At least 30 teachers have died of COVID in NYC alone. That seems significant for a viral outbreak that is nowhere near containment or exhaustion, and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually.
But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismissive of the risk or forced to take risk to feed themselves. I think the real change will have to be less preciousness/protectiveness of the value of human life, sadly.
> and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually.
I'm not proposing schools open in an NYC/Houston/Miami type situation. But in lower infection area (e.g. the Bay Area), where about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly, you are not "almost certainly" going to get the virus.
Obviously, school opening should be gated by community transfer level. California seems to be using a 2 week target of < 100 confirmed per 100k people (with low test positivity), which seems reasonable to me.
> (e.g. the Bay Area), about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly
I don't know if your 0.1% number is accurate, but let's assume that it is. If somehow cases remain completely level for the rest of the school year (which is far from a given, but for the sake of argument ...) over the course of 40 weeks, a randomly-chosen person has roughly a 40 * 0.1% = 4% chance of getting infected. But that is a randomly-chosen person, whereas it's not hard to imagine that a teacher exposed for hours daily to multiple young kids who aren't good at keeping their germs to themselves is (ballpark) maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person [1]. So then we arrive at an estimate of perhaps 24% odds of a teacher getting infected during the 2020-2021 school year using my assumptions (which you are free to disagree with).
Is 24% "almost certain"? No, but by highlighting the tiny 0.1% number, I think you are potentially seriously misrepresenting the true risk to an individual teacher. Hopefully, all of the measures that school districts might put into place will make my 6x-elevated risk estimate incorrect, but it's really hard to know. It's also possible that kids just don't transmit the virus very often. There's some evidence that that's the case, but I don't think we have really solid data on the question.
> maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person
That is almost certainly not the case. California has had 350 daycare staff get covid infections out of 100k+ workers. That's actually about a third the rate on average.
Again, kids are less likely than average to have covid. Infectious kids may be less likely to transmit. This is different from flu where kids are large carriers. There are few documented cases of young kids (under 10) spreading to other kids or to teachers.
Or there is the other option that we as a country acknowledge that being compassionate and finding solutions to feed these people is an all around better way to take care of our citizens.
Why is the solution: Generate corporate profits or die. Or expose yourself to needless risk or die? Seems...sociopathic?
But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismissive of the risk or forced to take risk to feed themselves. I think the real change will have to be less preciousness/protectiveness of the value of human life, sadly.