You act like it’s a question of whether to adopt new curriculum standards, or a national fitness program that might do kids a lot of good but could cause an occasional asthmatic to drop dead. We’re not talking about entirely discretionary things. What we’re talking about, or at least should be, is how to deal with the plain reality that has been foisted upon us. These parallels you are drawing seem to imply that we can just whoosh the virus away as long as we’re willing to pay the costs, just like we could pull the plug on a project proposal. You’re uncomfortable with the chance that X people in a hundred thousand could die? Yeah, I know, so is everybody. That’s really not the point.
Apparently the “need” to postpone the election is being “suggested” because of supposed widespread voter fraud, not because of the virus.
Stop the ride; I want to get off!
I’m not implying “whooshing” away anything. I don’t see the point of engaging with you if you can’t be bothered to discuss what I’ve written instead of your own imagination.
I read it and commented already. You want to draw parallels between environmental risk assessment – where presumably someone had a choice to introduce a carcinogen or not, since you mentioned they’d get sued if they did – and disaster management. I’m suggesting it’s not a useful analogy. So, while I would agree with you and also feel terrible if, say, some new educational program risked one in a thousand lives, I don’t see where that has much to do with the situation at hand.
Hm, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. For example, one’s risk of dying in a car crash per kilometer of travel is more than fifty times higher than in a plane crash. And WAY higher than dying from carcinogens in potable water, I expect (though I haven’t run the numbers). And yet people don’t stop using their cars because of this. People judge different risks differently.
Not going to disagree that it will definitely set a precedent for any future pandemics, though.
Ontario is opening up with masks. May not be a bad idea to have masks for a couple weeks and watch the numbers dance. Masks are cheap, but far from perfect. Social distancing is very expensive so you want to know it is needed. Still, a positive step that will please many.
Minnesota just released this plan:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7010544-07-30-20-Safe-Learning-Plan-for-the-2020-21.html
Thank you. That also has specifics and tiers. By my back of the envelope math, my district should be distance learning for secondary and hybrid for elementary. Instead, volleyball season is starting on time.
I’m not sure those are good analogies. People don’t send kids to school and teachers don’t go to work assuming risks will be similar to a day-long flight or car trip. The assumed risk has been much lower, school shootings notwithstanding. And with COVID, we’re not just talking about the risk to children, which is, of course, a huge factor, but the risk to their families, to teachers and their families, to other school employees.
We just don’t know how risky reopening schools will be. Tough to make accurate analogies in that situation.
Our county public health officer sent a letter to superintendents saying it’s not safe to reopen schools and urging them to keep schools closed this fall.
Whereabouts are you located?
Western Washington.
Missed edit window: my county has 50-75 new cases per 100,000 people.
raspberry_hunter:
Hm, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. For example, one’s risk of dying in a car crash per kilometer of travel is more than fifty times higher than in a plane crash. And WAY higher than dying from carcinogens in potable water, I expect (though I haven’t run the numbers). And yet people don’t stop using their cars because of this. People judge different risks differently.
All of this is true, but I’m not talking about “people”. People misjudge risks all the time. I’m talking about policy makers. Policy makers rest their decisions on well-established, consistently-applied risk levels. Every governmental arena has adopted thresholds they use to inform decision-making.
I don’t know what risk levels are used in education. They might be more stringent than what environmental protection agencies use or they may be less stringent. My point in bringing up this concept is to help folks understand how knowing the acceptable risk levels used to formulate past decisions helps us to gauge how “out there” are current proposals are.
For instance, let’s say schools are normally closed when expected snow falls are greater than some threshold linked to a greater than 1 death in 100,000. The research I linked to above posits that an additional 1.5 death in 100,000 is predicted when schools are open every 16 days during a COVID pandemic. Are we obligated to shut down schools during COVID just because we closed down schools for snow? No. But knowing how the two risk levels compare helps us to understand a problem we’ve never confronted before (global pandemic) in the terms of something we’re much more familiar with (inclement weather).
This isn’t analogous to comparing the risks of different modes of transportation, because these are the kind of decisions that individuals make. Individuals have their own reasons for doing things and they can be as arbitrary and capricious and unreasonable as they want to be. But institutions are held to a different standard. They are expected to justify why they make the very inconvenient and costly decisions they are tasked with making. It is easy for an institution to cover their ass by pointing to regulatory language stipulating the acceptable risk level they are expected to uphold. It is harder for an institution to defend a decision knowing that it violates a codified or “industry recommended” risk level they’ve used for eleventy-billion years. Not only would policy makers have to admit they ignored their adopted acceptable risk level because of political pressure, but they are also opening themselves (their institutions) up for lawsuits.
