He didn’t say that. A local district would of course be free to consider the status of neighboring districts when making a decision.
Hawaii’s rate has increased since then … but is still less than 10/100K (yellow level) across the state. The cases though are concentrated in Honolulu County, pretty much none elsewhere. And the HGHI guidance also advises to take the directionality and slope into account. Strong action on that island, inclusive of but not limited to orange level school restrictions (prioritizing preK to 5 and special education needs), makes sense. (Closing schools without the other actions would make no sense.)
Montana is at 10/100K and dropping with positivity rate under 5%. Death rates dropping too. I couldn’t quibble with either yellow or orange. They are neither red nor green though.
No question that ALL mitigation actions (and release from them) will need to be made tentatively and cautiously, and schools are part of the package.
@monstro - the district wide action should be not so often shifted as it should be part of the more broad mitigation decision process and package. Plans of response for when a case or set of cases are inevitably found in a classroom should be rational and require contact tracing with quarantine of close contacts, not shutting down entire schools and re-opening them “over and over and over again” because a teacher or student tested positive.
@GIGObuster I wouldn’t say that districts should “ignore” what is happening at the state or county level. In fact the HGHI approach includes consideration of what is happening in surrounding districts and state level as part of the decision process. But there is no need for, say southern Illinois and northeastern Illinois to implement exactly the same plans if their regional rates and slopes are very different.
I think he still has not noticed that the Harvard document has been noticed already, as I pointed out before it is really less helpful to the ones proposing that schools should open. Some areas can, but as your observation about how rates change rapidly, shows how likely is that even green areas can change color very quickly like in Israel or Georgia.
This week 260 employees in one of Georgia’s biggest school districts were barred from entering their schools to plan for reopening because they either had the virus or had been in contact with an infected individual.
The disclosure comes after an official report of what appeared to have been a “super-spreader” event, also in Georgia, where more than 200 teenagers attending an overnight YMCA summer camp were also infected.
Equally troubling, according to the report, was the fact that – contrary to earlier theories about the spread of the disease in children – younger children, as well as those who spent longer at the camp, appeared more likely to be infected.
The CDC report said: “The findings demonstrate that Sars-CoV-2 spreads efficiently in a youth-centric overnight setting, resulting in high attack rates among persons in all age groups, despite efforts by camp officials to implement most recommended strategies to prevent transmission.”
The report added: “Asymptomatic infection was common and potentially contributed to undetected transmission, as has been previously reported. This investigation adds to the body of evidence demonstrating that children of all ages are susceptible to Sars-CoV-2 infection and, contrary to early reports, might play an important role in transmission.”
Amid a vigorous debate in the UK and elsewhere about the reopening of schools, the Georgia events have highlighted how little is known about the spread of Covid in younger age groups, with much of the focus in recent months on older and more vulnerable populations.
Part of the issue, as the Harvard epidemiologist William Hanage explained last month, is that many countries closed schools early in the pandemic, leaving little opportunity to study if and how the virus spread among children, and studies that had been made of children and transmission were sometimes problematic.
“Household studies have typically found that children are rarely infected and rarely transmit. But those household studies all suffer from bias, which is that they start by identifying a person who was infected and then testing the people around them.
“Now, because children are much less likely to have severe disease or even noticeable symptoms at all, that means that an adult is more likely to be identified as the index case. And then when you go around and you sample the kids, you find the kid and you assume that the adult must have transmitted to the kid.
“The other thing about it is that the closure of schools and other interaction, other actions that people have taken as part of social distancing, limit the opportunity of children to make contacts along which the virus could transmit. So, we’re not seeing the types of interactions that we might expect if schools are opened.”
He did not say that BTW, But this shows that the main point is ignored, there needs to be a concerted effort, not an ‘every district for themselves’ solution.
Hence the often repeated point: the Harvard guidelines are less helpful to the idea that schools should open (again, even some places that can be considered green can change status very quickly as pointed before), the guidelines are more helpful to the position that we should start with remote classes as many districts in Arizona decided to do.
I really would had thought that when many others, like me included, reported early that what Harvard proposed was OK, that then one that looks for evidence that schools should open would had wondered why is that the people insisting with caution and insisting on not opening schools in general did agree with those guidelines too. (Hence the other point that this looks a lot as climate change contrarians when they totally miss that others already did look at a scientific paper (or guideline even) and found that it is actually more helpful to the reverse position that they have)
There does need to be guidance from at least the State level. This Atlantic writer does not favour return to university.
You really are not being coherent.
