Schools Will Close Again
As the number of coronaviruses rises in some areas and remains stable or declines in others, it’s easy to forget where we started. The larger the numbers become, the less they shock us. Remember just two months ago the New York Times created this graphic to help us feel the impact of the unimaginable milestone of 100,000 US deaths? Since then, we have added nearly 60,000 deaths and are rapidly approaching five million confirmed cases.
Yesterday morning, as I have done every morning since the start of this pandemic, I scanned my local newspaper for the latest case data in my state (Pennsylvania) and my area (Lehigh Valley, north of Philadelphia and bordering New Jersey) … For the first day since March, no new deaths have been reported in Pennsylvania. The state added 565 new cases, including about seven in my area. The area was a hot spot at first, given our proximity to Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.
These numbers seemed so low to me (hell, Florida was registering 10 times on the same day) that I thought for a moment, ” Maybe everything will be fine when the school reopens.” It got me thinking … how many cases were there in Pennsylvania where the governor closed all of the state’s K-12 public schools back in mid-March? I had to look for the answer : 33.
That’s 33 confirmed cases statewide and zero deaths. And yet we would become a hot spot, but our numbers would still grow for weeks and months. Five hundred and sixty-five cases is not a safe number; that’s 532 more than what caused us panic the first time.
The point is not whether the school will be closed this fall; it’s a question when .
How do I know this? Because we all know that. We know that our children need to go to school, be close to their peers, actively play sports, engage in a musical group and music. And we also know that it will only be a few weeks or days, or, in the case of at least one school so far , only a few hours before the positive test results start to flow and we will all say, “Well, we knew that WASN won’t last long.
In addition, we must reopen schools because of the disparity in access to the technology needed to complete virtual classrooms. We must be open to all children who depend on school feeding programs, as well as specialized educational or behavioral, emotional or mental health services. We must open up so that parents can work.
We feel like we should try it even if we know it won’t succeed, even though we know people will die because of it. As executive editor Adrienne LaFrance tells The Atlantic :
“This push to open schools is guaranteed to fail,” says Peter Hotez, pediatrician and molecular virologist, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine. I have corresponded with Hotez and several epidemiologists during the pandemic and have noticed their harsh views in recent weeks. “Expectations of social distancing and mask requirements for primary grades are unrealistic,” Hotez told me. “In communities with high transmission rates, COVID-19 will inevitably end up in schools. Within two weeks of opening schools in communities with high transmission rates, teachers will become ill. It is enough for just one single teacher to be hospitalized with COVID, and everything will turn off. “
We now know more about how the virus spreads than we did in March and April, when we were still pondering whether our food should be disinfected and whether we could stop touching our faces. We now know that our safety and the safety of our children and school staff depend not only on the precautions we take, but on all the precautions we take. And a dude from my city recently shot the cigar shop clerk (and eventually the cops) because he wanted to pick out his maskless cigarettes, so I don’t really trust the general public.
Regardless, despite what we now know about how important masks and physical distance are and how important it is to avoid crowds and confined spaces, there is still a lot we don’t know. We like to adhere to the belief that children tend to be at low risk of infection, or that younger children do not transmit it as much as older and older children, but because we close schools so early (as we should), we actually don’t know what happens when a large group of children is potentially exposed at once. And this virus hasn’t been around long enough for us to know the long-term consequences for a person who has had even a mild case of infection.
No matter how careful our schools are, no matter how we remind our children why masks are so important, and no matter how hard our teachers try to keep their distance and disinfect all things, at the same time, you know, teaching, this does not happen. work.
So get ready now. If your county still plans to reopen in person, even on a hybrid schedule, and even with all possible precautions: this is temporary. Your school will close again and it will be soon.