16
votes
Researchers at Cornell University concluded that an online semester would result in more COVID-19
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Cornell researchers say in-person semester for university safer than online one
- Word count
- 1248 words
Direct link to the paper: https://people.orie.cornell.edu/pfrazier/COVID_19_Modeling_Jun15.pdf
Note that this is not published in a peer-reviewed journal of any sort. It's hosted on the website of some Cornell professor. This is the academia equivalent of a press release.
There are 5 PhD students and 3 faculty members listed as authors. Whose ass were these "nominal parameters" pulled out of?
This "asymptomatic surveillance" turns out to be the key idea they have.
Now, what do they mean by "surveillance", exactly...?
OK, so it takes 3 professors and 5 PhD students to conclude that if you institute a surveillance regime where you test everyone every 5 days, you will have fewer covid cases than if you didn't test everyone every 5 days.
They've contrived two scenarios, one where people are on-campus and submitting to 6 nose swabs every month, and one where they're distance learning and not getting tested at all. Shockingly, contrived scenario #1 has fewer covid cases than contrived scenario #2...because yeah, if you look at a population in isolation and assume frequent testing of that population, that's the result you're going to get.
Aww, that's cute. They think a bunch of 18-22 year olds, after spending an entire summer under quarantine, will head off to college and maintain perfect discipline.
I haven't read all 54 pages of this paper, but I've read enough to convince me that the conclusion this article tries to draw from it is horseshit.
I read the Executive Summary. Since you've read the whole thing, do you think the Executive Summary does a good job or a bad job of summarizing their assumptions and conclusions?
If I, as a non-epidemiologist Random Internet Person, can find flaws in their assumptions based solely on the description in the executive summary, why exactly should I bother to read the rest of the paper?
The problem I have is with those assumptions, as stated in their own executive summary. If their starting assumptions are wrong, then it doesn't matter whether the rest of the paper is perfectly correct on the epidemiology and mathematical modeling, or if there's a subtle flaw in paragraph 3 of page 47.
And as I said, I'm not passing judgement on the paper as a whole...because I know that I'm not an epidemiologist and I'm not qualified to do that. I'm passing judgement on the specific conclusion that the Inside Higher Ed article focused on:
Do you think that every undergrad at Cornell is going to sit down and read all 54 pages, as you expect me to do? Do you expect an incoming freshman, who just graduated high school and is probably not going to be majoring in epidemiology or public health, to be academically prepared to read this, understand it, and evaluate its veracity?
I don't. I think they're going to read summaries of the research, like this one in IHE. Which is why it's important to me that those summaries don't overplay the conclusions of the research. The headline, as is typical of "science news" that's based on a single source, strips out all the "well, it depends"es of the research, and presents a rather definitive, nuance-free "will result in more infections" conclusion.
You know what "trust the science" means to me? I trust peer-reviewed science. If there's a paper in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal about the covid potential from in-person vs online classes, I'd be happy to read through it more deeply.
Even better if it's from authors without institutional conflicts of interest. I would trust this study a lot more if it was Cornell analyzing the effects of UCLA opening for in-person classes, or Harvard analyzing Cornell holding in-person classes, etc.
And obviously I'd love to see a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of multiple such peer-reviewed studies, but that certainly isn't going to happen in time to inform the decisions of colleges for this fall.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "Holding in-person classes is actually safer than online classes" is, in the context of everything I know about covid-19, a rather extraordinary claim. And I don't see extraordinary evidence here. I see a 54 page academic blog post with questionable assumptions starting on page 2. If you want to call that skepticism a "bias", sure, have at it.
If they were claiming to have found a way to reduce hospitalization for everyone by a factor of 4, that would be scientifically interesting.
But they are only claiming to have found a way to reduce hospitalization for students at Cornell by a factor of 4. Lets ignore the fact that this is in their own self interest. They achieve this neat feat by requiring students to be tested every five days.
Presumably this is via group testing.
This has two fundamentally problematic assumptions. The first is there isn't enough testing in America to test every student every five days, even using group testing. So we are assuming that somehow Cornell gets more than its fair share of testing.
The second assumes that students who are group tested positive will self-quarantine. With the high false positive of group testing, and the fact that most students don't give a flying fuck, this seems like a very poor assumption.
Some things make me go hmmm.
I expect similar findings coming out across the USA for lots of universities, but especially the private ones. In America, education is a big business.
Alright well... even though I just actively avoided posting about where I live like... three days ago, it feels super relevant now.
