A Yale professor's stark warning to returning students: Be prepared for deaths (non tweet version)

[marble falls]

A Yale professor’s stark warning to returning students: Be prepared for deaths

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/08/20/yale-coronavirus-warning/

Paulina Firozi
August 20, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT

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“While things will of course continue to evolve as the COVID-19 situation changes, it’s safe to say that your life in residence in the coming academic year will not be anything like the life you remember at Yale before COVID-19,” Santos wrote to the residents of Silliman College, one of the 14 undergraduate communities at the New Haven, Conn., campus.

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In a statement sent to The Post, Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart said university leaders “will continue to emphasize collective responsibility for adherence to health and safety rules and for behavior conducive to public health and education.”

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Brown also praised Santos’s warnings that student behavior would not just affect students, but also staff working at the residential college — including maintenance staff or dining hall workers — who may not have a choice about whether to return.

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She added: “We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections — and possibly deaths — in our community. Many of our staff members are from sectors of society that are most vulnerable to Covid-19 infection and mortality, so following the community guidelines will be essential for protecting them.”

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[JCMach1]

1. Could this statement be any more racist, or social Darwinian?

Gets a serious WTF, Yale

[The Magistrate]

2. I Suspect It Could, Sir, Since I Detect No Trace Of Such Things In It

My daughter has the running of a dorm in a sizeable school, and there is a good deal of concern. Many dorms have communal facilities, such as shared lavatories or kitchens, which make a number of the usual precautions difficult.

There will be deaths when students return, not only among students but faculty and maintenance workers and other staff, as the first are often at higher risk owing to age, and the latter in their routine duties go everywhere and encounter everyone.

[Ms. Toad]

3. Huh?

As a member of a university community that was very Pollyanna less than24 hours before we shut down, despite me raising an alarm cry, this strikes me as needed in the same way my own similar warnings were. The evening before we closed, I was asked to opine on a letter to students that contained phrases like, "we don't anticipate any disruption to our end of semester," and " it is unlikely that you or anyone you know personally will be impacted by this. " as a precursor to urging people to wash their hands and consider standing farther apart because of a threat they didn't want to expressly name (because they didn't believe it was serious).

Reading the article, it is very clear that this individual is trying to inject a dose of reality into an otherwise rose-colored picture being painted by the administration.

[marble falls]

4. Just the opposite: it reminds students that their behavior has effects on others.

[obamanut2012]

8. lolololol wtaf are you even saying?

There is zero of anything like that in this.

[Johnny2X2X]

5. Students will die

Sure, young and reasonably healthy people will not die at a high rate from Covid-19, but people aren't doing the math. When you have tens of thousands of students on campus interacting, most will get Covid-19, if you've got 20,000 students who get it at a large university, even with a fatality rate of 0.02% for that age group you're talking several deaths.

[marble falls]

6. Students will die.

[OneGrassRoot]

7. "collective responsibility"

Something the anti-mask, pro-Trump people not only eschew, but vocally reject.