…its rank amateurism to cite a random study that looked at data from months ago that looked at a specific set of data in one particular country to make the bold claim that every country that closed schools got it wrong. Rank amateurism at best. In fact I doubt even an amateur would make such a colossal error of judgement.
Okay, fine. Fair enough. How about ‘many countries got it wrong’? It seems there is an emerging consensus that:
a) children who’ve been out of school for an extended period of time are suffering from it
b) schools don’t appear to be significantly more risky places than wherever children are spending their time besides in school
*But, it wasn’t a random study. It was three studies, from respectable institutions and reported on by University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP, another respected institution. And it was three countries. If that helps.
…New Zealand closed their schools during Level 4 lockdown back in March. If we ever go back into Level 4 (which doesn’t look likely) we would close the schools again.
Did New Zealand get it wrong, and would it be wrong to close down again if we hit Level 4 again?
The UK have just closed schools again. Covid is wildly out of control over there. Were they wrong? Should they open the schools?
Sweden have closed some schools for the first time due to the pandemic. Are they wrong? Should they reopen?
The New Zealand experience showed that the best way to stop children being out of school for an extended period of time (and suffering from it) was to close almost everything down for a non-extended period of time to break the chains of transmission. Was that, in your opinion, the wrong thing to do? Did we get it wrong?
I’m more than happy to grant an exception for New Zealand.
…why?
And what about the UK? And what about Sweden?
Because New Zealand has done a stupendous job of managing the virus and preventing ongoing community spread. Every abundance of caution seems reasonable – particularly at this stage, with so much having been invested.
Sweden, though, or the UK or the US or any other place with uncontrolled community spread? They might want to start looking more closely at the costs and benefits. I maintain that the costs of closing schools are high, and getting higher as the months continue to pass. The benefits, in the way of decreasing threats to the health of children and school personnel, may not outweigh the costs. Or at least it’s worth asking the question and trying to arrive at an answer.
…this isn’t an answer to my question. Were the UK right to close their schools or was that a mistake? The UK reported 1564 deaths today. The biggest figure in a single day. And curve is still going up.
Is now the right time to be dithering over this? New Zealand did a stupendous job of preventing ongoing community spread because we didn’t fuck around making decisions. Boris and Co were insisting the weekend before they closed schools that schools were safe to open and that they had to open schools for the very reasons you champion here. And they opened schools for a single day before abruptly changing their minds.
Sweden, though, or the UK or the US or any other place with uncontrolled community spread? It isn’t the time to start looking more closely at the costs and benefits. We are into the second year of the pandemic and they’ve had a whole fucking year to look more closely at the costs and benefits.
This illustration shows where the UK is at. Except they aren’t breaking the chains of transmission. And because they aren’t breaking the chains things are spinning out of control. Drastic measures are needed now. They’ve run out of time. Closing schools cuts a chain of transmission. But they have to do more.
(shared under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0 . Illustration by Toby Morris in collaboration with Siouxsie Wiles and published by The Spinoff)
You really aren’t grasping the scale of where things are at right now. Cases in places with uncontrolled community spread aren’t going to magically go down. They aren’t even going to remain static. Exponential spread is exponential spread. Without intervention the numbers will only ever go up. Uncontrolled community spread is a really really bad thing. An out of control pandemic is objectively a really bad thing. When a pandemic is out of control you prioritize getting the pandemic under control. Because things will spiral even more out of control orders of magnitude faster than any potential consequences of closing schools for another month or two.
So my question to you again is should the UK open the school up now? Were they wrong to close them? Should Sweden open all their schools now? Were they wrong to close them?
That graphic is such low-level reasoning. It makes the clear implication that the people ‘downstream’ would be protected from disease by ‘upstream’ actions taken by specific individuals. God, if it were only that easy. Time does march on, and evading one would-be infection does not at all give you immunity against the rest of them. That one guy who didn’t take a domestic flight? He didn’t give a ‘get out of virus free’ card to countless people down the line. They better still keep their guard up. Communities aren’t organized in such neat linear hierarchies. It’s far closer to circular.
