We’ve reached the stage of the pandemic where a child waking up with a sore throat creates a dilemma.

Under normal circumstances in a New York winter, a sore throat isn’t necessarily enough to keep a kid home. If it were, some of our kids would likely miss half the season’s worth of school.

Dry winter air equals dried out sinuses equals post-nasal drip equals a sore throat. It’s not contagious. It’s hardly even noteworthy.

But we don’t live in normal circumstances.

We live in a time of at-home COVID tests and the knowledge that a kid with a sore throat in a school building is more like a ticking time bomb.

The science shows that rapid at-home tests do not produce false positives, but they do produce false negatives, especially in people who have been vaccinated and if you don’t hit the right window.

A negative test isn’t meaningless, but it’s not exactly meaningful either.

And almost worse for parents? Sending a kid with a sore throat to school can mean a call just a few hours later to pick their Typhoid Mary up from the building because well, they just started coughing, and you know what’s going to come next, don’t you? An entire class of kids quarantined and the risk that one is taking home COVID to a grandma fighting cancer.

Evaluating whether or not a sick kid is “sick enough” to stay home from school has always been like gambling for parents. Do you ask the dealer to hit on 13 or stand?

We won some. We lost some.

But these days the entire deck is stacked against us.