Question

PLEASE READ THE ARTICLES ATTACHED AND ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION. THE ARTICLES ARE BOTH LISTED

PLEASE PROVIDE DETAILED EXPLANATIONS.

PLEASE WRITE ONE REFLECTION COMBINING BOTH ARTICLES.

The purpose of the Article Reflection is to deepen your engagement with the topic of Epidemiology. It will give you the opportunity to reflect on the current real-life epidemiological issues at hand and help to bring meaning to them.

ARTICLE 1:

A group of students knew they had covid-19. They hosted a party over Labor Day anyway.

By

Jaclyn Peiser

September 11, 2020 at 5:56 p.m. EDT

When a police officer pulled up to a house near the Miami University campus in Oxford, Ohio, last weekend, he found seven young men hanging around on the front porch, unmasked, drinking beer and listening to Southern rock music.

According to the police officer’s body-camera footage, which was published by WOIO, he warned them that they were violating pandemic rules, ran one student’s license, and learned he recently tested positive for covid-19. Then, that student told him that many of those at the party also had the coronavirus.

“This is what we’re trying to prevent. We want to keep this town open,” the officer said.

Six Miami University students who live in the house received citations, a civil penalty, which includes a $500 fine each but no criminal charges.

Colleges and universities nationwide have struggled to crack down on large parties, despite strict rules and harsh consequences as schools try to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Last week, Northeastern University in Boston dismissed 11 students after they gathered in a room together — and the school won’t refund their $36,500 tuition, the Boston Globe reported. Ohio State University recently issued 228 interim suspensions to students who attended parties, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

The confrontation with the Miami University students occurred on Saturday around 4 p.m. In addition to the students on the lawn, more than 10 others were inside the house, one of the residents can be heard telling the officer.

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In the body-camera footage, the officer instructed the visitors to clear out while he ran one of the students’ IDs in the police system.

“I’ve never seen this before,” the officer said, waving the student over. “There’s an input on the computer that you tested positive for covid?”

“Yes,” the student said. “This was, um, a week ago.”

The officer asked whether he was supposed to be quarantining, to which the student replied that he was at his house and that everyone who lives in the house also tested positive for covid-19.

“But you have other people here, and you’re positive for covid? You see the problem?” the officer said.

The student said that some of the visitors had also tested positive.

The officer sighed. “You’re not quarantining if you’re mixing with other people,” he said.

Citing federal privacy laws, a spokeswoman for Miami University told The Washington Post in a statement that the school cannot comment on individual cases. But added that “any Miami University student who violates a quarantine or isolation order or hosts a large gathering that violates the City of Oxford mass gathering ordinance will face disciplinary action under our Code of Student Conduct.”

“We take these matters most seriously, and students can face suspension or dismissal for these types of violations,” the spokeswoman said.

On Tuesday, the school announced it would resume in-person classes beginning Sept. 21 and that all students moving to on-campus housing, which will begin through a phased-in process during the week of Sept. 14, are required to take a covid-19 test.

Over Labor Day weekend, the university reported 159 new student cases of the coronavirus, bringing the total number of active cases to 1,037, WCPO reported, at a school with almost 20,000 students. So far, the state of Ohio has had more than 134,000 cases of covid-19 and there have been more than 4,300 deaths, according to The Post’s coronavirus tracker.

“Upperclassmen moved back,” Miami University President Gregory Crawford told WCPO. “Those early weekends in August we saw an uptick in parties and gatherings.”

Other large universities, which have had students on campus for weeks now, have had a difficult time preventing students from holding large gatherings. The University of Alabama, which has had more than 2,000 positive cases, issued 639 individual sanctions to students as of Thursday, and 33 students have been suspended, the Associated Press reported. There have been more than 135,000 cases in the state, according to The Post’s tracker.

Despite having a comprehensive plan that included testing students twice a week and an app to track them, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hasn’t been able to stop students — including those who tested positive — from partying, the New York Times reported. Since the first day of classes in late August, the school has recorded more than 400 new cases, according to a news release from the university earlier this month.

“If you know you are positive and you go to a party, that’s not just a bad act,” Ahmed E. Elbanna, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the university, told the Times. “That’s very, very dangerous.”

ARTICLE 2

Colleges are making last-minute changes as coronavirus cases spike. That’s tough for students

At schools around the US, suspensions and dismissals are rising along with cases. And a growing number of students are seeing classes go online.

By Riley Beggin  Sep 5, 2020, 5:00pm

Coronavirus cases are flooding the campuses of US colleges and universities, leading to last-minute instructional changes — and sudden disciplinary actions — that have caused difficulties for students and their families.

This week at Northeastern University in Boston, 11 students were dismissed from their program without tuition reimbursement for violating Covid-19 social distancing policies, and the Ohio State University suspended 225 students before classes even began for similar infractions.

There have been more than 50,000 confirmed cases on college campuses since the pandemic began, according to the New York Times, a number that has increased dramatically in recent weeks. That’s prompted a number of colleges, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to cancel in-person classes after students had already paid tuition. And as Vox’s Terry Nguyen has reported, rising case numbers have also left many students scrambling to find housing off-campus or transportation back home.

