I don’t think “mingling with the locals” is likely to be relevant, the 7-day average cases in New London County is currently 78, in a population of 265,000, with 4% test positivity. That’s not low, but it’s not a community drenched in virus either. The FAQ page says this:
The Department of Public Health epidemiologists offered the following hypothesis. The gatherings of students at a local bar and on campus in apartments and residence hall rooms were what DPH described as “high density and high intensity” events: large numbers of people in overcrowded spaces speaking loudly in close proximity. Given that the crowds included symptomatic people, the virus spread to others at a level that overwhelmed the protective capacity of the vaccine.
When we know there were symptomatic people yelling at crowds of people in a confined space, not really any mystery about what these super-spreading event(s) that kicked off this spike were. As to whether this demonstrates efficient spread among vaccinated populations under “normal conditions”, it depends on whether you think “normal conditions” includes crowded bars and parties. I’d certainly expect to see more of these outbreaks in colleges.
also if i look at conn college academic calendar and they started a few days before this outbreak, meaning they came in from all over the country before showing up here, I’m going to really fucking pissed at y’all.
The question that set off the debate was specifically about asymptomatic vaccinated spread.
The local bar would be a place where people on campus and off campus comingled.
Agreed we will see more of these in colleges. Provincetown was also a setting where we would expect to see vaccinated spread somewhat easily as it was the same type of conditions.
Was a couple of weeks in. This wasnt the initial round of entry testing is my understanding, but was post the likely myriad of rentry to school parties.
3,477 tests the previous week with 0.14% positivity and 3,920 the next week with 4.34% positivity. They probably didn’t import a batch of students who were like 1/3 positive. Given the comments of the Department of Health about what they believe happened, I would presume case histories also demonstrated that they weren’t just importing these cases.
Yale was just starting it looked like when we stopped by the Sunday before Labor Day. I don’t know how traditional that is at NE schools.
Personally the full measures may be overboard but again it sends a message to not FAFO. An individual institution is not society as a whole and at least in the US we’ve given those places pretty wide latitude to set their own rules. As we’ve seen, most are doing too little, so if a few do too much I’m not going to sweat it much, not really the problem.
So I went to a BJJ dojo for the first time and didn’t think that decision through very carefully. Zero - literally zero - COVID precautions, and training consists of spending 90 minutes in a poorly ventilated space filled with heavily breathing unmasked men sweating profusely while rolling around together with multiple sparring partners per session.
Viral load has to be fucking supermassive if someone was contagious; goal literally is to close space as much as possible between you and your opponent and burying your face / head into their torso / shoulders while grappling.
Well pre-election prediction is kind of anyone’s guess now given that polling sucks, but the markets are terrible in-play in presidential elections. Biden was out to +300 or something despite never actually looking like a dog.
