That’s a nice summary. This is about the best I could pull out for a TL;DR.
Reopening of schools for all students in countries with low community transmission (Denmark and Norway) has not resulted in a significant increase in the growth rate of COVID-19 cases. Return of most students to school in countries with higher levels of community transmission (Germany) has been accompanied by increased transmission among students, but not school staff.
The US is obviously not a place with “low community transmission.”
I was working off of your post only, and I didn’t go backwards and see…
OK, that changes my numbers. Puts the chances of A SPECIFIC INDIVIDUAL at 0.07%, and OVERALL ADULT at about 35%.
AS A PARENT (and an optimist), I’m not too worried about my kids. I see the schools putting forth a good-faith effort to stem transmission; I know that transmission to/from youth is much lower than adults. AS THE SPOUSE OF A SCHOOL WORKER, I’m more concerned.
One difference is that you are not mandated to go to restaurants or clothing stores, but children are mandated to go to school. Another is that reasonable adults can go to clothing stores and wear masks and do other things to mitigate the risks; children (especially in elementary schools) aren’t going to wear masks (for long), and pick their noses and lick their friends and pull out wedgies and a whole bunch of other things that add to the transmission risks. Finally, what we’re really talking about here is that clothing stores and offices and manufacturing plants all are private businesses and are making their own decisions on how to safeguard their employees; schools are public and this whole discussion is about them discussing how best to safeguard their employees (teachers) and their customers (students).
Just started looking, and to echo echoreply (yes, that was on purpose), not a lot initially to pull out. Out of 15 countries, the effects on 10 of them are “unknown”.
I think it’s a pretty acceptable risk in places with low levels of community transmission. I’m pretty content to be labelled an essential worker. But I am not at all sure we should have “clothing stores, nail salons, offices and manufacturing of all types” either in places like the major cities of Texas, Arizona and Florida right now. Given that, I am not sure we should have in-person school.
I also think that we need a lot more planning time before we just start. All these things are going to require so much modification, and on the campus level, we haven’t yet had even one conversation about what this looks like, because we can’t really decide anything until three layers above us have decided things. So all the plans in the world will be meaningless if the first day kids show up we don’t have procedures in place, or if a month in we are out of hand-sanitizer and we have half as many teachers as we need, so we are ordered to cram them 30 into a room. I think these are not outlandish possibilities–in a city where COVID cases are breaking new records every single day.
Is there any level of community spread where you think distance learning is appropriate? Are there any safety considerations you would consider non-negotiable to make schools safe enough to justify the risk?
And the document is easier to get through than I feared. 18 pages! Yeah, well 10 of those are bibliography and “recommended resources”; 1 is a chart, so we’re down to 7 pages to digest.
I like this document because it shows what other countries have done, if results are available it shows the results, and it also links to recommendations from the CDC and others, so that individual districts can make their own reasoned and informed choices.
A few more numbers to throw in the mix. Colorado has so far had 894 cases out of about 650,000 aged 0-9 (137/100,000), and 2030 cases out of 750,000 aged 10-19 (270/100,000).
By adding up the onset data reported over the past four weeks, I estimate 4268 active cases. That will go up, because as cases are discovered in the future, they will be added to past weeks based on the symptom onset. I couldn’t find that data broken down by age, so I’ll assume 91% of those cases are 20+, as that is the historical rate in Colorado. So that works out to 67/100,000 active cases among adults.
That all works out to 0.0335 of the 50 adults that work at my local elementary school as having Covid-19. That seems pretty good. Maybe 2-3 of all employees in the district have it. What if one of those is a driver who delivers food to multiple schools everyday? What if the school gets hit by a meteor, or a kaiju?
Colorado’s Rt is currently 1.14 and rising. It was below 1 until we opened up. Maybe a rule that schools can only be open as long as Rt stays below 1?
Sorry for all this rambly math. I’m trying to convince myself it’s safe to send my kid to school in August.
I think DSeid and I both agree that the risk is higher for the staff than for the students. That Washington report shows what others are doing and what (if known) the effects are. At least it gives you a measuring stick to see what is “reasonable”. If your school is saying “Screw it - we’re opening up full bore!” then run, do not walk, in the other direction. If your school is saying “We’re giving each student their own giant hamster ball that we’re disinfecting every night”, you’re more than safe.
If we subtract the kids from the equation and don’t worry if they affect each other… a school is very much like a crowded business with lots of adults sharing indoor space with recycled air handling. Hundreds of adults sharing a handful of bathrooms with all that toilet aerosol, common surfaces, etc.
Post-COVID, we wouldn’t ask adults to work in those kind of situations even if there were no kids around, unless they were essential workers.
If we can find it in ourselves to admit that educators and school employees are essential workers, then for god’s sake let’s start paying them with money instead of “you’re a hero” signs.
Here’s a pretty good article from an epidemiologist discussing his thoughts on sending his children back to school and many of the topics being discussed in this thread:
To be fair, I get paid a lot more than many of the essential workers I have depended on during this era: grocery workers, hospital orderlies, etc. Even within a school, teachers are the highest paid group we are asking to take the risk: paraprofessionals (from the front office to the SpEd class), cafeteria workers, bus drivers and custodians make less and likely will risk more.
