Covid Take The Wheel

 Looking at these charts, it's fair to say that Omicran seems to be moving the virus in the direction of endemicity. That is to say that we are moving towards the "it's just the flu" stage of the virus, as it becomes less lethal both because of evolution of the virus and our better ability to fight it with vaccines, acquired immunity and therapeutics.

Our school has decided we are already in the endemic stage of the disease. We are not going to test the entire student body and faculty and staff anymore. We are "acknowledging the reality that omicron is here" and abandoning any efforts to do anything except isolate and treat the sick. During exam week in December, we sent home dozens of students with the flu. It was incredibly disruptive, we wound up not counting student exams if they "hurt" a student's GPA, regardless of whether they were sick. That seems to be our new "strategy" for dealing with Covid. 

High school students are not - as you might imagine - great about mask wearing. My team will be competing with other schools without masks, because you can't really wrestle with a mask anyway. Omicron is definitely on our campus, as we sent home roughly 30 students after our first round of testing. Since we testing is so overwhelmed, we can't get timely results, so we have decided that we are better off not knowing how many asymptomatic cases we have on campus. We aren't even going to update our testing dashboard.

At some point, we were going to have to get to this point. But the decision to simply not know how many of our students and faculty have the virus seems to be placing the desire to be "in session" over student and faculty health. Our priority is keeping the school "in person." If that creates super-spreader events, well, we're all vaccinated, so people are unlikely to get very sick.

The problem, I would think, is two fold. First is the current state of Covid in Connecticut. Hospitalizations of people with Covid (as distinct, it seems from people who are hospitalized because of Covid) are higher now than they have ever been. This does include ICU beds being as full of Covid patients as they were during last January's surge. If you remember "flattening the curve" we have abandoned that as a guiding principle. Fuck health care workers and strains on the system. For our purposes, I certainly hope no one gets really sick with Covid, not only because it sucks, but because they will not be able to get the same attention as they could have a month ago or a month from now.

Second is simply that while Omicron seems mild, that doesn't mean that Delta isn't still circulating or that the virus won't mutate again into something more deadly. By abandoning Covid mitigation efforts we - and frankly almost all of America - are inviting another mutation, at which point it will be really hard to re-introduce measures that work.

Rumor has it our Head of School was told by the school doctor that we should wait a few weeks to re-open. Other schools in our situation have done this. He apparently replied we would delay reopening "over my dead body."

I hope that remains a metaphor.