Coronavirus cases lead to missed school days for 6,500 LAUSD students during first week
That sounds like a lot! But here's the third paragraph:
About 451,000 preschool through 12th-grade students are attending Los Angeles public schools in person this fall.
So 1.4% of all LAUSD students missed some days during the first week of school. That actually seems surprisingly low, what with the Delta breakout and all. It's too bad that Americans are widely considered too innumerate to handle things like percentages in headlines.
Calling Americans innumerate got me blocked by Facebook moderators for a week. It turns out that the "community standards" at Facebook specify that "Americans" are a protected group and "innumerate" is hate speech. Who knew?
I've gotten banned for quoting well known joke from SNL. Artificial intelligence? More like actual stupidity.
Heh. I got a posting bounced by using the word "virgin." Don't know if it was considered pornographic, derogatory, sexist ... or what.
A propos "numerate": To make your point you'd have to compare this year with other years. Seems to me 1.4% of students missing on a single day would be quite a bit: Almost one out 70 students missing every day. Means one student missing every third day in an average size class. Much more than I remember from my school days.
We have to conclude that schools may not be as harmless as earlier studies indicated in the delta-era. We may see some super spreading happening in schools in heavily afflicted areas.
Azum, I think you might want to look at those numbers again.
If, on average, 1.4% miss each day, that means each student would miss, on average, 1.4% of their school days. There are around 180 school days in a year, so the average number of missed school days for an average student would be about 2.5 days per year.
That sounds just about right to me.
You can divide that by up to five; 1.4% of students missed at least one day during the first week. If each student missed exactly one day, then that computes to 0.5 days absent per student per year. I say "up to" because some of those students probably missed more than one day, which brings the average up.
Anti-vaxxers are low-end suicide bombers who think it's worth the risk to maybe kill some libs.
They're never going to do anything else that important.
[wrong thread, but happy to blow myself up if anyone disagrees]
That was El Jefe's plan for the first presidential debate in Cleveland, where he was openly shedding Rona in the vicinity of El Pepe Maximo.
Actually 1.4% of students missing class in a week might be really bad if that was the %age who were sick enough to know they had covid and been tested. And that is how many will read it.
But that would be wrong .
Lausd did massive testing for school reopening. All students and staff had to test. And they had to quarantine ( or at least not go to school) if they tested positive that week or the week before.
Of that 6500, less than half, 3000, tested positive themselves. The other 3500 were only exposed.
If about .6% then were actually positive sonetime during that 2 week period then roughly. 05% or a little less caught covid each day ( assuming you stay positive for 2 weeks which might be about right or maybe a touch high for kids).
For staff it was one out of 60 ( 1000 out of 60000) but did not see what %age of those were due to actually having it. Guess that exposure % would be the same but then that would mean that also about. 05% caught covid each day or so.
La county had been averaging maybe about .03% of the population having a confirmed case each day.
This might be a hint that the multiple of actual cases to confirmed cases is not that high- maybe only 1.5 or at least less than 2.
And that is BAD news not good.
We know how many have confirmed cases and we know how many deaths. A higher number of actual cases is a good thing as it gets you to herd immunity faster without increasing sickness or death.
The number of people who got immune from having COVID is small compared to the number of vaccinated people, even though that second number is too low for herd immunity. A few more cases make no noticeable contribution to herd immunity. Even more so if we consider the fact (if true, but everybody says it) that immunity through infection is less efficient than from vaccination.
Also important: Death is not the only negative outcome; there are many more cases of Long COVID than of death.
Herd immunity the natural way, I suppose, might happen over the course of many years but at a very high cost.
And would point out to some who are not getting this.
It is only for missing classes due to covid. Not for any sickness. So cannot compare to normal sick absences.
Indoor masking for everyone is required.
Are you going to do a compare and contrast to school districts that do not have mandatory masks?
There have already been some but not totally rigorous as you need a true control group , such as lausd itself splitting classes in two - some masked some not.
If you compare across different districts with different conditions, hard to come to conclusions.
