# Opening schools **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [May 21, 2020, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247 "2020-05-21T15:36:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 27
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/521 "2020-07-19T03:10:34Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Early in this thread, I worried that people would get their brains stuck on a position based on the incomplete data at the time and make it part of their identity, and refuse to change positions as the science changed. We 100% see that happening in our country, and I fear we see that in this thread. Indeed, while I do agree on letting very young students to go back to school, it is with the understanding that things like testing should be more available, as one reply showed, there is now the talking point that testing is not needed because of the USA being so deep into it 🙈. That goes against what experts are advising and the way the CDC advised against testing all students or staff is almost tailor made to make people not read the fine print; sorry, I mean: to read the rest of the advisory where the CDC explained that while not all staff and students should be tested before coming to school, that testing should be available in the school’s community for the ones suspected of being infected that should be referred. Problem is that the ramping up for the testing needed for suspicious cases in schools is not there in many locations or there are delays on results that can last weeks, making contact tracing that would be crucial for schools very hard or impossible to do as well as increasing individual quarantines or school closing times. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/522 "2020-07-19T13:27:26Z")
Lol, I didn’t say it wasn’t needed and I’m certainly not regurgitating talking points. I don’t even know what you’re upset about. I agreed with Manda Jo’s plan of what could work and I acknowledge that your political situation is making good choices unavailable. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/523 "2020-07-19T13:58:05Z")
Thank you for the article link. It is important and it is also important to not lose some of the nuance in what it does and does not find: Under 10s who are symptomatic are suggested to be half as likely to spread it as symptomatic older children and younger adults in a close household contact circumstance. From the NYT article: > [@](#): > > The researchers traced the contacts only of children who felt ill, so it’s still unclear how efficiently asymptomatic children spread the virus, said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. > > “I think it was always going to be the case that symptomatic children are infectious,” she said. “The questions about the role of children are more around whether children who don’t have symptoms are infectious.” From the actual article we find that the total n of under 10s who were the identified symptomtic index case of the household was 29 of the 5706. [Table 2](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315-t2) tells us that the total of household contacts positive were a total of 3 of 57 traced. Not in household contacts was 2 of 180 traced. There of course will be the children who come into school symptomatic but most of them will be straying home I hope. ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/524 "2020-07-19T14:01:39Z")
Until we are sure that this gun is loaded, treating it as though it is dangerous is not on solid ground… ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/525 "2020-07-19T14:12:18Z")
Ok, how long do you plan on treating 4 year olds like loaded guns? ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/526 "2020-07-19T14:17:56Z")
Until we have adequate testing to make sure they are not. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/527 "2020-07-19T14:20:55Z")
You think American children might be different than children in other countries that do have adequate testing? ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/528 "2020-07-19T14:21:51Z")
No, I think the children are the same, it is our testing that is inadequate. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/529 "2020-07-19T14:29:04Z")
Ok, you changed the subject then. We were arguing whether we should be worried that children are a spreader concern. Now you’re talking about a monitoring system to watch for outbreaks. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/530 "2020-07-19T14:36:38Z")
Well, looking at your latest replies to **k9bfriender** the talking points are coming fast and furious… And it is clear that you replied to me not **Manda Jo**. As for your current say so, it is really silly to reply that children being spreaders and not having a proper monitoring system are not sides of the same coin. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/531 "2020-07-19T14:37:53Z")
I’m curious: what exactly do you mean by “talking points”. You seem to be using it atypically. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/532 "2020-07-19T14:38:11Z")
My wife says parents send their sick children to school all the time. Nothing indicates it’ll be any different now. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/533 "2020-07-19T15:34:14Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > As for your current say so, it is really silly to reply that children being spreaders and not having a proper monitoring system are not sides of the same coin No, this is what’s silly. Whether children are spreader concerns is a physiological question. Testing is a tool for monitoring the progress of the disease. Yes, contact tracing/testing in other countries is why the general wisdom right now is that children under 14 aren’t a spreader concern. Testing and contact tracing is also why we know meat packing plants are outbreak concerns. Are meat packing plants on the same coin as kids? Should we close all meat packing plants until we have adequate testing in place? ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/534 "2020-07-19T15:57:24Z")
Uh, your reply shows that you are missing that me and experts pointed that a lot of the early reporting is not separating things such as less of an infection rate in the community as part of the reason why you might be not quite correct about the wisdom you point at. What the virologists in Germany and even the ones supporting your position point out, as a normal way to do science, is that more research is needed anyhow regardless of what their early studies say, part of that will be to confirm or debunk the spread rate among kids and from there to teachers, staffers and support people at schools in the USA. The problem is for many out there to ignore how testing needs to increase to get schools going on again. And that makes your last line an ignorant retort. As workers on meat plants are being compelled to continue working, they are not however being inadequately tested, massive testing has been going on and has been a way to get numbers for science from the guinea pigs workers. > **[How Widespread Coronavirus Testing Helped Meatpacking Plants Slow Outbreaks](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/22/879774584/how-widespread-coronavirus-testing-helped-meatpacking-plants-halt-outbreaks)** > > Thousands of meatpacking workers have been infected with the coronavirus. Some of their employers now are rolling out large-scale testing, and their experience may offer lessons for other businesses. > Since then, Tyson has carried out one-time tests of every worker at almost 20 of its facilities, from Maine to Virginia and Texas. “We’re somewhere around 30,000 people, team members, that have been tested,” says Brooks. “That’s about a quarter of our workforce.” > Meatpacking plants have been among the country’s worst coronavirus hot spots, with thousands of workers infected. Dozens have died. But the rapid roll out of testing among workers in those plants could offer lessons that other businesses may need to emulate as they try to re-open. > > Getting those virus-carrying workers away from their colleagues, and isolated at home, seems to have paid off with a big reduction in coronavirus cases— although Tyson executives and public health officials also give credit to changes inside the plants. Those measures include face shields, more social distancing in break rooms and lockers, and plastic dividers to separate workers on the production line. > > In Black Hawk County, Nafissa Cisse Egbounye says new coronavirus cases at the Tyson plant are way down. “Actually, today is our first day [when] we’ve had zero — a zero increase in cases,” she told NPR on June 15. > > Yet even Tyson’s big testing push may only be a start. Meatpacking plants are at the leading edge of a debate about how many people to test, and how often, in businesses and schools. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/535 "2020-07-19T16:14:37Z")
