Got to talk with my faculty today about the (hoped for) return to face-to-face instruction Fall 2021 (maybe).

We identified some *issues* that will be important in how we think about this.

First: Will *we* (the faculty) be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in time for the start of Fall semester?

I guess it *might* happen, but not unless California's vaccine distribution gets a lot more efficient pretty soon.

And, it won't just be faculty *access* to a vaccine that matters here. They'll have to *use* that access & put the vaccine in their bodies.

None of my faculty expressed that they were planning not to, but I reckon our uni faculty (& others) includes some vaccine-hesitant people.

(The university is betting that they *can't* require employees to get the vaccine. Can they make being vaccinated a requirement to be indoors in a classroom with students or colleagues? It's hard to know.)

Second: Will our students who want f2f instruction be vaccinated before they come on campus? Will their vaccine tier have access to the vaccine in time for Fall?

Because student-to-student transmission would be bad (as would student-to-student-to-grandparent transmission)…

That younger people seem *on average* to have less severe disease when infected with COVID-19 doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be no big deal for every *individual* who gets infected.

None of us wants our students sickened, permanently impaired, or killed by COVID-19.

Third: How does the f2f in Fall plan take account of the other humans with which faculty domicile?

AFAIK, our partners & kids & elder relatives don't get put in tier 1B just because we are…

… and we don't yet have good data on how likely vax'd folks are to spread the virus to unvaccinated people.

Do we want to be in classrooms w/asymptomatic COVID-19 hosts & end up infecting the folks at home (or, the other direction, end up infecting our students)? No.

Keep in mind, the vaccines so far approved haven't been tested on & are not approved for kids. Y'know, like the kids who live with lots of faculty members (& a significant portion of our students).

We want to keep those kids healthy!

Tl;dr: As enthusiastic as we are for "After Times" in which we can teach students in physical classrooms, we are also extremely mindful of all the people whose bodies, immune systems, & access to/uptake of vaccine should be part of the considerations. Ethically, we must be.

We'll make an "optimistic plan" for the Fall 2021 schedule we'd like to mount, but it will have less optimistic alternate plans built into it.

This will probably add at least 3 dimensions to the 12-dimensional chess that building a course schedule was even in the before times.

But, to be responsible to our students & faculty, I will take on the challenge.