Yes, an absolute disaster and they're going to blame it on Xmas instead of the actual cause, sending the students home. And then, they're going to let them go back again 2nd week of January :'(.
And not a single newspaper is reporting about it. The media should be shouting from the rooftops day after day that the 2nd wave was caused entirely by universities reopening and yet instead they regurgitate these releases from ONS blindly.
We could have reopened schools and accepted the small increase in actual cases, kept unis online only. But by reopening schools and universities, with the two events so close to each other they compounded and caused the 2nd wave.
As a small ray of hope, I know people who work in both the unis here in Notts and they're taking it very seriously and doing mass testing before they send them home, as well as staggering them being sent back. Hopefully other unis are too.
I've heard that one of the reasons Notts infection rate shot up so high compared to nationwide is because Nottingham University were aggressively contact testing with their own labs and found many more asymptomatic cases than the national government's shambolic track and trace system is presently achieving.