The insanity surrounding the school debate in the wake of coronavirus has reached peak levels. Washington D.C. public school teachers staged a gross, anti-science stunt in yet another attempt to avoid having to actually do their jobs. `

This time, it was piling up “body bags” to give the impression that teachers will all start dropping dead if schools are opened.

D.C Public Schools teachers briefly lined up “body bags” outside school system offices, protesting plans that could send them back to classrooms in the fall

Mayor Bowser is expected to announce if schools will partially open in the fall later this week pic.twitter.com/ARmqgkBfrG

— Debbie Truong (@debbietruong) July 27, 2020

Are these people offering to take a pay cut to sit at home and Zoom call for two hours a day? Of course not. They want their full salaries and benefits while refusing to do a job that contains far less risk than what your average grocery cashier is facing. Your neighbor’s 16-year-old kid can go interact with hundreds of people a day taking orders at a fast-food restaurant, but teachers act as if they are facing the apocalypse if they are asked to return to school with mitigation in place.

None of this is based in science. In fact, not a single case of student-to-teacher transmission of the coronavirus has been recorded throughout the entire pandemic, not just in the United States, but in the entire world. Think about how incredible of a statistic that is. A teacher is more likely to get into a car accident and get struck by lightning on the same day than to get COVID from a student.

That’s not to say it’s not scientifically possible for a student to give it to a teacher. Like all diseases, there are certain apexes of probability and risk. But it’s so rare (to the point of not having an actual recorded case) that it’s certainly not something that should keep children sitting at home, falling further and further behind.

I want to be fair here as well. This is not all teachers. I’ve talked to some of the teachers in my district. They aren’t throwing a hissy fit because they are being asked to do their jobs. They all understand the damage being done to kids and also understand that getting paid requires doing work. Of course, I don’t live in an area under siege by radicalism.

The facts are clear. Students do not transmit the virus to their teachers at a rate that’s even calculable. Further, if students give the virus to each other, which purportedly happened in Israel (though many other countries have seen almost no transmission), the death rate is far lower than even the flu. Neither of those two scientific facts supports the idea of keeping schools closed. Rather, they support the idea that students and teachers being in school is likely far safer for them than what they are currently doing in their daily lives.

What we are seeing in D.C. is simply an extension of the far-left lunacy perpetrated and commonly pushed by extremely liberal teachers’ unions. If teachers aren’t “essential,” they shouldn’t expect to be treated as such.