The pandemic is getting worse. What does this mean for fall semester?

Bryan Alexander
8 min readAug 13, 2021

This week I’ve been focusing on climate change, between my book and the new IPCC report. That was what I planned to work on, along with dealing with multiple family crises and fine-tuning my fall seminars. But COVID just won’t let me do it, and so now I fire up the blog engines to look ahead to what fall 2021 classes might look like.

I’ll summarize some recent pandemic developments here in some detail, then add forecasting notes. I hope readers feel comfortable sharing thoughts and stories in comments. You can use the contact page to reach me directly, if you don’t want to go public.

The reason for my sudden switch between catastrophes? Things… now seem to be getting out of hand. We started summer 2021 with high hopes, as the number of people getting amazing vaccines was growing towards herd immunity and president Biden spoke of July 4th as an independence from COVID day. Colleges and universities planned on finally returning to in-person education.

Then that happy image began to get more complicated.

In the United States vaccination rates fell and barely half the population was fully treated. Local and national politicians politicized public health to new heights. Around the world the Delta variant swept in and ignited fast new waves of infection. Then reports and research started questioning just how effective these vaccines are against the new strain. The Centers for Disease Control backtracked on its May masking recommendations. It all felt more than a little like very early 2020.

Then over the past week a whole series of COVID pandemics suggest a crisis out of control. To wit:

  • Delta infections are soaring in parts of the world. The World Health Organization numbers 203,944,144 confirmed cases globally. This seems likely to worsen.
  • It looks like Delta is able to defeat current vaccines more readily than its predecessors to some degree. Reports and research are all over the map here (here’s one sample article), so it’s hard to determine the precise degree of relative weakness, but we know that vaccinated people can be infected, get sick, and transmit Delta in significant numbers. Vaccines still protect us well from serious illness, injury, and death.
  • Being in a highly vaccinated population is no longer a guarantee of COVID safety.
  • There’s talk that herd immunity is…

--

--

Bryan Alexander

Futurist, speaker, writer, educator. Author of the FTTE report, UNIVERSITIES ON FIRE, and ACADEMIA NEXT. Creator of The Future Trends Forum.