Expect 4 weeks of closed schools and daycare - and how to get work done

The latest models show that closing daycares/schools/universities, AND closing down social venues, AND doing that early enough, AND doing it for 4 weeks (!) is very effective at pushing back the peak - for much more than 4 weeks. Here is how to not to go totally bonkers, AND get your work done.

We just had our first day of closed daycares, schools and universities in Denmark. I considered my family to be on the prepared side of things (see my article of personal preparedness for emergencies, and my article on what to expect from the pandemic and how to react). But guess what, there are a few things that you learn along the way.

How can you imagine closed schools and daycares, and an expectation to maximize social distance? Have you ever been on a 12 hour flight with your kids? It is like that, just for a couple of weeks. So whatever you do to prepare, stock up on arts and craft supplies!!!

Here are three educated guesses that I base my "most plausible planning scenario" baseline on:

Educated Guess 1: If you live in Europe, your daycares, schools and pubs will close

The only people more excited about our current pandemic than the risk and resilience guys (i.e. me and my friends) are the epidemiological modelers. Boy will they raise funding and revise theories in the next years. What makes this fun (for them) is that the current situation is unprecedented, and that there are many, many moving parts. One of the best inspirations comes from comparative studies of how different cities reacted to the Spanish Flu in 1918. That was a long time ago, and a different virus, and is one of the reason why the best guesses on what we should do and when, and what that will mean, will keep changing. However, the best guess right now is that one of the key findings holds: The key NPIs ("Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions") are closing schools AND social institutions TOGETHER. My understanding is that those ideas, plugged into current models, show a significant delay of the "peak" of infections - much more than the actual duration of closure.

I am writing this Thursday night, and I am willing to take you up on a bet (right now) that schools and daycares in Germany will start closing down Monday.

Educated Guess 2: They will be closed for more than 2 weeks - expect 4 - 6 weeks

Plugging those ideas into current models seem to suggest that if done early enough and for about 4 weeks, we can make a difference. Given the significant uncertainty that the modelers and policy makers are dealing with, announcing a 2 week closure and then see where that gets us makes sense. My understanding, however, is that, right now, the most plausible scenario puts a 4-6 weeks time window on the closures - but that will be evaluated and extended a week at a time. Something that, to my amateur understanding, is for now supported by experience from Japan and Italy.

For my wife and me, that is an important piece in our scenario-based planning assumptions (we are "minimizing regret", if you are a resilience nerd). Instead of Mac Gyvering 2 weeks of ad-hoc parenting-cum-home-officing together, and hoping our bosses will not notice what happens in the "home office", I believe it actually makes sense to start implementing right away a solution that you can sustain for 4-6 weeks.

In our case, that means my wife takes the early shift at work (5 am-ish - 12 noon-ish), while I take the early shift with the kids until lunch. My work shift then is 12 noon - 8pm in the home office, while my wife entertains the kids.

My personal 5 cent with my consulting-hat on: If you run a pub (how I envy you), fitness studio (not so much), comedy club (I want to be your friend), or any other social venue, look at your cash flow and figure out what it would mean if there is nothing coming in on the plus side for 4-6 weeks. Then do whatever you need to do to survive that.

Educated Guess 3: Quick-and-dirty epidemiology of playdates

Alright, I read about this stuff, I am not an epidemiologist. In absence of any concrete formal government guidance on the matter, here is the best that I can do and my personal planning rules (when you get some advice from someone who actually knows about this, please do trust their advice):

• Schools and daycares span social groups, and kids move across different age groups (say, at daycare, school, their siblings, their parents, their grandparents etc - you get the picture, the little buggers spread their viruses everywhere). So they are great at creating really terrible infection trees. So keeping them home makes sense.
• No playdates would be best. However, from personal experience of being home for about half a day with them, that will not be conducive to your mental health (or theirs).
• 1:1 playdates are best, epidemiologically speaking. Whatever you spread, you spread it slowly, not to large number of people at the same time. Playdates should be from the same (small) group of kids (see below)
• Have playdates (and any other socializing outside of your immediate family members that you live with) OUTSIDE, sun or rain. You automatically keep larger distances without it being weird, and airborne virus concentrations are much, much lower than in any indoor space.
• If you do small groups (say, below a handful), it is very important to make that group "redundant" from an infection point of view: They SHOULD see the SAME kids, and NOT mix kids from different groups. They are a group of people that have already infected one another, or are likely to infect one another anyway. They do NOT lead to the kind of infection trees we are trying to stop by closing the schools.
• Good example: You pick 4 kids from their class, a group of 5. They were all over one another until this morning anyway. Moving forward, they mostly meet one of them at a time, sometimes more. They DO NOT meet ANY OTHER KIDS for the duration of school closure.
• Bad example: On Monday, they have a playdate with 4 kids from school. On Wednesday, they see their cousins. On Friday, it is the kids from your friends from sport. This CREATES the kind of social group and age group spanning infection trees that we are trying to suppress by closing schools.

General best practice is to follow a fixed schedule every day of “school time”, “play time” and “everything else” (like meals, cleaning up etc). It is that kind of structure that allows schools and daycares maintain a minimum level of control and sanity. Our older daughter (7) had a lot of fun drawing up her “lesson plan” for the day. Make sure to include plenty of outdoor and physical activity time.

There are a few good resources out there on how to talk to your kids about the virus (and also, when not to). My go-to, as always, is the New York Times: https://parenting.nytimes.com/childrens-health/coronavirus-kids-talk

They also have advice on how to talk to teens / tweens about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/well/family/coronavirus-teenagers-anxiety.html