According to an NYC DOE document entitled "Preparing for School Year 2020-2021: Instructions Principles & Programming Guidance," students will be eating lunch in their classrooms while instruction is taking place. I find a few particular problems with this:
Basically, it sounds like another risk to keep in mind.
- At the moment NYC is not allowing indoor dining to take place. One of the key factors of this is a lack of ventilation, which would allow the aerosols produced by individuals with COVID-19 to spread it. The WHO recently agreed with this somewhat after mounting pressure from outside physicians. So, in a classroom with poor ventilation (read: most classrooms in the DOE) how can we allow students to eat, necessitating masks come off?
- If instruction is taking place then students need to be talking. If that's happening while they are eating, I can't imagine there won't be spitting, something that would seem to spread COVID-19 even more.
- What happens to the food trash after students are finished eating? Are they going to individually bring it to a trash can? Will a trash can be shared around? That sounds like an awful lot of touching things that have been spit on to me.
Basically, it sounds like another risk to keep in mind.
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