For example, if you compare school districts in a state with no student masking with one who has student masking, I am sure you will likely find that the unmasked students have more cases. But states allowing students to not mask are also those that are less vaccinated, are more southern ( bad for covid in summer) , had fewer restrictions, etc. . And those states had more covid cases- including among children- BEFORE school started, when whether students were masked could not play a role.
You see all kinds of crap " studies" purporting to prove something when they prove nothing. And yet masking proponents cite them all the time.
The most recent study that tried to take this into account ( although not with a true control group) - what seems to be the best so far - showed ZERO effect for student masking which would be surprising. But showed an effect for teachers masking.
Masks, plus testing, isolation, contact tracing can work.
Let's see what the numbers are in a few weeks.
If the high school kids get vaccinated, that would help a lot.
In general, we'll see in about a month or so if school reopening extends the current covid wave. And it's not just grade school--colleges are reopening, so many young adults from all over are moving around the country. Many places require vaccinations, which will help. And some states have tried to make vaccine requirements illegal.
Well might not be that easy or as obvious.
School reopening has caused an increase in confirmed cases without any real case increase simply because of the extra testing so you pick up more of the asymptomatic cases that would not otherwise be tested. And it can be multiplied when that random tesr finds a positive and prompts others to get tested because they were exposed.
So you have to separate out that " false " increase from a real one. Perhaps one important factor might be how often or if the school will test after reopening. If they are continually testing, you would expect an initial increase in confirmed cases with reopening and that stays then at the higher number ( assuming reopening itself has no effect). Then the first increase means nothing. It is a subsequent increase that is troubling.
If the school tests once on reopening then stops, you would expect a blip up due to testing and then a decline back if reopening had no effect. So then the initial increase would not indicate a problem but the lack of a later decrease would.
I do expect to have to make this point again after some post the inevitable stories saying that testing blip up proves school reopening caused covid spread. Not you because you did say in about a month.
Kinda hate to say it as Iike reporters, but the issue here surely is a reporter going to an editor and saying "I got a great story. XXXX LA students couldn't go to school this week because of covid."
A reporter trying to make a mark, and a living, is not going to go to the editor and say "I got a story saying 99% of students are just fine."
So probably the people who need the educating are not "the media" in general, but rather editors. Need to create a world in which editors assess whether something is really significant or not.
Same dynamic is very much at work in the coverage of Afghanistan. Very hard these days to be the editor who says "isn't this kind of thing always chaotic? What's really new here?"
correction: "Kinda hate to say it as I like reporters..."
If absolute numbers are low, look at %age. If %age is low, try absolute numbers.
On the topic of numeracy and context, what is the "typical" percentage of students out sick on any given school day in that district?
How many students were out for other reasons?
In your previous post about the Afghan evacuations you wrote:
and here you write:
So, while both figures seem like a lot - a helluva lot even - what is the percentage for Afghan evacuations?
Probably a "hellova high" %age .
There are ca. 4 million people in Kabul, 38 million in the country.
We've evacuated ca. 2% of the Kabul population. Not sure how many escaped overland, or found their way out on their own.
So in hand waving terms something like 0.2% to 2% depending on whether one applies a Kabul bias. If 1.4% was not a lot then are those figures?
Apples and oranges, what is your expected % to evacuate from Afghanistan, compared to expected % absences?
I think I stated somewhere yesterday that Tajikistan and Iran each expect 100,000 or more overland. The Afghan leaving that way are going to be more numerous than all we or nato allies evacuate by air but it is getting almost no attention in our media.
These are going to be the ones leaving more because of tribal or religious differences with the taliban and not the western oriented group we are getting out.
I really would like to see some of the more thoughtful commenters respond to my post of 11:08 above.
This type of information is important.
But I think people are reading it wrong.
First in misunderstanding what is being reported as it is not who is out for sickness. It is who is out DUE to covid. It includes students asymptomatic and includes those without a positive test isolating due to exposure. It does not include any student out for some other sickness.
But, more important , what it tells us, which the media and kevin and most of you are missing.
