Editorial
Let it be the schools
The Marathon County Health Department COVID-19 dashboard on Tuesday tells us that the pandemic is back and, in all likelihood, with a vengeance.
Over summer, we liberated ourselves from Purell and masks, hand washing and keeping a six foot distance from others. Now, the future looks perilous. The health department reports 1,001 active cases with the roster growing by between 75 and 100 cases each day. The county hospitalizes 25 people a week with COVID-19 and, sadly, some of these people don’t make it. The county lost six people to the coronavirus in September.
With mounting cases, COVID-19 politics heat up, especially at local schools. Local school boards will now debate a return to mandatory masks, quarantining, virtual education and social distancing of students in class. District administrators and principals want to control the virus in their schools. Parents, of course, push back. They want their old lives back. They want normalcy for their children.
On Monday, the Marathon Board of Education ran this gauntlet and, with public input, forged a compromise that, for the time being, people seem willing to live with. Board members opened the door to mandatory masks, while, at the same time, they agreed not to quarantine students lacking COVID-19 symptoms who have had close contacts with others who have tested positive. Instead, the district will hire people to test and monitor these close contact students for signs of illness. The approach will be costly, requiring the district to hire two or more staff people, but it will avoid sending healthy students home where virtual education is, at best, hit and miss. On Monday, Marathon Public Schools reported 124 quarantined students and staff.
The Marathon school board and public found consensus on COVID-19 protocols, but disagreement over some underlying issues still remain. A chief divide is over the question of how much responsibility does any public school have not just for the health of its students, but to the community at large.
Some parents at the Marathon meeting argued that students don’t die from COVID-19 and thus should not be quarantined unless they show symptoms. The students’ education is a first priority, they said. In this viewpoint, COVID-19 is just another virus borne disease, like the flu. Common sense, these people say, dictates you keep healthy children in school. You send sick children home until they are better. This view is fatalistic about what should be done to protect the vulnerable, including seniors, from COVID-19. In this perspective, old people die. That’s just how it is.
Here, we take a different view. We reject school COVID-19 protocols that only care about students and learning. True, student education is important, but so is protecting the most vulnerable, including the aged and infirm. Young life is vital and important, but so is old life. Schools are a disease vector. Schools have to take measures to halt community spread.
Further, COVID-19 is not like the flu. The flu is mostly spread by people who have symptoms, including coughing and sneezing. That’s not COVID-19 at all. The University of Chicago in May reported that only one-fifth of people with COVID-19 show symptoms and half of all cases of COVID-19 are spread by people who look perfectly healthy. If this research is valid, it means that fighting COVID-19 successfully will never make common sense. You will always have to isolate people who appear healthy and strong.
Finally, we dispute the suggestion that young people, including school age children, are somehow immune from COVID-19. Not true at all. The health department reports that six percent of all COVID cases in Marathon County occur in young children 0-9 years old and 11 percent in older youth ages 10-19.
Over the summer, our area schools adopted a common COVID-19 protocol authored by CESA 9 to present a united front against what people thought would be a withering disease. Those plans have now folded and, one by one, schools have to figure out their own protocols based on local case numbers.
Our advice is that local school boards would do better not just to manage the disease in complicated, dreadful protocols but to fight COVID-19 by getting students and their parents vaccinated. A thousand painful school meetings on quarantines won’t do as much good as a single vaccination clinic. Somebody needs to be a vaccination booster in our communities. Let it be the schools.
