Did you read the first post of this thread? It contains info from May, months after the lockdowns.
Most elementary schools except private ones around here do. Also, who says it has to be in the school under discussion? Just meet at the high school. Look for ways to meet, not for reasons to not.
Meeting spaced put across a huge room is not that much better than meeting via zoom. The issue is that when you are trying to say, overall a massive master schedule so that it can handle a radically changed set of expectations and constraints, it’s most efficient when you put all the stakeholders around a table. Or developing entry/exit procedures, or whatever. It can be done via zoom, it will just take longer. And right now we can’t even ask parents to commit to an option till 2 weeks before school starts.
I muddled through this thread, and I think I feel a migraine coming on.
Experts, educated people, and anyone who cares to share an opinion throw out percentages and studies and ultimately issue guidelines to mitigate any possible spread of COVID in the classroom.
Here’s a dose of reality: many many school districts operate on a shoestring budget. Over the years, expenditures have been cut to the bone. Teachers’ unions have been screaming for more pay, smaller classes, and better teaching materials.
School districts have balanced budgets by hiring fewer teachers, increasing class sizes, and telling teachers “do the best you can with what you’ve got.”
With this reality, it simply is impossible to put a completely protective environment in place.
And then you put the cherry on top of this shit-sundae by requiring children to wear masks. I’ve got two granddaughters, ages 9 and 11. They are really bright kids. Mommy can tell them, Daddy can tell them, Grandpa and I can tell them how important the masks are, that the masks will keep them from getting sick. But you take kids that age, put them in a group of peers, and they can get teased or dared, and those masks won’t stay on! They will make dandy slingshots, you can twirl them on your finger, or you can put them on your head and say, “But I am wearing a mask!”
To reduce class size for social distancing is a lovely idea. Where are the extra, empty classrooms to put the overflow? Where are the extra teachers going to come from to staff those extra classrooms, which probably don’t exist?
Pack the kids as usual in an overcrowded classroom, and put up plexiglas barriers. Where will you get the money to pay for the plexiglas barriers? Kids are destructive organisms. They will try to write on the barriers, scratch the barriers, and given a few moments when the teacher isn’t looking directly at them, will try to stack the barriers as Legos. I bet those things crack or break when abused.
Handwashing? Grade school kids? That age group can attract filth by sitting still. I don’t know if schools still use that horrible granulated pink soap, but handwashing is an alien concept to them. Try to reinforce handwashing in that bunch will lead to a water fight in the bathroom.
The reopening requirements probably include disinfecting the classrooms at the end of the day. Who will do that? Probably yet another job duty for the teachers… The school districts will have to ask the Tooth Fairy for money to pay for drums of disinfectant, cases of spray bottles, and bundles of cleaning rags.
Typically, when a school district needs more money, a bond is used. Nobody will vote for a bond in these economically-challenged times.
This all spells IMPOSSIBLE to me.
~VOW
No way is this better. Doing an online meeting is more convenient, you can share documents, and not shout.
My original response was to the last half of this:
Getting people into one room to hash it out. The only rooms large enough to attempt to maintain physical distancing handle public crowds and are available in most every school district. Heck, maximize 2 people in every pew and have 50+ meet in many churches.
I understand that but she was lamenting that it’s not feasible and your idea is not a more useful solution compared to an online meeting.
Again, it’s not even that it’s not feasible, its just going to be slower. So it’s hard to be responsive when we can’t even start until the big decisions are made above us.
Here is my simple thought experiment. I’ll use the numbers in my state and district. As of yesterday Colorado has 602 cases per 100,000 people. The district I am in has 31,000 students.
How many adults do those 31,000 kids live with? Most will have two or one adults at home, but sometimes those are the same adults, because some of those 31,000 kids live in the same homes. So, lets just pretend it is one adult per child. That works out to about 185 Covid-19 cases in those 31,000 adults.
So maybe 185 kids are coming to school after being exposed to SARS-Cov-2 at home. Not all of those kids will have Covid-19, but some will. They might not be as contagious as adults, but they will still be somewhat contagious. Even those who are not actively spreading the virus may still be physically carrying it. Surface transfer contagion seems low, but do you want to be the one getting a hug from a kid whose clothes is covered in Dad’s SARS-Cov-2 virus?
What about the adults? The district has over 4,000 staff. Let’s assume half of them live with another adult. That means about 12 live with somebody who has Covid-19. They’re much more likely to catch it and spread it than then kids.
Temperature checks and health questionnaires are necessary, but we know about the asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic nature of Covid-19, so they won’t catch everyone carrying the virus.
So how many people will those 185 students and 12 adults pass the virus to each day? What about for a state with 2,000 cases per 100,000 population?
Please tell me I’m making some big math or logic mistake, because I really want to send my kid to school.
We are at over 1% of the county infected (11 per 1000 people) . Poor people and Hispanics (and especially poor Hispanics) are disproportionately affected . . .and disproportionately represented in the school district, as well.
