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Schools are not significant spreaders of Wuhan virus, so schools should re-open


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2020 Oct 9, 5:47pm   813 views  33 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-arent-superspreaders/616669/

It’s now October. We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be a major spreader of COVID-19.

Since early last month, I’ve been working with a group of data scientists at the technology company Qualtrics, as well as with school-principal and superintendent associations, to collect data on COVID-19 in schools. (See more on that project here.) Our data on almost 200,000 kids in 47 states from the last two weeks of September revealed an infection rate of 0.13 percent among students and 0.24 percent among staff. That’s about 1.3 infections over two weeks in a school of 1,000 kids, or 2.2 infections over two weeks in a group of 1,000 staff. Even in high-risk areas of the country, the student rates were well under half a percent. (You can see all the data here.) ...

From my end, we are going to continue to collect data through our dashboard, to try to better understand the patterns we are seeing and what correlates with “safe” reopenings. I hope that more schools and districts will see these data, and others, and perhaps start to think about how reopening might work. We do not want to be cavalier or put people at risk. But by not opening, we are putting people at risk, too.


And this The Atlantic, which is so rabidly anti-Trump that they completely made up a story about Trump insulting soldiers.

Schools should re-open, immediately.

Comments 1 - 33 of 33        Search these comments

1   mell   2020 Oct 9, 5:52pm  

It's interesting - you'd think kids would spread it all over however there have been zero cases in our environment despite bday parties and resumption of play dates etc. It's almost as if this virus was designed to infect and cull the elderly only in a progressive manner.
2   Hircus   2020 Oct 9, 6:25pm  

Patrick says
And this The Atlantic

lol!

thats the very first thing I thought before I even opened the page. I saw the title, and "theatlantic.com" and thought "no way they said that"
3   HeadSet   2020 Oct 9, 6:43pm  

Hircus says
Patrick says
And this The Atlantic

lol!

thats the very first thing I thought before I even opened the page. I saw the title, and "theatlantic.com" and thought "no way they said that"


It means that Apple, Inc has determined that keeping schools close is hurting their bottom line (Steve Jobs widow controls Atlantic.)
4   theoakman   2020 Oct 9, 6:50pm  

I'm in the thick of it right now. Schools would be superspreading environments if we put 400 kids in a cafeteria and let them bounce apple cores off each others heads. But we don't have that happening. Instead, we operate at approximately 40% capacity, keep them spaced appropriately, wear masks, and sanitize regularly (between every class at the high school level.) The windows/doors are open all throughout the school. Th they leave before lunch and go virtual for another hour and half. I'd say we are covering content at 75% of the rate that we normally do at this point.

My particular town had 30 kids walk in on day 1 with it (unknowingly) because they had a labor day party where they were all in a garage playing beer pong drinking from the same cup. A student sat 10 feet away from me for 45 minutes with it. Nothing. No staff members got sick. No additional cases from school. And this was likely the most infected school in the nation for those 2 days. We took 2 weeks virtual as a precaution but likely didn't even need to.
5   theoakman   2020 Oct 9, 7:45pm  

Listen, I live in NJ. It's kinda stupid to brag about NJ's results when measured up against every single country, NJ is the worst performer overall in the entire world on basically every metric of people dead.
6   B.A.C.A.H.   2020 Oct 9, 7:57pm  

Patrick says
Schools should re-open, immediately.

Patrick, do you have schoolagers at home?
7   SunnyvaleCA   2020 Oct 9, 8:16pm  

HeadSet says
It means that Apple, Inc has determined that keeping schools close is hurting their bottom line (Steve Jobs widow controls Atlantic.)

Apple's quarterly report says otherwise, with Mac and iPad sales making strong gains. Maybe it's due to adults purchasing for work-at-home, but I think there has to be some education-based purchases in there too. In my case, I just grabbed the workstation from my desk at work and took it home; didn't help Apple sales at all.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348448/apple-q3-2020-earnings-sales-revenue-mac-ipad
8   Patrick   2020 Oct 9, 10:38pm  

B.A.C.A.H. says
Patrick says
Schools should re-open, immediately.

