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| Science & Technology |
| ‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail' |
| 2020-08-03 |
| [Atlantic]-..."This push to open schools is guaranteed to fail," says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and molecular virologist, and the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. I’ve been corresponding with Hotez, and with several epidemiologists, over the course of the pandemic, and have noticed a starkness in their views in recent weeks. "The social-distancing expectations and mask requirements for the lower grades are unrealistic," Hotez told me. "In communities with high transmission, it’s inevitable that COVID-19 will enter the schools. Within two weeks of opening schools in communities with high virus transmission, teachers will become ill. All it will take is for a single teacher to become hospitalized with COVID and everything will shut down." Hotez has good reason to be pessimistic. There were 68,605 new cases in the United States yesterday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The seven-day average has stayed above 60,000 new cases per day since July 13. Reaching 100,000 cases per day, once seen as an apocalyptic, worst-case-scenario warning from Anthony Fauci, is no longer difficult to imagine. Indeed, my conversations with epidemiologists in recent days were all strikingly dark. They agreed: Schools should not risk reopening, probably not even for the youngest children, in the coming weeks. "We can’t pretend like everything’s fine," said Gary Simon, the director of the infectious diseases division at George Washington University. "If I had a school-age kid, I wouldn’t want to send him to school." The evidence is all around us. There is the summer camp in Georgia where hundreds of kids and counselors—nearly half the camp—got infected after only a few days together. Then there’s the school in Indiana where, just hours after reopening last week, a student tested positive for the coronavirus. ("We knew it was a when, not if," the superintendent told The New York Times, but officials were "very shocked it was on Day 1.") There’s also the JAMA Pediatrics study [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2768952] that suggests that babies and young children can carry extremely high viral loads of SARS-CoV-2. The study’s authors found at least as much viral material in the throats and airways of young children as in infected adults, and sometimes 100 times as much as in adults. We’ve long known that kids older than age 10 can efficiently transmit the virus [https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article], but this new research suggests that younger kids pose a risk of transmission to the people around them, just as older children do. The more we learn, the more likely it seems that children are highly effective vectors for transmission. Springtime school closures took place before the virus seized the nation. A return to the classroom now—even with thoughtful precautions—would create excellent conditions to test just how quickly COVID-19 can saturate a community. School was deemed unsafe for children, teachers, and staffers back in March. The pandemic is worse in the United States now than it was then, with multiple epicenters burning across the country. So why would schools reopen now? Skip some obligatory Trump bashing There is another cause for concern, this one about what the virus might do to children themselves. Although the rate of morbidity in young children is relatively low, young children are also among the least-tested cohort in America. Fauci has stressed repeatedly in recent weeks that we know relatively little about children and the virus. For example, we still don’t know how frequently children get infected, or what percentage of children are symptomatic, or how underlying conditions may exacerbate or even alleviate the severity of the infection. The results of one six-month National Institutes of Health study, which enrolled thousands of families from 11 U.S. cities, are expected in December. One of the strangest things about living through a pandemic is the lag in understanding of how bad things are, an awful mirror of the lag in deaths that come like clockwork after a surge in coronavirus cases. All along, this disaster has been simultaneously wholly shared and wholly individualized, a weird dissonance in a collective tragedy that each person, each family, has to navigate with intricate specificity to their circumstances. The despair that has seemed to crest in recent days represents another kind of lag—a lag of realization—and the inevitable end of hopefulness about what life might be like in September. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #5 Why don't you brave boomers volunteer to be substitute teachers, crossing guards, bus drivers? |
| Posted by: Yosemite Sam 2020-08-03 21:41 |
| #4 The one population cohort who has not worn a mask during the pandemic, rarely wash their hands, and put objects and toys in their mouths are the least infected by the virus. Go figure. |
| Posted by: Airandee 2020-08-03 19:46 |
| #3 Eeyores don't have the same effect after it's been like a dead horse for too long |
| Posted by: Frank G 2020-08-03 19:27 |
| #2 Well Grom, some of your last comment can be explained by the fact that 1/3 of US deaths are in metropolitan NY and 40% of those were created by very bad policy decisions by a man the left currently has put on a pedestal. Then look at the number of lies in counting to spike numbers here and ignore numbers there and counting hospitalizations per total population rather than per million when comparing USA with other countries to make it look worse and a heavy dose of skepticism is predictable. Then we have the moving of the goal posts. Flatten the curve to avoid overwhelming the hospital became stay inside (despite proof early on that inside made transmission significantly easier) until the governor decides to let you out, even if that means that businesses fail and everyone becomes dependent upon the state to survive. And the closing of churches as too dangerous but allowing mass protests and funerals because these things are too important (despite the fact that BLM movement is built on a series of lies, a series of lies everyone in power knows about). Then there is the shutting down of debate on Hydrochloroquine and the usefulness of masks and it starts to look like intentional manipulation. Distrust of authority is in American DNA and the reaction in the USA is entirely predicable. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2020-08-03 19:12 |
| #1 Having a hard time squaring it with German study which found low risk of infevtion from school kids. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-13/german-study-shows-low-coronavirus-infection-rate-in-schools |
| Posted by: Thomogum Omereng5658 2020-08-03 18:33 |