'This is just insane': Students say UA is doing too little to protect them from COVID-19

[TomCADem]

Source: AL.com

On Monday, the university announced that all students living on one side of Burke Hall would have to move out to free up rooms to isolate and quarantine students who test positive for the virus or come in contact with someone who has.

Four days later, UA reported that the university added 481 new student COVID-19 cases from Tuesday to Thursday, a rapid escalation given that there were 562 new student cases over the previous six days. The university also reported Friday that over 36% of its isolation space in Tuscaloosa was occupied.

For Fernandez, concerns about the rising case count were compounded by her belief that there has been “a complete lack of transparency and communication from the university” about its plans for quarantining students and how it is protecting healthy students, employees and faculty. She said she first learned via Twitter that the school was converting half of the building where she works to isolation space.

“If there’s no communication, if we’re not being informed on how to deal with COVID patients as a desk assistant, we could all be at risk of contracting COVID,” Fernandez said in a phone interview Saturday. “A lot of us are really concerned and scared, not only for ourselves, but for the other housing staff and students.”

Read more: https://www.al.com/news/2020/08/this-is-just-insane-students-say-ua-is-doing-too-little-to-protect-them-from-covid-19.html

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You have to imagine that this is the Trump administrations preferred approach of responding to COVID-19 at schools in action. Simply return to in-person classes, then ad lib as COVID begins to spread like wild fire.

[sandensea]

1. Of course they are

It'll be a cold day in August before Republicans in the great state of Alabama will do anything that might annoy His Orangeness.

[Crowman2009]

2. All UA cares about is football money.

Protecting students from COVID is at the bottom of their priorities.

[RANDYWILDMAN]

3. Maybe Bama's highest paid employee could tell the president

to do something.

Paging Nick Saban, oh wait it's ball season

[bringthePaine]

4. lessee...FL,GA,AL exploding COVID college numbers - I can't be the only one seeing a pattern...

deep red Fed-revenue-dependent states all...

[Sherman A1]

5. Yup

Seems to be.

[BumRushDaShow]

6. Unfortunately not just there, it's here in PA too

for those schools that chose to go all "in person" or "hybrid", like -

Penn State University
Bloomsburg State University
Temple University
University of Pittsburgh
Villanova University

A bunch of others that had planned to do "hybrid" switched quickly to predominately "virtual". The one around here to watch for as a "larger" university with "hybrid" is St. Joseph's University, which had a couple cases a bit over a week ago already.

Most of the rest in Philly metro (scroll to the bottom) that have "in person" or "hybrid" are smaller colleges and universities with much smaller student populations.

[SharonClark]

7. Iowa, too, at Iowa and Iowa State.

Trumper Governor Reynolds’ has mishandled Covid and then add college parties. Not a good outcome.

[woodsprite]

8. Wow! Can't fathom the combined number, and we're just getting started.

At UD, it's not the students in the dorms, but the kids who live in off-campus housing who are going to be the worst issue. We're only having about 1.5K students living in the dorms (reduced down from ~9.5K), but a lot of students, even if they only have online classes, have moved back into off-campus housing. The local police already broke up an off-campus party over the weekend of 75 students. They estimated about 5K people will be on our combined campus' daily - which includes staff and faculty numbers.

We'll see what plays out. Today is the first day of classes, and the first day of daily health reporting. All students/fac/staff are supposed to fill out the report even on the weekends. I can't let you know what they ask about since as soon as I answered that I don't need to come to campus, I got a big fat red X and the survey terminated. I think I'm supposed to go get a baseline test and report the results, but I'm working from home and am not anticipating going to campus within 14 days - haven't been there since Mar 13. Our group was told we tentatively will return after Xmas break. Whenever I actually have to go in, I'll still need a new test and a 14-day quarantine.

[Johnny2X2X]

9. Have a close friend whose daughter is a sophomore there

I don't even ask him how she's doing because it has to be so stressful for him.

He's a liberal, but kind of went off the norm, he thinks Covid-19 is way overblown. I'm sure the news from UA is making him a nervous wreck though.

[Initech]

10. I'm convinced that we're way past the "slowing the spread" phase.

If we actually did care about slowing the spread, it wouldn't have this much of an impact or effect on our daily lives. Slowing the spread is virtually impossible as it's everywhere now. Now we have to try to contain this beast and that could get both tricky and ugly. And it will also not end well for anyone.