And thousands of experts, and the expert panels, have not …
Dozens of experts across the country not quite the consensus of experts you imagine it to be.
That’s clear enough, I hope.
Oh, it’s clear, all right. You haven’t cited “thousands” of experts, but you do you. If you think these people and many others (maybe “thousands”) are outweighed by the “thousands” of experts you believe support your view, you should set them straight. They have access to the same data you do. I’m sure they’d appreciate you pointing out how wrong they are.
Maimuna Majumder, PhD, MPH
Boston Children’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School
Krutika Kuppalli, MD
Infectious Diseases Physician and Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Fellow at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
William Hanage, PhD
Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
Sanjat Kanjilal, MD, MPH
Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
Howard Forman, MD, MBA
Yale University
James Gaudino, MD MS MPH FACPM
OHSU-PSU School of Public Health & Gaudino Consulting
Joan Casey, PhD
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Eric Goralnick, MD, MS
Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School
Mark Cullen, MD
Stanford University
David Tuller, DrPH
School of Public Health, UC Berkeley
Here are the others. I’m sure that’d appreciate being corrected.
This is what confuses me about your position. If you think it has no proven benefits, why do you advocate for school closures in areas with high rates of infection? You keep making this really absolute statement, that schools will be neutral in terms of spread, but you also seem to support closing schools in much of the country right now.
Again, good enough if we assume spherical cows, the reality on the ground is that most experts quoted are from more civilized nations, and what they are being able to do in other places is because things like more testing, universal health care and -as noted- free or almost free child care for working families (that include teachers) is available.
Of course, the ones that have to deal with the issue on the front lines are letting their overlords know that going over the top is not good when the conditions and the plans are very inadequate.
Cited mostly because of the sign the Teacher is holding:
“Teachers don’t accept INCOMPLETE WORK! We need a better PLAN!”
…it is entirely fair to judge Sweden on their performance right now. Your argument never made any sense in the other thread and it still doesn’t make any sense now. We don’t have to wait. The numbers are right there. Are those dead people going to come back to life at the end of the pandemic? Is that what you are anticipating?
Well yes, because pandemic. Its kind-of-a-big-elephant-in-the-room. Its a pandemic that can take up to two weeks for us to know whether or not somebody has it. And in some places in America it can take longer than that to get the test results back.
So just because a state or region may have low numbers now that won’t stop an explosion of cases if that state or region isn’t sufficiently “cut off” from the rest of the world. If they aren’t stopping people at the borders of the state and conducting mandatory quarantines then no, they aren’t safe. Just look at what happened to Victoria in Australia. It was almost Covid free. But they let it get away. That could even happen here. But we’ve worked hard on the infrastructure to be able to rapidly isolate, contact trace and test if that were to happen. But if you don’t have that set up: if it takes 22 days to get a test result back, then how confident can you be to open up schools in that environment?
Two months is four incubation periods of the virus. That’s enough time and social distancing to bring the curve down dramatically to allow the rest of the system to catch up. Ramp up testing and contact tracing so that efforts to suppress aren’t just “shots in the dark.” It wouldn’t be about eliminating the virus in America. It would be about bringing it under control. You need a massive reset and many people in America are starting to realise that a massive co-ordinated lockdown is the only way to go.
Not a hijack at all. You can’t talk about opening schools without talking about the environment you are opening schools up into. It isn’t a subject that exists in a vacuum. We’ve seen whats happened in countries where Covid is under a degree of control, schools have opened up and had to immediately close again due to a surge in cases. So what do you think is going to happen in America, a place where in many parts of the country things aren’t under control?
Keeping kids in schools but killing their parents seems like a pretty fucking huge harm to me. Keeping kids out of school so that their teachers don’t die seems to be a pretty big fucking benefit. I think in-person schooling is very important. But stopping people dying is even more important, and if you can’t articulate a way in this thread a way to keep everyone safe, and to just accept that “yes, there will be a risk”, then you don’t really have a plan to open schools. Just an aspiration.
There’s no need. The position that the entire country needs to completely lock down one size fits all no matter what current local rates or trends, certainly no school, is a fringe one. U.S. PIRG is a political advocacy group (founded by Ralph Nader) devoted to grassroots organizing, not an expert scientific or expert medical or policy making body. Maybe they should tell the CDC, the AAP, the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine, and heck throw this one in too, Harvard’s Global Health Institute “how wrong they are”? Surely those pillars of the field will be grateful to be so taught.
Entertainingly enough (surprising to some here I am sure) they come to similar conclusions that I have. @MandaJo you may be especially interested in the link as they actually give some numbers, choosing to focus on case incidence as their prime criteria but …
There are some details that are still fuzzy in that document but it is the most specific in its guidance of what I’ve seen.
Also @MandaJo “no proven” is not “proven none”. My position is to start from a position of good control and then to release methodically, in order starting with those with the most evidence of the most potential benefits over least evidence for significant harms. Opening schools for in person education, especially the younger grades, is high on that list.
I think he’s said lockdowns can be necessary but schools should be part of any phase 1 of opening. That allows for schools to be closed when nothing but emergency/medical/grocery stores are open.
I think you are still missing that what the CDC (that as reported on NPR, an expert has reservations on them due to the hard political pressure they are under now) and others propose, do match what districts decided to do already.
What it is still incomplete is that many more places in the USA still do not have the testing capability that would be needed to open the schools, even in places with less infection rates.
