There’s a “rest of the fucking owl” feeling throughout this whole article. The statistics are straightforward, but all of the reasons proposed by the writer are anecdotal.
Absence rates can rise for any number of reasons, but the one giant glaring one that is not given consideration is that covid still exists. The pandemic is not “over”, the world is just beyond caring.
Just think for a moment about what happens when you get a notification that your child’s classroom has active spread of covid. How seriously does your kids school take covid? How effective is the current vaccine with the current variant that is prevalent in your area? Would you send your kid to school knowing they would get sick? Would you want your kid to get sick and infect the rest of your family? How many sick days do you have left for the year? Can you afford to be sick? Is them missing school for a few days worth the risk of losing your job? Will repeated covid infection affect you, your kids, or the rest of your family in the future to a greater detriment than missing a few more days of school? Do you have immune compromised family that you also have to take care of? Did you already lose part of your family from covid? How close are you to adequate health facilities that could take care of you and your family if you are sick? Do you have anybody that’s willing to take care of your family knowing you are sick? Can you afford it?
Have you noticed that many of the states that have a far higher rate increase of absenteeism are also those that have either very large or very small classroom sizes? Have you noticed that they also seem to correlate with poverty rates? Have you noticed that covid rates are not tracked at all anymore in many states?
All of what I just said is hypothetical, just like the article, but those are all very real thoughts for many Americans. I have kids and if I found that covid was actively spreading through the classroom or school, I would much rather keep them home. If they get sick, we will most likely all get sick. If we all get sick we set in motion cycle of viruses that sets us back months, and possibly hurts our community. We risk our health, careers, and livelihood for a couple days at school. We weigh the risks as we see fit.
We can’t keep pretending that covid isn’t still an issue. We can’t act like it only existed for those 2 years. We definitely can’t be ignorantly watering down issues by attributing their cause to targeted talking ponts.