Schools and Covid

[freedom]

i'm a grammar school teacher and i WANT to get back into the classroom. hybrid A/B classes would work for me, as well as partial virtual learning.
BUT if you told me i had to teach in the class and teach virtual at the same time... that's not gonna work.

[Scrapiron]

My wife taught 9th grade language arts last year and is now moving to a reading intervention position for this school year. She said basically the same thing, but politicians and most bureaucrats don't understand how it doesn't work to just drag and drop a lesson plan from one setting into the other.

[Siress]

It would be the same stance I took with daycare. It's not happening. My kid is with family 24/7 now. It's financial burden to say the least, but fortunately we are able to sustain it for now.

The thought of my child one day realizing that he was the vector for the virus that killed his grandparent(s) is too much to bear.

[maggot]

Our kid has been back in daycare for over 2 months now. We gotta work, no two ways around it. We've accepted the fact that we're all going to end up with this thing anyways, so life goes on for us.

[Siress]

This is a situation of everyone trying to make their own cost benefit analysis with the caveat that no one has any good data to base their decision off of.

...and risk benefit analysis. I agree with you that these are subjective and largely qualitative efforts. Relatively speaking, though, we have far better data than the last pandemic no matter how you cut it. However, the spread is vastly accelerated due to our substantive increases in frequency and distance of travel. We have had decent data on the spread and mortality rate to inform our decisions since Dec. 2019. As of the Aug. 4th announcement, it seems US data may be in jeopardy moving forward, but we'll see. The data available around the world is pretty clear in regard to a few aspects that can inform people on what to expect:

• COVID-19 is extraordinarily infectious through respiratory systems
• ~5% avg. mortality rate that skews heavily toward the elderly population (~<1 to18% mortality exponentially increasing with age / existing respiratory issues)

...end of list for me. That's all I really need to know. There's a lot more information out there, such as concerns about long-term damage among the recovered population, but that granularity isn't necessary to make an informed decision.

This exercise is highly dependent on individual circumstances, but I'll share my own views from the high-level/general consideration down to my personal considerations.

First, consider which risks are perceived risks (e.g. stunted social development of children) and known risks (e.g. kids becoming significantly high-risk attack vectors that could infect the entire family unit). I will always favor the known over the perceived. When doing professional risk benefit analysis, we actually avoid perceived risks when making actionable decisions. Perception is more often than not a damaging attribute. With elderly family that we rely on for childcare at times, we're on high alert.

Then the question of cost comes in. There's a very real and immediate cost for losing the ability to work in order to care for kids. Or losing the ability to work at all if it would make one a likely vector that infects your family. That cost could be severe enough to present as an immediate threat to health and safety, making one of the 'known risks' a high probability loss of shelter, food, medicine... Some are faced with 100% probability of losing those basic necessitates without any ability to adapt - essentially guaranteeing infection since they'll be forced to integrate with society for those necessities. In that situation, it only makes sense to go to work and take your chances while maintaining your resources a best you can. If everyone had some sort of universal income to cover basic necessities then people wouldn't be faced with this struggle that's harming society as a whole. We'd still have many of the same issues, but this extreme wouldn't be one of them. On the other hand, people that can work in isolation sill have to consider job security through these challenging times. And people that have to take care of kids - to get back on point - have to consider how long they can sustain doing so full-time versus when they think it will be safe to integrate with society again. Will a vaccine really be available by the end of 2021? What if it's 2022? ...'23? To my knowledge, that's where we lack any sort of real data to support a decision. The leading experts have weighed in, so pick from those you trust and that seems to be all we can do for now.

The hardest pill for me to swallow, personally, is that there's going to be a time coming up where I will need to start traveling for work as so-called 'essential staff,' meaning my travel will not be impeded by gov't travel restrictions. When that happens, I will have to completely isolate myself from my family for ~6 weeks. There's a real mental health burden in doing that, and I haven't seen much discussion about it. Anyone suggesting this as a reasonable plan of action for families with sole-providers for the remainder of this pandemic is not technically wrong, but it could cause more harm than good in some instances. Again, this is a perceived risk so I would caution acting on it until there's a real and present danger, but I think suicide rates would see a massive uptick if not managed proactively. Particularly, suicide rates among men that have been isolating from their families would be astoundingly high over the holiday season. Every one of those factors is a significant risk factor for suicide: men, isolation from family, and holiday season.

I wish you all the best. If anyone is looking for publicly available resources on these topics I'm happy to share what I have.