Thread by @NoLore

My kids go back to school tomorrow like so many others. Twitter is full of all the reasons for why this is bad and we should be very worried. And lots of the reasons are fair and good.

Here's a thread about why I'm far more nuanced on whether this is good/bad.

First, here are the mitigation protections we've been promised: masks at all times, CO2 detectors in every classroom, distancing where possible, cleaning etc. The basics.

Active cases in our half of town? 899 per 100K (with all the caveats of poor testing).

That is lower than it's been in 2022 but it's still very high.

Those are all bad things.

Here are some of the good:

School closures might have helped contain omicron but schools were closed and it still blasted into the stratosphere. Compare that to 2021 where Quebec didn't close schools at all and most places didn't experience a third wave. Something else is up ...

We did though, and schools were closed for a month. What's clear is that school closures should be 1. a last resort and 2. locally-controlled. They need to respond to local spread, not used in the way Ontario did last spring.

The problem, obviously, is that nowhere are school closures a last resort. Factories, manufacturing, construction, business services businesses -- they all stay open. Schools close as a distraction from these facilities, or as an easier option than disrupting capital.

But schools are also spaces where COVID can be controlled in a way that sending kids home cannot be: no need for informal care arrangements or family mixing or whatever -- they are in school. They wear masks all day, there is a professional paying attention if a kid is sick.

There's no doubt that schools also prevent some spread, just as they also cause it. We haven't heard enough about how schools prevent some forms of spread and it's an important part of the story.

Schools are also public spaces where testing can be controlled by the state, unlike in private large congregant spaces where governments refuse to proactively intervene (like factories, manufacturing, construction).

An outbreak at a school doesn't just tell us what's happening in the school: it's a window into the community. Without these early warnings, it becomes much harder to identify spread, especially if contact tracing is non-existent.

And then, once an infection enters a home, the school is able to talk to households in a way that might be impossible for public health to follow up with every worker.

The school is a public intervention into millions of households.

In an era of neoliberalism, schools remain one of the few locations where such a public intervention still remains. And when they close, we lose that connection to the collective in the name of staying personally and individually safe. But only ...

only if you have parents who can stay home and just shelter in place forever. That is not possible for so many people so even the closures come with another danger: that the kids who don't have parents who can stay home are at the whim (and safety) of informal care.

Anyway -- children are not over-represented in overall COVID infections by age. That suggests that schools were not raging tirefires of outbreaks -- instead, while some cases for sure spread within schools, there were also broader kinds of spread outside.

Which goes back to the earlier tweet, an argument I make in my book and an argument I've been making since July 2020 -- we know where the hotspots are. We know who is most at risk. We need to target the schools and businesses in these communities if we want to affect spread.

But we is not actually we. It's they -- and they will not. They'll flatten the school issue into all or nothing. Good vs. bad. Mental health versus mental illness.

And I really encourage people to resist falling into these binaries.

And it isn't your fault if you send your kid to school and they get COVID. Or the flu. Or a bacterial infection inside an organ. Or if they break their arms trying to fly off the slide.