“A University Had a Great Coronavirus Plan, but Students Partied On” (NYT) is about how humans did not behave the way that the scientists assumed they would:
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, more than 40,000 students take tests twice a week for the coronavirus. They cannot enter campus buildings unless an app vouches that their test has come back negative. Everyone has to wear masks.
Enough students continued to go to parties even after testing positive, showing how even the best thought-out plans to keep college education moving can fail when humans do not heed common sense or the commands from public health officials.
What the scientists had not taken into account was that some students would continue partying after they received a positive test result. “It was willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” Dr. Goldenfeld said.
Some of the students who tested positive even tried to circumvent the app so that they could enter buildings instead of staying isolated in their rooms, university administrators said in a letter to students.
Attending university is a privilege, not a right. Why not an RFID chip in the neck of everyone who chooses to attend a school? With sensors over each door, each student can be tracked, even if he/she/ze/they fail to carry his/her/zir/their phone. It works well for dogs. Mindy the Crippler has never complained about her chip. The universities can buy kits on Amazon for $14 each, which includes a one-time-use syringe. From a consumer:
Chances are, you are planning to use this kit to microchip your animal yourself and skip the vet visit. If so, you are going to be very pleased. It is super easy to use – implanting the chip takes just a few seconds and registration takes about 5 minutes online (the chip also comes with a snail-mail paper registration form if you prefer). You may feel a little squeamish about the process but as long as you implant the chip quickly and confidently, your animal will probably barely notice. I just chipped my 7 week old Lab puppy and she barely even flinched. It would be a good idea to have somebody hold the animal still so you have both hands free – the needle is EXTREMELY sharp and you don’t want to risk jabbing too deep or potential jabbing yourself.
So the chipping of undergrads could be done by the graduate students who live in their dorms and whose job is keeping them out of trouble. If a student who is marked COVID-19-positive in the database tries to go through a door with a reader, Campus Police is summoned automatically to shepherd the errant soul back to quarantine. (Or, to cut down on policing encounters and costs in the Age of BLM, doors on campus could be covered in plywood and replaced with PetSafe dog doors that open only in response to a recognized RFID chip. The 11×16″ standard size opening would give students an incentive not to load up at the dining hall.)
Mindy the Crippler proudly displays her chipped neck:
Might work. A chip in the neck kept Snake Plissken inline.
The real issue is not whether attending College is right or a privilege, it’s that the Colleges themselves are situated in the larger context of the surrounding towns and ultimately the State. So that is where the public health authority for dealing with the crisis belongs, and it’s why the Mayor of Newton wants Boston College to hand over its contact tracing program for BC students who live off-campus:
https://patch.com/massachusetts/medford/s/h8o66/mayor-gravely-concerned-by-boston-college-coronavirus-cluster
“I am gravely concerned about the transmission of COVID-19 at Boston College,” Fuller said in a statement Saturday. “Boston College community members are integrally connected with Newton — they live, shop, dine and drink, play sports, work and recreate amongst our community. When COVID-19 spikes within the Boston College community, this impacts all of us in Newton.”
Fuller, who met with Boston College and other Newton officials Saturday, wants the city to take over the college’s contact tracing program for students who live off campus in the city. She also asked school officials to not open additional isolation facilities in Newton.”
I think the chip idea is great. The State has the absolute authority to drag you off to a hospital and plunge a needle into your arm to prevent you from spreading a communicable disease. Putting a chip into people to monitor and track their COVID status is the logical next step and in fact it’s necessary, because people try to circumvent the rules. Of course, some enterprising hackers will come up with black-market RFID chips for the adventurous.
Boris Johnson’s Operation Moonshot: test the entire UK population at 10 million tests per day to give people “freedom passes” so they can go out in public again and have the most basic of freedoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Moonshot
In Vermont colleges and townies are working together to snitch on non-sheep students. I can’t imagine this is going to help colleges or college towns. How long til these kids get tired of the BS and go home? Or move someplace nice and cheap full of young people all doing college online?
@GB: That may happen for a few of them, but it doesn’t change the basic public health authority equation. It’s like I said: the returning college student population is being used as a living laboratory to determin “what works and what doesn’t” when it comes to controlling the virus. It’s obvious that anyone who attempts to escape the control by leaving the college, returning home or otherwise circumventing the rules will force municipalities and state governments to take the next logical steps and apply them to everyone. Andrew Cuomo will have a press conference and explain it his no-nonsense style:
“It doesn’t matter whether you are a college student at a campus or not, right? You are still in the State of New York, and we are going to monitor and control your behaviors to stop the virus from spreading, right?”
@Alex it has zero to do with public health. It is all a humiliation and submission game. If it was about public health every American would get 50 proper facemasks a week dropped on their doorstep. Instead we are told to make our own out of anything we want. That it isn’t really about public health is obvious, they aren’t even trying to hide their motivations.
@GB: I share your disgust and I know this whole thing is a wet dream for totalitarian control freaks, Statists and everyone else who wants to see the world radically reorganized, with people’s freedoms placed in a technocratic straitjacket that can never be removed. Look, when the Chinese developed this thing they knew they had the greatest weapon they could ever use against us: one that would basically force us to destroy ourselves, weaken our society for their gain, and they’re the ones who are going to benefit from it. They already have. People say: “Why would they do that when they trade so much with us?” It’s not about short-term economics, it’s about geopolitics for the rest of this century. They’ll take the economic hit now, but we’re never going to recover from this, it’s going to take decades.
In the meantime, SARS-CoV-2 has been the greatest thing to happen for totalitarians since the invention of gunpowder.
I guess it became a competitive game among the left-wing politicians (and, mind you, there is a lot of them in R party, too) to come up with the most obnoxious inanity they could impose on their subjects and get away with it.
Where’s Yamamoto with his wise words when you need him?
Do you fellows ever pause and reflect on what you are writing? It is just short of batshit crazy.
In what way? Israel uses biometric passports for international travel. Since it’s incredibly important to control the spread of COVID, why is the idea of chipping people out of bounds?
https://www.gov.il/en/service/application_for_biometric_passport2
And it is purely voluntary. Anyone who doesn’t want to be chipped can stay home at Mom’s house and attend an online college.
How about putting locked tracking ankle bracelets on all the students who test positive. Then track those positive people to make sure they stay in their rooms. Maybe even make the positive people move temporarily to a special quarantine dorm with locked doors..
…
What ever happened to flattening the curve? Are we trying to eradicate COVID now?
Of course! Because this is worstest, most deadly virus the world has ever seen! It kills everyone, like 95% of the people who come in the slightest contact with someone who has it! We’re all gonna diiiie….
I mean, otherwise why would we be doing all this?