man the vax hangover is absolutely killing me today since about 2am. feels like i can’t keep anything down, even water. comparable to the worst alcohol hangover of my life.
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This seems almost Puritanical. Like we deserve to suffer for our past sins. It doesn’t work that way though. You can’t justify harming children and families as some sort of secular atonement for our poor handling of the pandemic.
As for what should have been done, I think it was completely correct to shut down for the end of the 2019-2020 school year. For 2020-2021, I think ~all of the schools that were closed should have been open, and many of the schools that were open should have been closed or should have operated very differently.
This is not supported.
Which is the point made that, in reality, school opening would drive spread because schools behavior IRL would be vastly different than the idealized studies discussed previously. It also doesn’t fit the straight up bullshit about kids not spreading covid stuff posted here and elsewhere.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1389590782605205509
Man, this shit pisses me off. I’m fully vaccinated, but what the hell am I supposed to be doing differently now? My girls are not, so we’re not going out to eat or other indoor activities. I wear masks in stores because stores still require masks. I wear a mask when picking up or dropping off the girls from daycare, because masks are required. I work from home because I work from home, and even if I wasn’t a full time WFH employee, my company isn’t planning to have a back-to-normal office presence until after Labor Day at the earliest. Shame on me for being irrational, I guess.
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I admit that I’m basically ignoring this discussion. What’s the major concern with kids back in school? We have a vaccine. Is this about how to deal with the 4-6 more weeks of this school year? Because the discussion seems fairly irrelevant if it’s not.
Most kids don’t.
[Prelude: I was in favor of closing schools last fall, and presented publicly to my district’s Board of Education saying so. But at this point, I’m pretty firmly in the open schools and require masks camp.]
For me, a major problem is that it’s no longer clear what the point of closing schools is. When I think of the possible reasons:
- We need to do what’s best for kids.
- We need to protect teachers/staff.
- We need to protect household members of the kids.
- We need to protect the broader community.
All of those reasons seem good, but at the same time it’s no longer clear what weight we should place on each one. For example, if we’re focused on #1–kids’ best interest–then I think proponents of school closings haven’t emphasized enough the costs of keeping kids remote. I know that I’m in a privileged household with functional computers and wifi and stay at home parents, and one of my kids still got educationally crushed by being remote. And when this issue gets brought up, it’s often met with, “Lazy parents are just mad that they are losing their free daycare and they actually have to PARENT.” Which is infuriating.
If the focus is on kids’ best interest, I also think the relative risk for kids–particularly in elementary and middle school–needs to be discussed more.
I don’t have national data at hand, but in Ohio, children under 18 represent:
- 9.7% of total cases (104,322 out of 1,075,999)
- 1.86% of total hospitalizations (1,056 out of 56,642)
- 0.03% of total deaths (6 out of 19,284)
and the under 18 cases are disproportionately in the high-school range:
So if we’re worried about the best interest of the children, I have a hard time seeing the obviousness that closing schools–especially elementary and middle schools–is the answer.
As for the other 3 factors, keeping spread low among the teachers/household/community, the availability of the vaccine seems pretty important. It’s very hard for me to make the argument that children should bear the cost of not being in school in order to limit the spread of cases among people who are or could easily be vaccinated.
So when I hear people say that we should continue to keep schools closed (especially in the context of the 2021-2022 school year), I wish I better understood which factor they’re focused on.
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So is it a debate about how to handle the next 6 weeks?
Cause if it’s a debate about keeping schools closed in August, well that seems kinda silly. Closing schools was an extreme measure justified by an extreme situation. The situation in the US is now far less extreme and will be far, far less in August, and most parents will be back to work.
So the places that have opened up schools tend to be the places where there is a bunch of covid spread, and they probably shouldn’t be open there, but the places that aren’t open tend to be in the areas where there isn’t as much covid, so they should probably open up.
Hmm…
That they’ll catch COVID and spread it around the same way they spread other coronaviruses every darn year.
“In-person schooling is safe within acceptable limits if we beef up our precautions.” is a position I can get behind! We can weigh the very real harm of distance learning vs the risk of spreading COVID in a sensible way. The problem is we’ve had months and months of hot-take artists assuring us that “kids are basically like vaccinated adults.” And I guarantee you The Atlantic isn’t going to run any “Oh, guess we were mistaken about all that” thinkpieces.
