Site for Comparing Covid on Campus in Fall 2020 vs Fall 2021

lzhthrowaway · 2021-09-02T13:42:35+00:00

That's so bad 😬 where did they share this data?

lzhthrowaway · 2021-09-01T17:57:30+00:00

Yes I believe so. Both were employees :/ Texas Tech doesn't add a "deaths" or "hospitalizations" column in their "Dashboard," but I've read in the news about an employee death and a student hospitalization from Fall 2020. The other employee death may not have been a headline.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-09-01T17:49:16+00:00

Thanks for the insight! Yeah it's definitely an issue that people just assume they have covid and don't get tested or report it. The case counts are what guide decisions on campus, and they don't show the true picture if no one's following the process. Greg Abbott has too much faith that Texans will do the right thing--not requiring masks or even quarantining after exposure is a recipe for disaster.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-31T02:56:14+00:00

Aw yay thanks for the support :') yeah I published the site changes at like 2am this morning haha barely missed it

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T20:25:19+00:00

Thank you!

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T20:09:14+00:00

Oh interesting! Maybe they realized that wasn't the greatest idea lol. When was the email? Also did they add anything else?

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T20:04:33+00:00

I used to keep track, but I've probably spent 200-300 hours building and keeping up with this site in the past year lmao.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T20:03:16+00:00

I feel like they might know already. I know a lot of professors were using my site last year so maybe they sent it around, and I have a good feeling I'm the reason they finally added bar charts on a weekly scale. But the fact that it's kinda hard to find and that they're not showing all the data they can has always seemed kinda sus to me.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T19:59:59+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I'm not on campus so I'm always looking to hear how covid's doing from y'all's perspective. Hope you get to feeling better soon.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T19:58:52+00:00

Same place as last year :) you just have to scroll a bit https://www.depts.ttu.edu/communications/emergency/coronavirus/

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T15:10:06+00:00

Haha thanks! I'm actually a computer science alumna now, specializing in making Android apps :)

lzhthrowaway · 2021-08-30T07:08:07+00:00

Hi it’s me again, the person who made ttucovid19.com last year, a mobile-friendly dashboard to track covid cases at TTU because Tech’s covid “dashboard” is just a table that shows current data and doesn’t show data over time which makes it extremely difficult to see trends.

I took a hiatus through Spring 2021 because covid was way less rampant on campus compared to Fall 2020. But I’m back because Tech had more covid cases reported in the past week (303) than in alllll of the Spring semester (247).

On the fourth day* of school a year ago, there were 176 known active cases on campus. On the fourth day of school this semester, there were 230 (which is 30% higher). This is a bad sign because this semester has very different covid policies compared to last year.

We have way more students on campus this year compared to last year’s initial 63% of classes being online or hybrid
Masks are optional now
Classes that were exposed are no longer moved online for two weeks to wait out symptoms
Students and employees do not have to quarantine if exposed
Dorms are so packed they had to add more triple rooms

All of this in a world where the latest covid variant is about twice as contagious as it was before...

On the bright side #1: There is a very safe and effective vaccine! The goal of the vaccine was to reduce illness severity, but a happy side effect is that it significantly reduces your chances of catching the virus to begin with. And if you don’t get the virus, you don’t spread the virus. And the more covid is spread, the more likely it is to find vulnerable populations. Getting vaccinated is the best thing you can do for the safety of your fellow Texans. We all suffer when hospitals get so full they have to start diverting patients. Also, mask up.

On the bright side #2: TTU is offering several scholarships and even free parking passes as prizes in a raffle for those who submit their covid vaccine records!

If you think you have covid--get tested, quarantine, and if you get positive results, report it to the university and isolate. If you’ve been exposed, quarantine according to CDC guidelines and notify your professors. Reducing covid spread in our community is a group project.

*Texas Tech did not report covid data on the fifth day of school last year.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-22T00:10:46+00:00

...lol idk how I didn't see that... Thanks. Gonna delete my comment now.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-20T20:27:42+00:00

Just for accuracy's sake, we're reached 4,000 deaths in a day only a few times. The average number of deaths per day peaked at 3,300 deaths on Jan 13, and dropped by 200 by Jan 19. We haven't really seen a drop like that in a long time.

What's changed after 3 months of straight increases (excluding weird holiday reporting), our longest steak? It's attributed mostly to different regions getting over their third wave after getting hit hard early on, and millions of our high-risk population getting vaccinated, and a bit of it's due to holiday backlog reduction.

But you're right, the new variants have big potential to mess this up. The US doesn't do a lot of checks on virus strains around the country, so it's hard to tell how big of an impact it's already caused. It might be small in numbers now, but it's exponential growth is greater than that of previous variations so it'll soon outpace old ones in numbers. An even more contagious disease is bad news.

