87% of students on earth have seen their schools closed, about 1.5 billion students.
But from what I can tell, daycares are still open. Is there a reason schools are closing but daycare is not?
Is it because people assume (some) kids are old enough to more or less take care of themselves at home for several hours a day (maybe age 10+) while daycare kids require a parent to watch them 24/7?
Seems like daycare is a massive point of transmission of the virus.
They are closed in many places.
I think a lot of it is a trade-off between essential people having to quit their jobs to watch their kids vs increased risk of transmission. And day cares are usually much smaller than schools–dozens of kids, not hundreds. Schools are bigger, kids mix more, and, as you say, more of them can watch themselves (and their younger siblings).
In Ohio daycares now need a special pandemic license to operate. They have to have a very low number of kids per room.
It’s for people who have to work and have no other means of child care. Even some school aged children will need to be in daycare. Everyone who can keep their kids home is but they daycares are open and running limited capacity for the people who cannot.
Around here, daycares that are open are not taking more than 10 children, and the parents are in necessary jobs. There’s a daycare down the street here that had about 40 kids, and announced it would be limiting itself to children of people who were critical at work. My neighbor upstairs is a supervising clerk at the state police main post, and can’t work from home because of confidentiality issues; she can’t work over her personal wifi. She is critical, and a single parent, so the daycare allowed her child. They had a couple of children of health care workers. After taking the children of people who were critical workers, they had still two slots, and held a lottery for them among the people who were not absolutely critical, but had what were deemed good reasons to need access to daycare.
My neighbor says they take each child’s temperature in the morning before they are even allowed in, and again before lunch. The parents who were accepted had to submit a plan to pick up a child right away if they developed a cough or fever, and sign a paper promising not to give their child medicine to prevent fever or cough. They also had to consent to their child being placed alone in a room wearing a mask if they came up feverish or coughing, while they waited for their pickup.
This has been a couple of weeks ago, already, that they did this, and I was still having conversations with the neighbors. I do see this neighbor leaving in the morning, with her daughter wearing her backpack, and so I guess the daycare is still open.
My brother and his wife are both home, and are taking care of the daughter of a friend who is a nurse practitioner in respiratory therapy.
They have considered telling her just to have the child stay with them 24/7, because going home with her mother every evening, and getting dropped off every morning, is not the safest thing in the world, even though the first thing they do is give her a bath, and put her in fresh clothes, then tie her clothes she came in, in a bag to go home with her. (They don’t launder them, because it’s California, and they don’t do small loads.) It would be pretty traumatic for her, but so would catching Covid-19.