It’s difficult to overstate the importance of opening schools in North Dakota, Minnesota, and all over the country. If our schools aren’t open for in-person education, all students will suffer the consequences, and it will disproportionately affect students with learning styles and abilities that require more direct teacher contact and involvement.
The problem is that the United States has not only failed to suppress the spread of COVID-19, but we are in the midst of a resurgence that is producing more than twice as many new infections each day than at the height of the pandemic last spring.
An analysis of the latest data on coronavirus reveals that the current worldwide surge in infections is being driven by the poorer nations- and the United States. The rest of the economically advanced, highly developed nations in the world, pending a potential second wave, have used rigorously enforced nationwide lockdowns to successfully suppress the virus, and many of those nations have the potential to open schools successfully.
For example, schools have opened - or are about to open - in Norway, Denmark and Germany, but with stringent restrictions that include very small class sizes with students separated by social distancing both in and out of classrooms. Germany has been averaging about 400 new virus infections daily, and Norway and Denmark combined are reporting less than 50, so it seems absurd to imagine that the United States, with more than 60,000 new infections daily, has the same potential as those nations to safely and successfully open schools.
We know that the greatest risk for transmission of the virus occurs when groups of people gather indoors in confined spaces. Opening schools with in-person classes carries significant risk of increasing the spread of the virus and thus lengthening the duration of the health crisis in the U.S. Safely reopening schools in North Dakota, even with the relatively low-incidence of infection, assumes minimal transmission in school buildings and carries the hope that what’s happening in much of the rest of the nation won’t affect the state. Both outcomes seem more wishful than realistic.
Last spring and early summer our national leadership squandered the opportunity to get the virus under control, wasting the sacrifices of millions of Americans. Now there is no escaping the consequences of that failure. No matter how much we may wish for a return to some semblance of normalcy, everyone, including our children, will continue to incur the damage, and the longer COVID 19 remains out of control, the more severe that damage will be.
Opening businesses and opening schools while COVID 19 surges is a danger, not a remedy. What’s required is an urgent nationwide effort that is firm, determined, and science-based, adopting what has proved to be successful in other countries. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any other choice.
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July 20, 2020
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Letter: Reopening schools is a danger, not a remedy | INFORUM - INFORUM
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