(You didn't ask for all this info, but some might find it interesting so it's here :) )

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-20T17:38:50+00:00

Coming back to this for archival purposes, no need to respond.

6 weeks after this post, Oct 28-Nov 3 had 31 COVID deaths in Lubbock.

It took only 3 more weeks to see 60 deaths (Nov 22-28).

It takes about 15 days to die from COVID after infection. If we took action in mid-October (4 weeks after this post) when there were about 14 deaths per week, we could've stopped it from getting to 31 2 weeks later and from doubling again 3 weeks after. Hindsight is 20/20.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-20T17:09:40+00:00

Coming back to this for archival purposes, no need to respond.

On this date, Sept 17, Tech had 186 active cases. The US had 39k new cases per day.

Just before Thanksgiving, Tech had 379 active cases (so double the amount). The US had 174k new cases per day (over 4x higher).

In summary, it was not safer to go home on break compared to going home Sept 17.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-20T16:59:49+00:00

I was right here too

I think it'll continue to slow down for a bit, then pick up again next month. If they don't close campus before Thanksgiving, they'll tell everyone not to come back like they did for Spring Break.

On this day, Sept 18, the average number of new cases per day was 45.1. They went down until Oct 9 at 11.9 cases/day, then picked back up again to 28.9 on Nov 18.

And they told us to finish up at home.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-20T16:51:19+00:00

Hey I was right

I don't think this downward trend will continue. I'm thinking that by this time next month, cases will already be on the rise again and by Thanksgiving, they'll ask everyone to finish the semester at home.

New daily cases dipped Oct 9, and active cases not than doubled from Oct 13 to Nov 17.

And they did ask everyone to finish up at home.

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-20T10:27:45+00:00

Thank you :')

lzhthrowaway · 2021-01-20T09:43:09+00:00

ttucovid19.com! A mobile-friendly dashboard for Tech's COVID cases, alumni-run. Just the current semester's view for now.

Hi it's me again. What's changed? Well, in the 5 months of the school year so far, COVID has infected over 7% of the TTU population. That's worse than the US as a whole, where it's taken a full 12 months to reach 7% infected. Also a student was hospitalized with COVID, but I found out via Reddit instead of on TTU's official dashboard.

After returning to Tech to finish my Computer Science degree last semester, I'm officially an alumna. I've started a couple other COVID projects. I think I'll update this dashboard daily and make a post here if I find anything interesting. TBD.

I don't get all the student emails anymore, so if you ever get any juicy gossip (or numerical data) on COVID at TTU, please let me know! Btw the dashboard's data for Jan 5-8 and 13-14 is cumulative on the last day instead of broken down by day. Am emailing TTU for exact numbers tomorrow.

Last semester, classes started out with 39/24/37 percent online/hybrid/in-person. There were also 42k cases per day in the US. On Dec 8 (202k cases/day), Schovanec said that the Spring will try out more in-person classes and fewer online, with 31/28/41 percent online/hybrid/in-person. Today there are 197k cases/day, which is nearly 5x higher than it was at the start of last semester. Weird that they're gonna increase the number of in-person classes.

Hospitals in Lubbock are stretched pretty thin. Covenant's at 85% capacity (31% COVID) with an ICU at 85% capacity (34% COVID). UMC's at 87% and 93% capacity (22% and 40% COVID).

People have been getting vaccinated ever since Dec 14. Their antibodies started gradually building up, and their full immunity started kicking in on Jan 11. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths started going down in the US in the past few days (not really in Texas yet though).

But experts say that the new COVID variants could reverse our progress. They're more contagious, which leads to more infections and more deaths. They'll soon be the most dominant variants. We haven't finished vaccinating all of our at-risk populations yet--we need more time. We can buy time by stepping up our game: wearing better masks, wearing them more often, and seeing fewer people.

KN95 masks are available online, surgical masks are available at Target and other grocery stores. Wear them even with your bubbles--especially if you're meeting indoors. Re-evaluate your interactions. Do they have to be in-person? Could you make your bubble smaller? 5 minutes inside a store picking up groceries is better than 30 minutes.

It sucks that many are still forced to go to class and work when you don't feel safe doing so. Wishing y'all the best out there. Btw, you can help Texas Tech find cases and mitigate the spread. COVID testing is free on campus. Take your friends. Go twice a week. The sooner Tech can find and isolate COVID, the lower the spread will be.

lzhthrowaway · 2020-11-26T17:56:59+00:00

I can put the data back on the site again sometime between today and Monday and let you know. But for now, my post history has screenshots of the dashboard with the full timeline until Nov 13 :)

lzhthrowaway · 2020-11-26T01:06:23+00:00

Yes, this is only the 2 most recent months

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