What would be a reasonable approach to classroom teaching in the fall?

[polly_mer]

As the subject matter expert, one must provide the consequences in stark enough terms that the decision maker will take a good action (pay for changes to airflow rates and more outside air for HVACs, keep as many people at home for as long as possible) instead of the easy, but wrong message of "wear your masks and don't spend more than X minutes with any one person and nearly certainly you'll live through it as a young, healthy person".

The subject matter expert has no particular expertise as to what constitutes a "good action" (which is a normative policy judgment that must balance many factors) and should stick to their own knitting. If the supercilious subject matter expert wants to make those decisions, then the expert should get the job of being the decision maker.

The hardest part of the overall problem is the decision maker usually doesn't know enough to ask all the right questions to know what actions are available and likely consequences of each to be able to balance the factors.

The SME absolutely must lay out the relevant actions with  stark statement of the consequences for the decision maker.  While other factors always come into play, in practice that means the SMEs in several relevant areas should work together to present a united set of proposed actions with the consequences. 

It's a truly bad idea to present possible actions that are bad on all the factors, unless the situation is such that those are really still the three best options.

Presenting just the data leads to assertions as we're seeing here of denials of what the consequences are because people aren't good at thinking through all the consequences outside their experiences.  For example, it's entirely reasonable upon hearing that 'X kills the virus in lab test' to ask ' can we get X into people to kill the virus?'. The SMEs then have to explain that there are other reasons to not use X=bleach in humans, so that's a bad action.

"I didn't say the exact words of 'let's kill grandma'" misses the point when the insisted upon action of reopening everything because most people will be fine after a few weeks and almost no one flat out dies results in huge disruptions and many more illnesses with severe consequences including death.

The exact words don't matter when the real consequences will be that effect.

It is exactly the SME's responsibility to go beyond just the facts to propose actions with the consequences, especially when tradeoffs in several factors must be made and several of the obvious actions lead to the worst outcomes in most of the factors.

Nearly always in high-consequence decisions are resources limited enough that one of the considerations is best overall bang for the buck, which usually isn't clear to a decision maker who has none of the technical expertise and is crystal clear to all the SMEs after jointvdiscussion.  The hygiene theatre linked upthread is an example of taking an obvious decision that feels data-informed, but misses the tradeoffs in resources and effectiveness in reducing virus exposure.

[polly_mer]

There's something weird going on here. Various people on this thread, not just Poly, seem to keep thinking I'm implying things I'm not writing. You just accused me "of dangerous magical thinking" for repeating something that is completely widely accepted by every actual expert I've ever read, that limited and distant contact outside is low risk. I think what is happening here is that lots of people are dividing the world into people who are concerned enough and not concerned enough. However, the only way you get on team concerned is to be equally concerned about everything. Otherwise, you're cavalier.

I will say it again: everything you've posted recently is from the mass media or government-backed summaries for lay people written by authors of unknown expertise.  Yes, sometimes scientists and other experts are consulted.  However, that's not at all the same as having the science discussions with the SMEs in all the glorious details. The short version is knowing the net effect of the individual actions means the collective risk if many people take individual actions is much different than the individual risk for any one activity.

It's true that there's no such thing as zero risk in life and actions can be ranked from insanely high risk to practically nonexistent risk.  Risk ranking charts and guidelines for individual actions to reduce individual risk for catching coronavirus are published in the mass media.

My colleagues in radiation have a relevant term here: ALARA for low as reasonably achievable exposure.  For a highly contagious virus that has a 20% severe or worst outcome for individuals, making exposure ALARA for everyone is the primary goal to prevent spreading.  Taking into account those who will be exposed due to their personal circumstances as essential workers means the message to everyone else has to be do an even lower exposure to try to balance the effects.  The virus can't spread if there's zero mechanism to do so.

