Coronavirus update: Northeastern dismisses 11 students who gathered in hotel

The students, who were part of a study-abroad program that was held in Boston this semester, will not be reimbursed for their $36,500 tuition payments, according to the university. They will be allowed back on campus in the spring. In the meantime, the university said, they can appeal the punishment in an expedited hearing.

Here are some other significant developments:

• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump administration is prepared to spend “another trillion dollars” to buoy the U.S. economy if President Trump is elected to a second term. Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday” that the administration is concerned about the ballooning national debt, and he called Democrats’ spending proposals excessive. But, he said, “in a war, you’ve got to spend whatever you need.”
• San Diego State University issued a stay-at-home order, asking students to remain in their dorms except for essential needs through the weekend. The campus’s coronavirus case count rose to 223 on Saturday.
• Coronavirus-related deaths reached 6,000 in Los Angeles County, according to the Los Angeles Times. The county remains one of the hardest-hit urban areas in the country. California’s rolling average for daily new cases has trended downward in recent weeks, but the state is regularly reporting more than 150 deaths daily, most of them in Southern California, according to The Washington Post’s tracking.
• Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that about 20 percent of the U.S. population could be exposed to the coronavirus by the end of the year, causing its spread to slow.

The dismissal of the Northeastern students underscores the extreme steps that universities nationwide are taking to deter behavior that could accelerate the spread of the novel coronavirus on campuses.

“Cooperation and compliance with public health guidelines is absolutely essential,” Madeleine Estabrook, senior vice chancellor for student affairs at Northeastern, said in a statement Friday. “Those people who do not follow the guidelines — including wearing masks, avoiding parties and other gatherings, practicing healthy distancing, washing your hands, and getting tested — are putting everyone else at risk.”

But public health experts have cautioned that draconian actions by universities may do more harm than good. Intense punishments could create a chilling effect, discouraging students from participating in contact tracing or reporting their symptoms and making it harder to track and contain infections, said Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.

“The greater the punishment, the less likely it is the students are going to comply with any public health efforts,” Marcus told The Post. “Using a punitive approach doesn’t address the problem, which is that students have unmet needs for social contacts. That’s not going to go away if you throw students off campus.”

Marcus cited the outdoor gathering space that the University of Notre Dame set up for students as an example of what universities could do to help students mingle in an environment in which transmission is less likely. The school converted a tract of lawn at the center of campus into an outdoor lounge, with Adirondack chairs, fire pits, a stage and an open area to play games.

“I feel like what Northeastern did was extreme,” Marcus said. “Universities need to be more compassionate and more creative in providing safer alternatives for students to socialize.”

Nearly every major university that has resumed in-person learning in recent weeks has reported coronavirus clusters among students and staff members. Some large universities, including James Madison University and North Carolina State, have pivoted to online classes after outbreaks emerged.

As the pandemic rages on, health experts have warned that Americans appear to be letting their guards down when it comes to protecting themselves and others from the virus. That could spell trouble going into the fall as people spend more time indoors in close quarters and cooler weather facilitates the spread of the virus.

“People are exhausted,” Gottlieb told “Face the Nation.” “I think that people’s willingness to comply with the simple things that we know can reduce spread is going to start to fray as we head into the fall and the winter, and that’s another challenge, trying to keep up our vigilance at a time when we know that this can spread more aggressively.”

The rolling average for daily new cases in the United States dipped by a marginal 2.7 percent over the past week, according to The Post’s analysis of state health data. Southern states hit hard by a summer surge in infections continued to report progress in controlling their outbreaks, but the virus was on the rise in several Midwestern states.

Local officials and health experts cautioned that Labor Day weekend festivities…