I mean, it’s just the most shallow analysis. I think the majority of people who talk about ‘exponential spread’ these days don’t have a full grasp of how what they are claiming works. That graphic shows a handful of generations of doubling or tripling. Do you know how long it would take for the entire world to be infected, if the virus really spread like that? Here’s a hint: not long. True exponential spread has a very short life span.
What I believe is that every jurisdiction ought to have opening schools as their default stance and one of their top priorities. If they believe they have compelling reason to intervene for short periods, fine. But indefinite closures as a default stance I believe is a mistake.
For what it’s worth, here’s the latest from the CDC:
The return to in-person classes in nearly two-thirds of the U.S. hasn’t led to a rash of community outbreaks, federal scientists said in a study of 2.87 million cases among those under age 24.
Disease rates in counties where in-person learning is available for school-aged children and adolescents is similar to areas where classes are entirely online, according to a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It concludes schools should be the last to close, and the first to re-open.
…that graphic was put together in collaboration with New Zealand’s best science communicators with a proven record of being right. Your opinion counts for nothing here.
God.
It is that easy.
Thats the entire point.
This was the New Zealand strategy.
It wasn’t flatten the curve. It was break the chains of transmission.
This was exactly how we did it.
Break the chains for long enough and the virus has nowhere to go.
That you have chosen to mock the graphic instead of trying to understand the graphic shows exactly why you’ve been wrong about almost everything you’ve said about Covid since the start.
The graphic says nothing about immunity.
Which is exactly why we have built multiple lines of defense. It started with a hard lockdown where almost everything was closed to break the chains of transmission. We closed the borders except to returning New Zealanders and essential workers and set up managed isolation hotels to quarantine returnees. We built a gold standard contact tracing team. We massively scaled up our ability to test. As things have gotten worse overseas we have adapted our strategy accordingly. QR codes compulsory on shops and venues.
We built multiple layers of defense, none of it based on immunity. We have kept our guard up.
I mean, you are demonstrating the most shallow of analysis here. Toby and Siouxsie’s graphic has been shared by scientific communities worldwide because it communicates a complex idea in a very simple way. The simplicity is the point.
Which is why every argument you’ve made on these boards, from lockdowns to wearing masks, have been wrong, and are dangerous. Without mitigation it wouldn’t take very long for covid to go around the world. But in reality every government and every community are doing things to mitigate spread. Some places are doing better than others. The UK is doing worse than most, but they are also in a “lockdown”, many are wearing masks, schools have closed, all of these measures have an impact.
Who has been arguing for indefinite closures as a default stance? Name those countries please.
And can you answer my question? Did the UK make a mistake when they closed the schools? How about Sweden? A yes or no would suffice.
And I’m sure it works very effectively for those who prefer simplistic reasoning with their afternoon tea. Me, I’m more interested in digging down and understanding how the complex systems really work.
Well, you can’t have this both ways. If it takes gold-standard mitigation measures to prevent overwhelming exponential spread, then those places that haven’t followed gold-standard mitigation practices must have had overwhelming exponential spread. And if they have, but by now everyone has not been infected, then the spread really wasn’t exponential in the first place, in theory or in practice.
Apologies if that level of analysis is not simplistic enough, but it’s as low as I’m willing to go.
…understanding the simple graphic will give you an insight into how that complex system works.
Well you can.
This wasn’t what I said.
This wasn’t what I said. My only mention of gold-standard was in relation to contact tracing, and I said nothing even close to “places that haven’t followed gold-standard mitigation practices must have had overwhelming exponential spread.” I outlined our extra layers of defense in response to your statement “They better still keep their guard up.” We did keep our guard up.
You are this close to deliberately misrepresenting what I said. I’m gonna ask politely for you to stop doing that.
Another distortion of what I said. Just stop it already.
There was no analysis. Just an attack on a strawman.
And I’m going to take it you aren’t going to answer my question? Okay then.
Okay, I understand that you aren’t claiming it takes gold-standard mitigation to successfully prevent exponential spread. What level, then, does it take? Is there room for schools to remain open?
…I’m sorry: but what are you even talking about now?
