Opening up the schools may be the way to herd immunity??
Anyone smarter than me care to opine? @bwarbiany ??
"The way to herd immunity" is the way to hundreds of thousands of deaths... Most think we need >70% infection rates to get to herd immunity, and it's unlikely we're above 5% nationally right now--with ~125K deaths to date.
The hope with this thing HAS to be to manage a
slow burn until we either find a miracle treatment that drastically reduces the mortality rate, or we get a vaccine. That doesn't mean keep the world locked down; that means doing the things within our power to keep infections as low as we can.
Kids need to go back to school. If we were to keep them out of school an entire additional school year, the damage to their academic development will be a disaster. Given that they are the lowest-risk demographic that exists, the risk to them is small.
But the risk to the rest of us is MUCH higher. A kid who goes to school and contracts COVID brings it home to his/her parents, who then become another potential vector of spread. What if the parents are health care workers? Nursing home employees? First responders of some type or another? What if they have an elderly relative in the household?
So if we want a slow burn,
we don't just toss them in school and hope they get COVID-19, we put them in school with physical distancing guidelines, masks, limited class sizes, etc, everything we can do to help reduce the spread while they're at school.
My kids are currently slated to go back to school in August. Apparently the school is making masks optional. I have made it VERY clear to them that no matter what the school says, *I* say they're mandatory. And that I'll reach out to their teachers at the beginning of the year so that their teachers understand that they are expected to wear them and if they don't that the teachers should contact me.
I said it above, and I'll say it again.
Herd immunity is not the exit strategy we should be hoping for. We should be hoping to minimize infections and deaths until we develop a better exit strategy (treatment or vaccine).