Keeping Kids In School

Can kids do in person school this year? It seems doomed to failure, especially in places where there is no mask mandate and people are doing pretty much whatever they want. In my university town the college students are back and a quick jog across the library revealed that about 2/3 of students were not wearing masks. Vaccinated or not, they can spread COVID, and last year that was the beginning of the rising death toll. Never a recipe for success when it comes to public health matters. This year our governor is forbidding people from mask mandates, so it is unlikely to go well. The truth is this is exactly what happened in the Spanish flu pandemic. It became clear that wearing masks and keeping apart really slowed the spread of influenza, but after a while, people ignored that, and the second year of the pandemic was far deadlier than the first had been. It was partly because the flu itself got deadlier. Will that happen this time? The current variation is definitely more successful at spreading and there are definitely more children hosptialized, some because they are unvaccinted and some because they can't be vaccinated. None of this troublesome news seems to motivate people to do better, at least at this moment, and soon we will all be heading back indoors.