Schools are open here in NZ and they’ve been open for quite a while and they were even open during the Americold outbreak back in August. This isn’t about whether or not I think schools should be open or not. This is about your assertion that “many countries got it wrong” about school closures. I asked you if you thought the UK and/or Sweden “got it wrong” when they recently closed schools. You never answered that question.
So you are saying that a microbiologist and epidemiologist (Dr Siouxsie Wiles) has provided a shallow analysis as an illustration. I rather suspect that she has a much better grasp of exponential spread than you do - quite literally, it’s what she does for a living.
Unconstrained disease spread is exponential. Factors such as the replication value and infection cycle control how quickly exponential growth occurs. Fortunately, even when people are not trying particularly hard, Covid-19 growth is partially constrained. But if the replication value is greater than 1, the growth is exponential (until herd immunity forces infection rates to tail off, because of the scarcity of un-infected individuals).
Here’s a science type person in France who may be qualified, or at least allowed, to opine on it:
Jean-François Delfraissy, who heads the scientific council advising the government on the epidemic, said school closures were unnecessary but new restrictions were needed in the face of the spread of the UK variant of the virus in France.
Psychological toll on students
Delfraissy also called for university classes to resume in February, citing the psychological toll of the pandemic restrictions on students.
“It’s a major public health concern,” the advisor said. “We are asking a lot of this young population of France.”
Ignoring a major pubic health concern might be considered by some to be…well, a mistake.
AFP new agency reported that a student in Lyon was stopped from jumping out a window of a residence on Tuesday evening after neighbours intervened. The student residence board said the reasons for the attempted suicide were unknown and that the student was currently in hospital.
The incident came as after another student was in critical condition in hospital after jumping out of a window of a university residence in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, several days earlier.
“Like all students, we are socially isolated,” wrote Romain Narbonnet, one of the student’s classmates, in a Facebook post shared 24,000 times as of midday on Wednesday.
“For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we stay in our student bedrooms, which are the size of prison cells, only with Wifi. How much can one student take?”
Anecdotes and all, but if they are really trapped in dorm rooms indefinitely, you can see how that would be not good.
Ah, but of course that is not how it’s portrayed in that graphic. I mean, not just ‘greater than 1’. Now is it? Compound interest is also exponential, but you don’t see bankers claiming you’ll be near-infinitely wealthy in a short amount of time. And viral spread does not work in the uniform way that interest does, or that the graphic implies.
I don’t know anything about what the good Dr Wiles does when she’s really doing scientific research. But I know full well what she’s doing when she’s pushing concepts like that for public health purposes. I’m quite certain that as an epidemiologist she is well versed in concepts of heterogeneity in viral spread.
…thank you for sharing a science type person’s opinion. How did you manage to stumble across it, may I ask? And what do you think the UK should do?
Has anyone suggested we ignore this?
Perhaps the problem here isn’t closing the schools, but trapping people in dorm rooms indefinitely? Perhaps this is something the science type person in France could actually do something about?
Because the entire point of the graphic was to get a very complex point out to as many people as possible in a way that they could digest it to save as many lives as possible. This is public health messaging in a pandemic. Stephen Hawking once said that “each equation I included in the book [A Brief History of Time] would halve the sales.” And most New Zealanders have never heard of “R Numbers” and they didn’t need to know what that number meant in order to keep each other safe.
Because the simplicity of the message is the point. Why would you use more complex messaging?
When I think about the four public figures most directly responsible for the success of our Covid Strategy IMHO I think of the Prime Minister, I think of Ashley Bloomfield, I think of Professor Mike Baker and I think of Dr Wiles. You’ve dismissed her work as “shallow analysis.” But our numbers say it all.
Well, there is a poster in this thread who keeps offering a comparison of Sweden’s death rate with those of three neighboring countries as evidence that Sweden fucked up by not locking down more stringently. I claim that such a simplistic measure is insufficient to assess Sweden’s approach, as it does not give consideration – any at all, as far as I can tell – to the benefits Sweden received from their approach, keeping most of their children in school as one case in point.
…so that poster hasn’t suggested we ignore this. Gotcha.
I think we have more than enough data to confidently say that Sweden fucked up. Having to close many of those schools now because they are struggling to keep things under control is just one example.