anyone actually surprised by this?
There's no way anyone actually is, like we were all horned up 21 year olds at one point, right?
There's an awful lot of finger wagging. And really, we've seen similar behavior all over the country from all ages of people. Open up bars and this is what happens
Same damn story led the news up here about flood aggie
We saw Sturgis, too
I do think Sturgis is different than what's happening in college towns. Nobody made those boomers and Xers go up to South Dakota. They are also 2 to 3 times older than these college kids. You can't send these kids to these small towns then tell them they can only have part of the experience. You send your kid to college, I would think you are sending them with the expectation they are going to do college stuff.
Re: Sturgis
I had reason to be in the area of Sturgis last weekend (not related to the motorcycle rally) and have enjoyed you all finger wagging and #boomermeming, but how about we take a data driven approach instead? This is imperfect of course, since vast numbers of people travel in to Sturgis and then leave a week later, but there can be some value in looking at the infection numbers of Meade and Pennington counties. The day before Sturgis started the total active cases for those two counties was 139. Today the total active cases are 135, net -4. I will check back in the next week but so far it appears the communal mask shaming and assumption of a certain outbreak has been unwarranted...so far.
I think we will find this can be applied to students returning to college as well. Bringing together low risk, low infection rate populations from a large area and concentrating them in one location does not inherently mean there will be an outbreak and that everyone's grandma is being murdered. There will be a few campuses that have issues of course, but most will probably be fine. It is way too early but Riley County has 60 active cases as of today, we will see where this goes in the next few weeks.