The Raid (on Rebekah Jones's home)

Politics & News
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Having read this entire article twice now, I have no idea why someone would view this as refuting Emily Oster . I would paraphrase what Oster has said with regard to “OFS” as:

  • There is a cost to keeping kids of school, and if we’re trying to evaluate costs and benefits of different choices, we need to weigh the costs and benefits of those choices.

  • Our data on kids’ infections rates and transmission sucks, and we need to do a better job measuring and tracking.

  • Kids–especially elementary school age kids–do not appear to be at much risk of suffering serious COVID-related consequences. So when we talk about mitigating risk of opening schools, we should be focusing that discussion on how to make it safer for the adults (faculty/staff).

  • Schools do not seem to be amplifying community rates of transmission (acting as superspreader sources).

The pushback noted in those articles that you posted seems to be, “We don’t yet have good enough data to be that confident.” I haven’t seen anyone say, “Actually, the things that you’re saying are not true - here’s proof.”

I still have no idea what it is about Oster’s statements that you find objectionable. You tend to just post links, laugh at “OFS” people, and then not respond when people question you.

Here’s a quote from the American Prospect article you posted:

in places where schools quickly test, contact-trace, and impose measures like mask-wearing, upgraded ventilation, and social distancing, reopenings seem to be working.

Do you know who said that? It wasn’t Oster. It was from a joint interview with Laura Garabedian, a professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Rebecca Haffajee, a health policy researcher at RAND. They wrote this article in late August:

There seems to be a great deal of agreement between those two researchers (who I think you would view as credible?) and what Oster is saying: Bringing kids back to school can be accomplished with strict mitigation procedures, particularly for elementary school children.

So again, what are the specific statements that Oster has made that you think are incorrect, and why do you believe Rebekah Jones is obviously more credible on the subject?

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Bullet point number 4.

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It’s been 3 weeks and you are just realizing that?

I’ve basically said it multiple times.

It really sucks making serious arguments and having someone either dense or in poor faith disagree just to disagree for days on end.

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It does suck, you should stop.

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439

And the whole point from a public safety standpoint is that OFS crowd has to prove it’s safe. Not the other way around. Sorry but that’s the way it works. Basically anecdotal studies where there isn’t any type of controlled testing of all students and certainly no real contact tracing is cherry picking and is not “evidence”

I’m not sure we why we can’t agree on the following points

  1. Opening schools is important
  2. When community spread is out of control as much as possible, including schools need to close in-person.
  3. Control the community spread, re-open the schools.
  4. Much of (US) is not able or willing to re-open schools with the necessary precautions.
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Thank you.

I have a vested interest in understanding whether schools do serve as likely vectors for kids. I have 3 kids in K-12 and we have to assess whether we’re comfortable sending them to school. I am also scheduled to teach in person starting in late January, in a reduced-capacity setting (13 students in a classroom that typically holds 45-50).

So I’m trying to view this question neutrally, and I am actively looking for evidence that schools are serving as superspreader origins. (That’s the whole Emily Oster article that kicked off the recent flurry of posts in this thread.)

From my looking around, I don’t see that evidence. I see things like:

  • A CDC report that shows no association between a positive COVID tests and attending in-person school or child care. This is in contrast to social gatherings or at-home visitors, which were associated with positive COVID tests.

  • A large-scale study of COVID transmission in child-care programs (in the journal Pediatrics).. This study “found no evidence of child care being a significant contributor to COVID-19 transmission to adults. This finding is consistent with previous studies showing a lack of association between school closures and transmission rates.” [It doesn’t look at transmission from adults to children or children to children, and cautions that the level of background transmission may be a threat to child care.]

and I’m happy to admit that the absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence. But has there been any evidence of schools, particularly elementary schools, reflecting superspreader events?

Like, when I see this:

I am going to push back, because it’s not clear how one would ever prove that opening for schools could be safe, and this attitude ignores the obvious costs of keeping schools closed.

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442

Obvious costs drawn from what?

Control the damn virus and life goes back to normal- or some approximation.

It’s a simple cart before the horse question. Nothing else.

Read what I And others have said in ernest. The point is to do everything else to control community spread and open schools. But when things go sideways the schools need to close too.

A sane world would pay the impacted People businesses and industries to be Shut down or limited operation so we can open schools.

A sane world would mandate standards in the schools.

