my wife is school teacher, when the pandemic hit and schools closed some of her kids were taken into CPS and some just flat out vanished. Elementary schools are basically social safety nets for some kids. I think that's why many governors were quick to re-open and very slow to close them down again.
to some degree a social safety net, but surely also a daycare in the most literal sense for a single parent who can't take their kid to work. Having school closed can be disastrous for people who are barely hanging on with joe jobs, fickle employers, and a rent to pay. Tough problem, because it shifts a lot of burden onto teachers to proxy as parents/wardens as well, which must undermine the mission of education.
> we realize that adults give COVID to kids but kids don't tend to give it to other kids or adults
This statement does not match available evidence. What can be accurately said is that children seldom have severe disease and often asymptomatic or have unremarkable symptoms, making the extent of Covid among children hard to measure (in general, asymptomatic people have their cases discovered and tracked at a dramatically lower rate than people with serious symptoms).
There has been overall very poor data gathering (testing, contact tracing, symptom tracking, ...) among children in most parts of the world, and in particular in the USA. All other age groups are tested and tracked at much higher frequency.
Due to the combination of this lack of solid research plus extreme political/social pressure, many people have argued (some based more or less on wishful thinking / confirmation bias, others disingenuously) that kids are not a spread risk and should therefore be allowed to mingle.
In many places where this has been tried, it was followed by notable outbreaks in schools (which then spread to the broader community), leading to schools shutting back down. In analyses of the effects of various public health interventions, school closures had one of the largest effects on the reproductive number of the epidemic.
My wife (teacher) got covid from small kids. Brought it home as a gift for the whole family.
School closed again after maybe 5-10% had already been diagnosed.
You can tell yourself whatever you want, but this kind of thinking has become pervasive throughout the culture as of late and it is a very concerning development. You cannot see a virus and you cannot prove one way or the other where you acquired the viral load necessary to come down with an infection.
