@TerribleBPthrower posted:If I lived in that town I’d personally rather have a letter that the students were coming back in town rather than one saying they weren’t and I’d have to close my business permanently or move to a new town to find a new job.
The question is whether the economics justify the risk. Your small restaurant would make more money if you didn't have to keep the kitchen clean, but we impose sanitation rules for the sake of others--even if the added costs mean you can't stay in business. Those kinds of trade-offs are the stuff society is made of. And getting this one right is going to be really hard--IMO there don't seem to me any obvious good answers.
Colleges are basically giant incubators for pathogens. That is why schools started requiring meningitis vaccinations. Schools can make rules to try to limit the risks from coronavirus somewhat, and maybe can succeed in enforcing those rules reasonably well (maybe...). But it's not clear to me that it's a good idea to intentionally create large islands of potential C-19 infections. This is the same logic that is making sports leagues contemplate playing with no fans in attendance--big groups mean high risks of transmission.
Some prisons have seen large outbreaks of C-19. College students are younger and generally healthier than prison populations; but in terms of living environment, universities are basically prisons where the inmates can go into town on weekends. Choosing to have 20,000+ people live and work in close quarters could have effects far greater than just opening restaurants and hair salons.
I had ducked out of these arguments here for a while. Not sure why I fell off the wagon today. It was fun (really), but think I'm going to go back to lurking.