Yes Israel opened up everything very quickly (and had a school opening plan of crowded High School classrooms with teachers who did not mask, one who came in sick, and no enforced student masking). Opening up packed bars right off can change rates. Who would have guessed? Not advising doing that.
The Georgia overnight camp CDC report and its “might” and “potentially” statement has been discussed before. Not gonna keep repeating the same points. But Georgia as an example of how “even green areas can change color very quickly”??? Georgia has been in the red metric level for well over a month, beginning its surge in early June.
OTOH if we imagined them actually being in the orange level for weeks then being sure to keep those who tested positive or who had close contact with a positive off the grounds seems like a good thing, not a bad one.
I’m supposed to be the incoherent. 
I guess you are also missing that my background is in Social Studies and then drifted into technology, point here that many already told you about how many would not follow proper advice, your advise is not going to very reasonable ears and many like me warned about that issue, just look at was going on in districts in Georgia (not just summer camp).
You go to war with the army you have, and in this case it is already dismissing a lot of what was recommended in this battle, hence: more ammunition to the side that advises on closing schools on most locations.
I can also tell you that some districts are headed by dunderheads that do not follow your advise. So it is then that we should demand the districts’ leadership to enforce the guidelines or else it is more regulation or closings coming from the state government.
Again, pressing on the Harvard guidelines are welcomed by me and many others that support school closures in most locations, it actually supports more the position that most places should not open schools yet.
What are the expectations around students getting tested? With the difficulty of getting tested and the long delays to get the results, it’s not really practical to get tested every time someone has the minor symptoms that could be anything. Plus, I can see working parents being disincentivized to proactively test their kids. If they would have to quarantine their kids until the results come back, parents may choose to just have the kid keep going to school and see if the symptoms get worse.
The rule is that if you have symptoms, you stay home as if you had COVID. Of course, lots of symptoms are very generic and common, so it’s not clear how that plays out.
This article makes some overlooked points about testing and ventilation systems.
Folks with seasonal allergies (like myself) are going to be twisted up in knots soon. From March-May, I was in near-constant COVID panic because my allergies are off the chain and the symptoms were just too damn close to COVID for my liking.
The Utah principal didn’t contract COVID-19 doing anything school related.
Unless you are making the point that we should open schools, because teachers and administrators are going to die of it anyway.
How about the point that had schools been open he could have brought it to the workplace. Or picked it up at the workplace. Either way.
I was going to have a word with monstro, but I will have an issue here with the reporting. There was a line in the article claiming that:
Rindlisbacher did not contract the virus in any capacity as an educator, according to Cache Valley Daily.
And then when one looks at the source, what they say was actually:
It is not believed that he contracted the virus while in any capacity as an educator or administrator.
Well, until more is known, talking about beliefs is not about the facts. The reporting there really did suck.
I don’t see that. I’ve got a G5 student. I’d still like to see him in school 1 day in 5, or 1 week in 5, or on random occasions suddenly announced the night before – if we had to suddenly cancel a day of work, or all work, it wouldn’t be any worse than having to cancel all work all the time.
Also, I just had a look at the Harvard guidelines, and I’d be pleased if something like that was in place. We are just at the edge of the Orange/Yellow categories – recommended some students at school in modified classrooms – but we’ve spent months in the Green area but with all schools closed while the only sick people were the family of returned travelers and cruise patrons. I burn more about being closed while we are Orange/Yellow because we’ve already lost all that time while we were Green.
The school that went viral for the photo of the packed hallways has reported nine cases.
Given the timing, the elementary school principal would have contracted the virus right around July 4th.
I don’t live in Utah. Maybe their school hallways were packed with children on Independence Day. Where I live, our schools are not open that time of year. There is a summer school, which was virtual this year, which takes far fewer students than the total student population, so this particular principal may not have been involved with that. I do not know what his job duties are or were in early July.
Hence, it doesn’t seem relevant to “opening schools.” It is one of the legions of clickbait articles related to COVID-19 that are not really about the issue being discussed, or “suggest” in the 5th paragraph what is stated with dead certainty in the headline.
Just by personal experience, working as an IT and assistant in 2 high schools in Phoenix, I have seen the principals of the schools being very busy in the July month, preparing for the coming school year by coming to campus with teachers or other staff to do work on some days, like when seeing if roofs are fixed properly or to help organize the academic materials or the new activities for the start of the year.
So in Arizona in the districts I know we were lucky, so far, I do think masks are making the difference and enforcing their use in the office has been a good thing. So yeah, I would still want to check if no activities were done in the office of that school by the principal who did die. And importantly, to know what TV news or sources he relied to get his information on what to do in his office.