The surge in Covid hospitalizations this fall drove me to look at my local school district’s Covid policies. I read about their rules for Returning To School After COVID-19 Diagnosis, Exposure, or Illness here.
The site is actually well written and covers many different scenarios. It provides detailed, clear instructions.
But nobody is going to follow it.
It says students who have been exposed to someone with Covid, but who have no symptoms must self-quarantine for 7-14 days (contingent upon PCR test results, symptoms etc.).
I can’t imagine families will be keeping their kids locked up for weeks at a time every time they find out their kids has had a possible Covid exposure.
I can’t imagine doing this myself.
After all, I go to the pool. I go to the grocery store. I go to the vet. I get gas. I see people on the street when I am out walking.
Some of these people must have had Covid. Especially if they are asymptomatic. I suppose I might have even had asymptomatic Covid at some point in the past 18 months. I’ve had 2 PCR tests – one prior to outpatient surgery last year and a second one last fall when I felt ill for several days. Both were negative. I had an antigen test in 2020 that was also negative – although apparently the false positive and false negative percentages of this test make it essentially worthless.
If I quarantined for every possible exposure, I’d have life sentence of isolation. So would school kids.
This reminds me of when I worked in corporate America and the executive team would roll out some new dictate. They’d have the marketing and training teams craft long, detailed programs and rules. They’d do “town hall meetings” and require mandatory training and certification.
Everyone in sales would be go through the retraining process and get certified. Then we’d go back to our desks and get back to selling the way we had always done before.
An even better example is mandatory HR Compliance training for sexual harassment, EEOC, and the like. Here, everyone in the company would attend training and complete the certification process. Then they’d go back to work and operate exactly as they had done in the past. Trust me, there were (and are) plenty of blatant, and not so blatant, HR violations happening every single day.
It is all box checking.
I’m sure some of the people involved in the process honestly want to help make a difference and solve the problem of Covid.
But if you create complex rules that nobody will follow, then it is not solving the problem.
Like my other examples above, It is checking a box. You can say, “We created a program and rules…they simply didn’t follow them.
You know what I think about complex rules – Employee Rulebook.