And I did learn something. It was an overall beneficial process and I'm thankful for it. It was also my first qualification with a significant portion distance and online: Every week we would have tasks to do, readings to complete and comment on. The main assignments were handled through correspondence with our teacher. The cherry on top was a practicum where all students came together, though, in Shanghai, where we our own classes to teach and also some very specific lessons that were taught in person.
At our school in China, our students were also learning online; they had to do enough online learning in order to get tokens to take live classes. This online learning was a lot about the English fundamentals, vocabulary and grammar practice, as well as reading and listening practice, but was not with a live teacher interacting with them. It was completely pre-set course work. The motto at the school was Learn, Try, Apply, Certify, where Learn is the online learning and then that means that classroom is a place for trying to use language actively rather than waste precious time with the teacher doing "what you could have done at home". Some students liked this. Others disliked it, perhaps only really focussed by having an instructor in front and classmates at their sides.
Our school now has a course that will be formally online, delivered to students abroad from next wee. Due to our current tight staffing I'm one of the main content creators and it's rather amazing how much time it takes to make good content. (Actually, I cannot even comment that it's good content because barely anyone has seen what I've done.) It's been quite an enjoyable process though, but one of the hardest things about having others produce content, and my actual, much bigger job of having our whole organisation produce more online material is that it seems, even in 2020, very few of the teachers have learned online in a useful way to the potential that online learning can reach. One of the main reasons I've committed so much time to creating content is that I want to know what is required, and I want a model available for people to come and hopefully say: "Oh, that's what it can be!"
Unfortunately, it's not meant to be part of my job and I have been getting pressure because the things I should be working on are falling behind. I have argued that modelling the expectation is one of the best ways to trigger more initiative in creation.
Anyway, Covid-19 has always been a convenient intellectual distraction for me. What a privilege that it is merely an intellectual distraction and not a practical threat to the well-being of the people around me! It is fascinating, although depressing, to see how the different countries have "gone". The interesting things to me have been whether there would be a fall "second wave" in the Northern Hemisphere. Scarily, it does seem to be picking up on cue, and it doesn't take much to really understand why with an aerosolised, airborne virus.
In my own mind there had been the contradiction of what I understood of the Wuhan outbreak, that which caused the central government of China to pull a national circuit breaker to suffocate the outbreak there, and the situation of other countries from May to September. Even though China's "official" numbers from the time don't sound like much compared to other countries now, there were horrendous scenes of people clogging hospitals and queuing outside in the cold, and being sent away due to an as yet negative test, hasn't quite been seen except perhaps in Lombardy, Italy. Although there was a steep track of people catching it and dying from it around the world in March-April, it hasn't really shown anything more than a "slow burn".
My prediction has been that autumn winter would be a worse time isn't novel, but has made sense to me based on the aerosol nature of the virus. Aerosols are just like the fly spray you put into the air. Even an hour after you might still smell it because it's in a cloud that sometimes just hangs there. The particles are so light that gravity doesn't have as much sway as the air direction. For an infectious disease this is quite a useful trait. The infect person goes into a lift and coughs, leaves, another goes into the lift and into the cloud. But warmer, airier environments suit the dissipation of aerosols. Imagine a summer restaurant: there will be doors and windows open. People might prefer to eat outside, too. An aerosol cloud once produced is dispersed and people might breathe in a little but at least it's not much. Now shift that too any indoor space when it's cold. The doors and windows are shut and people stay for longer. Then there is a multiplier effect: as people are more infected, the number of people in any one space might have a higher chance of being infectious; and also a person might be get multiple infection events before their body reacts. There were young doctors in China who died mainly because of the constant exposure. Well, that's how Wuhan makes sense, as well as another wave of Northern Hemisphere epidemics.
One interesting them in this is also the difference in the geography. Though it was a good effort, China has had a much easier task than the UK and the States because their was only one significant outbreak: Wuhan. They could trace almost every case nationally back to Wuhan. Almost every country had outbreaks "seeded" throughout and if they chose to suppress it had to play "whack-a-mole" with contact tracing on multiple fronts. But, still most countries were also fortunate that it only seeded in a few places. Italy had their Lombardy. Spain had their Madrid. England had London.
Probably the most negative aspect of this next wave for the northern hemisphere countries is that it is not just a few places - there are cases everywhere, and not just the places with strong health infrastructure. It could be, especially in the States, that there could be multiple cities or states Lombardymised, i.e., have overwhelmed medical services and have to triage.
Perhaps the most depressing thing about it all is reading the commentary, especially with respect to people's ability to interpret and contextualise numbers and statistics, or the wilful misuse of numbers to make ideological points. But I might leave that to another day to write about.
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