The Bloomberg headline says it all: "Colleges With Covid Outbreaks Advised to Keep Students on Campus".
Last spring this was called "shelter in place" when the general public was asked to comply.
The Mass Illusion has been collecting quotes from students at universities around the country who are not happy about how their COVID/Fall semester is going.
Why pay attention to the Auckland outbreak at all? It's pretty small. It's half a world away. And what the heck king of name is Auckland anyway?
First off, since January, I've emphasized that the pandemic will have macroeconomic effects. Gee, did it ever.
Second, the whole process of an outbreak generates time series data that my macroeconomics students are trained to handle.
But those are generic reasons. The third reason, and the one specific to this outbreak, is that it will generate unusually clean data. New Zealand has been the most aggressive country in stamping out the virus, albeit temporarily. And this new outbreak in Auckland started with one guy, and then his family. New Zealand has had other cases while this is going on, but all of them are inside isolation facilities (you have to sit in quarantine for 14 days before entering the country). And the strain of the virus is one that has not been seen in New Zealand before, and is relatively rare in the rest of the world. So what they have is community transmission, in the wild, of a single isolated outbreak, in a developed country that's prepared for the worst.
Here's what's happened.
Once again, this is not just like the flu: with the flu, you don't have 10% of the infected being hospitalized, nor 2.65% being admitted to the ICU.
Paul Graham runs some simple numbers for how wealth taxes work.
The reason wealth taxes have such dramatic effects is that they're applied over and over to the same money. Income tax happens every year, but only to that year's income.
Everyone of a certain political stripe is talking about wealth taxes. They should talk more about what they’re going to do when that particular tax base is taxed away.
I am not sure how often this is going to updated (the last one was 21 hours ago), but Inside Higher Ed is live blogging news reports they get about outbreaks at universities, and decisions made about those.
Professors can be in on these things early, but ultimately, legacy media firms have teams of people to keep track of these things.
In this case, the New York Times now has a database of colleges and cases, so I won't have to do daily reports anymore. Here's their map:
They not looking at all of them yet (e.g., SLCC, CEU and LDS Business College are not in there yet). Here's who they say they're covering "The list includes public, four-year universities in the United States, as well as private colleges that compete in N.C.A.A. sports or are members of an elite group of research universities." That's about 2,100 schools.
What's amazing to me is that 600 of them refused to respond or have not made their numbers publicly available.
And, they have a number I haven't seen anywhere else before. They attribute 64 deaths nationwide to those 26K cases. That number is lower than probabilities based on the broader population would indicate, suggesting the obvious conclusion that most of these cases are in younger and healthier people.
BTW: there is no comparable database for clusters, but UNC is up to 10 now.
UPDATES
The map above is a snapshot from a point in time. But if you click through the link, they are updating the map there. For whatever reason, the U is not on the map, but it is in the database. Even so, it looks to me like the database itself is not updated rapidly. As with everything else in the U.S. involving this disease, centralized standards for reporting local level data don't exist.
It also doesn't help that some universities have not been forthcoming with data, Just today, the Arizona State system with over 100K students had to be pressured into releasing its first number: 161, and about a third of the student body tested. Honestly, that's not that bad (relatively speaking) so the next logical question ought to be why are they so uptight?
Let's start with the callous part.
I'll give you an example from the before times.
For principles students, I describe recessions with this metaphor based on nature documentaries. Workers are like a herd of antelope grazing on the savanna. The pride of lions lurking in the tall grass is a potential recession. The antelope are aware that lions can charge at any time. But the antelope do nothing until the lions charge, and then they run. When one antelope gets caught, what do the rest of them do? Go back to grazing a few yards away! Workers behave the same way: they don't prepare much for the recession, and when it starts and takes one of them (through unemployment) they mostly go on about their work as if nothing happened. In fact, it's pretty well known that when most people become unemployed, they get dropped by most of their former coworkers and friends. That's callous.
It gets worse. I tend to be an optimist. Several years ago, I surveyed students with a hypothetical: if one out of every 20 workers was let go, and you felt no threat, and maybe even picked up some hours, would you be OK with that? I was floored: almost every student said yes they would. I did that hypothetical a few more times in disbelief. Eventually I gave up and concluded that people are a lot more callous than I'd thought. Honestly, this callousness is probably the most shocking thing I've ever learned from the classroom.
