This is going to be fun and we can track it

We're over 900 including employees.

I don't see the raw number of positives at a given college as the most critical number.  I would ask what would be the expected number of positives in the student body if they WEREN'T at school.  Then I would compare the risk posed to vulnerable (i.e. old) people posed by the positive students on campus as compared to the risk posed by positive students if they weren't on campus.  

I also firmly believe it's more important to test students at the end of the semester, rather than at the beginning.  I have heard some schools are doing this.  I would make the award of credits for the semester contingent on taking a COVID test.  

There can be a lot more to thinking about COVID than whether you do or don't like Trump.

Here are some stats from Dr. Andrew Bostom Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School from September 8th, 2020:


25,941 positive tests from 29 college campuses with a total of zero hospitalizations. Has anyone at BSU been hospitalized? Anyone on a ventilator?

Remember the goal of flattening the curve?



Ensuring that hospitals weren’t overrun? Well, what do you call a scenario where thousands of cases result in zero hospitalizations? I’d call it the ultimate flat curve – or downright flat line.



Yet rather than recognizing the detection of mild cases among college students as portents of good news, universities continue to sow panic.

If we had in place the strict eligibility threshold for COVID-19 testing that we had in March when tests were scarce, we quite literally would not know the “epidemic” of mild and asymptomatic cases on college campus even exists. After being open for weeks, college campuses have no reported deaths or even hospitalizations that I can find. You might say that’s because they’ve done such an amazing job preventing cases. Nope: They have tons of reported cases.

The horror! Some asymptomatic cases. What are they going to do during the flu season when even young people actually get sick for a week? The entire purpose of counting cases during an epidemic is because they might predict mass casualties. During this pseudo-epidemic on college campuses, they need to count cases to even know they exist. But if they don’t result in serious illness, then what is the purpose of counting them more than rhinovirus colds?

Then there is the issue of what exactly these PCR tests are detecting. Many of them could be false positives, insignificant viral loads, or the dead RNA of a virus that passed weeks ago still being carried around in the student’s nasal passages. There is no metric for any of this being monitored in the testing

Anyone notice the recent BSU tracking trends?Positive tests reported by IU Health (red bars) topped-out the week of August 24-30th at 194 cases, then decreased the following 2 weeks followed by 0 last week. Positive tests from other reports (black bars) peaked one week later, August 31 to September 6th at 287 cases, decreasing to 27 last week (Sept 14-20th). Recoveries (blue bars) peaked the week of September 7-13th at 484 and decreased to 218 last week. This week opened with 55 active cases which after Monday declined to 37 (20 recoveries, 2 new positives).

To those on campus, what the heck happened? From the data, Covid-19 appears to be ending on campus, but why:

1) Is the recent data posted on the dashboard inaccurate?

2) Have most courses moved online so the number of students on campus is next to zero?

3) Are students still getting infected, but due to their course loads don't have time to get tested like they did at the beginning of the semester?

4) Has IU Health has run out of testing supplies and thus can't test anyone?

5) Approximately 5% of the student population has tested positive. Are the remaining 95% good, responsible students who wear their masks, go straight back to their dorms after class, and don't attend weekend parties? In other words the "bad seeds" have been infected and the remaining responsible ones don't spread Covid-19.

Or is there another reason? If you apply the CDC "rule of thumb" that for every positive test there are another 9 that go unreported, the 5% of the student population who tested positive would mean 50% actually had it. Add in those with natural immunity from being exposed to in their past to other Coronaviruses and Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) has been reached on campus. You know I was going there, right?

That's undoubtedly true to explain volume of Testing. Testing isn't the strong point of BSU plan.

I'd like to see more random testing and reports on positive rate. Anything we say now is latgely speculative.

Masks and other mitigation steps are very good on campus. Off campus harder to judge.

Relatively fewer big social events like tailgating, and frat parties.

So far so good it seems.

There is better contact tracing and quarantine than for general Muncie community.

As weather gets colder and social life is groups of people indoors together more it's expected we see some trouble.

With mostly young population, more healthy than general population, good practices, I'm not sure we'd expect much different results, so far faculty staff have fared well, indicating good practices on campus. Every day adds to risks there, have to stay observant.

Delaware County has spiked, now down, but not good, and that is hard to separate from statewide trends. And after all is the important picture where we don't have really good practices or good testing.