Well, you know that probably has nothing to do with the school reopening though, right?
Of course what @RealityCheck71 says but more so it must be made clear: any community that has community spread WILL have cases among those of the community that go into schools. If at rates similar to the community at large then the school is a neutral action.
Kids will get infections just as they do now. They have parents and close contacts who hug them. This individual (staff member?) wasn’t infected in school but there will be cases that are.
But if staff and students follow reasonable mitigation rules, and schools have rational policies in place for contact tracing and quarantining when cases happen, then they should be contained and not contribute to significant spread within the school let alone the community at large.
Which is why the action in that article seems strange: contact tracing identifying actual close contacts is proposed for the country as a whole but the school can’t tell anyone in the school whether or not they actually had a contact?
It is inevitable if schools open there will be more opportunity for spread and more cases. This does not mean schools shouldn’t be opened, just that they should be made as safe as possible.
If you have a class of thirty students, they are going to have exposure in and out of the classroom. Better to let them be a “bubble” and stay together. I’m not convinced masks, social distancing and plexiglas would really make that much difference in a small classroom, but it might and I haven’t looked at the evidence. It is worth looking at what other countries have done. PPE for the teachers might be more reasonable. Some worthies at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto argue for no masks or social distancing during recess, I believe, and five days of class as normal. Obviously, regional situations may differ and parents, teachers and health authorities need to largely agree.
That’s not accurate. With remote learning, you’ve got a system that depresses community spread, by strongly encouraging family units to be at home for large parts of the day. (Obviously not all families will do this, but it’ll affect the community). With in-person learning, you’ve got all the kids in the community interacting with groups of other kids and adults for a significant part of each day.
When rates in a community are high, in-person learning will sustain those high rates. That’s not a neutral effect, except under the most pedantic sense. When compared to best practices of encouraging isolation, it’s decidedly not neutral.
This is my thought too. Might high school students get together if school is virtual? Sure (though schools could help that if they spend a lot of time educating kids not to). But they aren’t getting together in groups of 80-100, or anything close to it. A kid in a typical high school is spending at least 45 minutes with 85-100 different kids every day.
A discussion of the controversy between some Canadian epidemiologists and paediatricians
The experience of different countries.
Even beyond the absurdness of the comparison you are making (to an imagined best practice standard of isolation), in this you are simply being completely afactual or perhaps more accurately engaging in broad fantasy making about what happens during prolonged school closures.
Even for an influenza pandemic there has been sketchy evidence that school closures would be effective precisely because what you imagine, families all staying at home together huddled, parents not working or able to telecommute, no kids going over to each other houses to play, is widely understood to not be a likely reality.
School is not in session for most of the country now. Are parents all huddled at home with their kids across the country? Are parents all isolating themselves and their children? Is spread seemingly slowed down by schools not being in session?
Oh some parents will be unable to work because of this but many more will be interacting in the world and then having twice daily interactions with grandparents and others of greater vulnerability called in to help with the kids of all ages, and in ad hoc daycare arrangements, extended family and otherwise. Kids out of school will not be kept in isolation cells, and school closures will very possibly cause more exposures of adults with greater vulnerabilities to other adults with greater exposures, especially in the greatest risk demographics.
What you imagine is not even likely true for influenza in which kids are clearly more commonly infected than adults, much more contagious, and for longer periods of time. Kids are not kept home during closures and the impact of school closures even in the case of influenza while likely real has been small with little impact on adult rates.
The risk of transmission incurred being in groups (not of 80 to 100) in classrooms with masks on socially distanced is minimal compared to the risk of being in groups a five to fifteen not socially distanced likely not wearing masks and likely yelling and otherwise being fun times with each other. There is no contest.
Again though the point that was being responded to stand: expecting schools to be a protective umbrella with fewer cases than the community at large is absurd.
okey dokey.
Well, the disconnect I had with RealityCheck71 was that I was missing that he lived in a civilized country. 
It is hard to compare then what is feasible or not by comparing the opening of schools in other developed countries, but as even the CDC points out we should not ignore the rate of infection in the community, school openings in places with increased rate of infection are not recommended to open, as per this study that the CDC used for his latest recommendations.
