MESSAGE FROM
THE VICE-CHANCELLOR Warm greetings to all our alumni, partners, donors, friends and the DUT community at large.
With this being the first edition of DUT Connect for the year 2022, may I wish you well in the rest of the year. It is my hope that the challenges and problems that face us from year to year help to refocus and energise us to work even harder and innovate our collective future and prosperity. In my last message in this medium, I focused on deconstructing our strategy-on-a-page, ENVISION2030, so that we could all have a common understanding and interpretation. Towards the end of the first quarter, we will share with the DUT community a document outlining the state of DUT. Thus, given constraints of space and time, let me just focus on a few critical matters.
COVID-19 Update
We are still reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as a country generally, and more specifically as a sector. We must be encouraged, though, that at the time of writing this message, the total number of vaccinated individuals in South Africa was sitting at about 19 million according to the National Health Department Online Resource and News Portal1. With a total adult (18 years and older) population of almost 40 million, this means about 48% of the adult population has now been vaccinated; which is just below half of our population. Whilst there is still some way to go, this is a significant improvement considering the initial inertia and hesitancy that characterised initial vaccination up-take. The country, including its various sectors, is now in a better position to return, albeit slowly, to some ‘new normal’ – consisting of the old and the new we could no longer divorce - as business operations and activity increase. With the easing of restrictions, DUT has also been able to open up and allow a limited number of academic and other activities to take place on our campuses. The intention for 2022, sans any significant changes to the current COVID-19 trends, is to return more and more to regular operations. Of course, it would be foolhardy to suggest that the last two years have not upended our old ‘normal’; hence my reference above to a ‘new normal’. At its meeting of 4 December 2021, DUT’s Council approved our “Policy choices on vaccination of staff and students” to take effect from 1 January 2022. The approach of providing choices as opposed to insisting on mandatory vaccination is an attempt to balance individual and collective rights, responsibilities, and consequences of those choices. The summary of the policy is as follows: 1. 2.
One must either be fully vaccinated and produce a valid vaccination certificate to enter any DUT campus or; If one chooses not to vaccinate, they must, at their own expense, undertake a COVID-19 PCR test 48 hours prior
DUTConnect // 4
3.
to being on campus, which test must be negative and proof thereof must be produced, or; If one chooses to neither vaccinate nor produce a negative COVID-19 PCR test, then they may not be granted access onto DUT campuses. In the case of students and staff, if they opt for this option, they will have to study and work online respectively and contend with the consequences and implications of such a decision, especially when circumstances that require physical attendance on campus arise. This policy
1 Latest Vaccine
Statistics - SA Corona Virus Online Portal