**********************************
A firm did a survey across six countries. Here's what they found:
For most of us, 20% means someone in your household or your neighbors has had it. That's nuts.
For most of us, 9% means a couple of people on your block or in your building. That's worse than nuts. It also implies that people think it's 50/50 that someone who catches COVID-19 will die of it.
And the callousness is astounding: these numbers mean if someone said in public that "yeah, a couple people on my block have died, and Mrs. Jones next door has it right now, and it's about 50/50 for her" most people would not be surprised. Maybe I'm wrong (again), but I think people would flip out if others were dropping on their own block.
The reality is that about 1% of the population has had it. Here's how to interpret that: it could get up to 99 times worse than it has been so far.
And, the national rate of deaths is not 9%, but rather 0.04%. And plausibly we might get up to 99 times more deaths. That works out to about 1 person in every typically-sized college class.
Of course, I've already noted we'd be OK if that many people lost their jobs; perhaps losing a life isn't that different.
The University of Dayton is going online for the first week of classes.
The University of Connecticut has revoked student housing for violators recorded breaking social distancing rules. Baylor is threatening expulsion for violators of their policies.
Western Carolina University has a public dashboard. Most universities do not. The University of Tennessee is building one; they currently have 45 cases. Notre
Dame, which was the second school to take major action and the first to
go online for less than the full semester, has a dashboard and is now up to 408 cases. Texas Tech has a public one too.
Duke University (where football is not a big thing) will be playing home games in an empty stadium. East Carolina University, which had a cluster in a dorm last week, is going online on Wednesday.
The University of Iowa is reporting over 100 cases. VCU reports 58. Morehead State has 27.
The University of Kentucky violated everyone's privacy by leaving its database of student test results open to the public.
The University of North Carolina-Charlotte does not start for 2 weeks, but will be doing the first 3 weeks online. Dorm move-in will be at the end of that period.
UNC, which was the first university to shut down, is now up to 8 clusters and over 600 cases. Classes there are cancelled for today and tomorrow so that students can move out of the dorms if they want to.
Missouri State is up to 141 cases. They are not giving tests to everyone, so their positive rate on the tests they are doing is over 50%.
This is a rumor, but the University of Minnesota, with over 50K students on its main campus, is going to announce they are going online for 2 weeks and telling students to stay home. Interestingly, they already have 2/3 of their classes online (SUU had about 2/3 face-to-face a few weeks ago).
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (the big campus in their system) has a cluster in a sorority.
Temple University had a Zoom outage during classes this morning.
Washington State admits to a "substantial increase" in cases. No numbers.
Penn State has suspended two fraternities for violating social distancing policy.
***************************************
I did one of these reports Sunday night about 11 pm.
The above was all new 12 hours later on Monday morning. I got these from a Google search using the keywords "university" and "covid", with the option selected for just news stories within the last 24 hours. I went through 11 pages of links before I came across one from last night.
This is starting to look like some of those posts from February, where the news out of China, South Korea, and that cruise ship, was coming in every few minutes.
It's now readily apparent that a major cause of the high rate of COVID-19 deaths in the spring, and a good chunk of the high rate of death of seniors in the U.S. overall is due to crazy policies at the state level.
More specifically, 4 states required nursing homes and long-term care facilities to accept patients from hospitals that had been treated for COVID-19. These policies were in place from March through April or May, in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Here's the chart from Political Calculations:
Further, these states got their total deaths to flatten around the time they rescinded this policy:
Those 4 curves represent about a third of all deaths in the United States from COVID-19 since the start of the year.
Political Calculations, using data on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, estimates the world economy is down about 7% from a year ago (mostly due to COVID-19 and lockdowns).
Inside scoop is that the U has some cases already, but an official announcement is coming on Monday. I have heard some numbers, but I don't think they're official (beyond the 3 they confirmed on Friday). Westminster also has 1 in the dorms.
A frat house at Georgia Tech has been quarantined.
Towson State (a 22K student commuter school in the Baltimore suburbs) is doing all classes online temporarily. Northern Michigan University too.
Syracuse and Purdue are using extensive suspensions to control students behaviors.