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What’s the time horizon? I guess I’m fine with 4-6 more weeks of restriction. After that, especially with summer, the cost/benefit against reopening doesn’t seem serious.
The difference between 6.7 and 7 is not vast. It’s small, and driven largely by the hardcore YOLO contingent. I haven’t done this analysis, but I would bet a fair amount that the increased risk from the subset of schools that had mask mandates for students and staff (the absolute minimum level of responsibility) was either insignificant or very small.
This. I did not think that sending my kids back to school was 0% risk. But my kids, particularly my 12 year old, were definitely harmed by a full year of remote school and general lockdown/lack of exposure to peers. My son developed full on anxiety/agoraphobia that needed treatment. When his school reopened I first had a direct conversation with his teacher to find out how safe the teacher felt and how confident the teacher was in the measures being taken in school. After assessing the relative risks I sent him back.
And this is a kid thath lives in a stable home with great internet, his own computer (a few, in fact!), and basically any other type of support anybody could ask for. Many kids are obviously less fortunate.
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There’s a real problem in trying to assess the causal relation between schools and COVID spread, which the authors of the Science article recognize:
Places where schools are open are more likely to have residents who generally perceive COVID to be not a big deal. They pressure their local government and board of education to open schools BECAUSE they believe that COVID isn’t real/risky. And for the same reason, they engage in lots of other activities that are COVID-risky: they eat at restaurants, they hang out in bars, they go to movie theaters, etc.
Places where schools are closed are the opposite: they’re located in areas where residents are very cautious in all aspects of life.
As a result, we observe that places with open schools are ALSO the places with high rates of COVID. And you could look at that data with shocked Pikachu face and say, “Duh, this means that schools spread COVID”. But the point is that the underlying behavior is hard to control for, and it’s very possible that the currently-closed schools could open without any problems, ESPECIALLY if those households continue to act cautiously in all other regards.
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It’s all an academic debate anyhow. Even the places that will remain closed for the rest of the academic year are opening up in the fall, so it’s much ado about nothing. We are opening everything back up, in every facet of life, and within a few months pretty much all restrictions will be gone aside for some masking up in stores and walking to your table at Applebees. We will never, ever be enacting another restriction anywhere in the US ever again, so debating the nuance now of how to twist the knobs for maximal efficiency at this moment is silly.
We did the thing where we let it spread massively and it is going to be endemic and people will continue to die from this forever more. The great news is that it’ll pretty much end up being a nana and pawpaw reaper a la the flu (see, it IS just like the flu!), and will just slay some thousands of unlucky non-nanas, which nobody will care about unless you run bad and it pops off your wife. Oh wells, better luck next time.
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Admittedly this is a long term discussion that has been extremely frustrating. Lots of people have claimed, based on some really shitty science in my opinion that children do not effectively spread covid and that schools could be opened safely. The ‘kids don’t spread it’ was always nonsense, but there was some studies that were well done that showed schools could be opened safely. The argument then was that these studies were not representative of what would happen if you actually opened schools. It turns out those people were right.
As for how this applies to the future? Admittedly it’s not so clear. Wookie is right that we don’t have a vaccine yet for kids, but pfizer is about to get approved it seems down to 12. Community spread being way down changes things too. To me, it justifies caution with schools opening and more of a push to keep strict precautions in place if you do open.
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And they specifically try to control for it, and make a good case that they did.
Didn’t realize you could tweet faxes
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I suspect precautions will be low in the fall, and that will likely be ok. Maybe masks, but new ventilation systems and social distancing and other high cost or unrealistic precautions will likely not be widely undertaken, and that will be fine, unless it isn’t and then we’ll adjust.
A few things, your assertion that it’s ‘largely driven’ by the hardcore yolo contingent is not supported by the paper. When you say I haven’t done this analysis, you might as well say you’re just making shit up.
Second, and most importantly, is that even if it was true schools still spread covid. If 75% of schools reflect background rates and 25% of schools spread covid, schools spread covid.