Patrick, do you have schoolagers at home?


Nope. Wife is getting her teaching certificate and it's really hard on her and the other teachers to attempt to control kids from a distance. Kids aren't getting that much out of it either.
9   Patrick   2020 Oct 9, 10:40pm  

HeadSet says
It means that Apple, Inc has determined that keeping schools close is hurting their bottom line (Steve Jobs widow controls Atlantic.)



Good insight @HeadSet

I bet you're right.
10   WookieMan   2020 Oct 10, 5:34am  

Patrick says
B.A.C.A.H. says
Patrick says
Schools should re-open, immediately.

Patrick, do you have schoolagers at home?


Nope. Wife is getting her teaching certificate and it's really hard on her and the other teachers to attempt to control kids from a distance. Kids aren't getting that much out of it either.

Whether you have kids or not doesn't matter. They need to be in school full time. I don't think people really realize the amount of fucked up people out there. It's a small fraction, but there are kids getting molested and the shit beaten out of them and there's no way anyone would know. While I don't like government, schools are an important backstop in finding the deadbeat parents. It's actually one of their more important roles as educators in my opinion. 95% of kids would learn to read or write on their own, which is all they need to know to open pandoras box of future opportunities.
11   theoakman   2020 Oct 10, 8:35am  

I had a laundry list of awful teachers. Didn't matter. The few great ones gave me the background to do whatever I needed.
12   Bd6r   2020 Oct 10, 8:44am  

Why the fuck any schools need to be closed at all
13   NDrLoR   2020 Oct 10, 8:49am  

I was disappointed to see this in the headline of our local paper yesterday, I think it's over-reaction. This generation of students is going to be so screwed up and deprived of any kind of education even if most of it is indoctrination it's unbelievable. I was at my mechanic's last week and while I was paying out I noticed a little boy, the office manager's son, at a laptop that was talking to him and realized he was on I guess what is called Zoom.

https://www.kcentv.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/waco-isd-to-temporarily-close-4-schools-due-to-spike-in-covid-19-cases/500-40904302-7e9a-49fe-a805-376f52a11ed5
14   Onvacation   2020 Oct 10, 8:55am  

B.A.C.A.H. says
Patrick says
Schools should re-open, immediately.

Patrick, do you have schoolagers at home?

I do and schools never should have closed in the first place. The Wuhan virus just happened to be the first thing to come up after the failed impeachment hoax.
15   mell   2020 Oct 10, 9:36am  

I heard SF teacher unions will fight tooth amd nail for the whole school year to stay remote. Unbelievably corrupt lazy freaks
16   WookieMan   2020 Oct 10, 10:02am  

mell says
unions will fight tooth amd nail for the whole school year to stay remote.

Public sector unions need to be banned today. It's purely a money suck from taxpayers and even their own members. It's not 1920 anymore. Outdated ideas are okay to disappear. Existing regulations make it so teachers will get paid decently for knowing one subject and getting a degree to babysit your kids. Over-exaggerating, but not that far off from reality.
17   WookieMan   2020 Oct 10, 10:06am  

We had a positive test in our district Thursday. Leave it up to the cunt administration in my district to not even mention if it was in the high school, middle school or elementary school. Nah, I don't have $1,000 on line for a vacation that requires a Covid test. Fuckers. I should have gotten into education as originally intended. Apparently you don't have to know shit or have any common sense.
18   mell   2020 Oct 10, 10:11am  

I've had 2 Covid tests already because they are mandated here. At least they're free and quick drive-up but it's still a hassle. They expire quickly and to enter medical or other facilities they require negative tests. Billion dollar market lol
19   mell   2020 Oct 10, 10:12am  

I am thinking about making a ruckus if the school doesn't open. It's expensive to pay an additional student teacher to teach pods of kids every week and the remote program is pretty underwhelming.
21   WookieMan   2020 Oct 10, 10:44am  

mell says
remote program is pretty underwhelming.

