Votes of non-confidence by faculty or staff unions, student associations, or Senate are purely symbolic because decisions on hiring and removing senior administrators are made by Board of Governors. But still. I think it may be well past time at @uofg.
Non-confidence votes have been held at several Canadian universities, including recently:
Saskatchewan (2022)
Concordia U of Edmonton (2022)
Thompson Rivers (2022)
York (2018)
UBC (2016)
Western (2015)
Mount Allison and UNB (2014)
Regina (2013)
While we're speculating about whether new variants like BQ.1.1 (Cerberus), BA.2.75.2 (Chiron), XBB (Gryphon), BN.1 (Hydra), another variant, or a "clovar*" will cause a new wave, Europe already has a wave underway. 🧵
(* "Cloud of variants". A word I made up. Not a real word.)
This rise in hospitalizations isn't being driven primarily by the new variants, it's a resurgence of BA.5 (and immediate descendants), which caused the summer wave. (By far the worst pandemic summer yet in many places, by the way).
I think this situation indicates several important things:
1. So-called "hybrid immunity" isn't even stopping a renewed wave of hospitalizations caused by the most recent variant. That does not bode well for the rise of multiple immune-escaping variants.
It needs to be emphasized that what we're seeing with SARS-CoV-2 variant evolution now is something new. 🧵
In the past, we've had distinct waves caused by one variant rising quickly in frequency (percentage of infections by that variant) and abundance (total number of infections by that variant), then dropping off. Alpha, Delta, and the Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 waves were like that.
Where one occurred, the third Omicron wave was driven by BA.5, but it did not reach the same frequency or abundance as BA.1 and BA.2 did. In some places, the summer BA.5 wave plateaued and never really came back down.
What we call (or don't call) a virus plays an important role in how we frame our communications and responses to it. Here is a long thread about how SARS-CoV-2 variants are named.🧵
What the virus is called has been recognized as important since the early days of the pandemic. Geography-based names were used intentionally by some and avoided as problematic by others because they can promote xenophobia. Think "Wuhan virus" or "China virus".
Even technical names were treated with caution early on. In February 2020, the World Health Organization (@WHO) announced that they would refer to "the virus responsible for COVID-19" or "the COVID-19 virus" rather than "SARS-CoV-2" or "SARS2".
The University of Guelph is a research-intensive university with particular strengths in life sciences and many experts in fields relevant to the pandemic. Here is how much we're following science at @uofg under our current leadership in year 3 of the pandemic. 🧵
We have no mask mandate, no booster requirements, no distancing or class capacity limits, and we've let in 2,000 extra students thanks to admin ineptitude. Why no masks at @uofg? We dropped them in July in order to align with what shopping malls and movie theatres were doing.
Thanks to our "culture of caring", we do have "masks on" areas in a few buildings at @uofg. These share air with everyone else. And they aren't monitored or enforced anyway, even if the vet notion weren't absurd.