My colleagues in nuclear reactors use the term 'threshold' to describe the circumstances at which the really bad things start to happen and the term 'margin' to describe where the operating conditions hit the circumstances at which something has to be done to stop the progression towards the threshold.

I haven't seen any mass media descriptions of threshold and margin relevant to the spread of covid, particularly with those terms.  However, in the science discussions, I see a lot of discussion about the individual actions that are lower risk on a chart, but that collectively will rise well above a community 'margin' line in short order. 

One of the consequences of an exponential growth is how fast a one day growth is not that far up the curve.  There's a typical math problem that goes: if a pond is being covered with lily pads and is completely covered by day thirty, when was the pond half covered?  A quarter covered?

The answer is the pond was only a quarter covered on day 28 and half covered at day 29.  In terms of threshold and margin with time enough to do something to prevent total coverage, that means you actually have to set your margin at something like 4 lily pads to be able to have enough time for the interventions to take effect if the interventions take two weeks to really kick in and progress towards the threshold will continue during that whole time.

Thus, when people looking at collective results of individual actions to categorize risk, where the lines are drawn for 'everyone can do this' and 'the best message for the community is to say only a handful of people should do this' is a different line than 'this is fairly low risk for any one individual to do'.

For example, I can absolutely go 50 MPH the wrong way on a one-way street blowing through every red light at 2 AM.  That's a big problem if there's even just three of us doing that in the same downtown with no coordination of routes.

Yes, one person walking on the beach with no one around for miles or a bubbled group sitting in the backyard is absolutely safe.  I've not said that everyone must stay inside.  However, the collective effect of many people parking at a popular trailhead, being masked with one friend at a time and yet a different friend every couple of days with varying degrees of success at a minimum of six feet, and the problems with public defecation and urination with closed public restrooms is much higher than ALARA-desired average.

Knowing that people are people and many individuals will string together several lower-risk activities to have a collective result of a risk above the margin means one must set a collective margin much lower than any one individual action.

Thus, yes, people who are needlessly going above the ALARA of 'stay home and wear your mask when you make absolutely necessary trips for medical care' are not thinking about the people who do have to go to work to balance the collective risk.  Feeling cabin fever is not the same as needing to possibly contribute to spread by being a medical professional or contributing to the food supply chain.

Therefore, the conclusion isn't that you're being more cavalier with your life than makes me personal comfortable.  The conclusion is lots of people doing lower-risk activities makes all of us at higher risk of having negative consequences as a society, even those of us who stay freakin' home for weeks on end at the personal cost that entails.

[spork]

[. . . ]

The hygiene theatre linked upthread is an example of taking an obvious decision that feels data-informed, but misses the tradeoffs in resources and effectiveness in reducing virus exposure.

To this I will add:

• Since decision makers are human, they are usually terrible at recognizing that a new problem is very similar to an old problem for which an effective solution already exists; they need to be persuaded by experts that the two problems are in fact very similar and an effective solution is probably already at hand.
• Since decision makers are human, they often have personal, short-term interests that are in direct conflict with the long-term interests of the community at large; they need to be persuaded by subject matter experts that acting in the long-term communal interest will serve their short-term individual interests.
• Since decision makers are human, they suffer from the same cognitive biases that other people do, such as status quo bias and confirmation bias. Subject matter experts can help decision makers overcome these biases by introducing new information.

[mamselle]

Everytime I see this thread come up, I just want to say (in replying to the question in its title)...

      " Don't. "

M.

[Cheerful]

This looks super fun.

"What will college classrooms look like in the fall? Case Western Reserve University shares simulated spaces"
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2020/07/what-will-college-classrooms-look-like-in-the-fall-case-western-reserve-university-shares-simulated-spaces.html

"While arranging for the simulations, organizers found that it was 'impossible' to facilitate discussion that included in-person and remote students at the same time. Faculty members will decide how to balance courses and shape discussion, for example creating in-person and remote discussion groups."

