Thread by @cfishman

Two more surprising sets of test results from universities bringing students back.

First: Cornell.

• 3,208 students tested
--> 3 positive for coronavirus

• 983 faculty & staff tested
--> 2 positive

news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/0…

2/ Purdue University, with 40,000 students, is requiring negative tests from every student before returning to campus — and mailing tests home to students. They sample themselves, during a brief video tele-health appointment — so the sampling is guided & observed.

3/ Purdue, whose president is former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, was one of the first universities in the spring to say: We're bringing students back if we possibly can.

Results:

• 15,444 students tested so far
--> 133 positive

purdue.edu/newsroom/relea…

4/ The fear, the quiet prediction, was that young people & college students in particular wouldn't take seriously the disease, the testing, the need to be careful & to be community minded.

Guess what?

College students get it — at least a lot of them do, in this first wave.

5/ To summarize, returning college student testing, to date:

Duke Univ
• 3,116 tested. 4 positive.

UArizona
• 1,200 tested. 1 positive.

Cornell Univ
• 3,208 tested. 3 positive.

Purdue Univ
• 15,444 tested. 133 positive.

Not one school found even 1% positive.

6/ That's no prediction that re-opening can be managed safely and successfully. That you can bring thousands of college students back to campus — even with rigorous rules and good compliance — and not have outbreaks.

7/ But no university official or observer who spent the summer watching this, planning and doing the work to try to reopen — none of those professionals thought you'd test 1,000 returning students and find just 1 positive.

8/ And this wave of 'return to campus' testing comes as another trend is also happening: Schools changing their plans and telling students to stay home.

9/ In the last 10 days, these schools decided it's not safe to have freshman/sophomores on campus for limited college life — told everyone to stay home:

• Stanford
• Princeton
• Penn
• Smith
• Mt. Holyoke
• Georgetown
• American U.

All reversing more optimistic plans.

10/ Some of those schools — Princeton & Penn, in particular — said their own communities were safe but the schools didn't want to bring back students from across the nation, from hotspots, & risk an outbreak on campus, or bringing the virus back to places that had quelled it.

11/ The usual reminder:

It didn't have to be this way. We didn't have to have a fall 2020 with no in-person school for elementary & secondary kids, or for college & university students.

We mismanaged this pandemic. We didn't set goals, didn't put public policy to those goals.

12/ This is, as a nation, our failure.

Let's not blame students or teachers, professors or univ administrators.

Just look again at college-student test results:

Those kids are taking the pandemic seriously. The partiers turn out to be a small group.

We owed them better.

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