Just a point to add to Robert’s post below: Once teachers are vaccinated, there is no good reason to keep a school closed. Right now, at least 28 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have made some or all teachers eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine. Kentucky is on pace to finish administering the first dose to all teachers this week.
There might still be a need for teachers or other adults in the school to wear masks for a while, because among those vaccinated, “the risk of transmissibility is greatly diminished, but not eliminated.”
Claims that returning to the classroom amounts to a death sentence for teachers are anti-science scaremongering. Teachers are being asked to step into a classroom, masked, to teach to students, masked, three to six feet away, to avoid a virus they have a roughly 99 percent survival rate for, with few or no recorded cases of student-to-teacher transmission. It’s not giving CPR to Ebola patients.