NIGHTMARE ON THE STANFORD CAMPUS

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil      India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732        1185      246         82

July       1       676    4857        1057      438         92

             5       251    3572          535       421       173

             6       378    3573          656       474       111

             7       993    5504        1312       479       192

           12       380    4118          659       500       108

           13       465    3729          770       540         93

           14       935    5414        1341       586       174

           15     1001    5760        1261       614       107

           19       412    4606          715       675         85

           20       545    4040          718       596       140

           21     1119    5669        1346       671        195

           22     1205    7128        1293     1120        572

           26       450    4307         556       715        114
           27      596     4200         627       636        298
           28    1266     5589         955       776        190       

Summary:

• Just when you thought the worst was over...I know this is bad grammar...but it got worser in the USA.

• Ironically, the news channel that helped him get elected, Fox, is now why he most probably won't be re-elected:

“Trump repeatedly failed to act to tame the spread, even though that would have helped him politically,” The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has written. The headline on Sargent’s opinion column is: “How Fox News may be destroying Trump’s re-election hopes.”

As the summer period moves into August, a gnawing uncertainty builds in anticipation of the new school year.  This time, the feeling about the next unknown is compounded by a pandemic.







This transition period reaches a peak when first entering kindergarten, as many would be leaving home for the first time.  For the more fortunate, one again experiences this exciting, but apprehensive, sense when going away to college.  Having never left Hawaii before, I leaped into this strange new world when arriving on the Stanford campus in 1958.  Our freshman class was the first full group to move into Wilbur Hall.  I was lucky, for there were no world wars, pandemics, earthquakes...nothing but growing up,  so I graduated with confidence to become what I am today.

Project yourself further all the way back to 1914 when the new freshman class entered.  All was posh and preppy.  In my research, I stumbled upon something from the Stanford archives and found these photos of Stanford students.  This largely privileged, but unfortunate lot, innocently came looking forward to a life of some partying and little schooling.  The pervading thought here was if you were good enough to get in, you had enough to graduate.  Few flunked out then and now, you just changed majors.  I think these photos came from the year 1917.  Note how they dressed.  I arrived not owning a suit, not even a tie.

Of course the students were just about all White.  However, that is President David Starr Jordan in the middle of those Japanese students.  Utterly strange, for I thought I was the only Japanese in my freshman class and there certainly was no Japanese Student Association by my time there.  I suspect World War II ended that relationship. Did you know that President Jordan was a founding member of the eugenics movement, from which Hitler and Nazi Germany borrowed?

Three years ago, David Starr Jordan and Lewis M. Terman middle schools in Palo Alto replaced their names.  Terman was famous for the IQ tests that are given today.  He, too, was into eugenics.  His son, Frederick, is known as the founder of Silicon Valley.  These were all heroes of mine.  But the world does change.

Okay, enough of this digression.  Then came World War I, compounded by the Spanish Flu Pandemic when this group became seniors.

From simple students, campus life became a nightmare.  You wonder if this can happen again.

Maybe worry what else can happen over the next few months.  After all, Donald Trump is pushing for all schools re-starting in the classroom.

I happened to read this month's issue of Stanford, where an article reported on what happened on the campus during the Spanish Flu of 1918:

• Male students were just peremptorily made privates by the U.S. War Department.  
• Reveille at 6AM and Taps at 10PM.  
• You had to make your bed every morning with your pillowcase opening to the correct side, while women had tightened curfews.
• Can you believe the country was planning to send college students off to war?  This was not the only campus that got suddenly converted.

• On October 8 Charles Sullivan penned a letter indicating his temperature had spiked near 104F:

• Subsequently, Charles was stretchered to Encina Hall, a dormitory of mine for three years.  In 1906 there was the Great San Francisco Earthquake, which of course affected the campus.  That is Encina Hall in the background as the campus recovered:

• Back to Sullivan, he lived.
• Sometime in November, Charles snuck out of quarantine and found his way to Palo Alto where he got a haircut.  Surely sounds familiar.
• Turned out 100 students had been infected with this H1N1 virus at that point.
• Masks were mandatory, no shaking of hands and don't be in a crowd, as there was such a thing as social distancing.  Men still wore sport coats everywhere.

• As another aside, going back to 1903, there was a previous contagion on campus.  Typhoid, where nine students died.  The school physician then was Professor Ray Lyman Wilbur.  He became president in 1918.  Oh, that's why I lived in Wilbur Hall.
• So returning to the Spanish Flu, all students were checked for temperature at night.  Again, sounds familiar to what we're doing here daily at 15 Craigside.
• As best as could be determined, 14 were killed by the virus, mostly male students.  At that time the undergraduate enrollment was only 1322 (now 9000), so the death rate was at 1%.  In comparison, the current mortality of COVID-19 in the USA is 0.05%, or one-twentieth that of the Stanford Campus in 1918.
• Thankfully for those students, the war ended in November of 1918, and they went back to being students.

Well, maybe not quite, for there was a second wave:

So while you agonize over your children or grandchildren going back to school, imagine being on the Stanford campus in 1918.  On the other hand, should anyone be stuck all day in a room at this phase of COVID-19?  There will be a second wave.  From the New York Times:

A Times analysis found at least 6,300 virus cases tied to about 270 colleges. And the new academic year has not even begun at most schools.

I noticed that this July Stanford magazine focused on COVID-19:

• Should you want to gain a sense of life as a student who just graduated, read This Is How It Ends, by Melina Walling.

• Next, What's Funny Now, by Melinda Sacks.

• Then, This Not a Drill.  Remember, the Bay Area is where this all started in the country because San Francisco is where most people coming from China landed, plus, the Grand Princess docked here with the infected:
• The first U.S. case and death occurred here.
• The doctors who provided leadership in the various counties were almost all Stanford graduates.
• The article was somewhat boastful, in that they compared themselves to what happened in New York City, Los Angeles and other cities.  However, this region did get a second wave after the article was completed.  Still, though, better than Los Angeles.

So you're having a tough time, spend little more than a minute TO BE THANKFUL for what you have today:

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