I get the feeling there will be a lot of shunning. You think some kids felt left out before?
Aye; I caught myself and realized I had taken the Gish Gallop bait. But that’s all your post was: a flood of ridiculous questions, meant to overwhelm and thus stifle and dilute any response.
And you avoided answering my question: how long will we allow “I didn’t know” to be an excuse?
The kid’s parents had the guidelines. Why is “we didn’t know” an acceptable excuse?
I agree. It’s not at all clear how we handle allergies or IBS.
So, I went back to the story quoted above and it says
School personnel investigated the matter and learned that the student’s parents were mistaken about the student’s end of quarantine date.
I went on the school’s website and if you can find their covid guidelines you’re better than I.
There’s this page Should I keep my child at home? {page 279 btw) no mention of covid.
I went to the OK State Dept of Education, and they essentially pass the buck to the school districts. but they reference the CDC and The President’s Plan for Opening America Up Again which doesn’t talk about schools but does recommend that sick employees follow the CDC guidelines..
clear as mud.
I don’t have any info about the specific case, but if it was just that the student should quarantine for ‘x’ number of days then I could see how it could be confusing. Maybe the family was playing fast and loose. The kid was supposed to go back on Thu and they sent him back on Wed that sort of thing. But, it could be that the actual end day was vague.
My whole point, originally, was that the news headline made it seem like the kid(or parents) knew he was infectious and went to school anyway, when the reality of the case was quite different.
I don’t think @mikecurtis deserves the sanctimonious attitude, @Snowboarder_Bo. No one cares that you’re tired of “excuses”. He wasn’t making any. He was offering explanations.
I have been following the coronavirus stuff very closely from day one and even I don’t know all the “rules”. A couple of weeks ago I was in a very shitty dilemma. Should I let my mother–who had been battling corona just a couple of weeks prior–come up and take care of me after my surgery? Or should I tell her to stay home to minimize my risk of getting sick?
When I shared my worries with her, she insisted that she was corona-free. But the test results hadn’t come back yet. And she was still coughing and complaining of fatigue. But people cough all the time. And she’s a 73-year-old who just battled a major illness. Of course she’s going to be fatigued. Neither of those things means she’s contagious. Still, I didn’t know what to do.
Word got back to me that my mother was devastated that I was hedging on letting her come up. So I caved and told her to come. I did so knowing there was a non-zero risk that I might get infected. She spent four days with me, and that was three weeks ago. It is possible that I got infected, but I never got sick. Guess what? We still don’t know whether she was corona-positive while she was with me. Cuz the fucking test results haven’t come yet.
So I can easily imagine a scenario where parents (and teachers) make mistakeseven when they follow the CDC guidelines. We don’t have rapid testing. In many places the testing is so horrible it might as well not even exist. So parents will have to make the decision that their kids are no longer COVID symptomatic against a backdrop of confounding variables. Like anxiety-related symptoms and allergies. This is definitely going to lead to some kids going to school when they are still contagious. And this is especially going to be true in the next few weeks when cold, flu, and allergy season kick in. You will have kids who have corona on top of allergies on top of everything else, and we are going to be expecting parents to know what to do IN THE ABSENCE OF TEST RESULTS! So it is BULLSHIT to be sanctimonious right now. Save the sanctimony for when the system isn’t so shitty. Right now I don’t blame parents for not knowing what the fuck to do. They’ve got people hounding them to go to work and they’ve got people hounding to keep their kids at home. And no one is helping them with either. Hell yes they will be making excuses because what the fuck else are they going to do.
Working parents don’t have unlimited leave. They can’t keep their kids out of school every time they have a cough or complain of stomach pains.
Moderator Note
Let’s keep this kind of snark out of this forum.
To everyone else, let’s drop the personal remarks. Several other remarks deserve notes, but I’m not going to single them out. Let’s keep the discussion civil.
Colibri
QZ Moderator
To expand on this: every bit of advice assumes testing is available, affordable, and responsive. The positivity rate in Texas is 20%. That means there’s no where near enough testing, and it’s not like people don’t want to be tested. They can’t. And anecdotally, turn-around time is terrible. Weeks, not days, in many cases. Certainly not the 48 hours you need for it to be meaningful.
It’s beyond infuriating.
From the link that @mikecurtis posted:
For how long after I am infected will I continue to be contagious? At what point in my illness will I be most contagious?
People are thought to be most contagious early in the course of their illness, when they are beginning to experience symptoms, especially if they are coughing and sneezing. But people with no symptoms can also spread the coronavirus to other people if they stand too close to them. In fact, people who are infected may be more likely to spread the illness if they are asymptomatic, or in the days before they develop symptoms, because they are less likely to be isolating or adopting behaviors designed to prevent spread.
Most people with coronavirus who have symptoms will no longer be contagious by 10 days after symptoms resolve. People who test positive for the virus but never develop symptoms over the following 10 days after testing are probably no longer contagious, but again there are documented exceptions. So some experts are still recommending 14 days of isolation.
If I am a working parent reading this last paragraph, I’m gonna be like WTF, bro! Because it’s telling me that the 14-day quarantine period is just the bare minimum. If Junior shows symptoms on day 10 of the quarantine period and has symptoms for a week, then we’re essentially talking about more than four weeks of quarantine.