Oh yes.  Don't you worry, faculty gonna make everything alright.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Everytime I see this thread come up, I just want to say (in replying to the question in its title)...

      " Don't. "

M.

Yep.

[the_geneticist]

This looks super fun.

"What will college classrooms look like in the fall? Case Western Reserve University shares simulated spaces"
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2020/07/what-will-college-classrooms-look-like-in-the-fall-case-western-reserve-university-shares-simulated-spaces.html

"While arranging for the simulations, organizers found that it was 'impossible' to facilitate discussion that included in-person and remote students at the same time. Faculty members will decide how to balance courses and shape discussion, for example creating in-person and remote discussion groups."

Oh yes.  Don't you worry, faculty gonna make everything alright.

Who could have guessed?  Oh wait, anyone who has taught anything ever.
Or we all have superpowers of instant collaboration that will magically appear on the first day of class!

[eigen]

There's something weird going on here. Various people on this thread, not just Poly, seem to keep thinking I'm implying things I'm not writing. You just accused me "of dangerous magical thinking" for repeating something that is completely widely accepted by every actual expert I've ever read, that limited and distant contact outside is low risk. I think what is happening here is that lots of people are dividing the world into people who are concerned enough and not concerned enough. However, the only way you get on team concerned is to be equally concerned about everything. Otherwise, you're cavalier.

If I seem offended by this kind of accusation, it is because I am. I'm not addressing this to Poly, who I think is perfectly happy to accuse me of indifference to human life, if she thinks it would be a good rhetorical point, but for everyone else. I'm not cavalier.  I've modified my life hugely to try to reduce the risk to myself and others. However, perfect safety isn't feasible, so I try to balance out risks. I also think that basic kindness and understand is really important here. That's true, even for people engaging in really risky activities, but it is especially true for people doing things that are relatively low risk. From a practical standpoint, it is also just a waste of time. The virus isn't spreading through people at beaches , or having socially distant family gatherings outside, even if you personally have chosen not to take on the risk of those things.

I'm sorry I offended you. I have no idea what you are or aren't doing in your life, so I can't comment on that. But I can comment on the lines of thought and evidence, especially those that I see becoming increasingly dangerous on a societal level as people take increasingly less smart risks and the virus prevalence rises. My post was specifically in response to a place where you seemed to suggest that people gathering in large numbers maskless on the beach was "fine".

I'll also note that the article you linked to is archaic in terms of our understanding of how this spreads. It's from April. In April, the primary spread was thought to be fomite transmission + some large droplets. The evidence has shifted significantly over the intervening months from April to August, so citing a non-peer reviewed article that's one persons opinion on transmission from quite a while ago doesn't do much to convince me, personally, especially when I'm talking to virologists, immunologists and epidemiologists daily who disagree with that assessment based on current understandings of the risks.

[Caracal]

There's something weird going on here. Various people on this thread, not just Poly, seem to keep thinking I'm implying things I'm not writing. You just accused me "of dangerous magical thinking" for repeating something that is completely widely accepted by every actual expert I've ever read, that limited and distant contact outside is low risk. I think what is happening here is that lots of people are dividing the world into people who are concerned enough and not concerned enough. However, the only way you get on team concerned is to be equally concerned about everything. Otherwise, you're cavalier.

I will say it again: everything you've posted recently is from the mass media or government-backed summaries for lay people written by authors of unknown expertise.  Yes, sometimes scientists and other experts are consulted.  However, that's not at all the same as having the science discussions with the SMEs in all the glorious details. The short version is knowing the net effect of the individual actions means the collective risk if many people take individual actions is much different than the individual risk for any one activity.

It's true that there's no such thing as zero risk in life and actions can be ranked from insanely high risk to practically nonexistent risk.  Risk ranking charts and guidelines for individual actions to reduce individual risk for catching coronavirus are published in the mass media.

