# Opening schools **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [May 21, 2020, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247 "2020-05-21T15:36:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/1 "2020-05-21T15:36:12Z")
[_Science_ article.](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/should-schools-reopen-kids-role-pandemic-still-mystery) > [@Science May 4](#): > > For families eager for schools to throw open their doors, the tale of a 9-year-old British boy who caught COVID-19 in the French Alps in January offers a glimmer of hope. The youngster, infected by a family friend, suffered only mild symptoms; he enjoyed ski lessons and attended school before he was diagnosed. Astonishingly, he did not transmit the virus to any of 72 contacts who were tested. His two siblings didn’t become infected, even though other germs spread readily among them: in the weeks that followed, all three had influenza and a common cold virus. > > The story could be a bizarre outlier—or a tantalizing clue. Several studies of COVID-19 hint that children are less likely to catch the novel coronavirus, and don’t often transmit it to others. A recent survey of the literature couldn’t find a single example of a child under 10 passing the virus on to someone else, for example. … > > … some governments are beginning to reopen schools. Denmark sent children up to age 11 back on 15 April, and Germany welcomed back mostly older children on 29 April. Some Israeli schools reopened on 3 May; the Netherlands and the Canadian province of Quebec plan to reopen many primary schools on 11 May. … > > … Several new studies now underway aim to better gauge the risk, including one announced on 4 May by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) that will follow 2000 families for 6 months … > > … The evidence from studies done so far is not consistent. Researchers in Iceland, one of the few countries to conduct mass screening, turned up no infections in 848 children under the age of 10 without significant symptoms, compared with an infection rate of nearly 1% in ages 10 and older. A U.S. analysis of nearly 150,000 infected people found that just 1.7% were under age 18. But a study of 391 cases and almost 1300 close contacts in Shenzhen, China, reported that children were just as likely to be infected as adults. Eckerle cautions that some of these data come from surveys done after shutdowns were put in place. “They were collected in an artificial situation,” she says. Children “weren’t going to the playground and were not going to school.” > > Several studies suggest children who get sick with COVID-19 are just as infectious as ailing adults. Researchers have detected the same amounts of viral RNA in nose or throat swabs from sick children as in those from older patients. Finding RNA does not always mean a person is infectious; it can also come from noninfectious viral remnants. But in a 1 May preprint, Eckerle’s team reported that 12 out of 23 children sick with COVID-19 had the virus in their nose or throat able to attack and infect human cells in the lab, a rate similar to adults. > > Far less is known about the risk posed by infected children with few or no symptoms. But there’s at least one example of a child who didn’t appear sick and was nevertheless a virus factory: In February, doctors in Singapore described a 6-month-old baby, infected without apparent symptoms, whose coronavirus levels were on par with sick adults. > > Real-life studies of how often children transmit COVID-19 are scarce. Researchers at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) looked carefully at how the disease spread in 54 households, together comprising 123 adults and 116 children aged 16 or younger. They didn’t find a single family in which a child was the first patient. This study, too, began only after schools closed, says RIVM epidemiologist Susan van den Hof, but there’s additional evidence from Dutch contact tracing studies: Of 43 contacts of infected children and teens who were followed, none became infected. > > Critics have noted these numbers, posted on RIVM’s website, are too small to be statistically significant. But combined with other studies, Van den Hof says, “The data all seem to be pointing in the same direction: that there is not as much transmission from children.” … > > … **The countries reopening schools may soon provide a reality check**. If children are ample virus spreaders after all, cases could surge in a matter of weeks. And if they aren’t, parents and policymakers will heave a sigh of relief and more countries may follow. For now, the natural experiment proceeds. … Bolding mine. Update? So far, weeks later, **no new surges in countries that have opened schools**. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/2 "2020-05-21T16:05:12Z")
