The Reluctant Psychoanalyst: Covid Chronicles XII- Labor Day is for WORK!

Greetings on Labor Day Weekend – a two day weekend at my University. We have done away with all long weekends this fall semester to try to keep students from traveling home… In my last Covid chronicle, I shared an example of that plan being foiled on a non-national holiday weekend – I imagine it will be foiled this weekend much more frequently… I also realized after my last posting that I have been unnecessarily harsh on the very hardworking members of the University who have worked over the summer to create plans for the school to have a “safe” or at least a “safe as possible” reopening.

The issue is that my University is small. We do not have a medical school. We do not have a department of epidemiology. And so the members of the task force that have been formed to address the problem are people like our Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences. She is a very bright woman. She is an exceptionally hard worker. She has published two books. She is an excellent communicator. Her field is the history of Modern Europe and her books are about the impact of war on civilians.

I’m not sure that we would be better off at a school that has an epidemiology department. The advantage of having the huge National University system that we have is that individuals in each of those Universities can focus on very narrow aspects of their field. So the likelihood of an epidemiologist with a specialty in air-borne diseases being at an institution that also has a preventative disease specialist in this area, and that they are both ready to transform the research literature into a working plan to protect their institution is probably pretty small.

In fact, a September 4^th 2020 New York Times Table suggests that, if this is the case, it has not been the case at a number of large universities. The table below tracks the current cities in the US that have had the most outbreaks of Covid in the last two weeks:

New cases, last two weeks

METRO OR MICRO AREA		POPULATION	RECENT CASES	PER 1,000
1	Muskogee, Okla.	67,997	780	10.3
2	Statesboro, Ga.	79,608	753	7.3
3	Ames, Iowa	97,117	1,256	6.7
4	Iowa City, Iowa	173,105	2,027	6.4
5	Pullman, Wash.	50,104	518	6.3
6	Oxford, Miss.	54,019	468	5.6
7	Auburn-Opelika, Ala.	164,542	1,683	4.7
8	Bloomington, Ill.	187,155	1,276	4.5
9	Laredo, Texas	276,652	1,595	4.4
10	Pine Bluff, Ark.	87,804	607	4.3
11	Columbia, Mo.	180,463	1,230	4.2
12	Ontario, Ore.	54,522	460	4.0
13	Stillwater, Okla.	81,784	472	3.9
14	Manhattan, Kan.	98,615	532	3.8
15	Grand Forks, N.D.	100,815	793	3.8
16	Greenville, N.C.	180,742	1,357	3.7
17	Milledgeville, Ga.	53,347	526	3.6
18	Lubbock, Texas	322,257	1,596	3.6
19	Winona, Minn.	50,484	249	3.6
20	Charleston-Mattoon, Ill.	61,387	425	3.6
509	New York City area	20.0 mil.	9,550	0.3

Limited to areas with at least 50,000 people. Recent cases are those announced in the last two weeks, but in some cases may have taken place earlier because of delays in reporting.

Notice anything funny about those cities? Eight of the top ten cities are College towns and about 16 of the top twenty. Many of these cities have large Universities in them that likely have departments of epidemiology and medical centers. So why have they become super-spreader sites? I don’t think that the people with the specialized knowledge at those places are likely being tapped by the top administrators. Or, if they are, they apparently are not having an impact on the rate of infection that occurs when people come from all over and live together in close quarters. Certainly there have been plenty of pictures of students at parties without masks or distancing in newspapers.

Could we have seen this coming? Should we have some sort of National oversight of this? There is obviously a huge divide in the country on this. But when we have agencies who are charged with exactly this kind of oversight and they are not being called on to offer advice or guidelines, each of these Universities has to figure out on their own how to handle what is occurring. And, of course, this is going on at the High School and Elementary School level. So we have a wonderful natural uncontrolled experiment going on – unfortunately, the consequences of this experiment are potentially lethal.

What do we do with students after they have become exposed or infected? On my campus they are quarantined whether they are diagnosed or not. On Monday, we had about 250 students quarantining in their dorm rooms or in their off campus housing. By Friday it was 287, which is about 5% of the student body. One in twenty students who are on campus cannot go to class.

Now we only have, as of yesterday, 37 confirmed cases among students and 2 among faculty and staff (though this number will rise as diagnostic testing information can come in days later and we will only now retrospectively how many cases we had). So things are not grim yet. But if we have to close, do we send those who are quarantined home? Who lives in those homes? How much risk do the quarantined (and those we haven’t been able to identify) pose to their families?

I said things are not grim yet, but I was speaking about numbers. Teaching in a classroom that is set up to allow students to be there in person or by zoom, this week in two classes I only had two students in the classroom with the rest, around twenty, showing up on zoom. When I had all the students come in to take an exam – they got out of there as quickly after the exam as they could.

I was in a zoom meeting with a fellow faculty member earlier in the week, and she was in her office on campus. She has decided to work from there because the building is essentially empty. Few students come to class and those that do not linger. All faculty are working from home. The administrative support staff, as I noted in the last post, are stupidly required to be on campus whether they could work from home or not, but our building, usually a hive of activity, is tomblike – and our interactions with each other involve masks so they are muted and odd.

Grim. I think that the experience – as opposed to the usual jubilance mixed with the grind of work has been replaced by a certain kind of hollowness. The faculty who is in her office has also seen her in-person student attendance dwindle, and her sense is that her students are scared to come to class.

Ironically, we are doing much better than the nearby University that decided to have only online courses and wait to see how things went. This college town in the next county has now become so infected that the county as a whole has gone from orange to red on our state’s system. The students, not exposed to the classroom, may not be taking as seriously as our students are, what all of this means… There are many other variables playing into this – but I can’t help thinking that our approach to having classes in person – as much as I railed against it – is so far looking like a better alternative to the wait and see approach…

We, as the American Psychoanalytic Association guidelines for re-opening so plainly put it, are forced to come to the realization that we are currently primarily a threat to each other. Fortunately everyone that I have seen in our building is wearing masks – and they are using tons of disinfectant. I wear a mask until I get home. The first thing I do when I get inside is to hang it up and then to wash my hands. Wearing it all the way home helps remind me not to touch my face until it is safe to do so.

Will our local lack of knowledge lead to a level of fear that keeps our numbers down so that we don’t have to inflict infected students on their families? Will this cohort of students feel warmly about their college years or will they look back on them as a time of grimness? What about those who become ill and feel concern – and for some those feelings may range into terror? How will we remember this era? Will we use our defense mechanisms to distance ourselves from this experience? Will the denial that my university's administration has used permeate our consciousness as well? Or will we be forced to acknowledge the grimness – not just of what we are going through – but of not having a road map to get out of it?

All the while, a beautiful fall begins to unfold around us in this most surreal of years....

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For other posts on COVID:

I: Apocalypse Now my first posting on COVID-19.

II: Midnight in Paris is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID. (Also in Movies).

III: Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome. COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV: Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V: COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI: Get back in that classroom Paranoid ruminations.

VII: Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...