Thread by @cfishman

Three colleges in Atlanta — all HBCUs — announced today that they are reversing course:

They will be all-online for the fall.

The coronavirus outbreak has gotten to serious & uncontrolled in Georgia to safely reopen with in-person classes.

washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07…

2/ That link does take you to @washingtonpost story about those 3 colleges (the headline is for the WaPo covid breaking-news.)

Those colleges: Spelman, Morehouse and Clark Atlanta.

This is going to happen more & more, and shouldn't be subject to sniggering or 2nd guessing.

3/ Below is the chart of the course of the pandemic in Georgia.

One month ago, as Georgia colleges were planning, the average number of new cases per day was 1,000.

30 days later, it's more than 3x that, and rising.

(June 20 spot on the graph highlighted in blue.)

4/ These college & university decisions are devilishly hard—or seemed so 4 & 8 & 12 weeks ago.

The outbreaks in Florida, Texas, Calif, Arizona have in some ways made decisions easier.

You can't invite thousands of people from across the country to a campus surrounded by virus.

5/ The determination to reopen campuses — University of Miami has said it will reopen, along with Yale, the University of Arizona, Purdue, and dozens of others — that determination is part just that: Determination.

It's part wishful thinking. It's part marketing & economics.

6/ But it's also leadership & motivation.

College & university presidents knew 2 things:

1. They knew how fast you could shut a campus down. 5 days. 7 days. Thousands of campuses did that in March.

2. They knew how much work had to be done to try to reopen. A furious race.

7/ Any university trying to bring back students had to literally change every aspect of how a campus would run—from IT support to building ventilation, bathroom cleaning schedules to the way every subject is taught.

A summer was hardly enough time. A furious race indeed.

8/ What no one was predicting, on May 1 or May 15 or even June 1, as planning & reconfiguring got under way:

That the most populous US states would be having summer outbreaks unlike anything in the spring — 30 states with record daily cases, a dozen with record deaths.

9/ You could not have reopened a college campus this August or September without declaring you were going to try your darndest to do it, and then working hard all summer to try to make it happen.

And colleges do not control the communities, or the states, around them.

10/ University administrators knew that if they didn't try to reopen, they wouldn't. And they knew they could — with regret and a certain amount of pain — U-turn on a moment's notice, and say: The situation has changed. We can't bring people back under these circumstances.

11/ So in a week which may well see dozens of universities do what 3 just did in Atlanta, let's hold the mockery.

The administrators, faculty and staff at colleges & universities want everyone back on campus as much as the students want to be there.

12/ What did Anthony Fauci say, back on March 25, 2020 — a whole pandemic, or maybe even two pandemics, ago?

'You've got to understand that you don't make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline.…You've got to go with what the situation on the ground is.'

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