Of course, but that’s already old. I’m providing additional information that includes what’s happening when schools reopened in other countries. As I already stated, these countries have put in a better effort than some of our states in preventing spread. Their numbers were low when they reopened. Nevertheless, outbreaks have occurred. The US has done a shitty job containing the virus, especially in the south when there was more time to prepare. So we’re going to have a lot more virus circulating in the population.
Again, we still don’t know how contagious children are but it’s not zero. Younger kids may be okay but kids over 10 are more likely to catch it and spread it. Since we don’t even bother to fund our schools under normal circumstances, how are we going to provide resources to prevent spread?
The article in the OP is over two months old. Here’s a more recent article with tons of links to research articles. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/school-openings-across-globe-suggest-ways-keep-coronavirus-bay-despite-outbreaks
Based on the Colorado Dept of Health dashboard, which says 35,525 cases as of today, and a population of 5.759 million, Colorado HAS HAD about 617 cases per 100,000 people; that doesn’t mean they are all contagious today. For example, almost 20,000 of those cases were reported more than two months ago (case count was 19,803 on May 9). By now, the overwhelming majority of those older cases are either recovered or dead, and in either case not currently spreading their germs, so your math is skewed.
Now, how long a person can remain contagious seems to vary quite a bit; I’ve seen numbers anywhere from 7-10 days for mild cases up to 6 weeks for others, so I am not sure what number you should be using instead of 602 per 100K. The page above-linked does have a map showing cases per 100,000 for each county, but it has the same problem of showing cumulative cases rather than currently-active ones.
Good catch. I added up all of the daily new cases for the last month, and that comes to about 92/100,000. So that’s got us down to about 28 students (based on my previous assumptions) living with an adult with COVID-19. Even based on my method, it’s probably worse than that, because a month ago it was 150-200 new cases per day, who have probably resolved in one way or another. The new cases count from the last week is 250-450 per day, which indicates much more circulating SARS-Cov-2 than a month ago.
The thing I don’t know is what is a safe level? Does 28 kids potentially being infectious with a 1% chance per day that they pass it on seem like an acceptable level of risk? Is it 0.05% chance a day? 25%? I’m not arguing for no risk (I ride a motorcycle, when I actually have someplace to go), just a discussion of what level of risk is acceptable, and then data and models that let us estimate the actual level of risk. A big part of the problem is the data is not available.
Like I said, I really want my kid to go to school, and a month ago I was pretty convinced that would be fine, then the consequences of opening up started to hit, and I’m re-evaluating.
In Victoria, where we’re getting a COVID spurt right now, but it’s still small enough for the (many many) contact tracers to figure out where most of the infection is coming from, an intersting article in the Guardian the other day laid out exactly where the recent clusters were linked to.
It may be of interest to the thread, since quite a lot of them are schools.
Of the list of 26 newer clusters I count:
Around 8 family/social based
5 schools
5 other workplaces
4 healthcare/quarantine centers (hotels)
4 miscellaneous (including a childcare center and a youth center)
That looks like schools being a non-trivial infection source, specially considering there are not as many schools in the city as other workplaces, and they were only fully open for four weeks this term.
By my count, 32 of the cases are school connected. The largest one is 15 and the article notes that outbreak “is understood that it is connected to the Keilor Downs family two cluster”.
Let’s try to answer this. And appreciate that your case numbers are for the complete course of COVID-19 in your state, not daily.
Secondary attack rate in household close contacts has had different numbers reported but generally below 15% and some reporting children same rate of infection and others with kids a fraction as many. Let use the high end of 15% and assume kids are infected just as often, for the sake of the analysis. 185 students exposed, 15% become infected, ignore any utility of screening for fever or symptoms. Across your district then about 28 children who would enter the grounds potentially asymptomatically or presymptomatically infected, slightly less than one child per thousand.
How much less contagious are kids? We know it depends on the age group so let’s start with the group 10 and under, elementary school students. For them low enough that there just has not been transmission from these kids to others clearly documented. Problem is that the cases that have occurred in elementary schools and preschools have been so rare, despite many preschools being open throughout the heights of surges, that it can’t be clearly proven if cases were exclusively adults to the children (who then got mild to no disease) or any from kids to adults to other children. What has not been observed (or at least reported) are cases of household contacts catching the infection from their preschoolers (and elementary students in countries that have been open for a while). This despite preschoolers having lots and lots of contact with each other, with staff, and of course with household contacts.
I am confident though that their risk of transmission is a non-zero number, even if small. Let’s pretend and say that with all their close contacts it could be 25% of adult rate for elementary school and under, 50% for Middle School aged, and 75% for High Schoolers. Probably over-estimating but hey.
So adults are at a high end of 15% risk of spreading in a close contact household environment, so a 4% chance of each of this age group.
