How Safe is Safe Enough?

I've been following the on-going battle between the Chicago Teacher's Union and the City of Chicago over when to resume in-person school. The scientific evidence seems clear at this point that children are neither vulnerable to COVID-19 nor are they very effective carriers/transmitters of COVID-19 and yet the Teacher's Union is digging its heels in, saying that the teachers are being put at risk by returning to the classroom. It has now gotten to the point that Chicago is refusing to pay teachers who don't show up.

This all begs the question though - 'how safe is safe enough'? I can certainly sympathize with teachers who are over 60 and who fall into a higher-risk category as it relates to COVID-19. Not only are some of them likely to be fearful of catching COVID, but they could potentially lose their lives. I understand that. On the other hand, however, schools and children are notorious for being petri dishes for all kinds of disease. As a father of 3 young kids, it is a regular occurrence to get correspondence from either the school or the church indicating that something is going around, be it strep throat, influenza, hand foot & mouth (HFM) disease, noroviruses, lice, etc. Being around kids necessarily means that you are more exposed than the rest of the population to any number of illnesses and ailments. Bottom-line, if you sign up to be a teacher, you shouldn't be under any illusions that sickness/illness aren't part of the territory. And to be fair, COVID isn't the only thing that goes around that could kill someone in their 60s.

So, at what point would the Chicago Teacher's Union deem that all of their teachers are "safe enough"? Students are falling further and further behind in school and the detrimental effects of at-home school on the mental health of students is starting to become very clear. Even cursory Google searches about mental health and COVID bring back results like these. This isn't even to speak of the burden on parents who were never prepared and who are mostly ill-equipped to handle at-home school long-term. As parents start returning to out-of-the-home work, what are they to do if their children are not also back in school?

As I have said from the beginning of this pandemic, as a society we have to come to terms with the fact that illnesses and even death are unavoidable outcomes. I'm not suggesting that we do nothing - we have some tools at our disposal including masks and social-distancing - but we can't pretend like we will ever reach a point where we are truly "safe". Every year you read about those freak occurrences where someone catches a brain-eating amoeba while swimming in a pond somewhere. Nobody ever sees car accidents, or cancer, coming down the road (no pun intended). Right now, rather than worrying about the illusion of safety, we need to be considering how to limit the potential damage we are doing to our younger generation by keeping them out of school. That may involve some hard choices for some people. If you're a teacher and you are over 60, you have to make a decision about the risk vs the reward. That's a tough choice...but as for public policy, we need to make decisions regarding the group, not the individual. As for re-opening schools, the focus needs to be one what is necessary for the students, and then teachers need to make choices for themselves. Its never going to be 'safe enough'.