This is the other problem with f2f teaching during a pandemic. Say you have one student who gets CV19. They go to three seminars the week before their diagnosis, with 4 other students in each, and 3 lecturers. https://twitter.com/gsoh31/status/1267390969021976582

Each student has three seminars, all with three other students. Each lecturer is teaching nine seminars a week, each with five students in. Lecturers are also seeing students f2f in their office for pastoral support, and chatting to each other -- at 2m distance -- in corridors.

One student with CV19 could easily take out a huge chunk of a department, at least for 14 days mandatory isolation, longer if anyone actually gets infected. And that's without thinking about student halls (oh god student halls), lecturers' commutes to work, their own families.

(Seminars only have five students in because I am assuming that these have been socially distanced down from 15. So in this scenario we've also found a magic money tree, built a load of new rooms over the summer, and somehow given staff an extra 30 spare hours in their week.)

Even if staff are still working when they're in 14 days isolation -- if they're not feeling unwell, and they're still on full pay -- and if students are still able to study, we'll have to immediately switch to online provision for at least those two weeks.

And even when we are able to teach face to face, we'll still have to provide online resources for the potentially large number of students who are isolating at any one time. Presumably all lectures would be delivered online anyway, but much harder to do this for seminars.