Since Monday, 8 a.m., it has been the case again: wear a mask in class. While adults are exempted from doing this in the home office as well as in the office with sufficient distance, children and adolescents have to sit for hours in cold classrooms with double hoods: with mouth and nose protection and anorak, because soon two years after the outbreak of the pandemic Politics can’t think of anything else to protect the youngest. In contrast to the previous school year, when alternating lessons were initially ordered from an incidence of 100 and distance lessons from 200, the principle of hope now also applies to values of 250, 500 and 700: it will be fine – with a mask, ventilation and lollipop tests.
But it’s just not going well. Up to and including Monday, the virus had already caught 2,210 children between the ages of five and 14 in the district, a further 1,417 in the age group 15 to 19 – a total of 3,627. For comparison: 2,255 people were counted among those over 70 years old. Of course, the numbers are not comparable, because older people get sick more seriously. But it is just as correct: Measured by their proportion of the rural population, adolescents are more likely to be infected than retirees. Which is no surprise: Young people are vaccinated less often because they have only been immunized since the summer and only from the age of twelve.
Therefore, masks, ventilation and testing are not enough to protect students. There is only real protection if everyone who can be vaccinated can also be vaccinated. Children and young people more than deserve this act of solidarity; after all, they showed solidarity during the lockdown by foregoing schoolmates, friends and hobbies so that they would not infect the elderly when there was no vaccination for them. District Administrator Christoph Göbel rightly spoke out in favor of a general vaccination requirement last week. It is high time that other, more prominent politicians followed him and finally introduced them.