak on the same day, say 52, to get the number of red cases, which looks like it's about 24. So the current outbreak is about half as bad as what they were getting in March. That's not horrible, but it's comparable to the U.S. getting a fairly big spike this summer.

Also, for Utah students, note that Auckland has a population about 7 times that of southwestern Utah. And the whole country of New Zealand is losing their f***ing minds over a dozen new cases a day, when southwestern Utah, with one seventh the population, has beaten that every day for about 3 months.

Uh Oh

Michigan State has told students who intended to move into the dorms soon to stay home: all classes will be shifted to online.

East Carolina University has also found a COVID-19 cluster in a dorm.

Appalachian State University faculty approved a no-confidence vote on the school's chancellor over handling of COVID-19.

More College(s) News

The University of Notre Dame has suspended face-to-face classes for 2 weeks, with an option to extend that further. Students are not being sent home at this time. They have about 100 cases, and a 20% positive rate. Problem seems to be mostly in senior (you know, "legal") men. Who'd a thunk they might ruin it for everyone?

Also, Ithaca College has told students not to return to campus at all. Note that in the northeast, colleges don't typically start for a week or two.

The Wall Street Journal broke both stores about an hour ago.

More Colleges

University of Notre Dame: 58 cases

Bethel College: 46 cases ... roughly 10% of the student body

Troy State: 40 cases

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (where my old friend BL is a finance professor): attempting to contact trace a positive test that attended an off campus party

University of Alabama written up in The Washington Post for open bars on The Strip (this brought back memories of the before times, as I recall being a young faculty member after a football game in 1990 in one of the locations shown in photographs from this past weekend ... makes me glad I'm now an older professor in a tamer college town); University of North Georgia too.

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Honestly ... I'm feeling like some of these numbers could have been a lot worse. I do feel like it's clear-headed to realize there are going to be some cases. The real problem, and colleges are just like other hotspots, is when a growing epidemic exceeds fixed capacity allocated to deal with it.

The thing I worry about is the domino effect of shutdowns. In the spring, very few people were imagining colleges shutting down until the University of Washington did. Within about 3 weeks of that, they were all closed.

Two Observations About the New Zealand Situation

First, they still have no idea where the current outbreak came from. Importantly, they have all but eliminated the Americold facility where one of the early positives worked. Americold is cold storage warehouse for imported food, mostly from Australia and the U.S. It still could have come from Australia somehow, but the U.S. has been eliminated as a possible source because the strain of virus they found has never been in the U.S.

Second, journalists around the world are showing how clueless they actually are by focusing on the 4 week delay made to New Zealand's upcoming election. I think this is nothing more than Trump Derangement Syndrome: New Zealand is a parliamentary system, and the Prime Minister always has broad latitude to reschedule elections. This is barely news in New Zealand, where in a set of bullet points about the outbreak, rescheduling the election is second from the bottom.

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The Auckland outbreak is up to 69, and there are charts that give some scale to that in this live blog. Lab workers are putting in 12 hour days doing tests ... and that's with an outbreak that appears to be coming under control. It's not sustainable if it gets much bigger.

One More UNC Tidbit

As part of its preparations for COVID-19, UNC had set aside some dorm rooms to isolate infected students living on campus.†

As of Monday, 69 of 73 of those were full‡, and they were forecasting to be at capacity by Tuesday morning.

† My guess is that when UNC announces numbers for students in isolation and students in quarantine, that the only one they are allowed to isolate are those who got a positive test and who live on campus. Quarantine is probably for those who were exposed and tested negative, of for those who tested positive but who live off campus.

‡ My guess is that some of the rooms were multiple occupancy, since there are already well over 100 students in isolation.