I don't fully blame the teachers, but almost every area of this country is at risk of some natural disaster. How did administrators get so caught off guard? CA = Earthquakes. TX, FL, AL = Hurricanes. Midwest = Tornados. On and on. Why did schools not have a contingency plan in place for this or other disasters? We pay these fuckers 6 figures to run the district and they can't even handle events that are known to happen. Scares me about other levels of government and how prepared they are.
22   B.A.C.A.H.   2020 Oct 10, 3:07pm  

Patrick says
Nope.


WookieMan says
Whether you have kids or not doesn't matter. They need to be in school full time.


Onvacation says
I do and schools never should have closed in the first place


Sorry WookieMan, - Yes, everyone's entitled to express an opinion. I'm more interested in the opinions of those with more "risk", "more to lose", than those with "less to lose". By "risk" I don't just refer to the COVID virus but also the "risk" of the tradeoff of "home schooling" versus "classroom". Just like with anti-vaxxing, or circumcision or any other decision parents make for their kids, it's the parents' decision, not ours. For non-homeschooler types, it's this academic year's kindergartners that the closures are especially awful for. One role of kindergarten is to prepare kids to be ready for classroom learning and academics and all the rest. I got a feeling missing kindergarten could be life changing for that cohort, and not in a good way.

After the students, the next biggest folks with "what to lose" are teachers. Teachers' unions are acting like we have schools for the prerogatives of teachers, not students. I understand teachers with health problems, or immediate family household members with health problems, are "afraid" to return to the classroom. But whose problem is that?, - or whose problem should it be? Should it be the students' problem? I think not. Maybe its time for those scared teachers to move on, and make room for younger (and, since pay is based on seniority and not merit) lower-paid new hire teachers (like Patrick's partner).

Then after the students, there's the rest of us who also have skin in the game: taxpayers. If the schools are closed because that's what teachers unions want, WTF are we paying for in super high tax California? Just asking.

At least one local K-12 in the Bay Area has said they could not re-open because they did not have the money to comply with all the safety protocols (like those cited in The Atlantic article). Pensions, retirement medical, etc are not money being spent inside the classroom.
23   Patrick   2020 Oct 10, 3:32pm  

Dbr6 says
Why the fuck any schools need to be closed at all


Well, there was that one hospitalization in Wisconsin, and one in Illinois.

That certainly seems like good justification for shutting down all universities.
24   Onvacation   2020 Oct 11, 1:05am  

The Wuhan virus was the first thing the democrats could latch onto after the impeachment over the phone call to Ukraine about Biden's corruption. With complicity from the media and some murderous democratic governors they have used this cold to blame Trump for killing 200,000 and ruining Obama's economy. Now, instead of talking about important issues like government corruption, we are debating wearing masks.

Even the World Health Organization says lockdowns are a bad idea.

How long can this farce go on?
25   WookieMan   2020 Oct 11, 4:59am  

B.A.C.A.H. says
Sorry WookieMan

Huh? I think we're actually in agreement... confused. I want them back in school. Not sure what's to be sorry about.
26   WookieMan   2020 Oct 11, 5:08am  

Onvacation says
How long can this farce go on?

November 4th.

Though in some areas, with some of the legal proceedings across the country, business are telling local government to fuck sand. Governor here shut down our county again, restaurants specifically. I'm literally a mile from the next door county and 10-16 minutes from some other good establishments. That county isn't shut down. It's stupid. If Covid is bad in my County, people that want to go out to eat will just spread it to a neighboring county.

In my town though they're staying open for indoor dining against the governors orders. Literally had my local state rep make the rounds door knocking yesterday. We chatted for a minute or two and then he went and had a burger at the local bar... inside and posted it on FB. Fucking hysterical. My state representative is a troll (local, not federal) lol.
27   Shaman   2020 Oct 11, 6:06am  

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/who-official-urges-world-leaders-to-stop-using-lockdowns-as-primary-virus-control-method

Now even the WHO whom the Left claims to venerate, has told Democrats to knock it off with the endless lockdowns!
28   BayArea   2020 Oct 11, 6:18am  

As a father of two, my view is that we have passed the point where we are doing more damage by our response than the damage the virus would do otherwise.

Schools need to reopen immediately!