We already have a good idea of how many are getting sick from confirmed cases, and even more how many are being hospitalized and dying. This does not really tell us much on that account we do not know.
What we do not know very well is how many actual total infections there are - how many asymptomatic or real mild cases are out there that are never confirmed.
And testing all students or teachers does give us a good idea of that, for at least that group. So what this info really gives us is an idea of how many " hidden " cases there are with nobody getting sick or dying. But maybe still getting immunity and getting us closer to herd immunity.
For that the higher the number the better.
And here I think this is BAD news as the number is TOO LOW.
Its bad news if we were hoping for better, but don't we have those numbers?
Total population of CA is 39.5M, call it 40M.
I see total vaccines at 46M, divide by 2 so call it 23M. That's probably wrong because of the one jab v. two jab but anyway.
Total cases is 4.1M
So out of 40M about 27M have had at least a case or vax'd.
At 10k cases per day, and about 43k of people getting immunity through two vaxs per day, with 13M people left, before everyone either has had it or get's vaxed its about 260 more days (13M divided by 50k).
I get the whole argument that it would be great if there were a bunch of asymptomatic cases out there, so many millions of them that we would be almost done, but I don't think its that anyone is missing that argument, its that there are simply too many possible candidates to catch Covid left.
Per Washington Post:
California has administered at least one dose to 26,910,217 people,
covering 80.0% of the eligible population, 12 and older...
and 68.1% of the state’s entire population.
At least 21,795,413 people have been fully vaccinated
Overthinking again.
I think you get the point but your numerical analysis is off. You are right we do not have great data . There are some important issues nobody seems to report on so we have to assume.
Let's just do la county as school numbers are lausd.
You do not need to back into vaccination % the way you are trying to do . We do have that data . Per covidactnow, la county is 65.2% partially and 56.9 % fully vaccinated. Just for simplicity, let us discount partially and just treat it as equivalent to 60% fully.
So that is % age for some vaccine immunity. But what about natural immunity? We have cumulative confirmed cases but do not know actual cases .
La county confirmed cases are right around 14% . If the actual multiple is 4 cumulative ( it was maybe 20 at start and went down to maybe 2 or less now), then 56% have had covid and some natural immunity. Even accounting for overlap
Sorry hit post by accident. To continue
Even accounting for overlap , and recognizing that those who are unvacinated are much less likely to have had covid ( for 3 reasons of which vaccine preventing it is the least), the % of those unvaccinated without ever catching covid is low - maybe under 10%.
But if you jiggle the assumptions differently, then you can get anywhere from maybe 3% to 20% left with no immunity. And this group is the most crucial as they account for a disproortinste amount of the spread and most or the serious illness.
But then you have to consider that we also have a good idea of how fast covid spreading or shrinking, the R. And that is the most important, along with keeping it low. Having a high current case count with a below 1.0 R that you can keep below 1.0 - not bad. A very low case count with a high R that may stay high is dangerous . Right today, the USA is better long term than Australia.
La county R to me seems to be around. 9 or even lower ( covidactnow is too high). Keep it there or lower, we are getting out of this fast.
But every day, we lose a bit of immunity as it wanes over time . But that is offset by increased immunity from new vaccinations and new infections. If enough to offset waning immunity or more , R stays down or drops further. So more asymptomatic infections, great.
To me, trying to see exactly where we are with total immunity is pointless as you also need how effective that immunity is. It is the multiplicative result that matters. But we can see that we are at herd immunity now based on that unknown result.
So focus on how total immunity is changing, not what it is.
Really should be standard journalistic practice to pair any raw numbers with relevant percentages, and the headline writers just need to be more savvy (or less opportunistic/cynical), as the headline here should been like "surprisingly few LASD students out with COVID yet".
I will fix it further for you.
First still missing that the number are those out " due to" covid , not " with covid". The la times got that right and you misunderstood and made it worse in that regard.
But my main issue is what it means and that low numbers here are bad.
So headline should be
" surprisingly, disappointingly few lausd students are out due to covid".
But almost no la times reporters or readers would be able to understand that anyway.