My colleagues in radiation have a relevant term here: ALARA for low as reasonably achievable exposure.  For a highly contagious virus that has a 20% severe or worst outcome for individuals, making exposure ALARA for everyone is the primary goal to prevent spreading.  Taking into account those who will be exposed due to their personal circumstances as essential workers means the message to everyone else has to be do an even lower exposure to try to balance the effects.  The virus can't spread if there's zero mechanism to do so.

My colleagues in nuclear reactors use the term 'threshold' to describe the circumstances at which the really bad things start to happen and the term 'margin' to describe where the operating conditions hit the circumstances at which something has to be done to stop the progression towards the threshold.

I haven't seen any mass media descriptions of threshold and margin relevant to the spread of covid, particularly with those terms.  However, in the science discussions, I see a lot of discussion about the individual actions that are lower risk on a chart, but that collectively will rise well above a community 'margin' line in short order. 

One of the consequences of an exponential growth is how fast a one day growth is not that far up the curve.  There's a typical math problem that goes: if a pond is being covered with lily pads and is completely covered by day thirty, when was the pond half covered?  A quarter covered?

The answer is the pond was only a quarter covered on day 28 and half covered at day 29.  In terms of threshold and margin with time enough to do something to prevent total coverage, that means you actually have to set your margin at something like 4 lily pads to be able to have enough time for the interventions to take effect if the interventions take two weeks to really kick in and progress towards the threshold will continue during that whole time.

Thus, when people looking at collective results of individual actions to categorize risk, where the lines are drawn for 'everyone can do this' and 'the best message for the community is to say only a handful of people should do this' is a different line than 'this is fairly low risk for any one individual to do'.

For example, I can absolutely go 50 MPH the wrong way on a one-way street blowing through every red light at 2 AM.  That's a big problem if there's even just three of us doing that in the same downtown with no coordination of routes.

Yes, one person walking on the beach with no one around for miles or a bubbled group sitting in the backyard is absolutely safe.  I've not said that everyone must stay inside.  However, the collective effect of many people parking at a popular trailhead, being masked with one friend at a time and yet a different friend every couple of days with varying degrees of success at a minimum of six feet, and the problems with public defecation and urination with closed public restrooms is much higher than ALARA-desired average.

Knowing that people are people and many individuals will string together several lower-risk activities to have a collective result of a risk above the margin means one must set a collective margin much lower than any one individual action.

Thus, yes, people who are needlessly going above the ALARA of 'stay home and wear your mask when you make absolutely necessary trips for medical care' are not thinking about the people who do have to go to work to balance the collective risk.  Feeling cabin fever is not the same as needing to possibly contribute to spread by being a medical professional or contributing to the food supply chain.

Therefore, the conclusion isn't that you're being more cavalier with your life than makes me personal comfortable.  The conclusion is lots of people doing lower-risk activities makes all of us at higher risk of having negative consequences as a society, even those of us who stay freakin' home for weeks on end at the personal cost that entails.

Two points and then I'll exit this horror show of a thread.

1. It might be worth listening to the people who have experience in the intersection of society and disease. People aren't machines, even if you wish they were. There's an empathy problem here and describing the need to go out in the world occasionally as "cabin fever" typifies it. Cabin fever is when the weather is bad over the weekend and you're shut up inside. We are five months into a pandemic with no end in sight. People don't have cabin fever, they have an urgent and very real need to be able to get some outside stimulation. Would you like them to go the beach which is quite low risk, or should they go to a house party instead? You may wish they would do neither, but that isn't likely.

2. The broader issue here is a total failure of governance, particularly at the national level. It is one thing to urge people to obey clearly defined rules that keep them and others safe with the promise that as things improve, more of those rules can be lifted. In many countries, that has been exactly what happened. However, that isn't what happened in most of the US. Instead, restrictions were imposed and then lifted without really stopping spread in many parts of the country, everything about the response is adequate and we are out here on our own. I'm doing the best I can to be responsible, but help isn't coming and we have to just make the best decisions I can about finding a way to keep risk as low as I can while also trying to find a sustainable balance. The whole thing is impossible.

