Conveners
First reactions to the pandemic
- Chair: Violeta Toma (TRIUMF)
Description
March 2020 is a time we will remember and talk about for many years to come. It is the time when COVID-19 moved from epidemic to pandemic.
How did the pandemic affect your lab? Did your Business Continuity Plan include ‘pandemics’? If not, how long did it take your lab to come up with a COVID-19 response plan? Did your lab close down? Did you have to let staff go? How did you ensure site security and machine integrity during a time with minimum staff on site? How and when did you re-open the lab? How fast was your lab able to adapt to remote work? How did the ways of doing business at your lab change during the first month, second, third...?
Presentation of the experiences at RHIC shutting down and restarting with remote operations. Changes to the group, shifts and operating modes will be covered.
In March 2020 Covid hit our lifes and changed everything.
At the beginning rules were decided day by day and changed, measures were taken, not only in the government but also in GSI. The beam time schedule was uncertain and no one knew if GSI would still be open the next day.
But everything continued running, changes for our safety like our new disinfectant dispenser and wearing a mask, were...
When the pandemic hit Europe in spring 2020, the GSI/FAIR accelerator facilities were in the middle of a user beam time and after the first external user groups affected by the travel ban had to cancel their participation, we were faced with the decision to cancel the beam time as well. However, some local research groups organised a way to continue their experiments on their own, in exchange...
My talk will focus on the synchrotron's operations team's response to Victoria's Covid-19 outbreak broken into four distinct periods.
From March of 2020 to May 2020 the state government restricted the number of workers allowed on site, and only permitted research on Covid-19 or research otherwise essential to national security. Operations ran the accelerator “on demand” for the first time...