I didn't misunderstand anything, you're overthinking it.
“Twenty-one to 23 percent — or some 40 to 44 million of the 191 million adults in this country — demonstrated skills in the lowest level of prose, document, and quantitative proficiency. Though all adults in this level displayed limited skills, their characteristics are diverse. Many adults at this level performed simple, routine tasks involving brief and uncomplicated texts and documents. For example, they were able to total an entry on a deposit slip, locate the time or place of a meeting on a form, and identify a piece of specific information in a brief news article. Others were unable to perform these types of tasks, and some had such limited skills that they were unable to respond to much of the survey.”
* From a 2002 report by the U.S. Department of Education office of Educational Research and Improvement. The numbers haven’t changed since then.
This population is thought of as being borderline to functionally illiterate – for example, they are challenged with reading and understanding a prescription label.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 29% of American adults (about 73 million people in 2018) can do only simple numeric processes. They can count, sort, do simple arithmetic, and use simple percentages like 50%, but cannot do more complex numeric operations. As a result, they likely cannot select the health plan with the lowest cost based on annual premiums and deductibles for a family or calculate the difference in the percentage of patients who survive 1 treatment vs. another. Similar issues emerge in personal finances. For example, when told the amount owed on a credit card, monthly payments, and annual percentage rate charged, only 35% of people correctly answered how much their payments would have to be to pay off the debt within a decade.
This is a part of our society, a tragically large part.
To me 6,500 seems VERY high. That’s over 1,400 per 100,000. Even if not all are infected, early in the pandemic a 7 day rate of 50 was considered high (of course people sorta kinda learned to live with 200+).
Not really at least if looking at the confirmed cases.
First, actual positive cases produce a rate of around 650 per 100,000, not 1400. And this is for a 2 week period. And this is with testing everyone.
La county has had confirmed cases around 32 per 100,000 for this period per day, so about 450 per 100,000 per a two week figure. So, if kids are getting it at the same rate as overall ( HUGE if), then there are only an extra 200 unreported cases per 100,000 for two weeks .
And that is lower than expected to me.
Note that iffy if kids are catching at same rate buy they reported 1000 out of 60,000 staff out due to covid. Did not see breakdown there for number of positive tests vs. just exposed but looks staff numbers similar to kids.
Yes, you can say this shows that cases are high, at least way higher than what would be good. But we already knew that based on confirmed cases data. So this data adds nothing re that. But it sheds light on number of unreported cases.
The more unreported asymptomatic cases there are ( with a fixed amount of sickness and death) the better . Because they are contributing to immunity and not increasing a problem. Or actually they are but we already saw any problems re hospitalization and death- we just did not see extra immunity.
So that is why I said numbers are too low to be good. I was hoping for higher.
But I did think of one thing. The over 50% of those out due to being exposed but have no positive test are home because they could still become positive, right? And maybe they are positive later and never get tested again . So a good chunk of them maybe should count as positive. Maybe I can get back to my prior estimate of one unreported case for each confirmed then.
The only good news is that even with those very high numbers, hospitalizations are not at the levels of last winter. They are high, though. 450 or 650 or anything over 100 means this is out of control.
Might add that la county confirmed cases seem consistently down vs same day prior week at least for the last week or so. And this is with testing still going up and up.
So really clear covid is going down here. No more doubt about that.
Can we keep going down here ? I think so at least for a few months until we will see if colder weather in December is a problem. I am concerned that, as weather changes, vaccinations again drop off as we run out of any but really resistant, extra natural immunity declines as infections fall, the big immunity boost from winter surge and start of vaccinations gets a year old and immunity wanes, and people get complacent as cases get low, cases will start to rise again.
Pick whichever factors and in which order you want. The point is it seems to me that maybe everything that is now bringing cases down ( and will keep doing so for months) will all reverse around the same time.
So my pessimistic side predicts that cases will be dropping everywhere around the country and will keep going down more than most think possible through maybe early November. And everyone will get all happy that we have it beat . And then it will change again and start coming back just like last year .