The basic problem is that you are asking to prove a negative. The burden of proof is typically in the opposite direction. But that said if we can be confident there are a set of procedures and policies that significantly improves safety then the window should shift. The question is what are the plans, how effective are the plans AND how reliably are they followed. One of the reasons I talk about ventilation a lot. Monitoring CO2 could possibly go a long way. Could $300 air filters in each room do a lot?
The other big but is that tons of places in the US are doing much less than your school. Resources vary so much.
I just saw an article this weekend that made a good point
-if government says some indoor dining is Ok then people think it must be safe and there window for what they consider ok shifts toward more risky action. They went further and applied to schools in that with schools open, kids do more outside of schools because it’s safe to be open. (Note this is the opinion I read I don’t recall what data if any is behind it). The Overton window aspect around what’s considered safe based on government approval does fit with my conversations around town.
Mine have been too, with similar precautions and a lot of outdoor activity.
I was nervous about it but the plan seemed relatively sound and has worked. They test the whole school community each week.
No community spread cases yet, although the third case in the school population still not two weeks back so not out of the woods yet. They will take the day off and test the whole community tomorrow, go remote at least Tuesday pending results, then test the whole community again Thursday if deemed safe to reopen through Monday testing. Hopefully they can remain open. My kids are younger and zoom learning for them is borderline useless. I am expecting community spread drives it remote at some point, especially with outside getting harder with winter, but so far safe.
This is not possible in USA at large with the current resources and community spread, but we sure as shit could open schools during the pandemic if we had Federal support to do it rather then argle bargle rhetoric as part of a COVID minimizing propaganda effort.
I mean, my experience with kids and covid is pretty darn small for obvious reasons, but my older girl (3) is pretty fine with wearing a mask when we’re out. She doesn’t have the best nose discipline, but she seems to regard wearing a mask as something special for her (her sister is under 2 and thus too young for one). She like to wear one like mom does. Kids will tend to be worse than their parent’s on average, but I can’t say I agree that “kids” as a group, take the fewest precautions. “Republicans” may well be worse. Tons of them are way worse than my 3 year old.
My only contribution to this OFS thing is that I teach at a high school with 1100+ students and our county has had a 7-cumulative-infection rate of around 100/100.000 for a while. so statistically we should have had one case per week. We had one in five weeks and no in school spread based on that.
I think that is mostly due to reduced extracurricular activities on the students side and comparatively good mask discipline.
It is all anecdotal, but strangely enough I do feel mostly safe spending the day in a building with 1.000+ people.
You’re not wrong, but kids are more amenable to correction than many Republicans. Teens are tougher, but kids are not going to be all, “You can’t tell me what to do!” when most of themselves have spent their whole lives being told what to do. Vigilant badgering is effective, and modeling proper behavior even moreso. “Do as I say, and as I do” is how kids learn good habits.
Recently saw pictures of my classes taking large group photos together without masks. When they aren’t near a teacher, the mask is off. It only goes on if a teacher calls them out on it. Once the teacher is out of sight, mask off again.
I have no idea if you’re going to read this or not, but if you didn’t ignore me you’d have read it a week ago. From the CDC explanation of the indicators, bolding in original:
If, after applying the core indicators described in the table below, a school is at “medium,” “higher,” or “highest” risk of transmission, it does not mean that the school cannot re-open for in-person learning
The indicators are a guide to how vigilant the school needs to be, not a method for determining whether they should close or not.
I definitely don’t think “kids don’t spread COVID” but it’s definitely possible and perhaps likely that young kids spread it significantly less. Whether you close schools or not depends on your strategy. Basically my opinion is that if you’re going to accept some level of spread then primary schools are the absolute first place you accept it in, after truly essential services like supermarkets and healthcare. One of the big problems with “the case numbers are very high, quick close schools” is that high case numbers is in itself an indicator of insufficient action elsewhere. My answer to “omg high case numbers, should schools close?” is just “wrong question”.
In Australia, in Victoria schools were closed as part of a hard lockdown and they went for elimination of the virus and got it. In NSW they went more for test-and-trace and didn’t close schools. If you’re just going to allow virtually uncontrolled spread, then modelling from Imperial College, published in BMJ demonstrated that closing schools INCREASED overall mortality, because leaving them open allowed some spread within a non-vulnerable population, creating a mini herd immunity effect which mitigated second and third waves. I don’t think there’s anything like a linear relationship between case numbers and urgency of closing schools, it’s more complicated than that.
