Jeff Green | Aug 05, 2020


A teacher from Los Angeles by the name of Tom Rademacher summed up the dilemma around schools reopening this September, back on June 7, in a pithy tweet: “Going back to school in the fall is a bad idea. Doing distance learning in the fall is a bad idea. Some combination of the two is a bad idea. I do not have any better ideas. I hate global pandemics”

What Mr. Radenmacher pointed to is that there are negative consequences to any of the options that were on the table for the return to school in the fall. Not sending kids to school for another 4 or even 8 months, after already keeping them home for over 5 months would harm the children, their families, the economy, and our collective mental health. Sending kids to school will inevitably lead to a greater spread of COVID-19 throughout the household, including to the elderly and those who are immune-compromised. A hybrid model would do both.
It became clear over the last month or so that the return to school was going to happen, that this will result in more cases of COVID-19 than we are experiencing, and that this will test our carefully constructed COVID influenced social order in various ways.

From the start, an element of fear has been part of the government messaging about the virus. It was necessary at the start to get us all to pay attention to what was going on and to accept the negative changes in our lifestyles, our freedom of movement, that were part of the social isolation rules we have been following.

At the same time, Public Health Officials, and politicians, in some cases only when pressed, admitted that there was never a realistic chance that the pandemic would be stopped, that people would not get the virus and that some would get sick and some would die. The goal was always about mitigating the risk, and preventing our health system to be so overwhelmed that treatment for many chronic and deadly diseases, including but not only COVID-19, would not be available.

In the province, and in our region in particular, this has been accomplished so far, and that is why the schools and businesses can reopen. But we know, from what has happened elsewhere and what we have learned about this virus, that the caseload will increase as a result. Managing outbreaks, perhaps multiple outbreaks, will test our resources once again, and will expose more people to a potentially dire health risk. We get back to Mr. Rademacher’s observation, some bad outcomes result from whatever course of action we collectively take.

We have more experience with this disease that we did in the spring, and more testing and tracing capacity. Hopefully, combined with continued vigilance, the normalcy that comes from children going to school, families going to work, will make the coming fall and winter manageable for most of us.

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