There is no reason to shut down Schools unless all else has failed. Well guess what, all else HAS failed and arguing to keep them open is terrible. It’s TEMPORARY. Kids have significant elasticity. But if we drag out the virus we drag out the impact on them

But God no, opening schools is an absolute must no matter

Get the eff out of here with that completely non nuanced bullshit argument.

Everyone that says schools should close under the circumstances puts all kinds of qualifiers and priority to open them back up. The other argument is YOLO. The poor kids. Bullshit. It’s the Damn parents not wanting Their kids at home.

My whole posture in this thread has been to point out this hypocrisy but there is A small contingent that is incapable of understanding.

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I am living with 3 kids experiencing school remotely, and their education is suffering. It is laughable to me that anyone could believe there is no learning-related cost to closing schools.

And that ignores the fact that schools are de facto daycare for a large number of families. Which means those families are either going to involuntarily work fewer hours or they’re going to leave their kids in substandard care.

Serious question: do you honestly believe that there are no costs to closing schools? Am I drawing a bad inference from this being your opening response?

Things are sideways here in Franklin County, Ohio. Nonetheless, if opening elementary schools with precautions doesn’t increase the rate of spread, I’m in favor of opening elementary schools with precautions.

If action X doesn’t increase the rate of transmission, or the severity of infections, or other bad outcomes, why would we prohibit action X? My view is that we shouldn’t. Which is why I’m so interested in knowing whether opening schools with appropriate mitigation strategies actually does increase the rate of transmission or the severity of infections.

Absolutely fuck off if that’s how you’re characterizing my position. Literally no one I know (even the moron school board in my district) believes this.

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Oster’s made a lot of strong, counterintuitive claims about how COVID will spread based on one (1) study of schools with very tight COVID protocols. For reasons that continue to mystify me, news outlets and a squad of contrarian bros have taken this a gospel.

I’d like stronger evidence and maybe an explanation as to why this won’t spread among kids in the same way that every other respiratory disease seems to.

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I think it’s the tight COVID protocols that you mention - I interpret Oster’s stance as “Schools can open safely if they follow these set of protocols”. I infer the unsaid part of that to be “Schools shouldn’t open safely if they can’t follow those protocols.”

Maybe I need to lay this out more clearly, but I am self-interested in understanding the best approach for my affluent school district that is capable of implementing these protocols:

  • 100% mask wearing
  • <1/2 classroom capacity
  • No movement across classrooms
  • No common breakfast/lunches

My kid’s elementary school seems to be pulling this off, and that’s why we’re planning on sending him back. Middle school and high school do not seem to be pulling this off, so our two older kids will be staying remote.

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99% of Europe has had lower mitigiation than this and have remained OFS since March - kids and teachers still alive and community spread no higher than the US

UK elementaries for example: -

  • 0% mask wearing
  • usual classroom capacity
  • No movement across year groups
  • breakfast/lunches with year group only

There is a large EU study showing that parents of kids ‘still’ in school environments are at no greater risk to contract covid than those without kids too

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The only strong conclusion seems to be that schools are safe when they can strongly enforce safety precautions and not safe when they can’t.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/covid-19-soars-many-communities-schools-attempt-find-ways-through-crisis

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I feel said that you’re viewing me as a contrarian bro, but in my eyes this points to the determining factor for opening schools being:

  • Can you strongly enforce safety precautions?
    and not
  • Is there significant community spread?
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Nah, you seem pretty reasonable.

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grinch heart

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451

I’m referring to a collective position, you personally have more balance and nuance than a few others. Apologies for the implication.

Short term effects of course. I’m talking about long term effects on education. Will there be some? Sure. Will it be significant long term? Who knows? Will it be worse the longer this goes on? How do we keep it from going on a long time? Keep community spread down. You know what we can be sure of? People that die of Covid will be dead long term. 100%

We aren’t sacrificing 10s or 100s. We will be pushing a million. Well they are old?

Known death vs short term education issues vs theoretical long term education issues.

Maybe you live in a great school district with lots of resources and responsible folk. What is a governor to do when a significant fraction aren’t in that category?

But no we have to have this digital argument about open or closed.

How about if spread is above x we close. Then when it drops below Y we open (y<x)

How about we OFS with some planned breaks? Like it makes sense to jus close to in person mid November to mid January. About 3 weeks of that is break anyhow. It cuts overlap betweeen schools and holidays.

Otherwise something like 8 weeks open and 2 weeks closed. Of course dining etc could do something similar.

How about we say no to all the school associated activities that foster the spread. Indoor basketball. Locker Rooms. Secret parties. They are going on here locally in a very wealthy area. Seems like it’s actually worse in the private schools, at least those are getting in the press and Facebook battles.

