I’ve mentioned it a few times, Germany has decided to sacrifice its teachers on the altar of keeping businesses open. Bavaria’s prime minister explicitly said that schools and daycares must be kept open so parents can go to work.
This also means we’re not going back to a hybrid system like before the summer holidays with two days at school, in small, distanced groups, and Homeschooling for the rest of the week.
This also means we’re combining the 3Cs in an unholy trinity : closed space, crowded settings, close contact. By now we’re all convinced that it isn’t a question of we’ll catch Covid, but when.
It was kind of a wonder that we escaped our first case for so long. This week it happened and now guess who covered for a colleague in that class on Thursday. But for some reason that was the day I decided it was time to break out one of the 5 KN95 masks the Ministry so kindly provided. Haha. So I should be safe, and I don’t have to go into quarantine.
I hope you managed to avoid SARS-COV2 on Thursday and that you continue to do so. Over a month after our scientific advisers were saying we needed to take a two-week “circuit breaker” lockdown, and Johnson said it would be “absurd” we are set to go into a four week lockdown on Thursday. But not schools or colleges, *sigh*
I feel you. On tuesday our labclasses start again. I wonder if we make it without a case in staff or our students.
Jazzlet
Yeah, I still think that if we’d taken softer measures four weeks ago, we could have avoided the hard ones now. But two weeks ago Merkel and the prime ministers of the Bundesländer sat together, and all those dudes were trying to score points as the ones to keep the country open, and she said “this isn’t enough, we need much tougher measures, we’ll meet again in two weeks and the situation will be way worse” and I think every woman who ever sat in a meeting with a bunch of dudes feels here.
I was never a fan of Merkel. Her economic policies are horrible and cruel, but I’m glad she’s currently our chancellor.
Of course the right wing media hate her. Two weeks ago she made a model calculation based on the back then trajectory and they called it outrageous and she was trying to cause unnecessary panic. Now her calculation has been surpassed by reality they accuse her of having downplayed the situation.
avalus
Good luck. Real still has bulk packs of FFP2 masks for a semi reasonable price.
Oh, and of course Merkel and her whole government sank into a Sleeping Beauty slumber over summer, acting as if everything was over instead of making the damn parliament sit together and discuss measures and regulations and put them on a broad democratic basis instead of having another wave of top down government orders as if they didn’t have nearly 8 months time to prepare that shit.
Fingers crossed so you do not get the plague. No matter what denialists say, it is a really bad cookie.
I hope you’re OK.
I’ve already got a history of bad run-ins with coronaviruses and I’m not happy about getting it myself; I may roll ’00’
I was surprised that Merkel decided to tread water. Maybe it was misplaced optimism. But everyone should expect better from their elected leaders. As an American, who am I to talk?
You should be given an N95 mask for every day, but I’m glad you were protected when it mattered.
Thanks for the Tip! :) We got an assortment of masks from the University but they are not N95. Only the best for our best and brightest researchers and the future school teachers. (I work as a chemistry teacher-teacher *I am missing the correct words here, I guess. Lehramt*)
German Politics: It was strangely silence from AFD and FDP about the Covid the last week, thankfully.
Well, I scheduled a Covid swab for Wednesday. Apparently they’ll just test whoever books an appointment with a plausible reason, so the powers that be told me this was the fastest way to go.