There is also this _Science_ article from Tuesday: [“Why do some COVID-19 patients infect many others, whereas most don’t spread the virus as all?”](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-all?utm_campaign=news_daily_2020-05-19&et_rid=372394086&et_cid=3332443#) - Most of the discussion around the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has concentrated on the average number of new infections caused by each patient. Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three. But in real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all. In fact, the latter is the norm, Lloyd-Smith says: “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero. Most people do not transmit.” That’s why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people. In a seminal 2005 Nature paper, Lloyd-Smith and co-authors estimated that SARS—in which superspreading played a major role—had a k of 0.16. The estimated k for MERS, which emerged in 2012, is about 0.25. In the flu pandemic of 1918, in contrast, the value was about one, indicating that clusters played less of a role. Estimates of k for SARS-CoV-2 vary. In January, Julien Riou and Christian Althaus at the University of Bern simulated the epidemic in China for different combinations of R and k and compared the outcomes with what had actually taken place. They concluded that k for COVID-19 is somewhat higher than for SARS and MERS. That seems about right, says Gabriel Leung, a modeler at the University of Hong Kong. “I don’t think this is quite like SARS or MERS, where we observed very large superspreading clusters,” Leung says. “But we are certainly seeing a lot of concentrated clusters where a small proportion of people are responsible for a large proportion of infections.” But in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1. “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski says. That could explain some puzzling aspects of this pandemic, including why the virus did not take off around the world sooner after it emerged in China, and why some very early cases elsewhere—such as one in France in late December 2019, reported on 3 May—apparently failed to ignite a wider outbreak. If k is really 0.1, then most chains of infection die out by themselves and SARS-CoV-2 needs to be introduced undetected into a new country at least four times to have an even chance of establishing itself, Kucharski says. If the Chinese epidemic was a big fire that sent sparks flying around the world, most of the sparks simply fizzled out.\* There is a persuasive case for opening up primary and secondary schools anyway even if students are infectious; we can’t keep students at home indefinitely without impacting their development, parents who are working at home need the time and space to be able to do their jobs, and for many students school lunches are their one hot and reasonably nutritious meal as well as the support school may provide to students with bad domestic environments. And short of a vaccine, we are going to have to facilitate controlled contagion so that people in low vulnerability cohorts can be exposed and hopefully return to work and other activities with assurance of low risk. Allowing parents the option to send their children to school and then monitoring for signs and symptoms (and even periodic antigen test sampling) would give a way to control and track exposures. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![raspberry\_hunter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b19c9b/32.png) [@raspberry\_hunter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raspberry_hunter)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/3 "2020-05-21T16:50:04Z")
Oh wow, thank you for this **DSeid** and **Stranger**. It is definitely great news that there have been no new surges due to opening schools! I’m also very intrigued by the idea that many/most people don’t transmit. (Enough that it might be worth putting in its own thread?) It sounds like we might have lucked out in a lot of ways with COVID-19. ---
**Author:** ![Surreal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eada6e/32.png) [@Surreal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Surreal)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/4 "2020-05-21T17:22:45Z")
> [@raspberry\_hunter](#): > > It is definitely great news that there have been no new surges due to opening schools! > **[70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/70-cases-covid-19-french-schools-days-after-re-opening-n1209591)** > > The affected schools are being closed immediately. > [@](#): > > PARIS — Just one week after a third of French schoolchildren went back to school in an easing of coronavirus lockdowns, a worrying flareup of about 70 COVID-19 cases has been linked to schools. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/5 "2020-05-21T17:47:38Z")
> [@Surreal](#): > > [70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/70-cases-covid-19-french-schools-days-after-re-opening-n1209591) There will definitely be an increase in cases with any relaxation; that is inevitable. The point is being able to monitor and make reasonable predictions of the effects of of such relaxations. Short of a vaccine, we’re going to have to accept spread of contagion and a certain marginal level of mortality; the point of “flattening the curve” is to prevent cases from exceeding the capability of the health system and get a handle on the epidemiology and pathology of the virus so we can better control and treat it. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/6 "2020-05-21T17:56:15Z")
