On March 12, 2020, people all over the globe are wondering about the true origins and the true implications of the “coronavirus” that (as we are told) originated in Wuhan, China. Drastic measures being taken, including shutting down schools and colleges, draconian quarantines of cruise ships, cancellation public presidential campaign events, ending spectators at school athletic contests and the use of the National Guard to enforce a quarantine of New Rochelle, New York are all the types of measures we would expect in some sort of apocalyptic scenario, such as the Black Plague or the fictional “Captain Tripps” of the Stephen King tale, The Stand.
Digging Deeper
Many colleges and universities in the United States have cancelled in class teaching and substituted online class time instead. Students are told not to return from Spring Break. All this sounds easy, until you realize the students have important personal effects in their dorm rooms and in some cases are being denied access to those rooms and their property even when no students or faculty at the school is known to have the virus! Seriously, what is going on? Professors that have never taught online are being tasked with immediately adapting their classes to an online format. How does that work for classes that require labs? What about professors that are not computer savvy?
