covid diary: day 127

Look who came to visit

I spent an hour on the phone yesterday talking to my aunt Laura, who is the history department chair at our high school. We talked about the precautions the school is taking for the upcoming school year (separating lunch into smaller, more spread-out groups, putting more distance between desks, having clubs meet online only, using water fountains only to fill water bottles but not to drink out of, etc.) and the way the school plans to handle outbreaks. That second one is a little more amorphous because the plan is to handle every situation individually, because each one has so many variables. If a student or teacher gets infected, they have to do contact tracing within the school, but beyond that they're deciding on a case-by-case basis whether anyone needs to quarantine and for how long. I asked if there's a threshold of community spread beyond which schools would have to close, and the answer is that no, there's no specific number because they're also considering other factors like the death rate and hospital capacity.

To make a long story short, I ended the conversation more confused than ever. Laura is a very smart person, and she's involved in all the planning and discussions, and she's comfortable sending her kids to school. I spent the whole night asking myself what I was missing, what if I'm wrong to be this cautious, what if I'm making Liam hate me for robbing him of his junior year for an unwarranted amount of caution? What if, what if, what if? Mike still seemed very sure and confident in our decision to keep them home, at least for the first quarter (Laura did tell me we can re-evaluate each quarter, which is good information to have), but I spent the whole night wavering and doubting my own reasoning.

no explanation needed
credit: Rob Sheridan

This morning, I was telling my friend Kelly about it, and she brought up something she had just read about: People who are healthy have a much different conception of the medical system in general and the risks of coronavirus infection specifically than do people with any kind of chronic condition. People who have always been healthy tend to think that they will always stay healthy, and that even if they get sick, our medical system is so advanced that it will be able to fix them — and more importantly, they take for granted that doctors will be invested in finding a treatment and successful in that effort.

People who have had chronic conditions, in contrast, often run up against barriers to treatment that include but are no way limited to physician indifference, fat or disability or inherent racial bias, disbelief of their level of pain, and plain old inability to adequately treat their conditions. They know that the medical system is incredibly flawed, and they've learned never to take for granted that they will be believed, let alone treated effectively and respectfully. I've written about my own problems getting compassionate and effective care as a fat person before, and this really resonated with me as a differentiating factor between, say, me and Laura.

Where does that leave us? Well, I guess we're sticking with elearning, at least for the first nine weeks of school. We can reassess then and see if opening schools caused major outbreaks and give the schools a chance to refine their processes. Of course, the first nine weeks encompasses the entire tennis season, which really stinks, because the school's position is that if you're not comfortable enough with in-person school, you're also not comfortable enough to send your kids to extracurricular activities. I understand that reasoning generally, but in the case of tennis specifically it doesn't hold up because the risk of playing an individual outdoor sport for two hours a day is considerably lower than the risk of sitting in a series of indoor classrooms with 25-30 students in each for seven hours a day.

This whole thing blows. Honestly. It guts me that I have to make this choice. It makes me want to weep (not just want to, but actually do, in low moments) that I have spent their whole lives showing my children the lengths that I will go to, the work that I will put in, to make sure they have every opportunity in life, only to deny them this opportunity and have them believe that I am being selfish and not operating in their best interests.

But, Mike says when I tell him yet again that maybe we are the ones with the flawed reasoning, look at Israel. 

Not Israel, but this is the international section,
I guess, so as good a place as any to see what
Canada thinks of us.
credit: Patrick Corrigan, Toronto Star

By the middle of April, Israel was in great shape and ready to declare victory over COVID-19. But guess what happened? That's right, the country reopened too soon, and cases are soaring again, well over the peak that Israel experienced before mid-April. What's causing that? Well, there are the usual suspects: bars, clubs, gyms, restaurants. BUT ALSO, it turns out that in June, almost half (47 percent) of new cases came from schools. Listen, on May 17, when schools reopened, there were 10 (not a typo) cases for the whole country. 10. Health officials advised against reopening schools, but the government did it anyway, and by June 3, there were 244 positive cases among students and school staff. As of mid-July, 2,026 students, teachers, and staff had contracted COVID-19, and 28,147 were in quarantine due to possible contagion. Also by mid-July, 393 schools have had to close back down.

And Israel was in good shape to start. We're so not anywhere near good shape. Even here, in a relatively decent state, we're back up to 700+ new cases a day. I'm so worried for this whole country right now.

Nationwide cases: 3,559,899. Deaths: 138,185.