[spork]

[. . . ]

People don't have cabin fever, they have an urgent and very real need to be able to get some outside stimulation.

[. . . ]

I run at dawn, alone, because it's easy to keep a distance from others and not breathe in what they've breathed out. My mother, on the other hand, has been locked down in a retirement home without visitors since early March. While neither she nor I likes the situation, we both prefer it to her increasing her risk for infection by going outdoors in public, because if she does get infected there is a very high probability she will die. And I do not want to be the person who infects her.

People in their 20s and 30s who have been flocking to beaches and bars, whether they wear masks or not, are needlessly increasing the risk of infection for everyone else. It is in fact not that hard to act responsibly toward others, they just choose not to do it because of selfishness and laziness.

[Caracal]

My post was specifically in response to a place where you seemed to suggest that people gathering in large numbers maskless on the beach was "fine".

I'll also note that the article you linked to is archaic in terms of our understanding of how this spreads. It's from April. In April, the primary spread was thought to be fomite transmission + some large droplets. The evidence has shifted significantly over the intervening months from April to August, so citing a non-peer reviewed article that's one persons opinion on transmission from quite a while ago doesn't do much to convince me, personally, especially when I'm talking to virologists, immunologists and epidemiologists daily who disagree with that assessment based on current understandings of the risks.

I'm not claiming to be an expert but I have seen nothing suggesting that assessments of risk outdoors have changed. The risk from aerosols is mostly from crowded, indoor settings. Here's another more recent article if you like.

https://elemental.medium.com/what-we-know-and-dont-about-catching-covid-19-outdoors-252f32aa9817

And no, I wasn't saying that crowded beaches are a great idea, but it seems doubtful they are a significant source of spread and closing outdoor spaces down can be counterproductive if it leads to people going indoors to less safe spaces.

[Caracal]

[. . . ]

People don't have cabin fever, they have an urgent and very real need to be able to get some outside stimulation.

[. . . ]

I run at dawn, alone, because it's easy to keep a distance from others and not breathe in what they've breathed out. My mother, on the other hand, has been locked down in a retirement home without visitors since early March. While neither she nor I likes the situation, we both prefer it to her increasing her risk for infection by going outdoors in public, because if she does get infected there is a very high probability she will die. And I do not want to be the person who infects her.

People in their 20s and 30s who have been flocking to beaches and bars, whether they wear masks or not, are needlessly increasing the risk of infection for everyone else. It is in fact not that hard to act responsibly toward others, they just choose not to do it because of selfishness and laziness.

From everything we know the bars are far, far worse than the beaches. Next time you see one of those beach pictures take a close look. Usually if you look carefully, you'll see that most of the people seem to be in household pods, on blankets spaced far apart from others.

It is easy to feel mad about people who are making clearly irresponsible choices, but the elected officials who keep bars or restaurants open under unsafe conditions should bear far more of the blame than the person in their early 20s drinking there.

[spork]

Another simulation of fall semester classroom teaching: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/08/03/lessons-college-has-practiced-having-socially-distant-classes-opinion.

[Aster]

Another simulation of fall semester classroom teaching: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/08/03/lessons-college-has-practiced-having-socially-distant-classes-opinion.

Ooh. That's a very good article.

[Dimple_Dumpling72]

This looks super fun.

"What will college classrooms look like in the fall? Case Western Reserve University shares simulated spaces"
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2020/07/what-will-college-classrooms-look-like-in-the-fall-case-western-reserve-university-shares-simulated-spaces.html

"While arranging for the simulations, organizers found that it was 'impossible' to facilitate discussion that included in-person and remote students at the same time. Faculty members will decide how to balance courses and shape discussion, for example creating in-person and remote discussion groups."

Oh yes.  Don't you worry, faculty gonna make everything alright.

+1