If a child or a teacher at a school caught covid, the entire class was fully quarantined for a minimum of 14 days and two negative covid tests were necessary for anyone in that class to return. Classes were kept fully isolated from one another, and children had to wear masks in class for a significant part of the year.
No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.
What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.
My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave.
Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the extent possible. As a result, schools were able to stay open.
We've decided to solve that problem by consuming very nearly the entire residential power consumption of Canada, a country of 38 million people.
We've done this with a network that can process 400k transactions per day (at $20/transaction in fees), as compared to visa, which does 150 million per day.
No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.
What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.