Why are we okay with students being locked up in their dorms?

[JKRowlingIsMyQueen]

I just heard about the students in Manchester who are not allowed to leave their dorms.

Why on earth is this allowed to happen? So the rest of us who are not students are allowed to get pissed in a pub, get on a plane and travel abroad and back etc., but if you are a student you are not allowed to LEAVE your dorms?

What science are these kind of rules following? The science of Boris needing more ammo to blame young people for spreading the virus?

I'm losing hope.

It's really simple anyone that has been in contact with an infected person has to isolate. Not just students, anyone.
Now bear in mind that the university have a high level of positive infected students and bingo.....isolate...

Not difficult and not unfair

If they hadn't have come, you'd have lost your job wouldn't you zurich09?

Surely the self-isolation rules should only apply to the people in your flat not in the whole halls of residence. That’s like saying if someone in a block of flats tests positive then the whole block should self-isolate.

Students were encouraged to go back to uni, were told by the government it was the right thing to do, for freshers t must be awful.

but I do wish they hadnt come or at least understood the risk

My comment above refers to what you said here @zurich09

To the PP who said it’s like WW1 - don’t be fucking stupid. Yes, it’s concerning,. No, it’s not ideal. Absolutely, something needs to be done about it. But it is isolating for 14 days in a heated, modern building with food deliveries, not clambering out of mud-filled trench, crawling through barbed wire under shellfire and being shot to pieces by machine gun bullets.

What a moronic comparison.

@LimitIsUp

"If anyone would like to look through Sage reports, scientific, medical and public health papers submitted to the SAGE in July this was all modelled and predicted. What did the students expect"

Yes, because everyone should be reviewing the latest SAGE reports and medical and scientific papers over breakfast daily, as a matter of course 🙄

It was relatively well reported. Certainly accessible to everyone interested - which would include all students and their families.

@zurich09 your levelling all the blame on students and parents again but it’s your employers and the government who have put you and students in this position. If uni’s wanted students at home and all online learning why not push this, advertise it, make it attractive to students? They didn’t because they wanted the money not only from course fees but for accommodation.

@Browneyesbigbum

It's really simple anyone that has been in contact with an infected person has to isolate. Not just students, anyone. Now bear in mind that the university have a high level of positive infected students and bingo.....isolate...

Not difficult and not unfair

Exactly. See fruit pickers, factories, flats, cruise ships, hotels, schools...

@LimitIsUp - you know what when i sent my kid to the nursery - i checked some of the science cos you know its a pandemic, assessed the risks etc.

so actually yeah maybe they should have. plus it was in the papers and was not a secret. which bit of its a pandemic do people find hard to understand

@Dustballs and you know what - i fully expected to lose my job - not this year as my uni decided not to do major redundancies this year even before studnet numbers turned out to be good. but yeah we all assumed that this year would wipe out our sector.

but this isnt about my sector or my job but about student expectations for this year, living in halls etc.

[quote zurich09]@LimitIsUp - you know what when i sent my kid to the nursery - i checked some of the science cos you know its a pandemic, assessed the risks etc.

so actually yeah maybe they should have. plus it was in the papers and was not a secret. which bit of its a pandemic do people find hard to understand[/quote]
Are you really an academic? Did I misread that?

AFAIK Cambridge University is the only uni that declared outright (in May) that all lectures would be online for 2020-21. They’ve organised free weekly testing for all students (including asymptomatics). And this from one of their college guidelines:

“ Trinity’s contract, described as a “Covid-19 student community statement”, instructs students to “bring only the minimum amount of belongings that you require, primarily for academic purposes and basic living standards”. It warns that they “must have prepared travel plans to leave college accommodation, at your expense, at very short notice and at any time unless you have been granted permission to stay”.
The contract also requires students to “store in your room three days ’ supply of non-perishable food for use in the event of a lockdown”.

At least no one can accuse them of sugarcoating...

I’m not okay with it at all

Some of the symptoms of meningitis and covid could easily be confused.Sorry but people need to know.

