COVID-19 Does Not Care About Your Schools: Colleges got a schooling in virology this week. After ignoring recommendations from the local health department to hold virtual classes this fall, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill started classes on August 10, in person.
Within a week, with outbreaks spreading on campus, the school abruptly shifted to online learning. A day later, also facing an outbreak, Notre Dame did the same.
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That Greek chorus singing “Hate to Say I Told You So” in the distance? That’s public health experts, virologists and other experts who have repeatedly warned that cramming a lot of people together into close living and working quarters during a pandemic is a bad idea.
They also warned that colleges would try to blame students for outbreaks on campus, instead of owning up to the holes in their re-opening plans. Now, that’s happening as well.
Why the chorus of Cassandras? Because they know the virus doesn’t care about education. Or campus boundaries. Or the economy. It’s a virus. The point of its existence is simply furthering its own existence.
We can’t convince it to go away because school is important, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we have that ability.
What we can do is continuously adjust to the wealth of new information that we’re learning about this virus. Some of that information is the same as it was in the beginning: avoid crowds, watch the case numbers in your area.
A lot more of it has changed dramatically over the past few months. It can be hard to keep track of this fire-hose of information, especially because our brains tend to latch onto the first pieces of information we gather — a phenomenon called anchoring bias.
Challenging your own tightly held beliefs and assumptions is something that happens a lot in college. Now it’s just happening to colleges, too.
It’s very likely that we’ll keep seeing these swings in policies not just in schools, but in workplaces, movie theaters, restaurants, and gyms as this keeps unfolding.
But at the same time, we’ll keep learning better ways to reduce the spread, until we can stop the virus altogether.
