I Hope They Don’t Kill Any of Those Kids.

I saw a sweet photo of the first day of school in one of our diocesan parishes this week.

The kids were sitting, every other desk, wearing their masks, all neat and pretty in their uniforms while the parish priest stood talking to them in his mask. The comments under this photo were full of thumbs up and heart emojis and the verbiage was a chorus of awwwws.

My first thought when I looked at this photo was “I hope you guys don’t kill any of those kids.”

I don’t have any big illusions as to why Catholic schools are opening all over the country in the face of a pandemic. It’s the tuition money and the economic realities of keeping the schools closed for a few more months that’s driving this decision.

That is a hard boogie. I have no doubt about that. I’ve heard people excuse opening the schools with what amounts to sloganeering. “Kids have got to learn,” they say. Well, yes. But they don’t have to learn this afternoon. It won’t cripple their education to wait a couple of months. It certainly won’t cripple it to distance learn for a while.

The bottom line here is that the first requirement for kids to learn is that they have to be alive.

Most kids are resilient enough and lucky enough to skate through this virus. But some of them are not, and we can’t pinpoint which is which. We know that certain pre-existing health problems make it more likely that if you get this virus, you will die. But a lot of people who don’t fit inside those parameters end up desperately ill or dead from the virus, anyway.

All we have to predict who will die and who will be symptom free are indicators and probabilities. That’s the way life and death always work in the real world.

Here’s an example.

We now know that cancer cells pop up in everyone’s body. Just about everyone gets cancer.

But the vast majority of people who get cancer never know they had it. Their body knocks it out at that first cancer cell.

But if you’re one of the ones who hits the unlucky jackpot, cancer can still give you a really bad ride. It can make you horribly ill, and it can kill you. Cancer is not benign because most people never know they had it.

Once again, we have indicators and probabilities, but we can’t predict which cancer column you will fall into. So we tell everybody not to smoke, even though there are those like my mother who smoke for over 70 years and never have a problem.

That’s the way it is with any disease, including COVID-19. The fact that the guy down the street had it and never knew it doesn’t protect you at all. It could kill you. Or it could make you sicker than you’ve ever been in your life. It leaves some people with what are probably permanent heart and lung damage. It’s unpredictable.

All we know for sure are the numbers. The numbers say that many of the people who are surviving do so after horrific illness. Despite massive medical intervention, literally hundreds of thousands of people have died from it in a few months. It’s unpredictable, but it’s a killer.

The Catholic schools should not be open right now because the numbers say that, as a direct result of the school reopening, some of the kids in those schools will become horribly ill, and some few of them will die. The numbers say that some of the family members of these kids will also become horribly ill and some of them will die. All because the schools are open.