Teachers await Covid vaccines

Teachers await Covid vaccines

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She strove to create virtual classes for her fifth-year language arts students in the spring. In the fall, she was excited to be back in the classroom, but only on the second day back was she so concerned about the conditions at her school in Houston that she participated in an illness with other teachers.

Now, she wants the vaccine against Covid-19 to be prioritized for herself and all other teachers in order to keep them safe in their schools.

“I advocate that teachers be placed on a higher list because we are around so many,” she told CNN.

President-elect Joe Biden has devised a plan to spend $ 160 billion to run a national vaccination program, expand testing and mobilize a public health jobs program, among other measures. He also asked for $ 50 billion to expand Covid-19 testing, part of which was intended to meet its goal of getting schools back up and running safely.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that taking the children back to school and staying there would be one of his main goals when he became the chief medical advisor to the next government.

“The idea of ​​vaccinating teachers is at the top of the priority, as is doing surveillance in schools so that you have a good sense of the penetration of the infection,” he said last month.

Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention place teachers in the second tier of vaccine recipients, recommending that they be vaccinated along with other essential frontline workers, such as grocery workers and police, since health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities are protected.

But it is up to individual states to make their own priorities, so while some, like California, are following CDC guidelines, this is not mandatory.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis decided to open vaccines for anyone over 65, generating an overwhelming demand.
In Texas, where Gill is teaching, Governor Greg Abbott said in December that he wanted teachers “near the beginning of the line”. But the CNN affiliate KTRK reported last week that while firefighters and police in Houston fired, teachers still waited.

Alarm for the death of teachers

Evidence suggests that schools, especially primary schools, are not the super divisions that many feared. Cities that had increased rates of positive coronavirus tests like Miami have managed to keep schools open without a spike in cases between students and teachers.
Naseeb Gill teaches both children who come to the classroom and those who stay at home.

But the teachers were infected and some died.

Zelene Blancas, a healthy 35-year-old first-grade teacher in El Paso, Texas, spent months in the hospital before dying of Covid-19 complications.
Philamena Belone, 44, taught third grade students with an oxygen mask after being hospitalized for treatment against the coronavirus, but had to return because she was unable to breathe on her own. Also previously healthy, she died in December in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Stories like these shocked and alarmed teachers. Gill told CNN last year that she felt she was being asked to choose between her students and her health.

“I’m going into a room where I don’t really know what I’m breathing,” she said. “Many of our schools really, they are very old and … their AC units are very, very old.”

Gill says he knows people who are leaving the profession. She is stressed, but she is doing her best to let it go and accept the situation until she can be vaccinated and feel safer.

For now, she is using some of the same protective techniques used by frontline medical personnel.

“Before I go to my boyfriend’s house, I’m going to change clothes and make sure I’m going to take a shower and stuff, because I feel like I might be taking something to the people who care about me,” she said.

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