Good for Tyson. Are you or are you not advocating for the shuttering of meatpacking facilities until they have adequate testing in place? You are kind of hard to understand sometimes, sorry. ---
**Author:** ![Heffalump\_and\_Roo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heffalump_and_roo/32/7691_2.png) [@Heffalump\_and\_Roo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heffalump_and_Roo)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/536 "2020-07-19T16:22:17Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > NYT article about a new, large SK study that suggests under 10s are half as likely as adults to spread it, and that children over 10 are about the same as adults. > > [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur) Nice find! Some notable quotes from the article: > [@](#): > > “I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won’t get infected or don’t get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they’re almost like a bubbled population,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota. > . . . > Several studies from Europe and Asia have suggested that young children are less likely to get infected and to spread the virus. But most of those studies were small and flawed, said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. > > The new study “is very carefully done, it’s systematic and looks at a very large population,” Dr. Jha said. “It’s one of the best studies we’ve had to date on this issue.” And yet, even in this study, there are caveats. > [@](#): > > They tested all of the household contacts of each patient, regardless of symptoms, but only tested symptomatic contacts outside the household. > > The first person in a household to develop symptoms is not necessarily the first to have been infected, and the researchers acknowledged this limitation. Children are also less likely than adults to show symptoms, so the study may have underestimated the number of children who set off the chain of transmission within their households. > > Still, experts said the approach was reasonable. I’m still wary of this part. Since children can be asymptomatic and transmit the virus, testing only those people showing symptoms seems problematic to me. > [@](#): > > The researchers traced the contacts only of children who felt ill, so it’s still unclear how efficiently asymptomatic children spread the virus, said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. > > “I think it was always going to be the case that symptomatic children are infectious,” she said. “The questions about the role of children are more around whether children who don’t have symptoms are infectious.” The question of asymptomatic transmission by children is still largely left unanswered. The bigger finding of this study is that children older than 10 are even more likely than adults to spread the virus. > [@](#): > > The study is more worrisome for children in middle and high school. This group was even more likely to infect others than adults were, the study found. But some experts said that finding may be a fluke or may stem from the children’s behaviors. > > These older children are frequently as big as adults, and yet may have some of the same unhygienic habits as young children do. They may also have been more likely than the younger children to socialize with their peers within the high-rise complexes in South Korea. And again, this study comes from a place where the rate of infection was somewhat under control, there was a strict lockdown and contact tracing was obviously in place. Whether the finding would extrapolate to a place like the US where none of this is the case still remains to be seen. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/537 "2020-07-19T16:29:39Z")
> [@RealityCheck71](#): > > Good for Tyson. > > Are you or are you not advocating for the shuttering of meatpacking facilities until they have adequate testing in place? You are kind of hard to understand sometimes, sorry. Well you need to read again, more than once I have said that, taking all things into consideration, schools should open, **provided** that adequate testing, contact tracing and a reduced rate of infection in the community are observed. And the schools should open mostly for younger students. As for the meatpacking industry, if testing had not been available in high numbers a lot of protests would had come and I would had been opposed to having workers risking their lives with no improvements being done. As things stand, as a Hispanic IT with some health conditions, I would be now more confident on working with quality control and equipment in a meat packing facility than with the computers in the high schools I work for. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/538 "2020-07-19T16:45:50Z")
Is there some specific point or claim I’ve made you’d like me to defend or retract? Or some point I’ve disagreed with that you want me to expand on? I’m really not sure what we’re supposed to be arguing about. ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/539 "2020-07-19T16:46:32Z")
No, I did not change the subject. The subject is whether or not children in schools will be a significant factor in the spread of Covid. There are two elements to this, how well children can get and spread the disease, which can only be done by testing, and how much infection is in the community, which also can only be determined from adequate testing. Reember back in the early days of Covid when we weren’t sure whether masks would help, what kind of infection vector contaminated surfaces were, how much can be spread by aerosol? We still do not know the answers to this. Usually, by the time we know a disease well, it is after years or even decades of study, just throwing more money and researchers doesn’t help, especially when one of the things you are trying to determine is how things change over time, or the long term effects of something. Using some very preliminary studies that are contradicted by other studies as a foundation of public policy is dangerous. Using it as policy, while not ensuing adequate testing to make sure that you were right to follow a preliminary study can be catastrophic. Unless the idea is to just open up schools, close our eyes, and hope for the best. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247/540 "2020-07-19T17:06:01Z")
Thing is that, as you mentioned already, you are mostly fighting straw man positions and missing a lot from what is being cited. It was asinine, for example, your point about dismissing an expert in Israel just because he reported that the schools being open was a factor in the increasing rate of infection there. That was not the only expert reporting about it, if you had read the links in the cite you would had noticed that recently Israel’s top public health official resigned; because, just like in a place that also has issues with leadership, the rulers ignored her recommendations to keep places like schools closed and blamed the current increase in cases in Israel also on schools being open too soon. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247.md?page=26) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opening-schools/854247.md?page=28)