Here in Irvine the schools have been open all year, and today it occurred to me that I've heard . . . nothing . . . about this. No complaints big enough to make the paper. Apparently no dramatic deaths. Nothing. According to the school district:
Since resuming in-person instruction on September 24, IUSD and the Orange County Health Care Agency have found no evidence of student-to-staff or student-to-student transmission, and only two confirmed cases of staff-to-staff transmission. In each of these cases, physical distancing practices were not followed.
....Case rates remain extremely low and isolated. Our site rates have not come anywhere close to the state’s threshold for closing schools or other facilities.
Here's the current caseload throughout the district:
That's a total of 17 students out of 23,000 and 3 staff members out of 3,000.
Irvine is an upper middle class district, and obviously that makes a difference. And this is just one anecdote. Still, it's the real world and classrooms have been open for more than six months without any drama. It sure seems like this could be the case nationwide too.
When Denmark reopened its schools, nothing happened. Just like Irvine.
But in Israel when they reopened schools, it precipitated a massive outbreak.
You can't use the experience of any one place as a model for any other place in this epidemic. Lots of details matter.
You can't extrapolate from Irvine, where the schools are modern, and most of them, if not all, have modern ventilation systems with filtered, air-conditioned air, to, say New York City where many schools are more than a century old, and their ventilation system, i.e. open windows, can't be used in late fall, any part of winter, or most of spring because it's too cold outside. Not to mention how hard it is to imagine New York City high school students following masking and social distancing rules.
Also many places can't open windows either by policy or by physical design because of school shooters.
What's the %+ in the area? If it's low it should be low in the schools too.
We don't have the windows open here in FL. At least at three schools where my family members attend. Still no transmission.
To paraphrase the Twitter meme, “Tell me you’re from Irvine without telling me you’re from Irvine.” Tomorrow Irvine is going to have a high of 66 degrees. Where I live in New Jersey, it will be 41. In Detroit, 36. Having a school open without outbreaks is much easier if you can open the windows and not die of exposure.
Bingo!
Wealthy districts in moderate climates can re-open successfully easily enough. Now, is that an anecdote or common? I'm guessing common. But as I mentioned before, one of sister's school district shut down because of covid. It was not due to transmission in the schools--but high levels of community transmission. The student who tested positive, their family members, their pod, all have to stay home. Eventually most of the school had to stay home--so they shut it down. Another sister's school district stayed open with only one or two cases in a building at any one time.
What make you think schools that are open have open windows? In Florida the windows aren't open. Our schools have been open since August 31st and there's been (virtually) no transmission within shools.
Except this doesn't account for asymptomatic transmission back to the student's families units. The general population covid rates in Orange County are pretty high and it is likely that some of that is due to the schools. Even so given the effect prolonged mediocre schooling and lack of social contact will have on students it's probably a worthwhile sacrifice.
Yes! Totally agree.
Since we don’t do any contact tracing we have not good way of knowing. I recently read that Spain is now having trouble with clusters in schools.
My school system had to go full remote because they couldn’t keep enough staff. Too many were either infected or having to quarantine and there aren’t enough subs. We recently went back to offering the part time in school option. 26,000 families chose that but 60,000 have chosen to remain full remote. The majority of them are minority families who are worried about Covid. I keep hearing the media say that parents are demanding their kids be allowed to go back to school so I was surprised to see the large number families in my city who prefer to wait until we got more people vaccinated.
I recently heard Willie Geist say that many lower income kids don’t have the computers they need. My city gave every child either an Ipad or notebook, depending on their grade and had a big fundraising campaign to get the money from both public and private sources to make sure all kids had internet access. I can’t believe other cities haven’t done the same if my southern city with a Republican dominated state legislature managed to do that.
The danger of opening schools is that it might be a way to transmit COVID between adults who are not teachers. The mechanism would be:
1. Parent A gets COVID
2. Parent's child C is infected, but show no symptoms, so C goes to school.
3. C infects other children D and E
4. D and E infect their parents or (worse) their grandparents.
This effect was assumed to be important in the spread of COVID by models that existed about a year ago.
If many students are being infected, the probably not all asymptomatic, so it this mechanism is a concern. we would probably see more cases among students than we see. Still, the real test to do is to compare infection rates of parents of K-12 students in communities that have and have not opened schools.
And you think the possibility of these types of transmission justifies keeping schools closed for an entire school year?
