|The Moral Case for Reopening Schools Without Masks
If you re a public-minded student or teacher committed to reducing the death toll from Covid-19, what is the morally correct way to behave?
According to the epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, you should do just about the opposite of what s being preached by college presidents, teachers unions, political leaders, and the scientific and media establishment. Unless you re elderly or particularly vulnerable, you shouldn t be wearing a mask all day, or shaming others for going unmasked. You should be careful not to endanger the vulnerable, but otherwise you should be exposing yourself to the virus in order to promote herd immunity.
Gupta, 55, wants to teach her classes at Oxford in person, without a mask, and she is appalled at her colleagues reluctance to go back to the classroom.
It s such a disservice to this generation of students, she says. Teachers and students who are vulnerable should have the option to go online, but for the rest of us this virus is no bigger than other risks we take in daily life. It s not rational, and certainly not communitarian, to avoid being infected with a pathogen that carries such a low risk to you when there s a high benefit to the community by helping to create herd immunity.
So I’ll be zooming in my classes next semester. One class I have to because it is too large to do otherwise because of our logistics at the law school — it will probably have perhaps 90 students. The other class is a seminar. I could hold it in person, inside, but we would all have to wear masks. We don’t have an outdoor space to hold the class. Even if we did, I understand that state law or policy or ukase or something would require us to wear masks. But besides that, LWJ and WPT (that’s wonderful person Theresa, our house guest for the duration) have various co-morbidities that put them at higher risk for a nasty covid infection, I gather. LWJ is a retired physician with strong opinions about this sort of thing and she doesn’t buy this herd immunity stuff. My preference is to teach in person, outdoors and without masks. But that evidently is a no go. So there you have it.