Until recently, stop-gap measures taken in vital service sectors— schools, hospitals, etc.—around the COVID pandemic, tended to produce modest improvements, even if they didn’t solve the underlying problem. Now such measures are actually worsening the crisis, which indicates that a new phase of the breakdown crisis is underway in the United States.
Take the case of the Chicago Public School (CPS) system, the third-largest in the country with 330,000 students. In a desperate effort to open the schools to in-person learning, the CPS has insisted that the schools remain open up to the point that 40% of the staff is absent for two straight days. With Omicron transmission rates being what they are, the Chicago Teachers Union has rightly insisted that this will only lead to further contagion and rapidly escalating absences of both teachers and students. The union just voted 73% in favor of insisting that the schools only have virtual learning through Jan. 18, to try to get the contagion under control. The CTU has also called for a negative test result before returning to buildings and an expansion of the in-school weekly testing program that’s mandatory for unvaccinated staff members and voluntary for students.
