From a Peak to a Plateau

Daily new cases of COVID19 in the United States, as in much of the world, are either leveling off or declining slightly after reach a peak within the past few weeks. This graph from worldometers.com shows that, apart from day-to-day variability, the number of new cases in the world has essentially found a plateau around the 20K mark. The importance of this is subtle but strategically significant for private school leaders pondering the 2020-21 school year.Under other circumstances, a plateau might be a good thing, but in the case of disease prevalence within a population it means that COVID19 is going to be hanging around for a long time, perhaps with a non-zero base rate punctuated by periodic spikes here and there across there across the country. A safe, effective vaccine would drive the base rate down, possibly to zero, but that is a long way in the future and certainly not a factor for 2020-21.What school heads and boards of trustees need to work on this summer (in the Northern Hemisphere) are strategies for a world where COVID19 stays in circulation, much the way polio and measles once did. Head-in-the-sand is not an effective strategy; nor is hope or optimistic thinking.