I thought it was gonna work.
Really! I thought we could sort-of-open college again and not cause a big outbreak. Most of our students live here year-round. By all accounts, there have been fraternity parties all summer. We had a spike of cases in the campus area when bars opened back up at the end of June, which subsided when the county put back those restrictions (though never back down to the levels we’d seen in March, April, and May.) At the end of July I wrote “statewide, cases are growing and growing, and the situation is much worse in the South. I would fight back if you said this was a predictable consequence; nothing about this disease is predictable with any confidence. It could have worked.”
And maybe it could have; but it didn’t. As soon as school started last Wednesday, the percentage of student tests coming back positive, started growing, about 20% higher every day. On Saturday, nine Greek houses were quarantined. A week into school, with about 8% of tests positive, the University halted in-person classes and completely quarantined two first-year dormitories with two hours notice. Food is being brought in three times a day. Hope you like your roommate.
A lot of people, unlike me, saw this coming.
Maybe we can beat this back. Who knows? We did in July. But this outbreak is bigger.
Public schools in Madison are fully online right now. With a summer to prepare it’s working better than it did last spring. But it’s not great, and I would guess that for poor kids it’s a lot worse than “not great.” Private schools are allowed to be open in grades K-2, and a court decision that came down today has, at least for now, allowed them to open to all grades. More outbreaks? To be a broken record, who knows? The argument for opening K-2 sounds pretty good to me; while it’s not definite, most people seem to think younger children are less likely to spread and contract the disease, and that age range is where having kids at home limits parents most. Schools in Georgia have been open, and there have been lots of school outbreaks, and those schools get closed for a while and then reopen, but it doesn’t seem to have created big wave of cases statewide.
This article is good. Beating COVID isn’t all-or-nothing, but people seem to see it that way. If the bar’s open, that means it’s safe, and you can drink with whoever you want, as close as you want. No! Nothing is safe, if you mean safe safe. But also nothing is a guarantee of disaster. If everybody would do 50% of what they felt like doing, we could beat it. Or maybe 75%, who knows. But it feels like if we don’t insist on 0%, people will understand us to mean that 100% is OK. I don’t have any good ideas about how to fix this.
Quomodocumque 
It’s not at all surprising that the two large dormitories, Witte and Sellery, are quarantined. Most students have roommates in very small rooms and have communal bathroom and shower facilities. The hallways are very narrow. Students have to take elevators to upper floors. (Do they have special elevator rules?) The situation is probably worse than that of cruise ships, and more like meat packing plants. According to today’s State Journal, the Greek houses are similar to dormitories in that students share small rooms and there are many students packed into a house.
Van Vleck’s office tower is another scary place with its small elevators and narrow hallways. I’ll miss dropping in every once in a while for talks.
The hospitals have responded quickly by severely restricting visitors again. If this continues, they will probably start cancelling procedures again, including a small one I’ve already had rescheduled several times.
The big question is how and how fast this will spread off campus into residential areas. There are more students living off campus than living on campus, and they live in a wide area around campus, including large parts of the Isthmus and the near west and south sides. How much mixing will there be of on-campus and off-campus students? At the bars, certainly. So far the virus has not been very successful in my neighborhood, but I’m afraid that may not last.
Look to MIT for an example of an approach that might work.
[…] small proportion of UW-Madison courses were being given in person, until last week, that is, but not mine. I’m teaching two graduate courses, introduction to algebra (which I’ve […]
[…] Smart Restart: After the big surge with the opening of classes, UW-Madison shut down in-person instruction for two weeks and put the two first-year dorms where cases were concentrated into isolation. The positivity rate on campus has dropped back down to around 1% and the campus outbreak doesn’t seem to have created sustained exponential growth in Madison’s general population; but it does seem to have brought our daily case load back up to where it was months ago, from which it is, again, only very slowly dropping. When R_0 is a little less than 1, even a brief bump up in prevalence can be very expensive in terms of long-term cumulative case numbers. Now we are starting football again. Is that smart? There won’t be any fans in Camp Randall (which means the economic catastrophe for local businesses of a year without a football season is going to happen unblunted.) Then again, there’s something hypocritical about me saying “Hell no, why take the risk” since I’ve been watching and enjoying baseball. The enjoyment of millions of fans actually does have value. MLB, because lots and lots of money is riding on this, has mostly kept its players and employees from suffering outbreaks. The Big Ten can probably do the same — if it cares to. What I worry about is this. By all accounts, in-person teaching hasn’t been spreading COVID either. But when we had in-person teaching, everyone felt things were more normal, and thinking things were more normal, they relaxed their social distancing, and that generated thousands of cases. There was indirect spread. Will football generate the same? […]