Opinion by Louis Wertheimer, Year 11
The initial Omicron outbreak of December 2021 left many students and families wondering why schools were still open, with many parents believing that children’s potential to spread Covid posed a serious threat to public health. As the rumors of schools shutting down spread like wildfire on social media, the government quickly put an end to them by stating that school would only close as a last resort. Although the decision was criticized, I believe that it was the right one, as two years into a pandemic, with a widely available vaccine, it’s time to stop running away from the virus.
Science is the initial reason why we should start to return back to our “normal” lives, and completely forget about closing schools because of the virus. The vaccine has done wonders for the Swiss people, even as daily cases are 300% higher than last winter’s peak, hospitalizations and deaths are 50% lower. The numbers are promising, and with vaccines being widely available, there is no reason to start panicking again. There is no point in closing down schools just because a few people refuse to get vaccinated, and hence drive the numbers up when we have a solution to keep them down. Furthermore, at Ecolint, all Secondary School students must wear a mask, and with an increasing proportion of them wearing KN95s, the chance of transmission is greatly reduced. If science doesn’t convince you that closing schools is an irrational way of thinking, then maybe the possible effects on teens’ mental health will.
After the initial lockdown wave of 2020, half of all young men and women had mild to severe symptoms of depression. For teens, having schools closed initially felt like a vacation, but after two weeks of no human contact, loneliness begins to take a toll. Students could lose interest in learning and would stop attending classes. Even though their life seems to have come to a halt, the world keeps spinning, and at the end of the year, IB exams are still held. School closing in 2022 would lead to students falling behind in their studies and would result in a sad, unmotivated class of ‘22.
A final reason to not close schools is due to the fact that 60% of families have both parents who work. If the children are stuck at home all day, finding someone to take care of their children is a struggle, and as seen with the first wave of lockdowns, parents are forced to quit their jobs to liberate the time to take care of their children.
If we take a rational approach to the Covid problem, there is no reason to close schools, as the science of vaccines coupled with masks is doing a phenomenal job of keeping people safe and leading to a striving “new” world.
