My position on school reopening

May 23, 2021 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
The Hon. Minister of Education has announced that all school grade levels will be back in arm’s length, physical face-to-face classroom settings in September. Though more than three months away, I think that decision is premature, at best; and could be a step in the wrong direction, at worst. It needlessly exposes our young.
I have said repeatedly that the PPP Government has done well with the vaccine distribution, through the timely, equity and consistency. For the most part, it has been a quality effort, and kudos is in order for Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, and his team of professionals. But I think that some of the related decisions and non-decisions conflict, and even undermine, the positives embedded in vaccination. I speak of the government’s stubborn maintenance of curfew hours and its refusal to close down bars and other places of social gathering.
For his part, the Hon. Vice President went public to offer this bit of wisdom: “there was no evidence that by saying shifting curfew hours that you are going to get less infections.” It is unclear where the VP got his evidentiary basis or confidence from, since there was no shifting of curfew hours and measuring the result. In other words, since it hasn’t been tried, we just don’t know. To take this a little further, my take on what the VP asserted is the equivalent of saying something like: there is no evidence that putting up speed bumps helps with lower accident rates. If we don’t implement it, we are either guessing our way, or hoping for the best. Similarly, if we do not prove adaptable with our handling of elusive crime control, then the results are the results, and that is the reality with which we must live. As both the Education Minister and the VP may know, the novel COVID-19 virus has manifested itself to be versatile and mutative. In essence, this has reduced health authorities to scrambling for solutions and reacting after the fact and more often than not blindly. We have to learn from this, and there are little incremental ways that we do so, like getting ahead of the virus (if that is possible) by taking preemptive action, of which curfewFrom adjustments were one. By now, however, I think that that preemptive space may have been squandered, through insistent inaction.
Of particular note and an alarming one, was the statement from the Education Minister that, when the decision to close schools was made, “at that point, we had no cure, we had no way of preventing spread” and “we have also moved past the stage where vaccines were not so easily accessible.” I will agree on the last two positions, viz. vaccines… easily accessible” today and “preventing spread.” But as the minister should know, we still have no cure; no ma’am.
It is why I say, it is better that mature discretion than false valour prevail, with school reopening and curfew strictures. It has not been so.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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