How will colleges and universities plan for January? A crowdsourced tracking project

How will higher education respond to the Omicron wave next month?

As I’ve said before, it’s difficult to forecast what COVID will do, given the variability of the virus itself as well as how humans respond to its action. What we know now, December 20th, 2021, is that Omicron is much more transmissible than previous COVID strains. Cases have been appearing, then rising in many nations. In the United States many states have officially detected this new strain. Given that transmissibility we should probably expect a far larger reach.

Yet while this is disturbing, there seems to be a kind of cultural ambivalence about Omicron. On the one hand there are epidemiologists and public health officials warning of a new tide which could hit medical systems very badly. On the other, there isn’t a lot of urgency elsewhere. We know that booster shots massively improve one’s chances of not getting ill and not spreading the virus, but fewer than 18% of Americans (59.2 million) have gotten boosted so far, according to the CDC. I must add that boosters are free and widely available.

A personal anecdote: on Saturday my son and I went to the nearest grocery store. We were worried about COVID-19 rising. My wife reported that in the next county infections doubled over the past two weeks, then doubled again last week. But Owain has celiac disease, meaning he needs gluten free food to survive, and grocery stores aren’t always good about…