My district has done the right thing and gone totally on-line for the school year. They’ve done their best to make sure every student has on-line access, and passed out who knows how many Chromebooks. They’ve configured attendance and such to work through Google Classroom and Google Meet, and revised the schedule so that we teach staggered groups of students. Monday and Thursday I have periods 1, 2 & 3. Tuesday and Friday periods 4,5 & 6. Wednesday is all periods but for half the time. “Office Hours” for additional questions or help at the end of every class day. Science teachers and those who use specialized equipment have been going into their empty classrooms and teaching from there, while the rest of us teach from home. We ended last school year that way without too much disruption. We’ll see how a whole year of it goes.
FTR, I wasn’t offended by @Snowboarder_Bo and I gave as good as I got (as alluded to by @Colibri) I feel his frustration. And yours. Even for those of us who have been following the science, the advice from experts is not lock step.
I’ve worked in schools. No matter how thorough and obvious you think you’re making guidelines, there’s always gonna be some parents who dont understand, didn’t get the memo, or feel like they know better. And I think that one of the most important takeaways of this little excursion of ours is that schools need more guidance; then they need to make their guidelines for the parents and students explicit, and have a contingency in place for when everything goes south.
They also have to make them reasonable. Right now, the trend seems to be overkill: you can’t say that school is safe, as long as anyone with a little drainage or a cough or a sour stomach stays home. Treating a sore throat the same as a cough or a fever is ridiculous. By making the line “any symptom, any sign”, you encourage people to rationalize and ignore.
Also, acting like self-screening is meaningful lets the powers that be ignore the testing crisis.
When I kept after my district to allow more teacher input, they were like, Great, we’re putting you on the virtual academy committee!
I was irritated, because we need input into what’s happening now, not into what’ll happen eventually when students are allowed to come back but some students will for a variety of reasons choose not to come back right away. But I wanted to be a team player, so I joined the committee.
Except now they’re talking about setting up a virtual academy through our district permanently, and want me to help plan that. We’re a small district (~4,300 students), and setting up an academy is going to take significant resources away from our in-person students. As far as I can tell, it’s being done mainly to “recapture” (their words) the students who have left the district for charter schools, private schools, and homeschools–a population that’s overwhelmingly wealthy and white. So we’re setting up a school within our district that’ll be segregated from the get-go.
I’m looking for a way to resign from this committee: instead of helping with managing pandemic education, it’s gonna further educational inequality.
First off some ammunition for those who want some for their belief that kids in school are an existential threat to the health of all. The newest statements from the CDC are bigger belief in their transmission risk.
8 and 9 are the South Korea study and the Georgia overnight camp flare respectively.
Of course the CDC deserves some deference, yet still it must be pointed out the the South Korea findings have been revisited. (SAR = secondary attack rate.)
The NYT spin on it:
Thread participants interpret according to your own desires.
@Manda_JO - I’ve read guidelines that discuss major and minor signs and symptoms with cough/difficulty breathing being major (which means that many of us are going to much more aggressive with asthma controller medications inclusive of doubling up) but other signs, inclusive of fever alone, as minor, and low risk unless more than one are present. The CDC guidance is useless in that regard, noting that nearly half of kids with SARS-CoV-2 infections may be asymptomatic, but as for out of school is as follows:
FWIW.
Thank you.
Is there anywhere that puts any numbers on what counts as substantial community transmission? Is that what Havard Medical calls red? Yellow?
Following the link leads to a list of four levels which I’m guessing map onto the Harvard GHI four levels of green, yellow, orange, and red. But they have “substantial uncontrolled” and “substantial controlled” (would be red and orange?) … not sure if they mean only the one or both. I think we have to presume they mean both.
Not “making excuses” but dang they make it very difficult to not get confused.
I followed the link on my phone and didn’t see the chart. I’m sure it’s there, but again, confusing.
I can’t help but feel that the refusal to put numbers on any of this, even broad ranges, is more politics than science.
Here. Not sure if internal politics at CDC or just that they’ve been kneecapped.
Table 1. Level of mitigation needed by level of community transmission and community characteristics
Level of Community Transmission
Community characteristics and description
Level of mitigation
Substantial, uncontrolled transmission
Large scale, uncontrolled community transmission, including communal settings (e.g., schools, workplaces)
Shelter in place
Substantial, controlled transmission
Large scale, controlled community transmission, including communal settings (e.g., schools, workplaces)
Significant mitigation
Minimal to moderate community transmission
Sustained transmission with high likelihood or confirmed exposure within communal settings and potential for rapid increase in cases
Moderate mitigation
No to minimal community transmission
Evidence of isolated cases or limited community transmission, case investigations underway; no evidence of exposure in large communal setting
Low mitigation
Okay. I saw that. What I was looking for is some sort of quantitative data. If I am a school administrator in a small school district in an exurb, how am I supposed to know what level I am at? Am I missing something?
No. They stink.
I am presuming, perhaps mistakenly, that it maps to the Harvard GHI four levels, that do have numbers attached, with appropriate caveats on interpretations based on 10% positivity of more and directionality and slope.
That’s what I thought. And without an explicit connection, I think the CDC has basically said that “substantial, uncontrolled community transmission” is whatever someone decides it is.