First week done

 I may post more later (or early tomorrow morning, if I finish the big blanket tonight) but I just want to say: my students really made me proud this week. Everyone was good about masking (one person showed up and said he forgot his on the first day, I sent him to the secretary who had disposable ones, he came back wearing it) and doing the disinfecting of the tables and distancing appropriately. 

I hope our contact-tracing system works. I already have one student quarantining pending a test because he had a contact with someone who tested positive (but who is not showing symptoms). This is why I "broadcast" my in-person classes, people can tune in and not miss, and most of my labs are now designed such that people can do them on their own time as a make-up lab. Normally I don't let lab make-ups happen, but since I had to redo the labs to pretty much "do it by yourself" it's not that much more effort for me to let someone make it up.

I really hope people continue to be smart and that we can go at least a few more weeks in person (the goal is Thanksgiving, not sure if we'll make that, though I hope we do). I am not sure what the cutoff point is for "abandon campus" but apparently we had three or four people test positive last week and this week. But they're quarantining, and the dorms have "quarantine sections" so we might be okay? okayish? I hope.

Because I feel so much BETTER this week. Yes, the big class done over Zoom is exhausting and I wish I didn't have to teach it that way, but the in person classes - wow, did I miss that. (It's been what, almost six months? We broke in mid-March). Just being out of the house every day makes a big difference.I'm no longer questioning "Do I even have anything to look forward to? Or should I just get into bed and never get back out?"

 I very much felt over the summer like I had lost my purpose in life. And losing your purpose is terrible. (I thought a lot of the story I read about sheepdogs during the Hoof-and-Mouth outbreak in the UK in 2000, when a lot of sheep were culled, and how those dogs showed symptoms of what you could call "depression" in a human (moping around, not eating) and...well, they improved when they bused in schoolkids and tourists and let the dogs "herd" them. And yeah, I felt very much like a sheepdog without a flock for the entire summer, and it was WORSE this year because I couldn't distract myself by going places)

Oh, I will be even happier when we have this under *control* (so: either a vaccine or a very, very good preventative/successful treatment) and I can go back out and casually go to the JoAnn's and the Ulta like in the before times.

(And yes, regardless of what some people say, I do think we'll beat this eventually. I had a bobble the other day when I saw people again talking about "ooooh someone says we will never eradicate the virus and we'll just have to live with it" but it was that same Zhang article from The Atlantic where "eradicate" is an impossibly high bar - "eradicate" as in "what we did to smallpox or rinderpest." I am content to live with this being like measles or polio, where the disease still exists in the world but if you're vaccinated you are nearly 100% safe from it. That's not technically eradicated but in my mind it's practically eradicated. And no, I don't accept the "but immunity is short-lived" because every other serious disease has t-cell immunity, which is not well-understood yet that follows after antibody immunity, which is often short lived)

And yeah, masks seem to help a LOT, and the fact that everyone in my classes has been super good about it gives me confidence. (One colleague reports someone getting belligerent in lab about "I can't breathe in it, it's uncomfortable, I refuse to wear it" and she said (a) surgeons do this for hours on end (a lot of our students have dreams of being in medicine) and (b) unless she gets a letter from Disability Concerns, he has the choice to mask up or leave class. He masked up.)

But yeah, masks are not fun. They make my nose itch and I admit it was getting a little unbearable in my second class, but finally the class ended and I was able to run and wash my hands and carefully (handling by the ear straps) remove the mask and scratch my nose. But they seem to help a lot? It looks like states/regions with high levels of mask compliance have a lower R0 and that doesn't seem to be coincidence. 

But another thing about it - weekends are welcome now even if I am sticking at home because it means two days I don't have to wear a mask unless I go out to a store. (Well, once church starts back up in September, I will be masked for that). But it's kind of like not having to wear shoes when you're used to being barefoot and then are forced into shoes to be out in public.