It’s safe to say that we have all expanded our vocabulary significantly in the past 11 months or so. Quarantine, isolation, deep cleaning, and social distancing are all words or phrases most of us had never uttered even just one year ago. Another one of those is “essential worker.” Essential workers are those who never stopped working and those who never had the option to stay home to keep themselves and their families safe as we tried to flatten the curve. When most of us hear this phrase, doctors and nurses automatically come to mind, and they deserve every bit of the praise, deference, and adulation that they receive. However, there are a lot of other jobs with employees that can’t work from home and who had work right through the worst days of the pandemic. This week, I’d like to highlight bus drivers.
Even in the darkest days of the past year, public transportation has still had to operate. That’s because, for many, it is the only way they can get to work. Even if doctors, nurses, nurse’s aids, and even hospital custodial staff were the only people who needed to get to work, public transportation still had to run. Because of the way that buses are designed, bus drivers were naturally the most at-risk employees among public transit workers. Passenger-to-driver transmission of COVID-19 is very possible, and these drivers’ passengers were often those on the front lines, directly interacting with the sickest COVID-19 patients on a daily basis. Unlike on a train or subway, passengers have to walk right past the driver to board the vehicle, meaning these people put themselves at risk at a time when we did not know much about how this new virus spread (there was a time when they said NOT to wear masks, remember).
The stress and anxiety that must come with such uncertainty made this one of the more difficult jobs in the heights of the pandemic, especially in extremely urban areas where the virus was more prevalent because social distancing was harder and it spread quickly through low-income communities, who are naturally more predisposed to utilizing public transportation.
Furthermore, once schools reopened, school bus drivers were faced with a similar predicament. Social distancing is especially difficult on a school bus. Moreover, there was already a driver shortage, which was only exacerbated by the pandemic. In other words, just when school districts needed more space and more buses, the number of driver plummeted. Nobody knew whether it would work at first. Nobody knew if it was actually safe. It was a shot in the dark. Theses drivers, many of whom are already in high risk categories (73% are over the age of 55), put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of America’s children and their education. They put their lives at further risk for the sake of others. Fort that reason, school bus and public transit drivers deserve our utmost gratitude for everything they do, even if we don’t always show it. They truly are unsung heroes.