Downsizing

This evening, another teacher leaves. In three weeks after that, somewhere between two and four leave us. It's not a good feeling. We can only try to soften the blow. Students will complain. They'll be buffeted between class mergers and collapses. But at the end of the day the numbers in and the numbers out will decide the situation. The border won't be opening any time soon and things will continue to wind down. Next week we'll be partially back on site with classes on campus three days a week. It'll be a big thing for all to be back even if it's looking grim.

I'm still running lucky. I've managed to show enough value in my resourcefulness and common sense to have been redirected into a major project. There is a great likelihood that I might be into a major position of use in June. It's a perverse feeling to be getting an opportunity and a path to greater things amongst the carnage. It's often said that the word for crisis in Chinese ("weiji") is made of the characters for danger ("wei") and opportunity ("ji"), and I guess I'm doing well in a Chinese crisis.

But work-wise there is a horrendous overlap where the work is still heavy and all the supports are being pared back and diminished. I'm trying to pass on my duties to my senior teacher, who is effectively down to 25 hours a week from 40. Our awesome student support is now on 4 days a week. We let go of our receptionist the day before lockdown so once we get back, we'll be stretched. My line manager keeps telling me that I should focus on my project but the student issues haven't yet receded and the logistics of bringing people back to campus is not light, and I'm the one who'll be covering the task.

So it'll be a period of long days and not so idle weekends.

In the past, of Fridays, I would have had more of a thought or trend in the pandemic. I haven't had as much energy or time to wonder. In New Zealand, there is great hope that our chapter is over for the time being, and that there is no second wave. With over 7,000 tests processed in the last day, and only one residual case turning up I'm pretty confident. I certainly hope so, at least, because Friday night on Mt Eden did not show much in the way of social distancing. I guess we'll have to wait for June to really know if the sudden social exuberance has any epidemiological consequences.

The world under lockdown has flattened the curve in most countries, and only the countries that weren't doing it terribly well have been left with a terrible churn of cases and deaths. The United States deaths have dropped below 2000 a day and yo-yo between 1000 and about 1750 depending on the day of the week. If heat doesn't have much effect on covid, and the "re-opening" is as open as it sounds, I think the States could be in for what happened to the world in the first stage of the outbreak: deaths surged in a central are, Wuhan and Hubei Province, scattering out seeds to other provinces and a few to other countries. The world death rate slumped in late February after the burn in the early part of the month. But by 8 March, the rest of the world's combined daily deaths exceeded the highest day of deaths in China. I feel this could be like the US. New York is the Wuhan of America, and the populous lockdown states are like the neighbouring cities. All the iffily governed states that closed late or opened early are doing exactly what other badly affected countries did, and it takes some time to bite. From a timeline, it should be starting now. (Two weeks since the 1 May opening.) For their sakes, that's wrong. Two metrics to look at over the next week. If any day can exceed 30,000 cases in a day, or if any days can get back over 2,000 deaths, they might be heading into a world of tears...