Posted on by Californiacontrarian

The End Game ?

On 9/20/20 there was a long article in our local paper concerning Covid and local college students going back to college. The article was pretty well written but like most local articles contains a lot of the “emotional code words” meant to elicit fear and concern from the typical reader.( e.g. the title read, “Can UCSD Avoid Crisis Like That Seen at SDSU?) As best I can tell there isn’t a crisis at SDSU. SDSU has hundreds, approaching a thousand of positive Covid tests, mostly in minimally symptomatic or symptomatic students. To me a ‘crisis’ would be: “millions of people lose their jobs because of lockdowns” or “Covid is killing 10% of people infected” . . . Now that’s a crisis. Hundreds of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic students at SDSU is not a crisis.

As stated in the article: “Across the USA, as reported by the NYT, more than 88,000 college students and faculty have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began, with at least 60 deaths. (For us non-math individuals that is a morality of 0.072% . . . which by any standard is drastically low.)

What is the actual student and faculty risk from Covid? 

[The following is from a N.Y. Post article written by Dr. Scott Atlas:

“Science tells us that young adults are at extremely low risk for serious illness or death from COVID-19. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that only 0.2 percent of deaths have been in those under age 25.

That’s fewer than 400 deaths in a country of 330 million. That’s also fewer than the 407 from influenza, 4,685 from accidents, 6,759 from suicides and 5,540 from homicides reported in the latest National Vital Statistics report from the CDC.”

(A Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis recently summed up what the entire world’s data consistently demonstrate: The risk for children and young adults dying from the novel coronavirus is “almost zero.”)

Again from Dr.Atlas:

“We are already seeing the negative effects of students not attending school. Almost three-fourths of those aged 18 to 24 reported at least one mental-health symptom by the end of June. A quarter of that age group contemplated suicide in the previous 30 days.”

He continues, “Even most university faculty aren’t at significant risk; two-thirds of them are under 55; only 13 percent are over 65.”]

Back to the recent SDUT article:

“UCSD will have approximately 11,000 graduate and undergraduate students who will live in campus housing.” There is going to be an aggressive campaign of testing and quarantining students as needed on the UCSD campus. That sort of aggressive approach will work . . . for a while, but most are well aware that you can only keep the genie in the bottle for so long. In the fall and winter when students have had enough of being locked down, what do you suppose is going to happen. Certainly students will escape the confines of the campus, and they will figure out how to have parties outside of the purview of the watchful “student ambassadors.”

My question is what is going to be the plan then? What is the endgame here? If the present plan works, in a few months, there will still be many thousands of students on campus . . . the vast majority without immunity. When these students finally make their way out into the surrounding community, what happens then? If one is not in a nursing home or is not a health care professional, there will not be an available vaccine until well into 2021. Sticking a finger in the dike now may well work now, but when things get worse, what is the endgame plan?

Interestingly, I did not see this addressed in this long article. My suspicion is that there is no realistic endgame plan . . . Hmmm!

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