New York Bans Gatherings of 500 People Unless They Are Children Penned in Enclosed Spaces

New York’s private schools, including those run by the Catholic Archdiocese, are shutting down at a rapid clip, as are local universities.

So what is de Blasio’s justification not just for adopting a less aggressive social-distancing posture for public schools than the less-infected polities of Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, San Francisco, Bergen County, and the entire country of Estonia, but for attempting to keep these germ-swapping laboratories open “at all cost”?

Part of it is that New York schools provide social services, including to many poor kids. “We know that for many families, school is the only place to get meals for the day and that need continues even if a school closes,” an Education Department spokeswoman told PIX 11. “If a school is closed for 24 hours we’re prepared to serve grab-and-go breakfast and lunch for any student who wants it.”

De Blasio also warns, as he did this morning on WNYC, of a “huge domino effect”—not of kids infecting each other and then infecting their more vulnerable family members, but of working families working less. “Where do our children go?” the mayor asked at Thursday’s press conference. “And if our children have nowhere to go, then their parents can’t go to work, and that includes a lot of parents we depend on, first responders, health care professionals. It’s a very slippery slope.”

Most worryingly from my perspective as a local parent, de Blasio is suggesting that children’s comparative resilience to the virus is a factor in his thinking, when it’s their potential as transmitting agents that should be the focus.

“I worry that [coronavirus] is becoming sort of the cause for making a bunch of decisions that actually alter all the rest of our life, including in some very bad ways,” he said on The Daily Show this week. “Let me give you an example. Some people are saying, ‘Close our schools.’ Now, we have a lot of evidence that this disease, thank God, does not really have that much of an impact on healthy children. When you think about folks saying close everything…a lot of parents say to me, ‘Our kids need the schools not just for their education. It’s where they get their meals.'”

Italics again mine. The mayor this morning contradicted that logic on WNYC, disparaging what he called the “fallacy” that kids pulled from schools “would be in perfect isolation.” It seems odd to worry about people’s potential transmission effects only when they are no longer being corralled with hundreds of others in close quarters.

Faced with the very real domino effect of cascading positive tests, parents at my daughters’ two Brooklyn schools have been yanking their kids at a very noticeable rate the past two days. (This will be my 11-year-old’s last day.) It is possible that the combination of parent/teacher walkouts will spur a reluctant government into action; it is perhaps more probable that the sheer exponential velocity of spread will produce facts on the ground that will render Friday unrecognizable by Monday morning.

The question then will be: Did de Blasio’s paternalistic instinct to use government schools as social service providers paradoxically risk the lives of his constituents?

“Other cities that hesitated when action was needed are paying a heavy price,” warned the virologists’ letter. “We should not gamble with the lives of New Yorkers.”

Story cited here.