Teaching my daughters chess has brought me back to many of the game’s concepts, including zugzwang: a scenario where any move worsens your position, yet you are ultimately compelled to move.
Such a scenario happened just over three years ago, when we made possibly one our hardest decisions during a pandemic response filled with tough ones: a return to online schooling.
Let’s be clear: in ordinary times, nobody wants to send schools online.
It’s well understood that in-person education is vital for academic and extra-curricular growth, and socialization.
However, in April 2021, a third wave driven by Alpha amid low vaccine coverage was far from an ordinary situation.
A review from the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools confirmed that case rates in schools often reflected transmission levels in the community, and that mitigation strategies helped reduce transmission in school settings.
In practice, those strategies had their limits; much as how airbags and seatbelts become less effective at excessive speeds.
Notably, one of those effective mitigation strategies described in the review are dismissals: isolating cases and quarantining close contacts by sending folks home.
In April 2021, the sheer number of exposures occurring at those levels of community transmission made an orderly shutdown preferable to the haphazard dismissal of classes and whole schools that was occurring at random across our community.
Moving to virtual schooling freed up staff to support infection control efforts in other key settings and bolster our vaccination campaign.
As with the rest of the response, the decision was also more than just considering individual risk and transmission within schools alone. Almost everyone is connected to the school system, including many vulnerable groups. As high transmission rendered mitigation measures less effective, the risk of exposure and onward transmission beyond the school setting proportionately increased.
That made moving to virtual the lesser of two evils.
Consider the lifelong impacts now facing millions of COVID-19 orphans worldwide, children and youth living with the loss of loved ones or left witness to mass mortality owing to decisions to stay open.
It was, in essence, a real-life example of zugzwang: faced with the growing spread of a novel virus, staying in-person or going virtual both presented significant downsides.
As a father, however, I've seen firsthand how resilient children are. I also recall that the youth of the 1918 Spanish Flu disruptions became the Greatest Generation 20 years later.
Owing to a century health crisis that was neither ideal or ordinary, I remain convinced—years later—that, in applying theory to response, we made the best of a bad hand.
This post originally appeared on Lawrence's LinkedIn profile.
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