A large-scale reopening of schools while controlling or suppressing the epidemic appears feasible in countries such as Denmark or Norway, where community transmission is generally low. However, school reopening can contribute to significant increases in the growth rate in countries like Germany, where community transmission is relatively high. Our findings underscore the need for a cautious evaluation of reopening strategies that ensure low classroom occupancy and a solid infrastructure to quickly identify and isolate new infections.
No, it’s 80 to 100 throughout the day: this set in English, that set in math, a third set in history–and that’s just before lunch. And while there is overlap between the groups, unless they are scheduled that way, there isn’t that much.
And if they all come to school, social distancing isn’t happening. Face shields will, but there simply isn’t room for social distancing. My distict has made it clear that 6 ft is a goal to be approached, but if they need to put 30 in a class, that’s allowable.
We don’t know yet: when kids were yanked out of school, there were less than 4,000 cases of Covid-19 in the entire country. We’ll only know if the spread is now depressed once there’s something to compare it to when schools are all back in session for a while. Let’s check back in nine weeks and see how the numbers compare.
Class sizes of 35 will be standard in my high school, and I teach in a portable classroom so it’s even more crowded. There is simply no way to maintain physical distancing of six feet if everyone shows up at the same time. We’d be lucky to get one to two feet space between students. Not looking forward to this.
I wish there was more discussion that differentiated between elementary and secondary students. I heard a discussion recently (on NPR?) about this and it was said that there is data that indicates that children age 12 and up may be just as likely as adults to become infected and spread the infection.
The logistics of middle schools and high schools make spread of the virus much more likely than in elementary schools. There are larger numbers of kids (often 2,000+, double that in some places), typically with larger class sizes, and they can’t really stay in ‘cohorts’ like younger students can. Remote learning for most teenage students is less of a disruption to families. The parents can go to work, and the students can stay home and–provided they have or are given the appropriate technology–learn virtually without direct supervision from the parents. While remote learning is far from an ideal situation, I think it is worth it in the short term, if the community then makes progress in reducing spread.
I have to shake my head when I read articles with experts promoting the opening of schools “with proper safety protocols” in place. Unfortunately, there are many places where the decision-makers will loudly parrot the “experts say to open schools” bit, but mostly ignore the “with proper safety protocols” part.
And is opening a high school with strict safety procedures really that much better than remote learning? Let’s say you manage to work out a plan where the kids are 6 feet apart in the classroom and everyone’s wearing masks. No group work, no labs. Students eat lunch in classrooms instead of the cafeteria, maintaining social distancing. No after-school clubs or organizations. That basically removes one of the big arguments FOR opening schools (socialization).
And, unfortunately, the question of whether schools should reopen–like whether we should wear masks–has become politicized. I was looking at my district’s twitter feed recently, and started reading the comments on the tweets that announced we would be doing remote learning for the first six weeks (per an order from the county). There were both positive and negative comments. I started looking at the profiles of the posters and practically every single comment complaining about not reopening the schools came from the #MAGA #Trump2020 #GodandGuns type of folks (there are plenty of them around here). In the eyes of many parents–and, I fear, some school administrators–reopening school isn’t really about wanting what’s best for students. It’s about ‘winning’ this battle in the political culture war.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that schools are our most convenient (and least expensive) form of daycare, which parents need in order to go back to work. It’s all really about the economy, not safety.
I am curious what you think a town with, say, 2,000 teenagers will be like if only 500 of them are left completely unsupervised during the daytime. My wife and I thought about this and burst into bitter laughter.
Of those 80 to 100 fairly few would count as “close contacts” by contact tracing or medical standards and for good reasons. The risk from just being in the same room, not yelling or singing, masked, is simply not all that big, definitely smaller than being in laughing and yelling actual close contact with five to ten other teen.
That simply should not be considered acceptable (unless local rates are extremely low).
The study you may be thinking of was in South Korea but not quite. They looked at the few who became symptomatic and found that symptomatic older children were as likely to spread in close household contact circumstances as adults were. It informs not about how many get infected, how contagious the persistently asymptomatic are, nor about spread in circumstances other than close household contact. I remain fairly sure those numbers won’t be zero but again even for influenza, in which the contagiousness of children is much larger than for SARS-CoV-2, the impact of school closures on spread to adults is mixed at best.
But that IS what it is. Almost everywhere, unless half the kids are opting for virtual instruction. Socially distanced instruction isn’t possible in rooms scaled to have kids 2 feet apart. They will be masked, but they will be close. Full stop.