Disagree.
Any damage done by closing schools would not be as bad as the damage done by children experiencing the premature deaths of relatives AND CLASSMATES, when it was preventable. It was, and still is, the right thing to do.
When will schools reopen? That’s a decision that needs to be made by each individual district as things progress.
That was undoubtedly also the case in vic.aus: the medical advice was to keep the schools open, but the teachers wouldn’t have it.
As it happens, the medical advice here was partly based on the idea that they would need all the nurses at work, with their children in day-care at school, which turned out to not be the case in Australia: C19 never reached epidemic levels here.
Although the political leadership here is congratulating themselves on ‘following medical advice’, I have to say that seems untrue to me: economics and fear seem to be the main (competing) considerations.
In my state, schools have started to open: “foundation year” (grade 0) and grade 12. Other grades to follow over the next month.
Of course it was reasonable to play it safe. Playing it safe would mean following the advice of the most knowledgeable experts available. At the time that Ohio’s schools closed, the CDC was recommending that individual schools be closed, for only three weeks, and only if there was a diagnosis of a student or staff member.
Dismissing the advice of the CDC as “idiocy” is the exact opposite of “playing it safe”.
And no, the virus doesn’t “kill forever”. Nothing “kills forever”. All of those people who died in the Spanish Flu, where would they be now, if the flu hadn’t killed them? Still just as dead. But the difference between the Spanish Flu and this disease is that the Spanish Flu killed people who would still have had many decades ahead of them. COVID-19 doesn’t.
Chronic, at the time they were saying that, it was literally impossible to get tested unless you were so bad you were admitted to the hospital, and maybe not then. It was nonsensical advice given that reality. You can’t just handwave that away. Testing wasn’t possible, so no one would be diagnosed.
This is of course not what happened. The exact opposite of “playing it safe” would be taking more risks than the CDC recommended. Taking less risk is just playing it extra safe, which is understandable, being that the CDC messaging wasn’t entirely clear or consistent in the beginning (“never wear masks! correction, always wear masks!”).
So the 90K people who died are… just temporarily dead? Should we hold off burying them?
OK, so minus the sophistry and elision, we’re back to “grandma’s already had a good run, let’s get things back to normal”. Cool.
This is just one bad take on top of another, I’d stop digging if I were you.
That assumes that a diagnosis can be made—in March and April, most states were struggling to provide a few thousand antigen tests per day at best, and even then it was suspected that there were a significant percentage of asymptomatic people capable of spreading the virus. Given even then what was known about the infectiousness of the virus would have resulted in mass contagion had the virus gotten into a school, especially with environments like locker rooms, music/band practice, and lunchrooms. Lacking the knowledge and (still inadequate) testing capability we have now, closing schools was an obvious precaution because it is a perfect environment for transferring infection. And it is not as if this is a unique case; we’ve had school closings for measles outbreaks across the New York/New Jersey area because people won’t vaccinate their children and authorities wanted to prevent wide contagion.
First of all, let’s just stop with the notion that COVID-19 is just “an old persons’ disease”. Yes, it strikes the elderly with much higher mortality but that is true of the majority of virulent infectious diseases including most strains of influenza. (The 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ is notable for striking down more young people but that is because it is almost unique in that pathology.) There are plenty of young people with no underlying conditions or co-morbidities who have died of infection from SARS-CoV-2, and just because they’re eventually going to die in a few decades anyway is not a rationale for not taking effective measures to contain the epidemic and prevent health systems from being overwhelmed.
The idea that a generation of children are going to be ruined for decades to come is hyperbolic to say the least. This is not to say that there aren’t real harms from this interruption but the students it will affect the greatest are those who are already in bad domestic situations (severe poverty, domestic violence) that need to be addressed by more than just a hot lunch. For most students, this few months iis a mild disruption in their education that can be compensated for; those who are going to be most affected are those who are in the first couple of grades where educational development is crucial, and those who are graduating where this will impact their opportunities for college or employment. This certainly sucks but so would having teachers, parents, or other relatives contract the virus and die or suffer severe effects because treatment wasn’t available. Now that there is a better ability to track the virus and some degree of confidence that schools are not going to be uncontrollable incubators of contagion, a cautious reopening in the fall makes sense.
And again, we should be taking this opportunity to look at both how the education system as a whole and the architecture of schools and classes can be altered or updated to deal with contagious disease, because this is a problem that has been long ignored and the next epidemic may have an infection fatality rate of 5% or 25% instead of ~0.5%. No, we’re not going to rebuild schools in the short term or be able to practically distance in classrooms, but we should be looking at measures to improve overall health and well-being. Whether that will actually happen or not is an expansive question but we’ve been presented with what is a comparatively gentle reminder that there are threats beyond the control of money or executive proclamations, and we’ve been more lucky than good about preparing for them.