Mind you, I did read the reports you linked, and the disconnect is not on what they do recommend. Sure, the optimal thing is for schools to open, but what proponents of opening schools now are ignoring is not in fine print; like climate change contrarians, they do miss that the reports they cite already have big caveats that should not be ignored… but are when declaring that that schools should be open now.
Personally, I think they should consider graduated school openings, with children under ten going to classes five days a week wearing masks and hand washing when entering the classroom. If things are okay after retesting in two weeks, open things up fully.
Anyway, I am not an expert. Here is an article relevant to my above opinion.
Thank you for this document. It seems like the most sensible thing I have read so far.
I do with they were a little more clear about what they consider enough space. But besides that, it seems like a clear attempt to make actual, usable recommendations.
The Harvard document seems very reasonable.
I think British Columbia is making the right call opening up primary and secondary schools in September.
Findings In this US population–based time series analysis conducted between March 9, 2020, and May 7, 2020, school closure was associated with a significant decline in both incidence of COVID-19 (adjusted relative change per week, −62%) and mortality (adjusted relative change per week, −58%). In a model derived from this analysis, it was estimated that closing schools when the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was in the lowest quartile compared with the highest quartile was associated with 128.7 fewer cases per 100 000 population over 26 days and with 1.5 fewer deaths per 100 000 population over 16 days.
Meaning There was a temporal association between statewide school closure and lower COVID-19 incidence and mortality, although some of the reductions may have been related to other concurrent nonpharmaceutical interventions.
I think everyone (with some modicum of intelligence) knows that closing schools will reduce spread and mortality. As I see it, the issue is getting everyone to agree on what is an acceptable risk level (meaning, the level of harm that is considered OK). This isn’t an easy thing to do, admittedly.
In my professional arena, an acceptable risk level for a carcinogenic substance in potable water is 1 additional case of cancer out of 100,000. Meaning, if a known carcinogenic substance is found at a high enough concentration to cause more than 1 person out of a 100,000 to be stricken with cancer who wouldn’t have otherwise been stricken with cancer, we would find this concentration to be unacceptably high. The lawyers would be dispatched to sue the pants off whomever put that substance in the water. Mind you, the acceptable risk level for toxic substances isn’t 1 dead person out of 100,000. It is 1 sick person out of 100,000.
So the research I linked to makes me feel terrible about the experiment the country is about to embark on with its schools. I know an additional 1.5 deaths per 100,000 over a 16-day period doesn’t seem like a big deal to the typical layperson. But it is a big deal to those of us who work in environmental risk assessment.
But it doesn’t stand on its own, does it? I mean, what is the risk if you don’t put the substance in the water? That’s what we need to figure out in this case. And regrettably, we will never be able to use ‘the science’ to give us ‘number-answers’ to either side of this dilemma.
Sure, there are risks to not putting the substance in the water (or more pertinently, opening schools.) But they probably won’t be manifested in increased infection rates and COVID-related mortality. They will be manifested in some other metric.
The science will eventually reveal to us the harm of keeping schools closed for long periods of time. But we don’t have that information on hand right now. The information we have at hand informs us about the harm of keeping them open. Are you saying we should ignore this information until we get the full picture? Because while I agree that would be ideal, I don’t think that’s feasible given the tight timeline we are under to make a decision.
If we had rapid testing, I think I’d feel more comfortable with opening schools in places with positivity rates hovering close to 10%. A daily or bi-daily testing regimen at all schools would allow school officials to pivot very quickly at the first sign of an outbreak. But it’s taking two weeks to get test results back. I can’t see the wait times getting any shorter come September. It’s very unfortunate that the federal government has pushed harder for the opening of schools than it has pushed for widespread rapid testing.
No, I’m saying that ‘the science’ will never be able to give us a numerical sort of answer to what harm there is to keeping schools closed (I’m certain we don’t need it to ‘reveal’ to us the ballpark level to which it exists), nor to what harm there is in opening them. But the point was that policy makers should always keep both angles in mind, rather than focusing on the 1-in-100,000 cost of action as intolerable when the cost of inaction could well be far greater than that. I’m sure that to most of us that is so obvious as to be trivial, but sadly it seems to be missing from much of the public discourse on this matter.
First off, I don’t know why you think the science can’t tell us anything about the harm of keeping schools closed. It most certainly can and most certainly will.
But more importantly, I bring up the concept of acceptable risk level to help folks see how policy makers normally make hard decisions. If we have decided previously that options resulting in more than X dead bodies out of 100,000 are unacceptable, then suddenly switching gears and accepting a lot higher risk level needs to be justified somehow. Why? Because now we’ve set a fucking precedence. If we’re collectively okay with 20 severely ill kids, 100 permanently crippled teachers, and 10 dead teachers out of 100,000 by opening schools in a COVID pandemic with the current test capacity/capability, then you best believe that one day we will hear that we should be OK with 20 severely ill kids, 100 permanently crippled teachers, 10 dead teachers out of 100,000 under some other kind of environmental hazard. What we do now will guide future decision-making about a lot of stuff.
Just in case you haven’t heard:
Someone explain to me how it’s safe enough for schools to be open but not safe enough to hold an election. Seems to me those two things can’t be simultaneously true.
It’s nice of Trump to be so concerned about the welfare of solid citizens.
And he’s right. In fact, why hold any more elections at all?