[As noted previously](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=22267008&postcount=84), the evidence for closing schools have always been rather ambiguous, and it does not appear that the decision to close them was based on solid science. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/7 "2020-05-21T18:43:09Z")
Speaking as a public school teacher - Closing schools was the right thing to do. The students are disease-ridden plague-monkeys in the best of times. Now… ---
**Author:** ![Rushgeekgirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rushgeekgirl/32/3715_2.png) [@Rushgeekgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rushgeekgirl)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/8 "2020-05-21T18:53:55Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > [As noted previously](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=22267008&postcount=84), the evidence for closing schools have always been rather ambiguous, and it does not appear that the decision to close them was based on solid science. This link is archived and updated pages provide more information on school closures and the steps needed to re-open. They are no longer expressing any indication that closing schools was unnecessary. They really didn’t in the first place, only saying it didn’t seem to help in Hong Kong. How old IS that link anyway? There’s no date listed. [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/schools-decision-tool.html](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/schools-decision-tool.html) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/9 "2020-05-21T18:57:08Z")
Closing the schools was never the right thing to do. The damage this virus can do is strictly short-term. A few years from now, it’ll be history. But the damage done by closing the schools will still be haunting us decades from now. Gov. DeWine of Ohio has already “reassured” parents that schools will not be doing anything to make up for lost time, because remote learning has been just as good as open schools, for all students everywhere in the state. Which is of course patently false; many students haven’t had any remote schooling at all, for various reasons (including that many schools followed DeWine’s advice). ---
**Author:** ![Surreal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eada6e/32.png) [@Surreal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Surreal)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/10 "2020-05-21T19:22:56Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Closing the schools was never the right thing to do. Idiocy. ---
**Author:** ![Surreal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eada6e/32.png) [@Surreal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Surreal)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/11 "2020-05-21T19:28:07Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Closing the schools was never the right thing to do. The damage this virus can do is strictly short-term. Buying a smoke detector is never the right thing to do. The damage from a house fire is strictly short-term. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/12 "2020-05-21T19:54:33Z")
> [@Rushgeekgirl](#): > > This link is archived and updated pages provide more information on school closures and the steps needed to re-open. They are no longer expressing any indication that closing schools was unnecessary. They really didn’t in the first place, only saying it didn’t seem to help in Hong Kong. How old IS that link anyway? There’s no date listed. I think I first saw that source a couple of months ago. (It predates NYC closing schools, since I first saw it in that context.) All I took from that link was that the evidence was always ambiguous. The OP of this thread seemed to be suggesting that emerging evidence may point to closing schools as having minimal impact, and my point was that it doesn’t appear that actual evidence ever pointed to closing schools to begin with. That CDC guidance was that there’s a role for closing schools where the healthcare system is being overwhelmed or mass absences among the school staff and such, but otherwise pointed to evidence that there was no difference, based on the approaches of different countries. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/13 "2020-05-21T19:57:41Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Closing the schools was never the right thing to do. Closing the schools was always the right thing to do. Because with the dearth of solid information we had early in this pandemic, it was better to be safe than sorry. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/14 "2020-05-21T20:04:12Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Speaking as a public school teacher - Closing schools was the right thing to do. The students are disease-ridden plague-monkeys in the best of times. Now… They are, but- they arent practicing social distancing or wearing masks anyway. Just on a short walk yesterday I saw two groups of teen/tween kids, ten playing basketball, eight doing skateboarding. No masks, no social distancing, no parents. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/15 "2020-05-21T20:37:25Z")
