In the Dark

In between correcting examination scripts and preparing for another examination I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the allocation of teaching to Semester 2 which starts a fortnight today, on Monday 31st January. You might think this is a bit late to be assigning lecturers to modules and it is, but we’ve had lots of staffing difficulties this year and there’s been a lot to manage.

We haven’t yet had any official information from on high about how precisely we will proceed next Semester, but I’m assuming that it will be roughly like last Semester, i.e. with most classes in person and only the very big ones online. The one headache is our Computational Physics class which is quite large this year so we will have to take care about physical distancing requirements for the laboratory sessions. I’m actually teaching that module.

As Maynooth colleague Professor Paul Moynagh has explained, it does look like the omicron wave has peaked in Ireland though I am very confused about how much of this is down to changes in testing strategy. The figures plotted above (7-day rolling averages) only show PCR tests; there are many thousands of positive antigen tests that would previously have been referred for PCR confirmation but which are now just being reported separately outside the official figures.

Anyway, the least we can say is that things do not seem to be getting dramatically worse so there’s no real motivation for imposing fresh restrictions. All the talk is now about relaxing things, actually. The existing rules haven’t been very effective at halting the propagation of the omicron variant so there’s no very good reason for keeping them as they are. I think we just need to ensure that unlocking is not done in such a way that another surge ensues.

We first went into lockdown about halfway through Semester 2 two years ago, which led to our first set of online assessments. Two years later on we look like we might actually have a return to on-campus examinations. Perhaps the set of online exams we’re marking now will be the last? Let’s see.

This entry was posted on January 17, 2022 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Covid-19, Education, Maynooth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.