Since March, politicians and the media have been telling us that emergency government spending averted a far worse economic crisis than we’ve had.
This is a pure Keynesian argument, made by both parties.
There is also a non-Keynesian argument that the spending was necessary because it kept people from working in situations where they could contract COVID-19, and generally kept the circular flow moving with a bunch of people not working in it.
These two are often conflated.
Scott Sumner writing at EconLib notes that he’s OK with both of those … except that the first one has an accepted theoretical transmission mechanism that’s explained in most texts. Most of you know this: fiscal policy is supposed to put more money in the hands of those who can and will spend it, and this makes the economy improve.
Here’s the catch. How much shopping did you do these past 6 months? Yeah … I thought so. Your behavior sounds contractionary to me, not expansionary.
When we look at the aggregate data for 2020 II, instead, what we see is RGDP went down by a lot, but the less noticed NGDP went down by even more. Those are consistent with massive deflation, which makes sense given what you’ve probably seen with prices of non-essential items. But disposable income went through the roof. That’s the stimulus from D.C.
Plausibly, if everyone was working less, RGDP would go down. But if everyone had more disposable income to chase after those fewer real goods, prices should have gone through the roof. They didn’t.
To Sumner, this implies that the stimulus was just throwing money at people who didn’t have much to spend it on, or interest in spending.
Personally, I know in my household, we’re still working, and still getting paid the same amount. Our overall purchases are down a bit … and the stimulus check went to paying off outstanding bills for things we’d already consumed (like fixing and rehabing a broken arm that was on a payment plan, or paying off the rent to get out of the lease for the kid who fled SLC when the U shut down). Those keep the economic wheels turning, but they are not stimulating.
There’s a new working paper out. Here’s the facts they want to look at:
Unlike what you see in the media, they try to explain this using regression analysis and a lot of possible covariates — focusing on ones shown to track racial disparities. They use zip code level data from 6 large metropolitan areas (including New York City, which was hardest hit).
Here’s what they figured out:
Sooo … something is going on to transmit the disease in minority communities that we haven’t figured out yet, but once infected race doesn’t seem to matter much. This suggests we need a lot more community outreach among the well.
You can read the whole thing, entitled “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19: Evidence from Six Large Cities“.
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on death rates for the young broken down by race entitled "Covid-19 Deaths Skew Younger Among Minorities" Turns out the chance of a young (under 44) minority dying is higher than the probability for an elderly (over 85) white person. It has good charts to chew on. Unfortunately, those charts do not correct for other risk factors. That's important for a number of reasons, but what jumps out to me is that black and Latinex seniors are more likely to die than whites even though all of those are served by the same universal healthcare system (Medicaid).
You can probably learn quite a bit from a higher level article in MedicalXPress entitlted "Genome sequencing tells us the Auckland outbreak is a single cluster—except for one case". It discusses why identifying strains is important, and how contact tracing helps. Then uses that to discuss what they can surmise about the origins of the recent outbreak there which are still a mystery.
The Wall Street Journal also had an excellent piece today on the production of paper towels. If you're wondering why they are still in short supply, the answers are in here. Paper towels are a lot more complex than you think ... and I can't think of an apocalyptic movie, TV series, or book that noted we run out of those fast.
.
North Carolina State gave up: all undergraduate classes go online next week. Drexel in Philadelphia too.
The University of Pittsburgh has temporarily suspended face-to-face classes. Oberlin College has done the same, but the blame testing delays, not positives.
*******************************************
Oh ... and ... I've seen the rules for music students at the U.
They came out 2 days ago. Classes start in 3 days.
And they are extensive, and bizarre.
I am truly sympathetic to their situation, and I'd imagine that there's some sort of national accrediting organization that has suggested how music schools should go forward.
Having said that ... my impression is that they were written by someone who does not understand how musical instruments work. In particular, for woodwinds, they are very worried about the mouthpiece and the bell (the wider end), but not about the keys in the middle. But any player will tell you that the air they're worried about comes out mostly through the first open keyhole, and not through the bell at the end.
Anyway, music faculty, staff, and administrators really do have my sympathy. They are in a tough place. And students? What do you do? Take a semester off? IDK.
