The View from the Hermitage, Day 94

The university announced its formal plans for fall today. The email was long and wordy and contained multiple links to this webpage or that for elaboration. I liked the part in which they noted the expectation that students will be responsible and follow all the mitigation measures. Yeah, the same students gathering on a frat house balcony a couple of weeks ago, standing cheek to jowl and not a mask among them. If the university's public health police don't crack down on the first violator(s), they may never regain control. The email also claimed that fall sports will be held, but policies regarding attendance will be forthcoming. NCAA football with no one in the stands? Of course, the football team here rarely sells out the stadium, so perhaps the normal under-sized crowd will be able to maintain social distance, meaning no cuts in the ticket profits.

It seems that every fall class with 40 or more students will be taught only online. I expect that this has to do with what size classroom or auditorium it might take to hold 40 socially distanced students. Given the extra effort the husband has had to put into taping his summer class, fall will not be fun. At least we will be able to move the classroom studio from the living room to the husband's office upstairs. We'll be putting all the rooms back together after the floors are redone in late July.

The husband is wrestling with his summer school class. Summer school is tight trying to teach a semester's worth of material in three weeks. Taking one day off out of the fourteen scheduled can really hurt. Yesterday, the governor declared Juneteenth, which this year is the day after tomorrow, a state holiday. Today, the university cancelled all of that day's classes. The husband had all his lectures laid out with breakpoints between days carefully selected. Right now, he's seeing if he might need to adjust the material he's already taped for tomorrow's lecture. He's also taped Friday's, but at least he'll have a three-day weekend to figure out how to juggle the material in that one and the other eight. He's royally pissed and for a legitimate reason. (Decision: Tomorrow's lecture will run as already taped; he'll re-tape what he'd recorded to show Friday.)

States continue to report new peaks in covid-19 cases and hospitalizations. China is considering locking down Beijing's 22 million inhabitants. The scary part is that these are still part of the first wave, not the second the experts say will come. With 1918's influenza pandemic, there was actually a period in between the first and second waves in which the virus essentially disappeared. There were no cases. We need to keep that in mind as we watch how things progress now. Maybe we'll learn not to let our guard down too quickly. Yeah, I wish!