No parents are not mandated to send their children to the public school. Some will choose to home school, some commercial virtual learning academies, and many public schools, especially for upper grade levels, will offer the option to do all virtual.
The questionable utility of masks for elementary school students is addressed in the AAP guidance. The transmission risks for younger grades with kids playing as kids have been low.
For public population health the issue of private vs public is immaterial.
We need testing within the school system to shorten the delay at every step of the process and reduce the turnaround time for the test to only a day. With that kind of time resolution, we can increase awareness of the situation at our schools, along with the ability to react appropriately. Without it, we are flying blind and gambling with the health of our children, teachers, and community.
That is really different than just saying it should reopen. It is giving a baseline condition for that to be safe, and what seems to be a very reasonable one. No one has had school with infection rates as high–and rising–as they currently are in some places. No one has had school when hospitals are already on the edge of being overwhelmed. The article makes the point that when Israel closed a school, they knew of 2 cases–but they found 100. If we don’t have school-based testing in place, we may well not know it’s in the school until it’s much worse than that.
His final line actually matches what I have been saying.
We could be wrong about schools, but we cannot afford to wait to find out for certain. We need school-based Covid-19 symptom screening, testing, contact tracing, and isolation. Opening without a plan to test is irresponsible and a gamble with our children’s health.
And while he does say that schools should open, the fact is that (at the risk of getting political) the big elephant in the room is not being ignored by the ones that seriously propose the schools to be re-open. A lot needs to happen to open the schools safely, they do tell us what is needed, but the disconnect to what is happening (socially speaking) in the USA is still there. And a lot leadership is missing, funding will be a huge issue.
I actually liked how it was placed in the COVID-19 Task Force gated guidelines, as a Phase Two action.
That guideline had, to get through each gate, required:
SYMPTOMS
Downward trajectory of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) reported within a 14-day period
AND
Downward trajectory of covid-like syndromic cases reported within a 14-day period
CASES
Downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period
OR
Downward trajectory of positive tests as a percent of total tests within a 14-day period (flat or increasing volume of tests)
The requirement for contact tracing might be unachievable but the requirement for sentinel monitoring was and should be in place.
That phase, passing through the gates a second time with continued declines, included continued protection and sheltering in place of the more vulnerable, no gatherings of more than 50, telework encouraged, common spaces at work limited, large venues (e.g., sit-down dining, movie theaters, sporting venues, places of worship) able to operate under moderate physical distancing protocols, so on. The benefit/harm avoidance to risk equation for schools is better than some of those.
The ability to provide social distancing for staff is a nonnegotiable. High Schoolers and maybe Middle Schoolers need either adequate social distancing or masks or both as non-negotiables. High risk activities (like group sings and crowded sporting events) on hold also not up for discussion.
I like the gates, too, and I thought they were really reasonable. I felt really deeply betrayed by my state because those were the standards we were going to adopt for a more general re-opening, and I was very supportive. Then we (TX) just said to hell with it and reopened anyway, way ahead of that schedule.
Since TX, AZ, and FL are no where near that standard, and in fact are accelerating in the opposite direction on both counts, do you think we should delay reopening schools? I am somewhat optimistic that with the state-wide mask order we (finally) got a week ago, things may actually start trending back down at some point.
For the older kids (HS), is just masks but no social distancing acceptable in your mind? Because I don’t see any way we have 6 ft between kids.
That is similar to what my university is doing. Mandatory testing for students who live on-campus before they can move in. To detect outbreaks early they will do wastewater monitoring at multiple key spots around campus, including in the dorms. They have not yet decided on whether or not students who don’t live on campus will need to be tested before they come to campus.
They also will have dedicated quarantine plans for when on-campus residents become infected.
Employees continue under the rule of “if you can work from home, you must work from home.”
Yep. The only way to avoid a serious clusterfuck is to require the teachers and high school kids to wear masks and face shields. Because, like you said, there will be tons of circulating virus. Younger kids might be able to get away with just wearing face shields. Little kids, well, we’ll just have to cross our fingers, won’t we?
Our state is mandating all adults on a campus self-report any COVID symptoms–including mild headaches/sore throats. We have to stay out 14 days unless we get cleared by a doctor or have two negative COVID tests more than 24 hours apart. But there is no infrastructure for those tests, to get them done quickly, communicate results, any of that.
Our insurance plan has a $2500 individual deductible, so seeing a doctor will cost me the full price of the visit, plus the cost of the test (insurance may be waiving that). People who make $14K a year have the same deductible. We get 10 days of paid leave a year, so one sore throat will run through all of that.
The state announced all this 48 hours ago. Now districts are trying to figure out what they can do to support these procedures. And I think all of us would LOVE to have testing integrated into our schools. But there’s no state support at all. The burden appears to be entirely on individuals.
Really, what is so bad about having kids skip 1 year of school? If anything, it might be mentally good for them. Let them think about what they really want to do in life, catch up on whatever topics or subjects they were previously weak in, etc. For the older ones, a “gap year” is not only common, but in fact sometimes even recommended.
Furthermore - maybe someone can do the math for me - but if we reopen all schools in earnest, isn’t it possibly we’d actually end up killing or harming more kids and teachers than are killed in school shootings or the like every year?