Here in Bozeman, K-8 have been open for most of the year. A nurse I see who gives me an injection every couple of weeks keeps me up to date. So far there hasn't been much in the way of transmission. The catch is if there is a positive test in the family of a kid -- then that class goes back into quarantine and back to virtual class. She tells me that this can and has happened at any time of the day -- she's been called to pick up her kid at school in the middle of a shift. The back to virtual step has happened several times so far this school year.
In FL only kids that have been in the vicinity (6 feet for 15 minutes or more) of the person that tests positive. We have strict seating charts so its pretty to keep track.
My urban, high poverty, mostly non-white district in the far, cold north, has had the lowest grades open for a month. I don't know how many total cases there have been, but the state reports publicly any school with 5 or more cases over 2 weeks. No schools have been listed in the district yet.
We can't have open windows in schools (waaaaay too cold), but the district installed better air filters. Teachers wear masks and face shields, and many are vaccinated. I wouldn't be surprised to see some high schools to make the list when they open in 6 weeks, but the elementary schools seem very safe.
One issue with schools and transmission is that we don't have good data on the actual transmission of the infections. We can't differentiate between a school that has a lot of sick kids show up after getting infected elsewhere, and a school that has one sick kid infect classmates. There was a study done in Baden Wurtemburg that estimated that to get one in-school transmission, they'd need 25 infectious kids to come to school. They actually did the contract tracing to arrive at that estimate. Their schools may be somewhat different, but it's probably not wildly off for many Ametican schools.
"3 staff members out of 3000"
that's a case load of 300 per 100k, which is roughly 3x the peak that my county (Santa Fe, NM) hit around November 23rd 2020.
Now, fair enough, those 3 case may be spread out over more than the usual 7 day rolling window used for this statistic. But can someone explain to me why that sort case load in the teaching population is OK, but a disaster waiting to happen if it occurs in the broader community?
Apologies right off the top if I'm getting this wrong! But I think your calculation is wrong here. First, 3 cases per 3000 isn't 300 per 100k. It's 100 per 100k.
And that's 3 cases over the whole time they'vebeen open. As I understand it, the interval where the state measures the case rate against 100k people is the PER DAY rate (averaged over 7 days).
So those 3 cases were spread out over (depending on how you look at it) about 17 weeks of school or about 21 calendar weeks. So how you figure this out as a daily rate is murky. You could call that as little as ~85 school days or as many as 147 calendar days, depending on the measure and how widespread testing was. Let's take the lowest number to make the highest case rate.
100 per 100k, divided over 85 school days would yield a case rate of 1.76 per 100k per day. That's the second lowest tier of the four for California.
If you divided 100 per 100k over 147 calendar days, that would be a case rate of 0.68 per 100k per day. That's the bottom tier.
(Final note: All of THAT is before you start adjusting the case rate based on the level of testing. The more widespread the testing, the more that the adjustment would drop those numbers even further. I'm going to guess that the testing rate in Irvine, in schools, of adults is substantially higher than average for California. So even those small numbers would overstate the adjusted case rate.)
👍👍👍
Sheesh. And my calculations were wrong:
100 per 100k over 85 school days is 1.18 per 100k per day. (Still second lowest tier.)
Also, PaulDavisThe1st, I'm not sure how Santa Fe does its 100k measurements, or whether they do the case rate adjustments based on testing. Just comparing apples to apples here in Orange County, CA.
I use data collected/presented here:
https://covidactnow.org/us/new_mexico-nm/county/santa_fe_county/?s=1637578
It's the best web site i've found for COVID10 data.
Thanks for correcting my stupid math error, and elucidating the rest of it.
Thanks! I've been using the same site to watch the data in Los Angeles County, which has been looking much better lately. I'm a teacher here in LA County, and I'm itching to go back. I'm not in LAUSD, but that district casts a big shadow here in the rest of the county. It seems crystal clear to me that K-5 should be in session as soon as community spread isn't crazy.
And hey... the data in Santa Fe look really good! I'd LOVE to have those numbers! 🙂
Same here in Florida. It blows my mind that some school districts are still closed.
A lot of the resistance to going back has come from communities and teachers within those communities where non-compliance with protocols might be seen as an issue. It seems like a legitimate concern especially if the staff has a higher risk profile.
Fortunately, local independent school boards allow for concerns in different localities to be handled differently.
I wouldn’t believe any school data. I’m in Florida and our numbers in the schools were very manipulated. I know your in California and that might be different. But most teachers I know across the country say there is underreporting in schools. On the flip side I don’t think kids are dying from COVID-19 and many vulnerable teachers decided not return to the classroom so death rates from schools are probably low.
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