Places in America start school in August? That’s nuts.
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My kids’ school was supposed to start this week. It got pushed back two weeks. They also end in late May.
I haven’t read the article, but it seems that the author is forgetting one important detail: teachers don’t have to teach in person. Is it better? Sure. But they don’t have to.
I guess it’s related to the weather?
Anyway, I can no longer claim any sort of superiority on how things are being handled on the other side of the Atlantic. Decisions are no longer based on health but are almost exclusively political.
If it’s anything like the high schools we’ve been seeing, the virus will be ripping through that entire school in weeks.
So glad I’m missing the first week of the school year.
Gonna be so many outbreaks popping up anywhere people decide to open schools.
Hot take question of the day:
Will more kids die from contracting COVID-19 in schools than are killed in school shootings during the 2020-2021 school year?
Seems like an easy yes even if only 1 in 10,000 kids die.
That’s only 1,000 per 10,000,000 so what’s the big deal. Most of them were probably going to die anyways.
So about 2 9/11s worth of school aged kids dead with this OPEN THE SCHOOLS plan. Cool.
So we’ve had what, like 100 kids or so under 18 die from COVID-19 in the US thusfar? Having trouble finding the exact number strangely enough, but it looks like < 0.1% of all of the 118k deaths in a dataset I saw.
Do we really think that we’re going to see 5k+ dead kids over this school year? I feel like I’d snap up the under, but I’m curious to hear some actual analysis from smart people.
Kids are likely dramatically underexposed thus far. There are something like 75m kids age 18 and under in the US. If kids go back to school what percentage get it over the course of a school year? It has to be pretty close to everyone but lets just say 60%. 75,000,000*.0001*.6 is 4500.
Just doing an ‘at a glance’ type analysis, it looks like there could be something like 5 bonus points at 4 weeks of widespread mask usage and 10 points at 8 weeks. If you never make it to either, no bonus. If you make it to 4 weeks but not 8, it looks like it’s possible it might just stay at 5. Even New Jersey, which hits this (only a few places have had mandates longer than 8 weeks) is still not 10 above SDI with the adjustment of 10 right now for the 8+ weeks of widespread mask usage.
As a reminder, I don’t think you can crush the curve until a place is 10+ SDI points above the target for 8 weeks minimum, though there’s not enough data to know if almost doing this early on shortens that period. I think places can bend the curve with 4 weeks of 10+ above target SDI, and flatten/plateau it 5+ above target SDI. The mask mandates get a lot of places that have been slowing 5 above target SDI, but again, I haven’t looked at this in depth enough to know if I’m seeing things that aren’t there. I think the most likely outcome is widespread mask usage adds 5 points to a current SDI, if it does anything at all.
It helps that our governor said “lol, no” about kids gokng back to school.
I mean, it sucks for the kids in the south, and fuck those parents with every rusty tool in my box, but on the front lines we can sit back a little bit and be happy that at least it isnt happening here.
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Ty for that - makes a lot of sense. I’m feeling like the 60% of all kids in the entire country that attend a school catch COVID-19 is extremely high, but it’s all speculation. Lots of schools that will open won’t be in areas with high infection rates, and most schools will presumably shut down far before 60% of the student body contracts COVID-19. If I had to guess how many school kids will end up dying this year from the schools that open, I’d have to peg it in the low hundreds, but again just a wild ass guess.
It sucks that people are making these important decisions on guesstimates and gut feelings.
As a thought experiment, I’ve been trying to consider a scenario where we open all schools and imagine the number of dead children that it would take to justify closing them all. I think 188 kids died of the flu last season, and obviously that wasn’t enough to keep them home. Tricky to peg that number that would be “acceptable” even if we did have all of the answers.
Yes… the first thing we did when Corona hit was shut down the schools, and any sane parent isnt taking the kids out of the house/to the grocery store, etc etc. If we throw them silly nilly into a giant pool full of children and virus at the top of the peak, a whole shit load of them are going to die.
Peak of the first “wave” was 34251 new cases per day and 2749 deaths per day, delayed by 15 days. That’s about 12.5x new cases/new deaths ratio. If that ratio holds (big if), and the peak of this second wave is 78446 new cases, we’d expect the peak deaths/day to be 78446/12.5 = 6275, arriving at August 9th or so. Good news is that improved treatment options will probably lower that ratio considerably, 6275 is probably an upper bound.
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