I posted above or in the other thread data showing that school spread was proportionate to community until a threshold. After that school spread grows faster. British study. They said at “high” community rates but noted that current rates are much higher than the “high” rates in the study, meaning that schools are currently a big problem. And it’s worse here in lolUSA.

So there I have offered a nuanced position that schools should be open when possible but they should be closed when it makes sense to do so (high community spread which we are well past today).

I’d like to see a serious discussion by OFS advocates other than “my kids are going to grow up stupid and socially inept for the the rest of their lives”.

Is there any situation under which schools should be closed? What’s the awval number of deaths?

Is there a better way for schools to be open or is it just, “well the rest of society said F it so let’s say F it too.”

I sat for most of an hour and watched parent comments at a school board zoom that were 100% in the open our schools no matter what camp. And they used Emily Osters op ed logic. Literally quoted her.

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New variant = possible high school problems so if you keep this up a few more months, you might be correct. No issues with the last 9 months though. Elementaries return as normal, for the time being!

The government has delayed the in-person return of secondary (high) schools in England by one week.

The extra time is supposed to give schools time to set up mass testing, supported by the army.

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School closures seem completely reasonable as part of a broader strategy to control the spread of the virus. Closing schools while leaving bars and restaurants and offices open doesn’t seem like a good strategy to me though.

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454

Regarding transmission in children, I might be ponied here as this is a few weeks old, but the gold standard now is an Iceland study, in fact check out National Geographic’s headline:

The study found that children (defined by them as 15 and younger) transmit the virus half as effectively as adults. The study was very well controlled:

The best way to understand how transmission might occur between children and adults would be to constantly monitor healthy families with school-age children to see if they get infected. By testing frequently, scientists would catch infections as they occur, making it clear who got sick first.

Iceland and deCODE put this into practice by conducting comprehensive testing and tracing, screening more than half the country’s population: Anyone who was potentially exposed was quarantined, sealing them off from the community, but often exposing their families. By looking at the difference between adults and children in these quarantines, deCODE found that children play a minor role in transmission.

This is as close as you’re going to get to a lab-conditions study. This joins other large studies from South Korea and Germany, as well as many other smaller studies, in concluding that children are much less efficient transmission vectors than adults. The Princeton study from September which Dan has linked several times now is the only large study I’m aware of to come to the conclusion that children spread as efficiently as adults, and has a few limitations, a couple of the major ones are:

  • Their definition of “children” goes up to 17 years. There’s no disagreement that older teenagers spread just as efficiently as adults, in fact 15 in the Iceland study is older than I’d like. (There’s discussion of this and links to many other studies in the section “Don’t treat all ages the same” in the NatGeo article).

  • The study took place in India, where conditions are very different in terms of high-density living, inadequate hygiene and so forth. It’s possible children do transmit just as effectively under these conditions, although I’m still skeptical given the weight of other data we have.

The author of the study goes on to say:

Iceland never closed its elementary schools, although it did close its high schools at the peak of its first surge. Data from its wave in September support the idea that younger children are less likely to get sick or to infect others. Stefánsson is in the process of publishing these results in a peer-reviewed journal, but he says the meticulous dataset is conclusive for Icelandic transmission—“and we have turned out to be a reasonable animal model for the human population.”

Stefánsson cautions that if everything but schools and childcare centers are closed, children would then become one of the primary sources of transmission. He explains that while the individual risk might be low among youths, schools will still have outbreaks.

That means the question becomes not a scientific one, but rather what level of risk society is prepared to accept to keep children in school: “What are you willing to live with?” he asks.

This is sort of the opposite of what school-closure advocates are saying, that schools should be closed when trying to get an outbreak under control. The state of Victoria here closed schools during their outbreak but:

Brett Sutton, Victoria’s Chief Health Officer also said that in retrospect, the state would not have closed schools. Partly thanks to his advice, Ireland left its schools open during the most recent lockdown while closing gyms, churches, restaurants, and non-essential businesses. Nevertheless, community infections have declined by 80 percent in six weeks.

“Our priority to keep the virus out of schools,” Russell says, “is to keep it out of the community.”

That last sentence is my opinion in a nutshell. I recommend reading the whole NatGeo article, it’s a good summary.

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I’ve often wondered why Rebekah has not accepted the unspoken invitation to join us in this thread and defend herself.

It’s because she was waiting to send Chris’ lawnmower into orbit.

https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1343579984804392962?s=20

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