Life’s new lesson: living with a virus

Despite the misgivings of some parents and teachers, the reopening of schools is a sign that we are going to have to get used to a new, more careful way of life, dominated by the coronavirus. As is becoming clear now, while our infections and death rates spiral, the severe lockdowns South Africa has been subjected has not – as perhaps some people wished it might – helped us avoid the Covid-19 scourge. It may have delayed it by a few weeks, but the lockdown doesn’t seem to have done much to reduce its severity.

Many have forgotten that, right at the beginning of the lockdown restrictions, the government’s top scientific advisor, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, said on multiple occasions that the coronavirus was going to be with us for a long time and that we were going to have to learn to live with it.

Sending our children back to the classroom is one of the things we are going to have to do to adapt our lives to the pandemic threat.

Though children are less susceptible to contracting the virus in the first place and they appear to be hit less hard by it (with hardly any deaths in the young age groups), they nevertheless need to be educated about their potential to be carriers… and the possibility they might transmit the virus to their teachers and to vulnerable people back at home.

That is going to be the single most important piece of education they are going to get this entire year.

However, we cannot further delay teaching them, because every interruption and postponement has a cascading effect right throughout the educational system, which has already been damaged by the loss of teaching time.

Now is the time to start getting into those habits which will keep us, and our children, safer in the future.