@randomer

Some of the symptoms of meningitis and covid could easily be confused.Sorry but people need to know.

And students are less likely to have had vaccinations because of restrictions at GP surgeries.

It’s absolutely shameful. Older people (and I include myself) have no business treating the people we will rely on in future to look after us all in this way. It would serve us right if they shat on us as we have on them.

@zurich09 Surely it is the universities job to risk assess the situation with accomodation and university lessons. They have a duty of care to students. As you have pointed out this pandemic is not new it has been here since March so Universities Have had plenty of time to assess the situation and must have been aware of the risks they were taking with student welfare. Most students were offered blended teaching by universities with F2F contact And not provided with timetables until they arrived that is why they took up the accomodation in the first place as often the student lives too far to commute. If universities had been open and honest about the risks and provided full disclosure on what was being offered be it online lessons or regular Covid tests and F2F then students would have been able to make informed decisions like you could with your nursery instead students were fobbed off with vague statements of blended learning and the promise of F2F. Ultimately Universities have put £££ before student welfare and the blame lies at their feet

Students are usually the first to rise up against fascism.

Sounds like some of them are having fun to me

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08ssngh

Why are we ok with killing the elderly and disabled forcing care homes to take Covid inflected patients?

If anyone says 'well they're old/disabled and therefore expendable protecting them is less important than students temporarily staying in for a few weeks, then why don't we offer them a kinder way out? The Dignitas drugs are a painless and controlled death.

Also if the elderly/disabled aren't that important, why tell people to stop smoking 'because it shortens your life'?

[quote MummyPop00]Sounds like some of them are having fun to me

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08ssngh[/quote]
Sophie should ring the police to get her out of there. Or ask her parents to.

From a ruthlessly utilitarian point of view there’s a lot to be said for sending a million healthy teens off to live with each other in semi-isolation and letting the virus rip through them for three months while not giving them any contact with older lecturers, tutors etc. It would be the living embodiment of what everyone who’s saying “protect the vulnerable and let the rest of us get on with our lives” wants.

But you’d need to admit to everyone what you were doing - you’d need to preplan food supplies for the inevitable quarantines rather than making it up as you went along, you’d need to tell (and support) anyone with a Covid risk greater than a 30 year old woman to defer (both actual mature students and teens with serious health issues), you’d need to tell the students that in return for putting up with self-isolation they should feel free to party like it was 1999 and rule of 6 be damned, basically you’d need a level of honesty which no government has ever possessed.

You’d need a lot more than just a million students in terms of % of the population. Try everybody under 50 instead.

This is potentially manslaughter.

As a PP has pointed out, symptoms of meningitis can look like Covid. If the situation arises where a student with such signs is corralled in halls and forcibly prevented from leaving to seek early medical care, and subsequently dies or suffers life changing brain or organ injury as a result, I hope the uni gets absolutely ravaged in court for squillions.

If you want to make an interesting ethical comparison to the locking up of hundreds of healthy individuals, google the rules on forcible detention of a patient with multi drug resistant TB who refuse to take treatment. That's a kid glove situation and detaining such an individual is considered a last resort.

@cantkeepawayforever

I genuinely cannot believe that every parent on here crying 'those poor students' didn't think this though and say to themselves - and their child - 'Covid will come into your halls of residence, and will spread. You will have to self-isolate, probably more than once. What will you do, and how can we prepare you?'

Do you have a child going to University this year? Do you have a child that didn’t know that if she was given an en-suite room she would be classed as a single household ‘bubble’ and therefore would be unable to socialise with anyone else other than outside (very likely in October onwards) Presumably you did as you are so much wiser than the rest of us but I have a very confident dd who goes to Uni next weekend on the verge of tears as she has heard from her friends what an awful time they are having . So you can mock ‘those poor students’ all you like but I know that normally strong kids are genuinely struggling so I dread to think what more vulnerable ones are going through but you carry on thinking that you are such a better parent than the rest of us