Apparently Tennessee isn’t even going to collect data on cases in schools. They won’t even know if there is an outbreak at a school. That’s all on local districts.
Shit like this is why everyone is reading the official guidance so skeptically. How can we trust anything?
That’s exactly why I don’t think schools should open, @MandaJo . If a school isn’t obligated to tell you if there are any kids in your class who have COVID, then it is impossible for you to make an informed decision.
It’s bad enough we don’t have data that are granular enough to accurately characterize the risk of opening a school within a school district, let alone an entire school system. Having that would be a good starting point, at least. But it is unfathomable to me how anyone can justify withholding information about what’s going on inside a school that’s already open.
We should have a general strike until we have free or low-cost rapid testing everywhere. Test results should be georeferenced by census district and published on every state’s health department webpage, updated daily. Our test capacity should be enough to allow everyone to be tested on weekly basis. A school should only be allowed to open when the census districts it serves have a low positivity rate. I know this is a fantasy. I don’t need anyone to tell me this is a fantasy. But this is what our leaders should have pushed for before anyone even talked about opening things up. I’m so pissed off right now!!
Right. And not just knowing if my school is personally safe, but knowing which schools are more or less successful gives the rest of us information we need to keep our schools safe.
In Canada, the decisions are not made by institutions but public health medical specialists. They have not been perfect or avoided mistakes. Far from it. But I’m grateful Canadian governments have listened to the medical experts (who disagree quite a bit) at the national, provincial and municipal levels. They’ve done a credible job when data is incomplete and fears are high. It’s not easy to take these tough decisions, and impossible to avoid criticism. Those making them should be as informed by science as possible. They should publicize any results when this is a reasonable thing to do. I think they have struck a reasonable balance here. I’m glad our leaders, even ones I didn’t much like before, have been very open. Individual districts need some guidance. Canada’s politicians have earned some respect on this file.
Well being somewhat who you apparently would classify as without some modicum of intelligence, I don’t “know” that. My sub-modicum level of intelligence also means that I had to spend some time reading and re-reading that article to understand what their analysis actually was. It would be a great journal club article to illustrate poor conclusion drawing.
First some background. In most countries across the world the growth of COVID-19 cases and mortality followed a similar growth trajectory, slowing the growth rate sometime after week 2 of reaching 1 case/million.
For examples week 2 and subsequent weeks 7 day averages of growth rates per 91-divoc:
U.S. 1.37; 1.19; 1.12; 1.06
France 1.22; 1.18; 1.15; 1.07
Sweden 1.29; 1.10; 1.10; 1.05
Iceland 1.18; 1.17; 1.12; 1.06
The bottom line of this study is that across the U.S. school closures were done and growth rates were lower the following weeks, “a temporal association”, and the difference between what the rates would have been at the same rates extrapolated, rates “which were calculated using model estimates with the assumption of linear growth” and the new rates, they claim, are cases and deaths saved by the intervention. But no where in the world did that assumption of continued linear growth hold true.
Sweden and Iceland saw similar sorts of decreases in the same several weeks into their epidemics without closing schools … the same “temporal association” between NOT closing schools and slowing of growth rates. All four of those countries, the ones that closed schools and the ones that did not, all dropped to 1.06 +/- 0.01 by week 5. Huh.
If there was ever a study in which the caution about correlation and causation was warranted and horribly ignored by the authors this one is it. But that could be my sub-modicum intelligence at work …
That said I will grant the obvious, no matter how low the risk of harm (which ≠ “level of harm”) the issue is always deciding what is the acceptable level of risk (to the best ability to deduce it) compared to the harms and risks of harms caused by doing the other action.
Agreed with @Dr_Paprika that his country’s credible leadership and specific guidance from the top levels is a wonderful thing that the United States is lacking. We are left many individual states and districts making irrational choices, each re-inventing the wheel, some coming up with square ones and some with brakes stuck in full on position.
Ah! This makes sense, and yes, I would love to know what kind of threshold risk levels schools use to decide when to close for e.g. snow, and how that compares to the estimated risk here. As a child growing up in the South, what I thought happened was that schools just closed down whenever there was a snowflake because we had no idea how to deal with snow and had no idea how dangerous it might be. (Hmm… an analogy? 
) When I met people who lived farther north than I did, they thought we were ridiculous and were willing to go to school in much harsher conditions, but then again they probably also had much more data to be able to make an estimated risk assessment. But I don’t know what that is.