Among my group of friend who have kids, the resentment towards teachers and administrators is growing. They are now maybe a notch or two above child molesters.
29   Robert Sproul   2020 Oct 11, 7:35am  

Hundreds of top medical professionals are courageously speaking out against further lockdowns:
(Maybe there is a PatNet post on this on this that I missed)

The Great Barrington Declaration
"From October 1-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a remarkable meeting of top epidemiologists, economists, and journalists, to discuss the global emergency created by the unprecedented use of state compulsion in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. The result is The Great Barrington Declaration, which urges a “Focused Protection” strategy.

After a brief explanation of the strategy, and a discussion of the astonishing costs of lockdown, the Declaration concludes: “Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume.”

The primary authors and signers of the document are

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Professor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, Medicine, Stanford University.
Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor, Theoretical Epidemiology, University of Oxford.
The co-signers include

Dr. Rodney Sturdivant, PhD. associate professor of biostatistics at Baylor University and the Director of the Baylor Statistical Consulting Center. He is a Colonel in the US Army (retired) whose research includes a focus on infectious disease spread and diagnosis.
Dr. Eitan Friedman, MD, PhD. Founder and Director, The Susanne Levy Gertner Oncogenetics Unit, The Danek Gertner Institute of Human Genetics, Chaim Sheba Medical Center and Professor of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine and Depertment of Human Genetics and Biochemistry, Tel-Aviv University
Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, MD, MPH a physician with the VA health system with expertise in epidemiology, health equity practice, and health impact assessment of public policy. He formerly served as a Deputy Health Officer for San Francisco for 18 years.
Dr. Michael Levitt, PhD is a biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University. Prof. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.
Dr. Eyal Shahar, MD professor (emeritus) of public health at the University of Arizona, a physician, epidemiologist, with expertise in causal and statistical inference.
Dr. David Katz, MD, MPH, President, True Health Initiative and the Founder and Former Director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center
Dr. Laura Lazzeroni, PhD., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of biomedical data science at Stanford University Medical School, a biostatistician and data scientist
Dr. Simon Thornley, PhD is an epidemiologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has experience in biostatistics and epidemiological analysis, and has applied these to a range of areas including communicable and non-communicable diseases."

This, of course, is being disparaged on Wikipedia and the MSM, and buried by Google.
30   WookieMan   2020 Oct 11, 10:43am  

BayArea says
Schools need to reopen immediately!

Not gonna happen until 11/4. They want you suffering. It my opinion it's backwards logic and a failed attempt at politicizing an airborne virus. Even some of the dumbest people I encounter understand that it's not one persons "fault" or that one person can fix it. I think they believed fear would make Trump people flee from his camp. I think the opposite is happening. Especially now that he's had it.
32   B.A.C.A.H.   2020 Oct 11, 3:45pm  

WookieMan says
Whether you have kids or not doesn't matter.
WookieMan says
Huh? I think we're actually in agreement... confused. I want them back in school. Not sure what's to be sorry about.


Sorry, I count the opinions of parents of schoolagers more than non-such parents, and the opinions of teachers and school staff more than non-educators.

I count the educators' opinions with more weight, but I am skeptical about their motives. If we're only going to do on-line at-home schooling, why must we in California pay so much taxes for such generous benefits? If it's exclusively on line instruction the teachers could be in lower cost places like Montana or even outside the US.
33   WookieMan   2020 Oct 12, 2:00pm  

B.A.C.A.H. says
If it's exclusively on line instruction the teachers could be in lower cost places like Montana or even outside the US.

I agree.

Also, Montana ain't cheap. If you want to live near civilization, in a non shithole neighborhood, it's $300k+ all day. Which outside of CA and NY is expensive for the average person. 6.5% income tax. No sales tax, but as government goes they'll make it up somewhere else. Vehicle registration, liquor licenses/taxes, etc.

If you're into fly fishing though some of the best in the world on the Madison near Ennis, MT. Last 4 years or so been making the trek out there annually to hang with some old friends. It ain't cheap, though maybe the pension costs would be lower overall compared to CA.

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