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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

What were they supposed to do? They had about two weeks to go from fully in-classroom to fully-remote with no warning, in the middle of the school year. I don't care what kind of technology you have, that is going to be a clusterfuck.

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The problem was this clusterfuck lasted for far too long and public guidance was and still is a complete mess.

We panicked everyone instead of having a level-headed policy where we stratified risk by age and health condition.

Should we also stratify by Relation to risk, and how do we enforce this ? Also how would policies stratified by age/health work? Only unhealthy or old people need to mask when they go to the store filled with unmasked, Covid-spreading young people?

That would be fantastic. I'm triple vaxxed and have had covid twice. I frankly don't care anymore.

Masking is fine! Prolonged shutdowns aren't. Anyone who wants to go to work should have been allowed to, others are welcome to isolate.

Special times could have been reserved to allow the elderly/unhealthy/fearful to go shop and take care of themselves. (Costco senior hours?) There are a lot of options.

When has there been a prolonged shutdown? I am in one of the heights of the Covid epidemic and we only shut down once in early 2020. Schools are still in person now at the height of omicron. What’re you talking about?

Quebec, Ontario, Australia, France, Italy, Ireland, South Africa...

Australia wasn’t under a prolonged shutdown. They were fully unmasked and having parties over the summer. Movie companies were filming there specifically because of how Covid-free they were. Again, what are you talking about?

Los Angeles, one of the largest school districts in the USA, where there was no in-person school for over a year.

A whole year? Did one of the parent had to become stay at home parent or how can it even work for working class?

How does remote school == prolonged shut down? Los Angeles was having outdoor dining and stuff during that time. It’s clear that schools simply were t prioritized at that time, not that the city as a whole was on lockdown.

> no warning

We're in the third year of a global pandemic and nothing that is happening now is something that wasn't predicted as a serious possibility.

Pretending everything is fine doesn't make it fine. Acknowledging the situation we're in, and having plan for "rapidly spreading variant that starts impacting kids more" is something that would be an obvious thing for schools to do.

We concretely knew in November this was coming. Again, many people tried to pretend this wasn't happening and brush it off, but there was plenty of time to foresee this situation and plan for it.

The vast majority of people, on all sides of the political spectrum, have aggressively been trying not to see what is happening in front of their eyes. To try to force things to be "normal". If we accepted that we're in a pandemic, and that sometimes we'll have to change our life a bit, we could have easily prepared for this case.

>They had about two weeks to go from fully in-classroom to fully-remote

Yeah, and then they had 2 years to rethink it

This is exactly my point.

But it is now two years in. I wouldn't have expected something in 2 weeks, but in 2 months? Thought that something would have been built.

Yeah maybe by fall 2020 you could have expected better preparation. On the other hand, I think people kept thinking it would go away over the summer, or we'd just reach herd immunity. I think very few people in summer 2020 thought we'd still be mired in this in 2022 with no end in sight. None of the previous virus scares, SARS, flus, Ebola, Zika, came anywhere close to lasting that long.

What were they suppposed to do? Of course they had to limp along for a bit, but it's been almost two years now and as far as I've heard (I don't have children), it's status quo where they aren't trying to force kids back into the classroom. Try to remember the first time you heard the term "distance learning." I think it's been at least 10 years for me.

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