Of those 31,000 kids in the district, half are this elementary group. So 15.5K elementary students, 14 possibly infected, roughly 50/50 that none or one would spread it to a single person within a close household contact circumstance. Or put another way the risk of spread per close household contact level exposure is about 0.003%. A staff member would have to be in close household contact level exposure with all of the districts elementary students to have a 50/50 chance of getting infected by one of them. Possibly staff is safer from exposure while they are there than when they are pretty much anywhere else in your state short of self-quarantine!
This analysis tried to err to the worst case numbers and the result is very very low risk, at least for elementary school students. No question in the AAP guidance that High Schoolers need more stringent social distancing than elementary students. OTOH the time they are in school is where they are most likely to be complying with guidelines. And teachers/staff can distance themselves from them and each other (and mask) without too much hardship.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but (restating) you’re saying that transmission in the same household is below 15%. I’m surprised the number is that low, and we don’t have any idea of how long that exposure is. Is that 15% chance over 1 day? 2 weeks? Lifetime (so far) of the pandemic?
You are probably right that your estimate for elementary might be high; I’m guessing that your estimate for high school might be low - they probably have a higher chance due to age / health to be asymptomatic. Maybe the infection rate is lower; we simply don’t know.
And here’s where I must object to your glib statement.
Let’s see if I can re-create your math. 14 infected out of 15,500 = 0.09%; 4% change of re-transmission (25% of 15%) = 0.0036% That’s in the ballpark of your number. HOWEVER, you’re using the transmission number twice . We’re already assuming 185 students are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic; you applied the 15% to them to get to 28; half of that is elementary (14), then 4% chance of re-transmission (15% * 25%). Gonna have to change your 0.003% up to .024%.
A particular staff member would now have to be around about 3,000 kids to have a 50/50 chance of infection from the kids. With 15.5k kids, there’s more than one staff member. Let’s say the student-staff ratio is 10-1. That’s a staff of 1550 (she said 4,000 total, so this is about right). For simplicity, let’s say that each staff ONLY interacts with 20 students and that’s it. The chance of 1 particular person getting it from a student is 0.45% (1-.99976^20); the chance of SOMEONE getting it is 99.9% (1-.9955^1550). Back to my question above - is that per day? per pandemic? Now that an adult has it, transmission levels are higher. And the adults do interact.
Let’s throw in a bit of reality to our simplicity. The students interact. The teachers are around more than just their 20 students. Office staff see a whole lot more than 20 students during the day (granted for a much shorter time each than the teachers). And let’s not forget common lunch / recess / physical education time which is always multiple classrooms combined.
Finally, think about a staff member’s time outside of school. When you’re shopping, you might be in contact with a lot of people, but that contact is very brief and your total time is shorter - 1 hour in a store vs. 6 hours in the school.
So, I’m going to agree with you that the transmission within the schools will probably be lower than people think, but it is not negligible. There’s a number of assumptions we’re making here, and a number of factors that we’re not including because we simply don’t know. This is why pretty much everyone this side of the whitehouse thinks that opening the schools up fully for in-person instruction is a bad idea.
Most schools are eliminated shared lunch/recess/PE. . . the littles will be in one room for all or most of the day, or by themselves on the playground.
I do think y’all are underestimating how much contact adults will have with each other. Lots of adults share a room . . .TAs and teachers, cafeteria workers, front office. Parents come in constantly. There can be things in place to mitigate this, and in places with a relatively low rate of COVID, that may well be enough. But look at Miami Dade today. It’s everywhere, and growing. Opening schools, opening anything, when there is that much community spread, is really really different than opening schools when the dates are much lower.
It is over the course of the household exposure.
No the 185 is the number exposed to an infected household member, NOT the number pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic. 15% get infected (high estimate) and of those 4% pass it on (in a household level contact).
I think that mitigating that is in fact very achievable so long as there is the recognition that that is where the big risk is. Most of what has opened has much more contact between adults and likely less ability to mitigate the risk as adult staff in schools do. Zoom staff meeting will be inefficient. Zoom patent teacher conferences maybe worse. Parents not allowed in will be a change (possibly appreciated by some teachers!) and cafeteria workers will need the same mitigation measures as food workers elsewhere. Plexiglass at the front desk is annoying. Staying 6 feet away from an adult co-worker in your room and wearing a mask as possible is a hassle. But all very achievable and not absurdly costly.
As a society we are willing to say that the risk of close adult to adult contact is worth it for restaurants, and clothing stores, and nail salons, and offices and manufacturing of all types, but much less risk is not worth it to avoid the major harms imposed upon kids, and to avoid the other negative impacts that causes?
Not sure if this has been posted yet, but I happened across this analysis undertaken by University of Washington researchers today, and am sharing in case it hasn’t: COVID-19 Schools Summary. It provides some data and analysis on various countries that have reopened, how they reopened, what protective measures they have taken in doing so, and to what extent they have seen further outbreaks (or have not) following the reopening.