This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated December 23, 2021
We all want to be done with COVID, but we are not quite there yet. Omicron is here and it is spreading like a wildfire. As a percentage of all U.S. COVID cases, as of December 4, Omicron accounted for 0.4 percent of new cases. A week later, it had risen over seven times to 2.9 percent. Seven days later, it accounted for 73 percent, an increase of over 2400 times, compared to the week prior.
Anecdotally, I have heard of nearly two dozen people I know who have tested positive or suspect they may be positive during the second half of December. It seems all but assured that everybody is going to hear about many people they know testing positive over the next few weeks if they, themselves, do not have their own brush with COVID.
Granted, we cannot institute complete lockdowns as we did in the early months of the pandemic in 2020, but we need to take steps to address this surge and mitigate how steep the curve will be. Otherwise, overcrowded hospitals will overwhelm health care workers and make it hard for people, including those with non-COVID health issues, to get treatment. Schools will have great difficulty staffing their buildings and classrooms, due to excessive numbers of DOE employees either positive with COVID or in quarantine due to being exposed. And businesses will encounter the same issue with their workers, as well as face the reality that a large percentage of their customers will restrict their public interactions and postpone patronizing their establishments.
In his final days in office, Mayor de Blasio is again being obstinate in the face of stark pandemic statistics and is fully committed to not enacting any mitigation efforts to get a handle on this surge. He is adamant that city workers must all continue to report in-person to their workplaces and school buildings remain fully open with the inadequate testing he instituted earlier this school year.
“…the outgoing mayor insisted things would remain as is. Incoming-Mayor Adams needs to take immediate action.”
Throughout the month of December, weekly lab reported positive cases for New York City school-aged children have increased five-fold. Cases in schools are increasing exponentially. The Situation Room, which investigates and takes action when school-related cases are confirmed, is overwhelmed. These dedicated professionals had been working long hours before the omicron surge, but with their office being flooded with new cases the past few weeks, they just cannot keep up.
As of Monday, official DOE public data showed that I.S. 228 – Boody Junior High School in Gravesend had 11 partial classroom quarantines and 2 non-classroom quarantines. However, reports from school leaders indicated that there were dozens of positive cases and somewhere in the range of 900 students, which is about 60 percent of the student population, in quarantine due to having close contact with someone who had tested positive. The building had clearly become an unsafe environment for anyone inside it and it no longer made any sense to keep it open when most children had been shifted to learning from home, yet the decision from above was to deny requests that the building be closed.
On December 20, the principal of I.S. 201 Junior High School in Dyker Heights sent a letter to their school community advising that their building would be closed the following day due to the high number of staff forced into quarantine after being determined to have had close contact with someone who tested positive. Parents said that the day before the closure, most students spent the majority of the day in the auditorium watching a movie, due to staffing issues.
It no longer made sense to patch things together like this and have so many schools scrambling to operate in-person learning, especially with the current surge about to get worse with many people about to gather for the holidays, yet the outgoing mayor insisted things would remain as is. Incoming-Mayor Adams needs to take immediate action.
A delay to the return of in-person school on January 3 must be considered. A negative test requirement before returning to school buildings next month must be instituted. A remote option needs to be brought back for families. Our elected officials must be vocal in calling for these new mitigation methods.
