“All In” is making us all insane
The third year of COVID schooling begins
It hit me two weeks ago, when my kid got a sniffle. His illness seemed completely ordinary. We were more careful than we used to be about a cold — taking his temperature twice a day, asking about taste and smell — but saw no real reason to worry. We postponed a playdate or two, but more or less went on with our already low-contact lives. Then my second kid got it. Same symptoms. Same process. When, three days later, I too woke up with a sore throat — the very ordinary beginnings of what felt like a very ordinary virus — I decided to get a COVID test to be on the safe side.
It was negative.
So why am I making a big deal out of a negative COVID test, of an annoying-but-extremely-typical cold that moved through our house in an extremely typical way?
It felt like a harbinger.
The amount of mental energy I had to put into these colds was, well, high. It included frequent but are you really OK?-type questions that I bombarded my kids with. Detailed explanations of our very ordinary symptoms were shared with every person we had been or planned to be in contact with, including the date and results of my COVID test. Then I realized just how much worse this is going to get when school starts in three days, every time a kid so much as sneezes.
I do not know where I am going to get the energy to do this again. I had been putting it off, the worry. Things were getting better, and better still, and kids were low risk, and they need to be in school — we’ve learned that — and then things got so bad again so quickly you could almost pretend it hadn’t happened, or was a blip that would solve itself, and then suddenly you’re staring down another school year of uncertainty, and then you’re three days away from it, and the school district is proudly stating it’s “all in” and apparently following a health and safety plan written in the halcyon days of early July. They’re not even acknowledging that the combination of the Delta variant and classrooms at full capacity for the first time since March 2020 might force another change in plans, let alone sharing what those plans might be. It’s all too much.
And it feels worse now, not because this year is yet another promise broken, another shredded piece of the social compact, because somehow I’ve started to expect both of these things over these long months. It’s worse because the people who made it their jobs to protect us appear to have simply given up. There are the cases of actual sabotage, of course — the governors banning mask mandates in schools are the clear frontrunners in the Who wants to win at losing to COVID? sweepstakes — but I can’t give high marks to any governor at this point.
Imagine if one, just one, way back in 2020, had said that bars and restaurants and gyms would remain closed in that state until schools could open. What might that world have looked like? What other states would have followed suit? What creative solutions might communities have come up with that could have been replicated elsewhere? (And yes, people will naysay about unions and teachers not wanting to work, to which I say, had we been able to truly make it safe for teachers, it would have been safer for all the bars and restaurants and the rest of us too.) Had anyone decided to put schools first, without just insisting they open without a real plan, it would have said something very different about what our country values. It would have said something good.
Here in Columbus, we’re told often the school district is in “communication” with the Department of Public Health about its plans. So it was disheartening when Dr. Mysheika Roberts, the head of that department, appeared on the local news telling families that if their young child is exposed and told to quarantine that parents “just have to be creative and try to do their best to separate the individuals.” The “individuals” in my case would be a five and/or seven year old, and I’m not sure Roberts fully appreciates the level of “creativity” it would take to keep them mostly isolated for two weeks. This is another high burden to put on families, unavoidable in the beginning, but unacceptable when we’ve had 18 months to plan for this moment.
Instead of talking about quarantining young children like it’s an inevitability, I’d like to hear Dr. Roberts and her partners at CCS talk about what they are doing to prevent the need. I’d like to hear specifics about ventilation in their mitigation strategy, acknowledging it as a key piece of the puzzle instead of a haphazard add-on at the end of a long FAQ list that raises more questions than it answers. (For example: what does it take to “safely” open a window, and how likely is it most classrooms will do so?) I would like them to answer their own question about how children will be kept safe without masks in the cafeteria, because despite drawing attention to this very question, they never tell us. I would like to know how likely it is that our children will have to quarantine, and if there will be an online option if they do, and what keeping three feet of distance “when possible” actually looks like when you’re talking about a classroom full of Kindergartners, who will sit at tables in a windowless room for seven hours each day.
That last one is personal. That last one describes the space in which my youngest will begin his school career.
This week, last year, statewide cases were at a seven day average of 927, and school was fully remote.
This year, the seven day average just spiked to over 3,000, yet we are “All in.”
Every case is a life upended, temporarily or tragically. Just because the numbers are now high enough as to be incomprehensible does not mean we have the luxury of forgetting each and every person the digits represent. Every case reverberates through households and families. Looking ahead to yet another potentially disastrous school year, it’s tragic we decided “hot vax summer” was somehow deserved, never mind that so many people decided to skip the “vax” part; never mind that no child under 12 was given the opportunity. Now we’re planning to pack them into classroom petri dishes and might not offer them a vaccine until early 2022. Now pediatric cases are rising. Now our kids will have to bear the consequences of our choices.
Again.