Reopening Schools

[Belsnickel]

(07-13-2020, 09:31 PM)michaelsean Wrote: The
My son will be a freshman. They will do in person until Thanksgiving and resume again in January. He certainly wants to go because he wants to play fall ball and see if he liked such a small school. He’s always wanted to go to OSU but his only options for baseball were small D3 schools. Find out if he lives it, and if he doesn’t he can transfer to OSU and play club ball. Ok but COVID, but COVID already robbed him of his senior year in high school. Kids his age are extremely low risk to almost statistically none so I’m fine with it.

The issue with reopening in the fall for in-person classes is that colleges and universities aren't just made up of the 18-22 year old undergraduate demographic. There are the professors, the staff, the administrators, and then you have the wider community. I'll use JMU, my school, as an example. When we have 29,000 students descend into the city and county from every state in the country plus a couple of other countries, they already bring with them illnesses that spread into the community. Call it the freshman flu, the college crud, whatever you want, we have something spread around in the fall semester every year. This is because those healthy 18-22 year olds may not feel it, but when they go to Target and Walmart to pick up stuff for their dorms and apartments, or go hang out in the cafe at the local Barnes & Noble, or crowd the local watering holes, they aren't isolating their contact to their fellow 18-22 year olds. Other members of the community come in contact with them and then it spreads.

This is the same story for every college town; I guarantee it. This is why I say that colleges and universities opening up in the fall for in-person classes are risking the communities, because the students aren't the ones at most risk. The people that work on campus, that shop in the stores, eat in the restaurants, drink at the bars, those people will be the ones hit the hardest.