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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-it-is-not-such-a-bad-time-to-be-living-alone-in-someone's-basement dept.

[Editor's note: We had been gathering together COVID-19 stories for eventual release as a round-up story. I lack time at the moment to personally gather all those together with this most recent submission. We will run the next round-up in the next few days. But given the significance of this submission, I wished not to delay it from being immediately released to the community. --martyb]

World Health Organization declares the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic:

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on Wednesday as the new coronavirus, which was unknown to world health officials just three months ago, has rapidly spread to more than 121,000 people from Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

“In the past two weeks the number of cases outside China has increased thirteenfold and the number of affected countries has tripled,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva. “In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths and the number of affected countries to climb even higher.”

Tedros said several countries have demonstrated the ability to suppress and control the outbreak, but he scolded other world leaders for failing to act quickly enough or drastically enough to contain the spread.

“We’re deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” he said, just before declaring the pandemic. “We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.”

[Ed. addition follows.]

Also at Ars Technica and cnet.

For those who might not be aware of the distinction, Wikipedia helpfully provides these summaries:

An epidemic (what we have had up to now with COVID-19):

An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί epi "upon or above" and δῆμος demos "people") is the rapid spread of infectious disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time, usually two weeks or less.

[...]An epidemic may be restricted to one location; however, if it spreads to other countries or continents and affects a substantial number of people, it may be termed a pandemic.[1] The declaration of an epidemic usually requires a good understanding of a baseline rate of incidence; epidemics for certain diseases, such as influenza, are defined as reaching some defined increase in incidence above this baseline.[2] A few cases of a very rare disease may be classified as an epidemic, while many cases of a common disease (such as the common cold) would not.

By comparison, a pandemic (which has just now been announced for COVID-19):

A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν pan "all" and δῆμος demos "people") is an epidemic of disease that has spread across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic. Further, flu pandemics generally exclude recurrences of seasonal flu. Throughout history, there have been a number of pandemics, such as smallpox and tuberculosis. One of the most devastating pandemics was the Black Death, which killed an estimated 75–200 million people in the 14th century. The current pandemics are HIV/AIDS and Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).[1][2] Other recent pandemics are the 1918 influenza pandemic (Spanish flu), and the 2009 flu pandemic (H1N1).


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:43PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:43PM (#969854)

    Harvard, MIT and other universities are stopping classes a week early, before spring break, and telling students to pack up and stay home after spring break, classes will be continued over the 'net. Here's the MIT announcement, https://web.mit.edu/covid19/update-from-president-l-rafael-reif-to-the-mit-community/ [mit.edu]

    Not sure how this will work for laboratory classes?

    MIT will make exceptions if you (student) can't go home for a good reason. The stated goal is to greatly reduce the interaction on campus--oddly just the opposite of what universities usually want to accomplish.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:54PM (4 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:54PM (#969862) Journal

    On Campus / boarded students earn the University more money.

    Not shutting your campus down for the most part and having 3% of your students die due to COVID-19. Not very good PR.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:38AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:38AM (#969952)

      Actually students have a lower fatality rate and is this the message we want to send our students?
      No, we should tough things out in the face of adversity.
      Work even when we don’t feel like it,
      Go the extra mile to get’r done!

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:12AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:12AM (#969969)

        While far fewer young people die from the coronavirus, they are still getting infected and can infect others. Illnesses spread very readily at colleges, where students live in close quarters and are in close proximity to each other in classes. College campuses are not isolated from the communities they reside within. If these students are ill, they may well spread the coronavirus to more vulnerable people. You also have a significant amount of faculty and staff, who are older than students and, therefore, are more vulnerable. Universities have a responsibility to their faculty and staff as well as the surrounding communities. Moving classes online is a form of adversity for students and faculty, both of whom have to make significant adaptations. Social distancing is a form of adversity for people who have to make some sacrifices or experience interruptions in their life for the benefit of the community. We should be very concerned about the overburdening of hospitals in Italy and Wuhan increasing death rates. We all have a role in limiting the spread of the coronavirus and by extension the amount of people who end up seriously ill in hospitals. There's a big difference between getting through adversity and taking foolish risks.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:04AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:04AM (#970058)

          There's a big difference between getting through adversity and taking foolish risks.

          "It's game over, man!"

          Ripley: "This little girl survived it all alone. Man up, you pathetic Republican!"

      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:25PM

        by Freeman (732) on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:25PM (#970250) Journal

        They're not shutting the school down. For past generations shutting the campus down meant shutting the school down. They're doing all online courses for the remainder of the semester or something like that.

        A small university with a few hundred people is one thing, but a place like MIT has over 11,000 students.

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:56AM (#969960)

    A lot of other universities are taking similar measures. Some of the justification for closing universities is extreme caution, such as the University of Missouri moving classes online for two weeks because MU faculty and staff attended a conference where someone tested positive [kshb.com]. One by one, I've seen Big Ten schools moving classes online, some temporarily, some for the rest of the semester after spring break. It seems like administrators are following the leader here, where everyone waits until someone takes action, then everyone else does the same. Part of the justification I heard a few days ago for the University of Nebraska's response to the virus is that is was similar to what lots of other universities were doing. It doesn't mean the response was correct, just that it was similar to other universities. Now that several other Big Ten schools are moving classes online, I'm expecting I'll receive an email shortly that Nebraska is doing the same thing. It hasn't come yet, but they've already told students, staff, and faculty to prepare for a 2-3 week closure. Faculty and staff who can work from home are being encouraged to make arrangements for doing so. Now that most of the Big Ten is moving classes online, I expect it'll happen here shortly.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:20AM (#969975)

    As for lab classes, there are a couple of options here:

    1) Complete any labs or field work prior to the university closing. Faculty at Nebraska have received this advice.

    2) The lab or field work component of a class could end when the university closes, with students being graded on that component until the time that the university closes. If a class is entirely based on lab or field work, the class would probably be completed at that point, with no further work required. This might not be a bad deal for students because it would be one fewer class to stress them out at the end of the semester. When I teach, I try to give the last few assignments in a single batch a few weeks before the end of the semester, then allow students to turn them in whenever they want through the end of dead week or even finals week. Students who want to get the work out of the way early can do so and have more time to focus on other classes. Students with big projects in other classes can focus on those and worry about smaller assignments in my class later. I let students decide what's best for them at the end of the semester and they've generally appreciated it. It would give students more time to focus on other classes.

    3) Some universities are suggesting they'll reopen after a two week shutdown. I'm skeptical that they will actually reopen this semester, but if they did, lab work could be completed before the end of the semester. I don't like this option because it could cram the same amount of work into a shorter period of time. That's not something students like and I don't blame them.