Returning to school has been a very controversial topic for students and staff ever since the Coronavirus cases spiked, and now they have started allowing kids back at school. It’s just not very safe to go back to school during a huge pandemic.

The Coronavirus has hit many countries, especially America, very hard. In Texas there are around 6,000 new COVID-19 cases every day, with Travis County making up about 150 of them (as of late October when this piece was written).

To make this situation much worse, the flu season is coming up from December to February, in the middle of a pandemic. Not only will we have to watch out for the flu, which can have many different levels of severity, but we will also still have to be on the lookout for COVID-19.

With Covid cases making a steady increase in Austin, going back would be unwise. While staying six feet apart can help to protect you, Covid can live in the air for up to three hours and travel as far as 26 feet with or without a mask.

Since most classes take place in the school building, the air can’t ventilate as well as the outdoors, making it even more dangerous. With Bowie’s well-known ventilation problems, that will create even less room for the air to move around in.

As well as the ventilation problems, allowing students to eat lunch on campus is a terrible idea because it requires taking off the mask that is protecting everyone. Unless all students are eating outside and at least six feet apart, the virus can easily spread among the student and teachers.

Also, in a school that contains hundreds of students, if just one person were to come to school with Covid, they could spread it around the entire school population. This could happen in less than one week.

Then again, there’s the AISD Covid scanner that is meant to test you for Covid with a few simple questions. This can not really determine whether you have the virus or not because many people don’t even show symptoms at all. Another reason this scanner doesn’t work is because the scanner can’t tell whether you lie or not, meaning that you could know you have symptoms and still go to school.

While many people think that Covid can’t affect them, they are very mistaken. If someone were to contract Covid, they could spread it to friends, family, and others they are around. Although the death rate may be low in adolescents, there is still a chance of fatality. There is also a chance that you could still pass the virus onto people of an older age who aren’t healthy enough to push through the virus.

Of course, sometime in the future, it will be safe to go back to school and return to our normal lives. As that may be true, now is not the time, and we must do our best to keep Covid from spreading any further so that we can all be done with this awful pandemic.