> [@Surreal](#): > > [70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/70-cases-covid-19-french-schools-days-after-re-opening-n1209591) unclear if students or teachers and by timing seem to not be from school transmissions. [https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/international/europe/498460-france-reports-70-new-cases-of-covid-19-in-schools-allowed-to%3Famp](https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/international/europe/498460-france-reports-70-new-cases-of-covid-19-in-schools-allowed-to%3famp) > [@](#): > > Blanquer did not make clear whether the 70 cases involved students, teachers or a combination of the two, but he noted that the virus’s several-day incubation period suggested people were infected before last week, when about 40,000 preschools and primary schools reopened with maximum class sizes of 15. EU consensus is so far so good. “Schools reopening has not triggered rise in Covid-19 cases, EU ministers told” > **[Schools reopening has not triggered rise in Covid-19 cases, EU ministers told](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/18/french-minister-tells-of-risks-of-missing-school-as-more-pupils-return-covid-19)** > > France’s education minister says it is more of a risk keeping children at home > [@](#): > > The update on the state of play in the 27 EU member states came as France’s education minister told parents it was more of a risk keeping their children at home than sending them to school now the strict lockdown had ended. > Jean-Michel Blanquer was speaking as a second wave of pupils returned to secondary schools. Blanquer said the government’s priority was to avoid youngsters who struggle at school or at home becoming “collateral damage” of the Covid-19 crisis. … > > … In an interview with RTL radio, Blanquer revealed that 70 cases of Covid-19 had been diagnosed since 40,000 primary and nursery schools reopened last week. > “It’s inevitable this sort of thing will happen, but it’s a minority,” he said. “In almost all the cases, this happened outside of the school.” Assuming that this bug would behave like influenza was reasonable. Erring to caution even as it became clear it does not was defendable. But the harms have been very large and at this point the burden of proof is on the need to keep imposing the harms upon the children. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/16 "2020-05-21T21:12:48Z")
> [@Surreal](#): > > Idiocy. **Moderator Note** Keep it civil in this forum. No warning issued, but refrain from remarks like this directed at other posters. Colibri QZ Moderator ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/17 "2020-05-21T21:21:58Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > Closing the schools was always the right thing to do. Because with the dearth of solid information we had early in this pandemic, it was better to be safe than sorry. At the time that various states made the decision to close primary schools (and many colleges and universities elected to send students home) we had little direct epidemiological knowledge of the SARS-CoV-2 virus except for what was being reported by the WHO based upon data provided by China on the Wuhan outbreak, the catastrophic epidemic being observed in real time in Italy and Spain (and mass graves being dug in Iran as seen from satellite images) and the unexpectedly rapid spread in North America and Europe, which gave disparate statistics that had led some people to hypothesize that we were actually experiencing a more virulent strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus than the one responsible for the epidemic in Wuhan. This, combined with a lack of available testing even in countries with advanced health care systems and robust epidemic response infrastructures, created a lot of uncertainty about how the virus was being spread and who was spreading it. We now know that that was largely a result of inaccurate information and a high asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infection rate but at the time official sources were quoting the R[SUB]0[/SUB] as 1.6 to 2.3 whereas even a fairly naive model that I cooked up over the course of a weekend in early March showed an R[SUB]0[/SUB] of at least 4 and potentially greater than 6 (and there is no way that professional epidemiologists weren’t coming to the same conclusions and just not voicing them). The current estimate is now 3.8 to 8.9 with a mean of 5.7, which means the virus is a lot more transmissible than the then-official statistics indicated, and estimates of case fatality rate were ranging from a fraction of a percent all the way up to 5% depending on whose country’s stats you looked at. It is easy to say now that “damage this virus can do is strictly short-term” and “the damage done by closing the schools will still be haunting us decades from now” (I’m not sure I fully agree with either statement) but that can be readily turned around to say, “Students can make up for lost time but the virus kills forever”; and the calculation between loss of development time versus loss of life is not a simple or easy one to make. Dr. Birx, who was an early advocate of isolation measures (presumably including school closures) has had personal experience with this; her then-11-year-old grandmother brought home the H1N1 ‘Spanish Flu’ strain that killed her Birx’ great-grandmother and carried guilt about this with her for the rest of her life. If children were found to be effective carriers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and