Ready for your school to close?

itting down to our parent-teacher conference in early March, I explained to my son’s second-grade teacher why he wouldn’t be returning to class the following week. We couldn’t risk passing the novel coronavirus to his grandparents, and we couldn’t imagine cutting off contact with them.

“He won’t end up missing much class compared to everyone else,” I assured the teacher. “Everything is going to shut down within a couple of weeks.”

The teacher was floored. Nobody had told her to expect school to close. I pointed out New York City’s busy airports, dense crowds, and lack of testing at the time. I talked about exponential growth and how rapidly the virus was known to spread. A disease modeler by profession, I agreed with experts around the world that it was only a matter of time until infections surged. School would have to close, even if it wasn’t clear exactly when. Nobody in an official capacity had warned our school.

We’re now on the other side of the spring pandemic wave. Testing is free and unrestricted. We have a good sense of infection rates in the city. We know how the virus spreads and how to reduce transmission. Families can choose between a hybrid of in-person and online learning, or else all-online learning: the only option available in most other major U.S. cities. In-person learning has been delayed twice and many are frustrated by the delays, but I’m also glad in-person learning will become available and that schools are heightening precautions.

What hasn’t changed since spring is that some school closures remain inevitable. According to city Department of Education guidelines, a single case would shut down a classroom for at least 14 days. Two cases, unless linked by known contact, would shut down an entire school for that period. A neighborhood or the entire city’s school system would have to close if more than 3% of tests come back positive. Even if a school stays open, mild cold symptoms — which most people get multiple times a year — would be enough to keep individual students or teachers home waiting anxiously for test results.

These events are bound to happen. At current rates of cases across the city, two unlinked cases appearing in the same school will happen by chance somewhere in NYC every day, even if transmission isn’t happening within the school itself. It’s just math.

There’s a balance in deciding how many cases are enough to suspect a school outbreak. It depends on how many cases there are in the community — the fewer there are, the lower the chance of cases appearing in a school — but it also depends on how readily the virus spreads in our schools, if at all. The rate of school spread has been so variable around the world that there’s no way to know what will happen in NYC until the school year is underway.

If the number of infections grows in the city, schools would face a dual problem: Not only would school shutdowns become more common, but it would become harder to know whether or not there really was an outbreak at a closed school. Conversely, if NYC manages to bring the virus to near-extinction, not only would schools be safer, but when cases are detected in schools, there’d be more confidence that a real outbreak is happening. It would be easier to learn what circumstances lead to transmission and how to prevent it. If the city succeeds, the schools succeed.

My own family, like nearly half of public school families in NYC, opted for all-virtual instruction. We didn’t want to cut off close contact with grandparents whom our kids adore and who are helping with childcare. With choices like this, there is no one-size-fits-all. Like everyone else, we’re watching closely and taking it a day at a time.

We must go into the pandemic school year expecting uncertainty and disruptions. There will be scary moments. There will be false alarms. And there might be real outbreaks. Time will tell. Multiple times a year, students will miss school over what turns out to be a harmless cough or runny nose. On a daily basis, a school in NYC will close. We can’t help but worry when this happens, but we don’t need to panic. Because this time, from the outset, we can set expectations. Unlike the disaster of the spring, this time, we don’t need to be caught off guard.