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In late March, New York’s public high schools reopened for in-person instruction. Elementary schools have been offering some in-person instruction since December, middle schools since February. The country’s largest school district has managed to provide more in-school hours than many other districts that might have seemed better equipped for the task. But, nearly three months after vaccines became available to teachers, fewer than half—around sixty-five thousand, out of approximately a hundred and forty-seven thousand Department of Education employees—have received at least a first shot of the vaccine.
For much of the past year, in-school transmission of the coronavirus has not been of particular concern to infectious-disease specialists. Data seemed to show that children become infected at a relatively low rate. That may be changing, however, with the advent of more infectious variants of the virus, as Peter Hotez, a pediatric microbiologist and vaccine specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine, told me. The B.1.1.7—or U.K.—variant, for example, appears to cause more severe illness in young people than the original version of the virus, and has an over-all higher risk of transmission. Not much age-based data exist on the more recent B.1.526 variant, which is now the single most widespread variant in New York. The positivity rate at schools stayed low through the fall, even as cases spiked citywide, and although it has been inching up it still remains below one per cent. (In mid-March, my nine-year-old son, my partner, and I all tested positive for the coronavirus, with my son the first to show symptoms.)