Stranger
… they aren’t.
This germ is full of surprises and this is one of them.
Diagnosis and tests aren’t the same thing. And the CDC knew how rare tests were at the time they made that recommendation.
And doing more than the CDC recommends is only “playing it safe” if the things you’re doing don’t have their own risks, which most of the lockdown measures do. If it were actually safer to do more, the CDC would have recommended more.
There are several different issues being mushed together. Let’s separate them a bit.
The current evidence supports opening schools as a very low risk item. The fact that schools have been opened in many different countries without big flares resultant is the real world test. So far results strongly support that opening schools represents little risk. Please note that little is not none. It would at least shock me greatly to find out that kids have zero risk of transmission to others even when asymptomatic. But it seems clear that it is much much less risk than they do with influenza, and much much less than adults do. How much less still needs to be answered. More evidence will come and inform decisions more.
There was never any direct evidence that children were big spreaders of COVID-19, but the evidence against it was soft with no urgency made to collect more. (The evidence was at first only the lack of transmission from children to others in contact tracing activities. A very surprising thing as kids are usually the amplifiers of many infectious diseases.) It was in the pandemic playbook because that playbook was written for an influenza pandemic: past experience with influenza is that kids are the amplifiers and that school closures can be effective. The guidelines for how it was effective as part of that playbook was distributed and not followed, as noted. (And possibly for good reasons as noted.)
Closing schools has HUGE negative impacts. Parents (inclusive of “essential workers”) often need to stay home as a result. (And/or interact more with aged relatives called in to help out.) This is a huge economic impact born with great inequality. The impact on students’ academic cognitive and socioemotional achievements is huge and also is distributed with great inequality. For some poorer students whose parents have fewer resources to call upon the impacts are much greater. For kids with various disabilities in many categories the lack of services may cause missed opportunities and harms that are never recovered from. It really is NOT HYPERBOLIC to say that both these groups may be “ruined for decades to come”. Upper SES students of two parent households will likely recover more and faster. “The gap” will increase and as always racial inequalities will be synergistic with economic ones. Also note that the harms are nonlinear with duration.
OTOH even with a lack of meaningful direct impact on spread of disease closing schools can have some positive impact on spread* indirectly*, as a behavioral/psychological/political tool. Parents need to stay home which obviously decreases their social interactions. There is nothing that signals “be afraid” (and behave accordingly) to parents like closing schools and raising the specter of their children’s health being at risk. Other behavioral changes to “Stay Home/Save Lives” are complied with more readily. (Of course that fear induced behavior got generalized and resulted in a crisis of lack of preventative care inclusive of immunization rates falling dramatically, but they stayed home.) And yes fully functioning schools can be an infectious disease “attractive nuisance” - pulling adults into contact with each other over kid activities.
Given the lack of solid evidence to base a decision off of, the original decision (to either direction) is not one of science but a judgement call and ultimately a political one. Cynically once one major mayor or governor closed schools the others had no political choice - if they did not follow suit and a flare happened they were toast for re-election. Nevertheless as a judgement call it was a reasonable one, given what was not known.
Your logic is pretty weak. Anything that kills, kills forever. Everyone who was alive in 1918 is now dead. Everyone who was murdered in the Holocaust is now dead.
And of course COVID-19 kills people who would have had many decades ahead of them. It also kills those who would’ve had many good years ahead of them. That may not matter to you, but it matters to most of us.
99%-plus are, but there are still a few centenarians who were alive in 1918.
Yes, the baby sitting services need to be re-opened so parents can get those damn brats out of the house. So let’s pretend that kids missing a little school is somehow different than when they go to school and then forget the little bit they learned at the end of the semester.
I am a teacher in South Korea, at a hagwon (These are supplemental, usually after-school academies that focus on English, math, or some other specific subject). Public schools here have been largely closed since March, and are gradually opening now.
Hagwons are subject to a different standard for closing. I personally have only missed about a week for the coronavirus (and another for switching academies during the lockdown), but many teachers in my position have lost a month or more. The government came just short of ordering the academies to close down, as that would have required them to reimburse hagwon owners for lost funds and there are just too many of these places for that to be an option.
We wear masks at work, Purel dispensers are everywhere, and a thermal camera at the front desk scans everybody for obvious fever spikes. It’s worth mentioning that nobody I know personally in Korea has the disease, and the only people I know with it are both in America. (One cycled through it in two weeks and is doing fine, the other is still shit-miserable sick.) At no point was Korea ever the ghost town that I see in the media that is every major American city.
