Week 2: DONE. This was another successful week for me and I’m finding my study groove. I decided to use a study group and we’re going to be meeting for 2 ½ hours every Wednesday and Saturday. We may meet more than that, depending on how the workload is starting next week (see the attached schedule). Next week, we dive into the basic medical sciences, and we’ll be medical students in the truest sense of the words! We also started the EMT-Basic course. It’s not hard but it’s a LOT. We have six to seven quizzes that must be completed each week by Friday, so I’m trying to do two of them each night. My goal is to finish the entire course early so that I can spend more time focusing on my medical school coursework however.
We have had students test positive for COVID so we moved to online learning today and this will continue into Monday. We received a mandate for all students, faculty, and staff to get a COVID test, irrespective of vaccine status, so that the Dean and her leadership team can determine how widespread COVID is on the campus. This will allow her to decide regarding whether to extend the online learning period. My gut tells me that this will be extended for probably two more weeks, maybe longer, irrespective of the extent of COVID in the class. San Antonio is being hit HARD by the Delta variant and worryingly, the Lambda variant has established itself in Louisiana and it is potentially more deadly than Delta in that early research shows that it can evade vaccine-produced antibodies and the antisera of recovered patients. More studies need to be conducted, but this is the data that is coming out of Peru and Japan. As much as I hate to say this, I think that out of an abundance of caution, we should go 100% online, and the nation needs to adopt a public health posture that more closely resembles February 2020. I know that many reading this would not agree but the alternative is an increasing number of filled body bags. In any case, I never thought that I would be a medical student during a global pandemic. It’s an odd feeling…
