I know. Another corona blog entry. But, with the fourth wave pummeling Germany at the moment, the admin types can’t get up to their usual mischief and are busy focussing their creative energies surfing this current wave.
Now, Germany getting “pummeled” is really a relative thing. A friend from the UK wrote me a couple of days ago to ask how we were all coping and I simply responded that we were finally getting close to the same infection levels that they had been dealing with for ages now. I guess we’re just taking it more personally that a little bitty virus has outsmarted us again.
Ok, the rising infection levels are indeed something to worry about, but no one really seems to be worrying that much. Or that quickly.
The current rates are crushing those that we saw in the Spring, but the precautions aren’t. Back then, store entrances were literally guarded more securely and with more paperwork than the country’s borders. No test, no dice. (Or whatever it was that you were shopping for.) Now? Despite a couple of weeks of record numbers, restrictions are only just coming into force. Slowly …
So, a bit of vocabulary together with some Boolean logic about those restrictions first:
- 3G: vaccinated OR recovered OR tested
- 2G: vaccinated OR recovered
- 2G+: (vaccinated OR recovered) AND tested
As you can see, today’s restrictions are brought to you by the letter G. 3G is what we had in the Spring, just with a fancy new handle attached to it: only those people who are vaccinated, recovered, or tested can take part in whatever it is they want to do. (The Gs come from it all being in the past tense. Whereas English speakers add “ed” in such cases to the end of everything, German ones add “ge” to the front: ge-vaccinated, ge-recovered, and ge-tested. (Mock German, of course, uses both.) With 2G, testing no longer counts for anything, but returns with a vengeance for 2G+ insofar as you also have to be virus-free in addtion to being vaccinated or recovered.
(I’m hardly the first one to have noticed this, but in the case of 2G+, what exactly are the 2Gs bringing to the table if you have to be virus-free as well? The plus (or 1G, which no one outside of physics has yet to use, but wait for it …) is by far the most important safety criterion here because then there’s no virus about, regardless of how many other Gs you might or might not have. Instead, all the Gs are probably a not-so-subtle method to get people to immunize themselves (which is a good thing) without having to mandate it explicitly (which many would see as a bad thing).
The latter becomes even more apparent with the recent decision that getting your booster shot (or being “geboostered“, which looks a lot like mock German although it ain’t) is the equivalent of 2G+?! Except to admin types, this is obviously and patently absurd.)
Still with me? It gets worse …
Adding to the general confusion is the specific confusion associated with the official Corona Warning Levels here in northern Germany that automatically (and inversely) determine the relevant number of Gs to enforce: 0 = 3G, 1 = 2G, and 2 = 2G+. Now, assuming that these warning levels are sticking to whole numbers, we must, by default, always have had at least 3G in play. But, for most of the summer, nothing was enforced (which actually sounds a lot more like a warning level of zero to me) and 3G is only now coming into discussion even though we’ve only officially reached Warning Level 1 just last Wednesday.
(This could be because I strongly suspect that the meaning of the levels has changed sometime recently. I distinctly remember that, at one time, 3G would only come into effect when Warning Level 1 was reached. (Again, something that would give Level 0 some kind of intuitive meaning.))
And, to top it all off, it would seem that these warning levels are really only suggestions and that everyone can do what they please anyway. For instance, here in Not-Bielefeld, Warning Level 1 means that everything here is now “uniformly” either 3G or 2G depending on the type of activity, whether its inside or outside, the number of participants, and the current phase of the moon. The next little town over of Next-To-Not-Bielefeld? 2G+ across the board.
Even the University here in Not-Bielefeld is playing along in this game of shuffling your feet to your own rhythm and you can sense that the priority has shifted more to trying to keep the University and the classes open instead of trying to keep everyone alive. Here’s the timeline of “action”:
- Start of the semester (Level 0): no restrictions
- About three weeks later (still Level 0): 3G for some classes
- Now (Level 1): 3G for all students and all staff
To be fair, the University was mostly following the provincial guidelines of the day and not of to-day. Interesting in all this is the “some classes” part of it. Again, following the current guidelines at the time, the 3G rule only needed be enforced for any gathering (class) with more than 25 people (students) because, as we all know, how infectious corona is depends on absolute numbers rather than density.
.jpg)
With the sudden, unexpected shift to Warning Level 1, everyone is praising the University for its quick response. (Well, not everyone. It’s mostly the University congratulating itself.) Although the coming 3G requirement for the workplace was already known a few days in advance and the wave could be seen heading to slam the shoreline for some weeks already, the University only sat down on the day of Warning Level 1 coming into effect to discuss how they were going to implement it. And, in the end, after one whole day’s worth of discussion where they burned the noontime oil from ten to four thirty, the solution that they came up with was to basically implement 3G in the workplace.
No. Seriously. That was it.
If you read through the flood of e-mails that followed for actual content, that was the take-home message. The President’s Office announced the measures, the Dean of Students repeated the measures, and, for good measure, the Faculty repeated the measures again. Oh, there was lots of other words too, like how any non-3G people caught on the University grounds would be charged with trespassing (seriously!), but what was sort of lacking was the actual implementation of it all.
The students were covered here. Since the start of the semester, the University had invested in an electronic registration system where the students could register their 3G status (and re-register and re-register for those who were only tested) should it ever become necessary. But, the system was (and still is) only for the students. Not for the staff and definitely not for the teaching staff even if they had to enter 3G-certified classrooms to instruct the 3G-certified students.
Instead, we get something better: good old-fashioned paper, beloved by German admin-types everywhere. Why extend a working system when you can create a new one?
Yup, documenting the 3G status of the staff has been delegated to their immediate supervisors who then get to fill out a paper form for each person in their care, each of which then gets sent on to the respective faculty. (And, again, presumably on a daily basis for those with the wrong G.) To date, the form is only available in German because of the inherent difficulty in translating field names like “Name”, “Birthday” (um, why?!), and “3G status” into English. Indeed, the form is so complex that it is divided into thoughtfully numbered sections starting with “1. 3G Status” and ending with “1. 3G Status”. (But at least it is devoid of any exclamation points, gratuitous or otherwise.)
Nevertheless (or perhaps, more accurately, unsurprisingly), questions abound …
For instance, who verifies my 3G status because, as a group leader, I really don’t have a supervisor. I also need to state the date each person’s vaccination or recovery is valid until. Are there any official values here? (Update over the weekend: officially nope, but the field remains.) Wouldn’t it just be more straightforward to provide the date when each was valid from so that the until can be calculated based on the accepted values of that day and phase of the moon?
And, of course, the big one: how is all this really supposed to be enforced for 10 000+ people?
The threat about trespassing is there, but, at the same time, there will be no entry checks into the buildings because “this is not necessary”. The 3G status of the students might be registered, but we as the teaching staff are not required to check it and, indeed can’t, probably because of privacy issues. Apparently, only the largest lectures are actively checked (again, remember, numbers, not density). For everything else the safeguards here are, and I’m not kidding, the mere act of the students registering themselves and the possibility of “further active controls” by the University.
Seriously? Is that all we’ve learned in nearly two years? A little bit of trust and a little bit more laziness to avoid any inconvenience? That’s sure to stop the pandemic dead in its tracks.
The Blog About Fog 