It’s good school will be back in session on Monday. It’s good Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mayor-elect Eric Adams said so with one voice, heading off the kind of clashing messages and confusion that were routine when Andrew Cuomo was in charge. And it’s good buildings will reopen with stepped-up testing for students, including routine testing of vaccinated kids (provided their parents provide consent forms) as well as the unvaccinated and millions of at-home rapid tests set to be sent home when kids in a given class test positive.
Have no symptoms and test negative? Back to class you come.
In the very early days of the pandemic, remote learning was the understandable default; we just didn’t know enough about the role schools were playing in spread, and teachers and other staffers were relatively unprotected. Since then, four things have happened: Schools have proven not to be the petri dishes many feared, especially when kids are masked; educators have all gotten vaccinated; the academic and psychological harms to young people of prolonged isolation have become clear; and, most recently, the virus itself has mutated and mutated again, with the new variant both more contagious and less dangerous than previous iterations.
All of which means that, omicron notwithstanding, in-person learning is a go, with a small subset of immunocompromised kids learning from home. The toughest cases, the ones that City Hall should consider taking a second look at, are youngsters with a medically vulnerable caregiver or family member at home.
Between now and Monday, de Blasio and Adams public health officials must carefully monitor rising child hospitalization rates not only in New York but nationwide. Overall numbers remain low — an alarming jump in the city was from just 22 in early December to 109 later in the month — but trends are troubling. If it turns out omicron is hitting young Americans especially hard, that would be cause to reassess. Better to live and learn than fail to learn from emerging evidence and put kids at risk.
