New York City is absolutely winging it as the school year begins. The nation's largest school system is planning on bringing students back to classrooms with a shockingly scant number of COVID-19 mitigation measures:
As part of the new protocols, the city will test a random sample of 10 percent of unvaccinated people in schools every other week, a group that will include only students later this fall, when all adults will be required to be fully vaccinated, the mayor said. That means all children in elementary school will be subjected to testing, pending parent consent, while only unvaccinated middle and high schoolers will be tested...
This year, when someone in a classroom tests positive, only unvaccinated close contacts will have to quarantine for 10 days...
Middle and high school students who are unvaccinated but are considered close contacts of an infected person can leave quarantine early if they receive a negative test result five days into their quarantine.
Buildings will close for 10 days if there is evidence of widespread transmission as determined by the city's disease detectives.
Elementary school students learning at home during quarantine will receive live online instruction from their teachers, but quarantined older students will work on their assignments on their own at home...
All students and staff will be required to wear masks, and each classroom will also have two air purifiers. Principals have been instructed to keep three feet of distance between students everywhere possible, and city officials said distancing will be possible in the vast majority of classrooms.
That's it? Really?
I don't know about you, but I think our children are worth more than this paltry lineup of ineffective COVID-19 countermeasures. Some actually helpful ideas: Each student should get his own individual school building; all students and teachers should be required to receive a daily vaccination shot while wearing nine masks; schools should be sterilized with superheated bleach every six hours; any student or faculty member who has had come within fifty miles of a suspected COVID-19 case should be loaded into a rocket and launched toward Neptune.
If you're going to do it, do it right. Children can handle it; they're resilient.
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