Bars and restaurants are mostly open and doing about a third of the business they would normally be doing. There’s a little dance we have to do with keeping our masks on inside Starbucks when not actually sipping coffee.
I concur that distance learning, at least under these unplanned circumstances, falls way short of being the real thing. It throws a much greater load on the students and their parents than they’re used to handling - and of course if those parents are ‘essential workers’ and have little time and energy to support their kids’ schoolwork these days, or if they didn’t really get that great an education themselves, it’s gonna work out poorly for their kids.
For purposes of planning the coming academic year, pretending that the current school year finished up more or less normally strikes me as a huge mistake. My thought at the beginning of all this was that they shouldn’t have bothered with the distance learning for the rest of this spring, but should take the time off entirely, finish up the current school year this fall, then start the next one after Thanksgiving and have it run through August 2021, at which point the calendar could go back to normal.
That’s harder to do now, on account of the teachers’ having not had any time off this spring, so teaching in the summer of 2021 would be in addition to rather than instead of teaching during the spring of 2020. And of course with state and local budgets strapped in the absence of any help from the Federal government, there’s no money to pay for it anyway.
There’s probably brighter ideas out there for the schools and students to get caught up than the one I’ve just outlined. But there’s no money to pay for them either. Welcome to FUBAR World.
Having had a degree of flattening the curve, a national Reff value of less than for some weeks though not eliminating the threat, Australian schools are scheduled to reopen on Mon 26th.
We got a message from my son’s superintendent. Pretty depressing. He flat out says they won’t be able to afford to implement the CDC recommendations. So whether school exists in the fall or not is questionable. May have to continue virtual learning indefinitely. Which is not good for my son.
One of the only countries to leave schools open was Sweden. Unfortunately, they didn’t do much tracking. But according to newspaper accounts, there was at least one school closure due to the adults getting sick and several deaths of adults in schools.
How Sweden wasted a ‘rare opportunity’ to study coronavirus in schools
One school closed when 18 of 76 staff tested positive and 1 teacher died. At another school, at least 2 staff members died.
Sweden didn’t study whether the transmission in the schools was from students to teachers or if the teachers were getting it and passing it to each other. But based on that one case in Sweden, a school can become a hotspot with many teachers and staff getting sick.
Thank you for contributing the thread.
Clarifications to what you wrote above - one school (apparently in all of Sweden) closed for two weeks when a teacher died and other teachers called in sick. On testing 18 of the 76 staff were positive for SARS-CoV-2. (From the source material, “infection mainly occurred between staff working in the higher grades”.) It was “at other schools” across the country, not “at another school” that at least 2 other school staff members have died.
It may sound picky but I remain firm in my belief that precision is important in these discussions.
I agree that the Skellefteå school case was a missed “rare opportunity” to have studied a transmission chain in a school setting and to have potentially provided better evidence about the important question. Unclear how many of the 18 staff who tested positive were symptomatic. Was there a staff superspreader or staff superspreading event? If so what was the event? Contact tracing would have been very helpful information for the rest of us, and identified clusters in school settings have been so rare that not studying this one was indeed a wasted chance to learn.
I am sure that in all of the over 90K teachers and many times more associated staff members in Sweden there have been more than those three deaths … unless working in a school is protective. It would in fact be very interesting to know if there have been fewer or more COVID-19 cases and deaths among school staff (matched by age and other demographics) than the rest of the Swedish population.
I do want to make clear, speaking as someone who believes that opening schools is a low risk high reward action - low risk is not zero risk. Being in a school will in no case act like a magic shield and I highly doubt that children have NO ability to transmit infection, nor does being in a school building prevent adults from spreading it between themselves.
You’re right, I read that as 2 schools. As you point out, it reads like it could have been at least 3 schools involved.
Also from that source article, the chair of the Teacher’s Union has concerns about teachers’ safety in Sweden.
As the UK starts planning to open its schools, the teachers’ unions have similar concerns.
Schools row: Warning that it is ‘impossible to sustain social distancing amongst children’
“As the government insists that it is time for some pupils to return to class, union leaders warn that staff need more safety guarantees”
As the UK plans to open back up, teachers and staff are still concerned about safety. Unions are demanding that they get more answers about how to protect everyone adequately.
I’m not sure why the cabinet member says that any school is “exremely unlikely” to be the source of an outbreak. I would think it would be as likely as any activity where people get together indoors.
There’s a lot of emphasis on children not getting Covid-19, which is good. But less attention is paid to the teachers and staff who may be at risk. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to become the next round of (generally low-paid) front line workers who are risking their lives on little known information.
I’d love to hear a reason why schools should re-open when there is any risk at all. Other than parents wanting to be relieved of the burden of raising their kids anyway. What is the horrible problem that must be avoided by sending kids to school during a pandemic?