Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.

It is unfortunate, and a poor reflection on modern culture that 4th grade is too young to form strong bonds outside of school. Kids are missing the after school unstructured free/play time. Decades later, I'm sill best friends with kids I went to school with in 4th grade.

It's all a game of numbers - sure, there will be some transmissions if you let children play together in open spaces, but overall, from what current data suggests, it's not a significant vector. We generally have to think like this now, there's no such thing as absolute safety and we really have to think hard about what should be restricted and what negative effects this will have long term. Isolating kids at home for months is IMO not worth it.

On a different note, neither is allowing small businesses to fail in droves even if they can provide a good hygiene concept. Switzerland has also opened up hairdressers since this week - with masks, hand sanitizing and contact tracing being mandatory for everyone. We'll see in a couple of weeks whether this works or not.

Adults more or less try to maintain distances, as you said.

Everyone will catch this. To think otherwise is folly. Our intrepid leaders have had between 4-6 weeks to sort things out. Hope they did.

My kids can go play outside. This is getting absurd.

And shelter in place with strong social distancing has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of the virus given the current testing capacity and lack of contact tracing.

This is bullshit.

We will learn more during this time about how the virus works and how to treat it as well. Hopefully that knowledge will help us exit faster but we should expect this to be a long term new normal.

Travel and tourism is definitely going to take a bigger and continued hit. But there might be ways to make it work.

Like most people on the site, I am well adapted to the conditions forced upon us by this pandemic.

What I can’t do is go travelling, what with the airports being closed to tourists, the hotels being closed, and the airlines cancelling any flights other than repatriations, etc. — and I can’t go to local museums, because they’re closed.

I can’t go to a pub to hang out with local furries, because the pub is closed. I probably can’t go to the large furry convention that was going to happen later this year in my city, because the hotel it would be held in is currently being used as a pop-up hospital. Even if I got around the airport problems by learning to fly (I have the money and time for lessons but not for a plane), I couldn’t go to any other cons instead because their hotels have also been converted into pop-up hospitals.

I can go for walks, but I can’t go to any parks, because they’re closed.

I’m also not comfortable with selling my old home in the UK and buying a new one in Berlin — but that’s not because of risk to me, it’s because of the situation in the UK. It’s not really a “hobby”, but it is something I had planned to do and have put off because of this.

I’m not into music or dancing or spectator sports, but those are big parts of most people’s lives — now impossible because their venues are closed.

The only thing I can do is walking (on sidewalks), passive a/v entertainment, MOOCs/etc, and video games.

Suits me, but if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.

If you live in an area that's a hotspot then you need to have tighter restrictions than if not. If you know you're in an at-risk group then you need to have tighter restrictions.

Our restrictions and daily routines are naturally going to have to shift about as the virus ebbs and flows. Which is why a good local testing and contact tracing regime is essential to end the most draconian lockdowns. If you don't even know how the virus is distributed locally and can't quickly act to quarantine people who have been in contact with someone who is infected then it's very hard to say mingling together is a great idea. That said the risks of kids playing together in a neighborhood seem pretty minor if otherwise people are keeping to themselves. The likely negative consequence is that if one family has a member that tests positive then all the others in the neighborhood will need to quarantine until they can be tested or enough time passes. Here that's 14 days if you're not symptomatic or 7 days after the symptoms go if you are. Then the less likely consequence is that you're the vector that passes on the infection and it kills one of your neighbors.

We're relaxing our restrictions here a bit in Iceland on Monday and I'm really interested to see how that goes.

I have my hopes, if not at least until Winter.

Luckily, I have hobbies that are easily done without large groups of people and believe I can avoid groups of 10 or more people for most of summer and probably 50 people until September. (I've not spent more than a few minutes with more than 3 others for the last month and half)

Another commenter pointed out that there were only a few school-aged kids in their neighborhood. I noticed when I graduated high school there weren't many younger school-aged kids in my neighborhood even though I grew up with a good number of people nearby. When my sister moved into a newly built neighborhood when they had kids other young families moved in, too. I think neighborhoods tend to cluster with families, it cycles and may not always catch on every generation and some kids get stuck.

Those situations sound incredibly depressing, but I don't think it necessarily reflects all of society.

In my area, kids on the B team in FIFTH GRADE play over 55 basketball games a season.

That's more than any college.

It's the same lunacy for hockey, baseball, etc.

They get social interaction from the team, sure. But it's no longer a seasonal thing. It's year round and cancels out a lot of play time in the hood.

Maybe that's because as a child I had unsupervised access to a networked playstation and a computer. I would have loved to stay at home all day.

As an adult I hate it. When my city opened back up I took up cycling as my only mode of transport because I've taken the feeling of physical exertion for granted.

It’s no different than removing sports as a separate subject. You don’t learn math or English running down a track field and you don’t learn how to swimming reading 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Living in the 3rd largest school district in America, I'm wondering if secretly ,the administrators are seeing this as an opportunity to get 1 step closer to automating away the teacher so that they can stay within budget constraints and serve more people.

Feels like it is all going the wrong way. We need to flip this narrative: massive federal funding for schools, more teachers, better pay for teachers, better facilities, more field trips, small student to teacher ratios, free tutoring.

My son is the kid who relishes every chance to miss school, but was devastated to find out there would be no more school for the year.