[slg]

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.

[CydeWeys]

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.

[slg]

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.

[CydeWeys]

Sure, but the dining halls are being closed for the same reason as the dorms. If not for the coronavirus then neither closure would be happening.

In other words, it's not like the dining halls are being closed and then as a consequence the dorms are being closed for lack of food options.

[slg]

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.

[CydeWeys]

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.

[slg]

I have no idea what we are even debating anymore. It sounds like we both agree that the school closing down was a good decision because there are too many avenues for the virus to spread quickly through the student population.

[baddox]

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.

[slenk]

Not always, and definitely not whenever they want in China