I live in Ithaca, the city that Cornell is in. This has been hugely controversial, as I’m sure you can imagine. Ithaca, as of about 7 hours ago, has only one active case, and hasn’t had a new case in almost a week. We have had 168 total cases and 0 COVID-related deaths. The city has responded to the pandemic outstandingly well for a number of reasons: Cornell, Ithaca College, and Tompkins County Community College all sent students home fairly early; the city itself is pretty geographically isolated, and the local airport shut down fairly early; and residents and local government took social distancing, mask wearing, and other public health measures very seriously.
But a massive part of the Ithaca economy is deeply dependent on Cornell and Ithaca College. Cornell is a hugely outsized employer in Tompkins County, and students from all three colleges nearly double the size of the city during the academic year, propping up the service industry. Some massive plurality of Ithacans work in the service industry; Ithaca has more restaurants per capital than NYC, and as you can imagine, we’ve been hit very hard on that front.
So yeah, it’s concerning and suspect that Cornell is bringing a massive flood of students here just as we’re seeing the other side of this pandemic, at least locally. Doubly so because some students have come back already (I work with some of them), and there are already completely irresponsible, non-socially-distanced parties happening. On the other hand, it’s hard to say how much longer Ithaca can last without the economic boost that comes from these students. Cornell has done a fairly good job avoiding layoffs that would devastate local Ithacans, but it’s hard to imagine how long that can last with no students on campus.
Ithaca proper has about 350 hospital beds. It’s a dangerous game.
Edit: Worth noting that Tompkins County Public Health Director is supportive of the plan: https://ithacavoice.com/2020/06/cornell-university-students-to-return-to-ithaca-in-september/
I perused the study when it first came out, I think the recommendation makes sense but it's based on some kinda bizarre primary research. They somehow measured that a high amount of the student population intended to physically return to their residences at the University, which I understand from a student's desire to maintain some normalcy in the experience but wouldn't have expected. So the two scenarios are
If they could continue to open and enforce healthcare policies and centers, that would make sense. Or if they could convince students not to return to the area for virtual classes. I think those needs make the University-specific recommendation unique and kinda weird when you first read the headline.
I reject the basic premise of the entire study.
If students are on campus then the University had a high degree of responsibility to ensure their health and safety. If they are not in campus, a large portion of the responsibility for health and safety lies with whatever state and city they reside in.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
I know a lot of people at my school (UT Austin) are stuck in their leases, I know I am. I might as well go back because being home sucks and I’ve been paying rent for 4 months without being there already.
I'm curious about why you signed a lease starting in March? Is that common in Austin? When I was in school a long time ago, most leases started in August or September, at the beginning of the academic year. But I think we signed the leases for the following year a lot earlier? (My memory is fuzzy.)
If that's really why, Cornell deciding to open because their students won't stay home because they can't get out of their leases would be pretty darned typical for 2020. A lot of unfortunate things are happening this year due to long-term contracts that were written before we knew that COVID-19 was a thing. If we were thinking ahead, mortgages would typically have a disaster area exception allowing payment to be suspended until things return to normal, and the same for leases.
In conclusion, contracts often consist of dumb rules creating bad incentives that make us reluctant to react intelligently to change by doing something different. But we usually don't know that when we sign them.
Student housing is in such high demand here that it's not uncommon for leases for students starting in the fall will be signed and money deposited in March. Though I'm sure the pandemic has upset all that as well.
Oh sorry, it didn’t start in March, I’ve just been home since then. I just meant that I’ve been paying for my apartment that I was in, but I haven’t been there. I did re-lease back in January before COVID started so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . And yeah, our leases are usually from August through July, and you do usually have to sign pretty early.
That’s what I tried to mean, sorry I didn’t make sense! Since a lot of people signed leases last fall that are from August 2020 through July 2021, a lot of people will just want to to anyways since there’s not really a way out.
I went to Cornell for undergrad. Students started signing leases for this upcoming year last September, and almost all of the properties that are walking distance from campus would have been signed by December at the latest. Collegetown (the neighborhood where the vast majority of Cornell students live) landlords are notoriously unscrupulous, and I’m fully certain they will never let students out of their leases unless forced by law (and even then... it’s questionable).
Yup, it's basically what @vord said: They made the assumptions to get the conclusion they want.
"If we do online only and are being knuckleheads about the health of people who live on campus, it's going to be worse, than when we do some wishful thinking about what we could do for their health if all are here."
Is it cynical to read that as a veiled threat of "we will make your healthcare shit if you return for an online semester"?
Note also that the survey they base the number of on-campus students on does not seem to ask about coronavirus risks. Maybe students were implicitly assuming that the online-only classes in fall would be due to an overabundance of caution and corona would be more of a theoretical threat at that point. Hell, if I thought corona will be over at that point but the school were being ridiculous, I'd go there and spend time and study with friends. But if corona was still a threat, I'd peace out, because I know I could better trust my family to not be stupid about risky behaviors.