Following winter break and panic over Omicron, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted to go on strike, refusing to teach in person classes. The next week saw a series of negotiations between a mayor desperate to ensure 330,000 Chicago Public School (CPS) students did not go without education for an extended time, and (CTU) leaders who felt the risk of Omicron’s spread in schools was worth sacrificing the education of hundreds of thousands of students.

The CTU demanded schools switch to remote, and a long list of additional anti-COVID measures be put in place, including more KN95 masks, opt-out saliva testing as opposed to opt-in, and metrics for when schools should switch to remote.

Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, was understandably upset with the CTU’s strike but didn’t do much to alleviate the situation other than hold press conferences and exchange playground insults. Chicago parents were sent into a frenzy to coordinate child care because despite an almost $10 billion budget, CPS had failed in their most basic responsibility, keeping schools open.

Lightfoot did the right thing by pushing for school reopening, but her past fear mongering stoked the CTU’s fears. Last school year, despite the Center for Disease Control finding “no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates,” she insisted the threat of COVID spread in schools was worth sacrificing the education of a third of a million students. She declared education to be a non-essential activity, and the CTU got the message.

Unfortunately, teachers unions were not the only ones who got the message. Students from 20 CPS schools, seeing the example being set forth by their teachers, decided to walk out of school Jan. 14 to protest their return to in-person learning. The students, chanting about the dangers of in-person school, packed shoulder to shoulder outside of CPS headquarters and held signs with slogans like “Until cases decline, class is online.”

Omicron cases will decline, but not because 10-year-olds aren’t in schools. “Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Omicron is inevitable and will continue to infect large swathes of the country for some time.

Millions of people have sacrificed two years of their normal lives in the hopes of not contracting a highly infectious virus, which the World Health Organization found to have a 99.9% survival rate.

However, so many people who “did everything right” – double masking, keeping kids out of school, avoiding gatherings – still became infected with COVID. Despite upending their entire lives to avoid the virus, they only delayed the infection, if anything.

The habitual shutting down of education whenever headlines spell doom will continue to harm students for no good reason. COVID is never going away. No matter what measures taken to stop the spread, COVID will continue to make its way back into communities as it has over the past two years despite all of our mitigation efforts.

Luckily, OPRF was not a victim to the same fate as Chicago, but the instinct to hit the glowing red “SHUTDOWN” button remained. A series of statements sent by the school addressed a number of community members who thought a rise in COVID cases would cause OPRF to switch to remote or who believed that it should.

While the Omicron wave is starting to subside, new peaks and COVID seasons will continue throughout our lifetime. We need to stop pretending it is March of 2020. An effective vaccine is widely available, Omicron causes less severe illness, and medical knowledge on COVID has progressed in leaps and bounds. It’s long past time to live our lives, and ignore the glowing red button.