If you look at a Australia that did proper contact tracing there were several kids found to have the virus and schools that got closed after they tested positive. However none of these led to big clusters of cases. All the big clusters were around indoor dining, pubs and churches. Places that also all got closed down immediately after a positive test. This is why I still think children spread it slower than adults but if you keep your school with postive kids open then eventually that won’t make a difference. Order of closing things first to last should be churches, pubs, indoor dining, schools. Especially since closing down schools has an impact that is the most difficult to recover from.
So you would predict that the test positivity rate in children would be substantially higher than in adults? Turns out it’s not! In fact, for most states that report the data, children’s test results come back positive at a significantly lower rate than the population at large. (Sources are here (p. 16) and here.)
When reading this thread, virtually every time I came across asymptomatic, my brain read it as asymptotic and I had to correct myself. This time, someone actually wrote asymptotic, but after all the training, my brain read it as asymptomatic.
@BadPokerAnalogy, it’s like I made hero calls at every opportunity the whole session, was wrong every time, but then finally found a fold and got shown a bluff.
An interesting thing about school-aged children is that, although they have a lot of contacts outside the home, the social graph of children is largely disconnected from broader society, except for a relatively small number of bridgehead nodes (basically parents and schoolteachers). Children, for example, don’t (or shouldn’t) do the family grocery shopping, hit the bars, etc. So even if there are a lot of young kids with COVID, you could attenuate the spread of the disease from that population to more vulnerable adults by regularly testing parents and teachers and discouraging contacts between kids and people other than caregivers.
So was turkey the cure for Covid all along or someone explain how the numbers are magically down so much the last 4 days? Let’s of counties and states not reporting or what? Even if Thanksgiving didn’t have states report shouldn’t those numbers have ended up in one of the last few days?
I don’t really get at all what the “debate” is here.
Of course kids catch and spread this respiratory virus.
Of course the schools that take the most rigorous precautions (testing everyone regularly, distancing, capacity restrictions) will tend to have lower prevalence of infection than those populations not doing the same level of mitigation.
Of course it is riskier to send your kids to school (or anywhere outside of a home on “full lockdown”) during a pandemic.
Of course educating children is important and should be done as well as possible wherever possible.
Of course the more essential a service is, the more likely it should remain available during a crisis.
Of course, some people will be willing to accept the increased risk for themselves and their children and consume various services during a crisis.
And finally, of course humans are terrible at risk analysis, and clear, concise public health messaging borne from good science should be the absolute minimum governmental response during a pandemic. Ooops.
I think the “close the schools” crowd is a little to naive in their thinking that we just can stop for a year and pick up after this pandemic is over. I dont think its that easy. The development of the body and brain doesnt take a break. Kids have to reach certain development steps. If they dont they usually(at least in my country) get a prescription for ergotherapy, physiotherapy or logopedics to help them reach these steps. You cant just postpone because the next group of 1/2/3/4 year olds will be there in a year from now and the number of teachers doesnt magically increase. There isnt an abundance of therapists either to help all these kids to catch up.
As soon as the pandemic is over the focus will shift. I wouldnt trust any government to do the right thing otherwise schools wouldnt be in such a poor shape overall. So the burden would fall back on the parents to somehow help their kids catch up. Parents were already overwhelmed with the first lockdown. The choice right now probably is between school and visiting your grandparents less often. Its a tough choice to make for certain.
I generally agree with your post, but I don’t think “close the schools” is exactly what anyone who feels that pausing in-person instruction in areas of high community transmission of COVID-19 is advocating for.
Obviously its very complex, and there is a hit to academic integrity that comes with moving to fully distanced modalities, and there are certainly very clear equity issues that arise as well.
But, the other thing that hinders a child’s development is death, be it their own, their parent, or their teacher. So, of course it’s all a balancing act, and it shouldn’t be all or nothing on either side of the ledger imo.
My school system has gone fully remote until Jan. 15 due to all the people, (including teachers and administrators, but also the student’s families), traveling for the holidays. The town is outraged of course. Most parents who spoke at the committee meeting wanted to go from hybrid to full attendance just after the TG break lol. Life is for living dontchano.
Look for NH numbers to start exploding if the rest of the state is anything like my county. It’s everywhere around me now. Crazy how many positive cases I’ve heard about in the last few days, well over a dozen just in my little town alone.