That's easily fixed. You keep the study aspect of university life online and let the students mix amongst themselves as much as they like. Skipdriver is right on this matter. Let the virus rip through the student population. There will be virtually zero hospitalisations as a result. Let them all catch it and develop some element of immunity before it's time to return to families in December
As you put it yourself later in your post:
The problem is that most students live in private rental housing and university has no control over the students here. So it won't work.
Why doesn't that make the student-sacrifice plan impossible too?
Even if they are in uni-controlled housing, they're not prisoners and some will get out - and then there's all the food and services that have to be delivered.
Far from it being easily fixed, we can't completely isolate students from the "gown towns" hosting them. We can't even isolate them from their universities because some courses have essential lab or practical work that will put them in contact with Teaching Assistants at least, so now you've got to confine TAs and they're not as young as the students, so there will be a death toll, probably including many of our country's future researchers and lecturers.
And then you've got the problem of what happens when December 21st arrives and students want to go home as promised in return for this crazy plan but you've still got half of them testing antibody-negative in some unis?
And then you've got the problem of natural immunity maybe not lasting more than a couple of months, so do you have to do this all again next term? And the term after that? And next year? How long will it be before the "virtually zero" death toll doesn't look so zero? Do we know much about reinfection survival yet? And how many would suffer long-covid symptoms?
How is all this "easily fixed"?
It looks like a hell of a gamble compared to following WHO advice for a change: test, test, test, distance, mask and wash.
