A memo from the Provost of WWU to the teaching staff announced today that classes for the fall session will be “predominantly online or remote” except for “face-to-face delivery for experiential and research teaching/learning” that cannot be done otherwise. In any event, the memo indicated that such face-to-face teaching would be very limited.
Additional information with details will be forthcoming from WWU President Randhawa on Friday, the 30th of July.
This action closely follows a similar announcement to go all online that the Washington State University at Pullman made about a week ago. I reported on that as an update to my piece “Open The WWU Campus In September? What Then The Toll?”
All for the better.
This will save lives.
Comments by Readers
Tim Paxton
Jul 29, 2020Why would anyone pay to go to an On Line WWU? MIT already has 2400 Free Courses on line you enjoy as a shut in.
Nicholas Sotak
Jul 29, 2020I’m not sure using Sweden as an example would motivate many to open everything back up. With a death rate of around 5%, unemployment of 9%, and a predicted economic contraction of around 5% I wouldn’t say it’s a great example of what we should be doing. Consider also that Swedes, in general, are much healthier than people in this country and therefore theoretically much less likely to have severe disease. We’ve had over 150,000 deaths so far, and that’s arguably much lower than it would have been had many of the early hot spots not shut down.
Since starting to reopen here dialy cases have reached a new highs. Daily deaths wold probably be at new highs as well, but we’ve gotten better at managing the disease and the new cases are concentrated in younger people. That said, who’s to say we aren’t sitting on a time bomb of a new spike in deaths when those younger people spread the disease to their older coworkers, friends, and relatives?
Finally, I have plenty of friends in the reserves that are being mobilized to help with a case surge in southern Texas. Getting back to business as usual? It can wait. It is possible to recover from economic collapse, but it’s much more difficult to raise the dead.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53498133 <——This article is a few weeks old, but I’m sure there is still no consensus even among Swedes they made the right call. There’s also no guarantee they won’t have another wave.
Ray Kamada
Aug 01, 2020And two more recent Covid studies await further confirmation…
78% of Recovered COVID-19 Patients Show Heart Damage, German Study Suggests
https://www.newsweek.com/most-
RE School re-openings: SARS-CoV-2 Transmission and Infection Among Attendees of an Overnight Camp — Georgia, June 2020 | MMWR
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/
Ray Kamada
Aug 02, 2020And wrt learning, covid may severely damage the brain, even while causing only minimal scarring of the lungs.
https://www.sciencealert.com/serious-cases-of-brain-damage-are-on-the-rise-and-covid-19-seems-to-be-behind-it