Fall 2020 Semester at Washington University: The COVID-19 Version

 


We have successfully completed two weeks of classes now at Washington University, but the fall semester is definitely quite different than it was last year. Even strolling across campus, the large groups of walking students have now disappeared even between classes when you just see a few students walking around and never in groups larger than two or three. Everyone is properly wearing their masks and after two weeks, the university is showing very low numbers on our COVID-19 dashboard, even though they are making it very hard to even find. Since August 31 they have run 7,477 tests on students and only have found 12 positive cases. I had thought SLU (Saint Louis University) had been doing pretty well themselves with their much more informative dashboard, with only 136 positive cases since August 31, and only 12 positives in the past 10 days out of 642 tests (Sept 14-23).

One thing that really looks odd when you walk around campus is seeing all the random lone chairs placed all over the grass as in the Brookings quad photo shown above. I actually have seen some students sitting in some of them but they are mostly vacant.


Our classes end December 18 and then all the students go home with all finals being virtual. I know a lot of our faculty members in our department are just planning on skipping final exams instead or taking them on the last regular day of class. That means we are 2 out of 14 weeks completed with 12 more to go. Wish us luck!

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