They have 2 new cases they can't trace to the ongoing cluster.
They also have people protesting the lockdown without social distancing. Seems we've been told that's all Trump's fault. Guess not.
Cold Spring Shops on the COVID-19 experiences of colleges and their students:
Is anybody really surprised that when you peddle the residential campus experience as a social experience, and the classroom stuff might be secondary, that people might take you up on the offer?
I hadn’t thought about it that way yet. But yeah … I do notice there’s a lot less outbreaks at commuter schools and community colleges — where students take their studies briefly and then head to home or work.
Not sure what that bodes for SUU, which is residential for about 5 nights a week, and then loses a ton of people to parents' home in St. George.
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.
***********************************
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
************************************
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.
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.
*************************************
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.
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.
UNC is putting all undergraduate face-to-face classes online by Wednesday at the latest.
They are working on plans to get some students out of residence halls and some to disperse for home.
FYI: UNC is both larger than the U, BYU, or Utah State, but it also has a higher proportion of students living in campus-related housing. And North Carolina is a more spread out state than Utah, so most students are in for a substantial move home.
No word on new clusters. They are up to 130 positive test results amongst students, 5 amongst staff, a positivity rate of 13.6% (up from less than 3% last week), 177 students in isolation, and 349 in quarantine.
*******************************
This might be a good time to reiterate that people need to stop the BS about COVID-19 not affecting young people much. We can put forth a lot of subjective opinions about why minorities are being hit harder, but the objective fact is that death rates for minorities aged 44 and younger are higher than for whites over the age of 85. For some minorities it's even those under 34.
*******************************
There's also an entire sorority house at Oklahoma State under quarantine after 23 members residing there tested positive.
Oh ... and there's a cluster on the Oklahoma football team.
FWIW: at the time that I write this, none of the news items linked above appear on the website of FOXNews.com or DrudgeReport.com. They are on CNN.com.
UPDATE: Between the time I wrote and posted this, and went back to another tab, DrudgeReport had gotten this news on their page.
(My apologies, but Blogger is blocking me from showing an image of that source). Here's a link to a twitter page showing a photograph of the print edition.
Also interesting is the campus map on the first page showing the location of outbreaks that were known at the time the paper went to press.
A new cluster has popped up in Auckland this past week.† They have a few dozen positives, and about a hundred people in involuntary quarantine.
This is important for a few reasons.
They phylogeny on the strain is primitive at this point. Keep an eye on Nextstrain's dashboards for further developments. Disappointingly, they don't say too much about this strain yet.
So, we've got an isolated country that's buttoned down tight, and very aggressive about limiting contact ... and they still got an outbreak. Reddit has some speculation on what might have happened.
† Auckland is the largest city in New Zealand. It is a bit smaller than the Salt Lake City consolidated metro area (the "Wasatch Front" to locals).
The main campus of the University of North Carolina opened this past week. They already have 4 clusters of COVID-19 in student housing: 3 in the dorms, and 1 in a frat house. The first cluster was reported 2 days ago.
A Faculty Executive Committee has scheduled a special zoom meeting for Monday to make recommendations about how to go forward. Due note that on most campuses, faculty have the least power to make things happen.
Like Utah, North Carolina has a uniform COVID-19 policy statewide for higher education. A representative of faculty at UNC has written to the state government asking for that to be rescinded so that decisions can be made on a campus by campus basis.
******************************
Clustering is significant, not because it drives total numbers up, but because it indicates a failure of systems in place (like social distancing, and better hygiene) to limit transmission.
The government's own records appear to show almost 42,000 people died with Covid-19 symptoms up to 20 July, versus 14,405 reported by its health ministry.
The number of people known to be infected is also almost double official figures: 451,024 as opposed to 278,827.
The data was sent to the BBC by an anonymous source.
It includes details of daily admissions to hospitals across Iran, including names, age, gender, symptoms, date and length of periods spent in hospital, and underlying conditions patients might have.
The details on lists correspond to those of some living and deceased patients already known to the BBC.
A level of undercounting, largely due to testing capacity, is seen across the world, but the information leaked to the BBC reveals Iranian authorities have reported significantly lower daily numbers despite having a record of all deaths - suggesting they were deliberately suppressed.
