There are plenty of fast food places/corner stores/restaurants/groceries in Cambridge within walking distance of MIT dorms. So the "no way to eat" part is a bit dramatic.
There is "no way to eat [while remaining quarantined]".
Dorms do not have private kitchens. They don't even have private sinks. I'm not familiar with MIT specifically, but the most you can usually hope for in the average American dorm room is a mini-fridge and a microwave. It would be incredibly difficult to expect a large number of people to live in those conditions for multiple weeks if quarantined.
You're still allowed to go to the grocery store in China. It's one of the very few places you can still go. Same in Italy. Obviously starvation is a much surer death than coronavirus, hence governments are not literally starving people to death by disallowing them from even obtaining food.
I was more focusing on the lack of facilities to prepare food. That limits what is available to students from the local grocery stores. Are we going to force these kids to basically eat cereal for every meal for a couple weeks? Do the local grocery stores have the stock of non-perishable and ready to eat foods to meet the needs of these students? Does every student have the funds to purchase this food out of pocket and outside of their meal plan? There are a lot of questions that aren't answered by just pointing to the local grocery store if the dining halls and local restaurants are no longer an option.
This whole chain of comments started out with the following prompt:
>In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead?
Dining halls are inherently a highly trafficked gathering of a large group of people. That is exactly the type of things people are being instructed to avoid. It is likely a losing effort to try to prevent the spread of the disease through a college campus while still running dining halls at normal service levels. And once the decision is made to close the dining halls, you have to look at other options to feed the students. There is no clear answer to that question due to the reasons outline in previous posts so the ultimate response is to just send people home.
All of that applies to dorms too, maybe even worse because the close quarters are for much longer periods of the day. You've got multiple people living in the same room in dorms, and sharing all the common areas. That's a great vector for spreading disease. The dorms are closing for exactly the same reason as the cafeterias are, not because the cafeterias are closing first and now students have nothing to eat.
If everyone’s going to go to the same place to buy groceries you might as well keep the cafeterias running. Serve meals in shifts if you think that’s necessary.
I don’t know how much dining hall food costs or if it’s prepaid but you are talking about eating out for every meal on a students budget.
The point about bringing up the dining hall is they can’t go to the grocery store because they have no way to cook (and maybe even store) the food they bought.
Meal plans are typically pre-paid at the beginning of the semester. So that money is already gone, and I would expect that eating out for every meal -- even at below $13/meal -- would be out of reach for a lot of students.
The closest grocery is Target in Central square, which is extremely limited or maybe Trader Joe's, which also isn't the same. The Star Market that was right behind campus closed a couple years ago. It's not so easy, in my opinion.
That Target barely has any groceries, it's a small general department store. But yeah there is Trader Joe's, H-Mart, and Whole Foods. Market Basket is a bit further but more like a real grocery.
Yeah, the point is there's a wealth of options for food within a an easy hour round trip of walking (not just specifically the one Target). And a lot more if you have access to a bike. People are not going to starve to death when the alternative is walking 15 minutes to a grocery store. Let's be real. Downtown Cambridge is NOT some food desert like what exists in other parts of the US, where you could walk for hours and not reach the nearest grocery store (this is particularly prevalent in rural areas).
They can't shut down the grocery stores for long periods of time for the simple fact that people will start starving to death, which has a mortality rate strictly worse than any pandemic disease. The only retail businesses still open in the worst-struck parts of China and Italy are the grocery stores and pharmacies, because they have to be open. They are essential. Some of my relatives are Italian and they have to book a specific time slot to go to the grocery store, and that and the pharmacy/doctor/hospital are the only things they can be on the roads to do.
These options will continue to be viable unless society completely collapses, which doesn't seem in the cards here.
Amazon Fresh will deliver groceries from Whole Foods within 2 hours, there's Uber-eats, DoorDash, Grubhub etc. There are a ton of inexpensive bars and restaurants all around Kendall and Central Squares (and yes, certainly some expensive ones!).
Dorms do not have private kitchens. They don't even have private sinks. I'm not familiar with MIT specifically, but the most you can usually hope for in the average American dorm room is a mini-fridge and a microwave. It would be incredibly difficult to expect a large number of people to live in those conditions for multiple weeks if quarantined.