EHVS informs:

Canceled Economy Weekend HT 2020

The School of Economics at Växjö Student Association (EHVS) was founded in 1994 and is a non-profit student association under Linnaeus University and the Linnaeus Union. The association is responsible for, among other things, education, business, and social events. During every semester, the association has organized a so-called Economy Weekends, which consists of various events for EHVS members that take place over a total of three days.

During the current pandemic, the association has always strived to ensure the safety and well- being of our members. Last semester, the Economy Weekend was to take place during the spring of 2020, but we chose to cancel, as we did not consider that we could safely carry out our events. This decision was made in line with the Swedish Public Health Agency's recommendations that were relevant at the time. A lot has happened since the spring term and the conditions now look different from what they did before. Due to this, we began working on executing the Economics Weekend for the autumn semester of 2020 in line with the current recommendations. Our program committees, which are responsible for planning, have done a solid job with the events and taken measures to ensure that the events are carried out in a safe manner.

On October 9, a press conference was held aimed at university students, where, among others, Matilda Ernkrans expressed concern about partying and called out the students to take responsibility. During the same press conference, Johan Carlson, Director General of the Swedish Public Health Agency, presented that specific statistics do not yet exist regarding the spread of infection among the country's universities, but that an increase in positive cases had been observed in eight of the country's regions.

The third person to speak at this press conference was Simon Edström, chairman of the Swedish United Student Unions, who emphasized the importance of following the Swedish Public Health Agency's recommendations and called for avoiding Corona-dangerous parties and trying to change, rather than cancel. Simon Edström referred to the following link; https://sfs.se/corona , where it is possible to retrieve information about how a Corona-friendly event can be carried out. Based on these conditions, the association planned, in dialogue with the university and an epidemiologist, how the Economics Weekend would be implemented. After a continuous dialogue, the association compiled an action plan in detail regarding how the events would be carried out in a safe manner. See the attached document for the action plan we have conducted.

Today, on 16th of October, an open letter was published by principal Peter Aronsson shortly after 10 o'clock. In the letter, the association was asked to rethink and cancel the weekend's events. After a dialogue with Peter Aronsson, it was announced that he had not reviewed our action plan, however, he stood by his position to urge the association to cancel.

During the day, the association has been contacted by the media at both local and national levels. In order to meet the expectations set in the open letter and to avoid attracting negative publicity for both Linnaeus University and EHVS, the association decided to therefore cancel today's and tomorrow's events.

We have been careful to have a continuous dialogue with the school to avoid misunderstandings, but unfortunately do not feel that this dialogue has been met with the same understanding and consideration. The association is therefore disappointed with the short foresight in which the letter was published to the public and we wish that we had heard principal Peter Aronsson's views much earlier.

We would like to once again apologize to our members for this rapid change. We understand the frustration that arises and we are very sorry about this. With this statement, we wish to be able to bring more understanding to our decision and that we did not feel we had any choice to act differently.

// EHVS Board 2020

Updated: october 16 2020

Linnaeus University informs:

Linnaeus University has here compiled frequently asked questions and answers about the new Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease COVID-19

Linnaeus University follows the recommendations from the Public Health Agency of Sweden and those from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Linnaeus University has a crisis management group that works with questions relating to the corona virus and this group closely monitors the development.

Linnaeus University does frequently updates regrading the education, witch can be read about here.

Information from Folkhälsomyndigheten