February 2 has come and gone, no one cared even a tiny bit about Groundhog Day. This has to be because we’ve been living in the endless loop of Groundhog Day for almost a year.
This pandemic is the closest thing to the Groundhog Day movie that I can imagine. The only thing it compares to, in my experience, is the endless loop of parenting young children. Or maybe it compares to the endless loop of being the mother of teenagers. The struggles of families in this pandemic time are real. So much of the burden is being borne at home. Parenting littles or teens or young adults is exponentially harder in a pandemic. We’ve all had to make sacrifices this year that no one could have predicted last Groundhog Day.
And we are all tired. We are mad. We are frustrated, and when plans change, it makes everything worse. We are worried about mental health, and feel powerless to fix things. We survived 2020! Now it’s 2021 and we want normal!
Normal may look different for each of us, but we can all agree that normal means our public schools are open. However, if we collectively agree that normal means that schools are open, then we need to be collectively willing to sacrifice other pieces of normal, to focus on this singular goal. But that’s hard - and that collective spirit takes work.
In the past, the choices made in our private lives were our own, not really anyone else’s business. In a pandemic, the choices made in our private lives have serious consequences for everyone else. We need to embrace that reality and make choices with the public good in mind, even when that is hard.
Over the years we’ve all developed different tolerances for things like loud music, spicy food, parenting styles, and cold weather. That usually works. But in 2021 we need to agree that we, as a community, have no tolerance for behavior that could distract from the shared goal of opening schools.
When you are watching the Super Bowl this weekend, listen for chatter about a “Chunk Play” - a high-impact play that eats up a whole bunch of yards to get the offense closer to the goal line. Chunk Plays are exciting, but they can’t stand alone. To win, teams have to rely on the little runs, short passes - a collection of small plays to actually lead to a touchdown. Those small, consistent plays win games.
Falls Church is benefitting from a Chunk Play. On February 15 most FCCPS employees will get their second vaccine dose. But we need all the accompanying small plays to take this down the field to score a huge community win.
Because of the vaccine, FCCPS is in a better position to reopen than any other school division in the area. How did that happen? Dr. Noonan advocated for and received vaccinations for all staff through the Fairfax County Health Department.. He has not let up one day during this pandemic in advocating for this community - whether that means better funding, access to PPE, more testing sites, or providing vaccines. Chunk Plays don’t happen by accident, they take lots of behind-the-scenes work.
Thanks to the vaccine availability, school reopening is in our sights. But we need supporting, consistent small actions from each one of us to turn it into a touchdown and a long-term victory!
The recent Covid-19 case numbers for Falls Church, are alarming. We did well at keeping the virus at bay in the City for most of the year, but the past two months are a different story.
It took Falls Church more than 8 months (March - November) to get to 100 cases. We were at the bottom of every chart and graph in the state, even as we hunkered down. Did we get lucky or did it work? We’ll never know, but the case numbers stayed low.
Covid-19 showed up in late November and is travelling quickly from person to person. We added 75 cases in December, and by February 1 the official number was 290, which means we had 160 cases in January. At this rate, we are doubling cases each month. That has to end, and it is going to take each one of us to put a stop to it.
Those numbers increased because of us - because of small interactions, where people let their guard down. It could have happened at any time during this pandemic, (because, let’s face it, we all broke the rules a little bit). It is being passed, right now, from person to person in places where we are letting our guard - and our masks - down. Did we all get too comfortable breaking the rules a little bit?
Stop being comfortable! We are in a pandemic. To get schools to open, to get back to normal, we need to be singularly focused and more vigilant, not more comfortable.
Guess what? Teenagers hanging out with their friends can get and share Covid. When the schools do open, if there are as many cases among students in March as there were during the January surge, there will be plenty of days when school has to close because of quarantining and contact tracing. That’s the hard reality. This is why our collective commitment to opening school has to include behavior changes in every single person.
Schools can’t manage human behavior outside of school. The Superintendent and Principals can’t force anyone to be more careful in parks, restaurants, stores, or homes. That is up to each of us, working towards a common goal. There are robust plans for mitigation when school is in session. Mitigation is important in every setting, not just in places where there are rules and enforcers, like school. If we are not wearing masks correctly, staying 6 feet apart, and limiting gatherings, Covid-19 will keep exploding like it has for the past two months.
The Falls Church community has a serious peer-pressure responsibility here. We need to be vigilant in a way we have not been before. I know, it’s exhausting. We need to put our collective weight into making sure that every single one of us is following the mitigation guidelines every day. Every single one!
Put your mask on tightly. Wear two. Follow the rules. Stay home. Order take-out dinner and cocktails. It’s hard. Just do it, and we will be that much closer to getting back to normal.
This is the shared responsibility we all have for the public good that we all desire. Come on Falls Church, show us what you are made of! Let’s win this! Let’s get back to normal.