The increasing infections have left college towns such as Auburn, Alabama, and Ames, Iowa, hot spots for coronavirus outbreaks. More than 1,000 cases have been discovered at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, nearly 1,200 at University of South Carolina, nearly 1,400 at the University of Alabama, 540 at the University of Kansas, 752 at Texas A&M, and 962 at University of Iowa.

University administrators are all handling the surges differently. Currently, around 20 percent of colleges are either primarily or fully in-person, according to a tracker from Davidson College’s College Crisis Initiative. Around a third are either fully or primarily offering courses online. Overall, Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, described the current higher education situation to Politico as “national chaos.”

Some schools, like Boston University and Colby College, are checking students daily for coronavirus symptoms. Others are setting up quarantine dorms and creating screening stations throughout campus. But many aren’t conducting robust testing of students — in fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t recommend testing when some colleges opened for summer instruction.

And when things go awry, it’s often students who take the blame for the failure, leading to a rash of suspensions at schools including Syracuse University, the University of Miami, and the State University of New York, among others.

Some argue this is an ineffective strategy given that the patchwork of policies employed by universities around the country largely fails to protect students. Julia Marcus, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Jessica Gold, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in the Atlantic this summer:

Relying on the self-control of young adults, rather than deploying the public-health infrastructure needed to control a disease that spreads easily among people who live, eat, study, and socialize together, is not a safe reopening strategy—and yelling at students for their dangerous behavior won’t help either.

Rising cases and sudden policy changes have left students in a difficult place

That schools would see high case numbers and be forced to move instruction online should have been obvious, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sophomore named Suzy told Nguyen.

“From the moment we stepped foot on campus, I knew we weren’t going to be there for a long time,” Suzy said. “Parents knew. I overheard someone joking that they’ll see their kids in two weeks.”

And this has largely been the case, leaving students frustrated at sudden changes, and upset to learn they would not be attending class in person after paying tuition or making travel plans.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held in-person classes for only one week before shutting down on August 17. Jarrah Faye, a sophomore at UNC and a residential adviser in a first-year dorm, told Nguyen she had to both find new housing for herself and support freshmen moving out while keeping up with online classes.

“Where am I going to live? I have so many questions and so little time to think about what I’m going to do and where I’m going to go,” Faye told Nguyen. “Had this been done better, low-income students like myself wouldn’t have been put in this position of wondering whether our housing will be refunded, or if we’ll have enough money to get food if dining halls close down.”

With cases continuing to climb, colleges are now faced with a new problem: Whether to send students back home to communities where they could continue to spread the virus, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned against doing, or risk keeping them on campuses to wait out a pandemic. It’s another piece of the complexities of education in 2020 — but one that many see as a problem that could have been avoided.

The reflection assignment must include:

a) a one paragraph comprehensive summary of the article including the primary objective (please Give detailed explanation)

b) a one paragraph reflection of your own personal response to the reading. (please Give detailed explanation)

Answer 1

a). The world is witnessing one of the most dangerous pandemic situations in this year. Here, we can see that the government is doing their maximum to put an end to this chaos. But many countries have failed to bring down the cases even while following strict lockdown rules. The irony is that the people were so much worried and careful while the cases where in single digit numbers and the same people have become ignorant and careless when the cases have reached millions. Here, both the articles are bringing out the controversial situations that arise when the government imposes stricter rules on the citizens to control the pandemic. Although, the intention of the rules is for a better outcome, the students and the citizens who are getting affected by the rules are left helpless with a huge penalty. The first article shows the facts related to the students who are being irresponsible and careless while the cases are spiking. Its a known fact that young people are less affected by the covid - 19, but these less affected people can act as carrier and spread the infection to people who are prone to get affected. For eg a teenager could be a carrier and spread the disease to his grandparents who already has chronic diseases like diabetes. This can dangerously affect the grandparents while the teenager can still remain asymptomatic.

This is the reason why the government imposes rules to prevent people from social gatherings regardless of the age. But, at the same time, these lock down can bring negative effects to many economicaly low citizens and students. As in the situation of jarrah faye in the second article, many low income students find it difficult to pay for the housing charges while being sent back to home due to online classe. In addition, due to the lockdown, job opportunities are very less and even if you find job, the pay would be less.

In such a situation, its the people's responsibility to be careful and to follow the guidelines to prevent the spread of the disease. The people should find the cause and act accordingly rather than just abiding by the rules. As a citizen, we should be careful enough not to become the reason for someone else's misery.

b) According to me, as citizens, its our responsibility to be careful. Rather than following the rules which are implemented without knowing the rationale, we should get to know why we are not supposed to do it that way and why to follow this way. In the early stages of the pandemic, the rules could have been of much use. But now, as the infection has spread to community level, these rules won't do any better unless the people stay careful on their own.

As youngsters, we all should admit the fact that we all can stay as a carrier of the disease even while we stay asymptomatic . That means, still we can be a threat to our parents and old relatives or anyone who are less immune to the virus. So the care we take now can act as a prevention for others as well. After all, don't be panic but be careful.

According to my personal interest, we can never stay inside the home being afraid of a virus which has no proper incubation period neither a set of symptoms. We believe what's being told to us. Try to learn about the disease and act responsibly. Staying inside the home have not brought any better outcomes. So, be ready to go out and work but always be maximum careful and cautious. Be ready to face it with your knowledge and action.