Quick thread about corridors and contagion.

I've been hearing about how things played out in a UoM teaching building – one of the big ones with not-so-big corridors – around the middle of last week. If the report (second-hand, I should say) is right, there was no distancing:

students were crowded into the corridors as normal, unable to get out of each other's immediate vicinity for minutes on end. I don't have info on level of masking but this is obviously not good.

My point is that it's unavoidable, if you run mass on-campus activities at all.

UoM has a detailed Covid safety protocol which took a lot of effort by a lot of people, and I don't doubt a case could be made that the problem here is due to some number of students and/or other folk not following that protocol.

I disagree. These approaches just don't scale.

Consider: a key part of the plan – which actually contains much good sense – was to stagger the start of teaching, such that last week was intro week only for new undergrads, with returning UGs due back this week.

So, the students in the corridors didn't know those corridors.

So, on the one hand, there are one-way systems and guidance about carefully maintaining distance from the person in front.

On the other hand: you're 18, you're a bit trepidated, you've already got lost three times, and you've been told you *have* to be in this space at this time

in order to receive important information. You also know that we're living through a time in which "important information" often really *is* important.

By the time you're ten minutes late, are you seeking your destination slowly and in an orderly fashion maintaining 2m distance?

Well, suppose in fact that you *are*. Suppose, even, that 95% of your fellow newcomers are trying to do likewise.

Leaves 5%. 5% of what might be a 500-strong cohort in this barn of a building. 25 persons milling about aimlessly in one corridor.

That corridor's blocked...

...and, being once blocked, stays blocked. The more people arrive, the bigger the mess.

The other 475 are doing their best. But they have to choose between crowding (not allowed) and not being in that room (equally, not allowed).

Other people are doing it. Maybe it's OK?

Maybe this was foreseen. Maybe there is a system of corridor marshals who are supposed to keep them in file.

You would actually need quite a lot of them, at various interections and on all floors where these sessions are happening.

Now, how many corridor marshals have to be absent from their posts for any significant length of time for the system to break down?

There is a canonical answer to this question. You can probably guess it and it isn't very good news.

As a rule, no organised group beyond a certain size can ever really be expected to turn out at full strength, because of a distinctly human cocktail of illness, miscommunication and plain Sod's Law that it's generally more useful to accept than to analyse.

If you need a system to run like clockwork, which is what we're dealing with here, you need long lead times, central control, trialling, and a lot of redundancy.

Confusingly, that's "redundancy" in the sense of having *more* people available to do the job than the job needs...

...rather than in the typical workplace sense of "getting rid of staff who knew what they were doing", which is what many institutions have lately done. (My ultimate informant, though not actually redundant, had taken voluntary severance, and was in to clear the office).

I should at this point emphasise that, although I'm not giving out the specifics here, as the person who raised this understandably doesn't really want any social-media heat, it has been or is being duly communicated to the Proper Authorities. This thread is not a whistle-blow.

I'm not sure you *can* blow the whistle on "corridors don't work like that", which was just a fact before any of this started and remains a fact now.

And my employer is not behaving any worse than any other institution that's requiring physical-on-campus attendance...

...unless there's a University of the Ten-Metre-Wide Corridors With Massive Extractor Fans somewhere that I'm unaware of.

The point remains that "Covid-proofing" a campus is not practical. You can refine the teaching-space setup indefinitely, but other stuff will get you.

(To be honest I hadn't really thought much about the corridors myself. That's because I was focusing on the lifts, and more importantly the buses. For many institutions, if you haven't nailed the public transport problem, it doesn't matter what you do to the university premises.)

There's a lot of good faith in Covid-proofing activity. There are skilled and hard-working people who have been given their bit of the problem to solve and have successfully solved it, who wouldn't take kindly to having the whole business called a charade. And indeed it isn't.

Some of the learning about how to adapt people and buildings around each other is going to be really useful in many contexts.

Not the one we're in right now, though.

Anyway. This thread goes out to the malevolent gits who always pop up to push the blame onto the students' lax morals. (Now these people *do* show up like clockwork; I bet they have a rota.)

It's not about coitus. It's about corridors.

This thread on university buildings being uncommonly hard to navigate (for staff and students alike) is in line with my experience.

The historical reasons for this are really interesting, if you've got time to think about them, which is unlikely. https://twitter.com/avoiding_bears/status/1310492042733158401

This specific element of the problem is worth noting: https://twitter.com/BruceHistorian/status/1310497872119463939

This other specific element of the problem is also worth noting: https://twitter.com/marsden_sj/status/1310517542470004737

That second one, of course, is a result of implementing at scale without testing at scale.

*Which is unavoidable*. There was no way to test it at scale without incurring bizarre costs and risks.

But if you don't test at scale, you'll hit unforeseen problems all along the line.

Meanwhile: if you approve this message and are UoM staff (inc PS, researchers, GTAs, demonstrators) then please join the ~500 colleagues who have signed this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14bJYYg9MB9kjcyaVPsuPuYLd-51acSiaTpe3mn0J114/

If you work elsewhere in HE and have no such petition, I suggest you get yourself one.