infected adults _en masse_ after passing it around in the unsanitary confines of schools, that could result in a mass epidemic outbreak that could easily overwhelm the health system. That it now seems that this is unlikely gives good confidence that opening schools will not result in uncontrollable contagion, and although children are not as ‘immune’ as once thought, the morbidity and mortality rates are sufficiently low that it isn’t a greater risk than exposure to influenza or other common viruses that affect children. And I feel compelled to point out again that the response to this pandemic shouldn’t just be about “getting back to normal” as quickly as possible, but using this event as a learning experience for the next and potentially more virulent pandemic, which includes altering our educational, medical, and social systems to be able to cope with isolation measures and establish a more robust epidemiological surveillance system. People (myself included) keep using the term “unprecedented” to describe this pandemic, which is true in the context of modern history, but it is really modern history that is unprecedented in that we haven’t had a really unconfined highly transmissible epidemic since polio (except for HIV/AIDS, which people conveniently forget about because it is relatively easy to avoid in developed nations). The history of the world is rife with infectious epidemics sweeping through whole regions and decimating (or worse) the population. Smallpox swept through Eurasia innumerable times with casualty rates often exceeding 25%, and when it was transferred to the Americas as a novel virus the population there had never experienced, it cut through the native peoples killing so many we don’t even know what the fatality rate was other than that it was likely greater than 90%. We need to think not about what we can do to get back to work, school, and play next week, but what we can do to make sure the next infectious pandemic can be controlled without such massive disruption. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/18 "2020-05-21T21:42:58Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Closing the schools was never the right thing to do. The damage this virus can do is strictly short-term. A few years from now, it’ll be history. But the damage done by closing the schools will still be haunting us decades from now. This is poor reasoning unimproved by any evidence whatsoever. We know children are less affected by the virus. But there’s no solid evidence that they don’t spread the virus. And schools are not hermetically sealed capsules; school activity generates a lot of secondary travel and contact for both kids and adults that could lead to more spreading. Dropoff and pickup, extracurricular activities, fieldtrips, shopping, deliveries, increased socialization all create additional social mingling and points of contact. There may come a time when we conclude that opening schools is the best of bad choices. But in the early days of a mystery pandemic with details still emerging, of course closing schools is the right thing to do. Even in hindsight we haven’t determined that it was the wrong thing to do. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/19 "2020-05-21T22:28:58Z")
My wife is an elementary school teacher, so she is keenly interested in this. We’ve been following developments in California, and all I can say is it’s going to be a mess. Ideas being bandied about include: No recess. School only on alternate days for students (though teachers have to go every day). Students sit in the same seat all day, including for lunch. No prep periods (specialty teachers like PE, music, and science). ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/20 "2020-05-21T22:38:13Z")
It should also be noted that while the majority of teachers are under the age of 65, there are some who may still be in vulnerable cohorts, as may be other staff and volunteers, notwithstanding the sheer number of people between 20 and 65 with no underlying conditions who have nonetheless presented severe cases of COVID-19. Keeping schools open for in-person classrooms is tantamount to forcing these people to remain exposed while other businesses are allowed or encouraged to allow workers to work remotely even there is no way that teachers and students can follow distancing guidelines. Teaching is already a financially undesirable occupation with many teachers leaving for other fields because of inadequate salaries or benefits, and forcing them to remain on-post in the middle of an epidemic is just going to exacerbate that exodus. There is no question that online education is not the same as classroom instruction even for classes without a lab or physical interaction component and many students lack the facilities for online schooling but without testing and monitoring schools are natural nodes for contagion. Closing schools along with hair salons, barbers, restaurants and bars, concert venues, et cetera is an obvious and nearly obligatory first step in dealing with any wide scale outbreak until the epidemiology is better understood and there is good confidence in being able to monitor and control outbreaks. Stranger [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247.md?page=2)