As I drop my son off in College Station this week, the fear of losing the football season is now taking a backseat to the reality of keeping my kid safe. With all of the talk of "let's see how the football teams do when all of the regular students are back," I know there will most likely be reports of coronavirus outbreaks on different football teams (let's hope its not the Aggies in the news) - especially with the B10 and P12 dropping out there will be plenty of people hoping for epic fails in the SEC/ACC/B12 - so I'm sure we'll hear all about those results every step of the way.

Does anybody know if there will be any tracking/updates on coronavirus positives in the general student population? If things start to go south, I'd love to know. With one of the largest student populations in the country, it would be great to know what's going on, but I'm sure privacy rules will prevent anything too specific. Has anyone heard anything like this? You would think they'd at least try to keep the students in the loop to help control stupid behavior if numbers start ramping.

Mine will be there next week. He stayed after the shutdown in March and I kept up with the Aggieland thread out of curiosity. He stayed in his apartment and at this point is more cautious than I am.

302 TAMU students tested positive in the March - July timeframe. And we were 4th in infection rate out of 270 colleges who had numbers and reported them.

6600 students tested positive from 270 colleges in that time frame. That was with spring break and reports of students ignoring stay at home. That is including summer, all holidays and protests.

6600. out of 270 colleges. 302 Aggies out of 60k+. That's it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/28/us/covid-19-colleges-universities.html

Do you suppose so many students having left campuses across the nation had something to do with that?

It will be a new test to have the majority of students back, coming from so many different locals etc. I suppose many will take the on line option for attending class. It seems there has been time to set up the best possible scenarios for this going smoothly. Fingers crossed.

I was hoping someone would do a study and run antibody tests on a sample at the beginning of the semester and later on.

And yes the antibody tests are not as definitive as we hoped. However, there are still things that can be done that would be interesting.

my freshman is in FOW this week and I am totally confident in his safety. They never have their masks off. Spread out, smaller groups for PT, meals, etc.

Dropped off my Soph living in dorm and I am not very worried. She has all her covid survival gear, purell, clorox wipes, assorted masks etc...

I totally expect a surge in cases early then I think it will settle down. None of the bars are open which means there will be a lot more apartment parties, which IMHO is worse than an outdoor bar but we will see.

Texas A&M has internal student numbers and does not release that data.

bay fan said:

---

Do you suppose so many students having left campuses across the nation had something to do with that?

It will be a new test to have the majority of students back, coming from so many different locals etc. I suppose many will take the on line option for attending class. It seems there has been time to set up the best possible scenarios for this going smoothly. Fingers crossed.

---

Of course. But I lived through the after spring break shut down too, as a parent with a student at TAMU. And I know that the worry was absolutely there, that the ones still in town (even if a fraction I'm guessing it was 10K+) were going about business as usual and not following guidelines - in addition to coming back from spring break from all over the country. That infection spread never materialized. That is the point I am making with those numbers.

GAC06 said:

---

There are other viruses I'd be more worried about if I was a college student.

---