It would make sense for colleges to treat their students like prisoners if those on campus were a demonstrable public health risk. Yet the data so far show the exact opposite.
Brown University epidemiologist Andrew Bostom tweeted Tuesday that he had tallied up just over 26,000 students testing positive for COVID-19 (which itself may double-count the same person for multiple tests), based on reported figures from 29 universities, all but three public, stretching east from Arizona.
Yet he could not find a single reported hospitalization among those supposedly infected students. (PCR tests are notoriously prone to produce false positives, given that they catch even inactive viral fragments.)
Bostom has been tracking reported cases from campuses for a while now, writing skeptically about COVID-19 conventional wisdom at both his own blog and The Blaze. One of his Blaze colleagues at highlighted Bostom’s Friday case count of 11,000 in a post earlier Tuesday.
“[R]ather than recognizing the detection of mild cases among college students as portents of good news, universities continue to sow panic for no good reason,” Daniel Horowitz writes:
How is this an emergency situation? If anything, the fact that there are so many cases is a blessing, because, with such a young population, these cases are a de facto vaccine, creating herd immunity without danger.
Yet the University of Arizona hired a private security firm to enforce harsh COVID-19 restrictions, “essentially turning the campus into a prison and criminalizing the lives of young adults who have near-zero risk from the virus.” Horowitz notes that one so-called outbreak in the athletics department turned out to 84 percent false positives.
He denounces Ohio for forcing even students who test negative to be quarantined and letting their schools control visits from their parents:
This is a mandate for de facto prison – all for an “epidemic” built on false or notional positives with no health risks beyond the ordinary bugs that spread on campuses every year. …
It’s becoming self-evident every week that the virus that is really spreading is an incorrigible psychosis. Rather than confining our youth for a cold that might not even spread in its asymptomatic form, perhaps its time to start confining some of the public health officials … to a mental health facility.
Follow Bostom on Twitter and read the Blaze article.
IMAGE: DOERS/Shutterstock
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