NEW YORK LETTER
Suddenly, Wednesday evening, November 11 at 6:02 p.m., we received an email from the school. A third case of SARS-CoV-2 was detected in primary school. The building was going to be closed the next day. Not seven days, not fourteen days. but twenty-five days, until December 7th. A week after Thanksgiving festivities, time for everyone to take a mandatory Covid-19 test. In the meantime, kindergarten children are entitled to lessons on Zoom. In other words, no course.
In disaster, the parents try to supplement the school with their nannies. But, since it was a week of bad luck, the babysitter had a cold. Logically, she went to be tested: a quick test and… negative. But that’s not enough for the lab, which ordered a quarantine before having the results of a more reliable test.
Family life is hell
Since then, the ax has fallen for all New York schoolchildren. On Wednesday November 18, Democratic City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the closure of public schools for an unspecified duration, with the city’s positive test rate exceeding 3%. According to Wall Street Journal, since the start of the school year, there have been 1,790 cases of Covid-19 among Big Apple students and teachers.
Donald Trump’s United States has mismanaged the pandemic, and day to day, family life is hellish. American schools have closed, favoring distance education. New York was the only megalopolis to reopen at the start of the 2020 school year – Los Angeles and Chicago have chosen to keep their schools closed – but with extreme caution. The epidemic was accentuated this winter by the procrastination of the mayor, who did not want to close schools due in particular to the social devastation that the decision was going to cause to populations in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
And then came the so-called Kawasaki syndrome epidemic, which has affected 1,163 children and killed around 20 people across the country, according to US health authorities. The children were 98% infected with Covid-19, were on average 8 years old and were overwhelmingly African-American or Latino. Thus, it is the minimum risk-taking that is essential, with teachers very worried about health risks and parents who are hardly less so. By fall, only 280,000 out of 1.1 million New York students had received face-to-face lessons, typically three days a week.
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