The New York Times surveyed a group of pediatric infectious disease experts and their message was clear: It's OK to send kids back to school. But only if common-sense precautions are taken:
The 175 experts — mostly pediatricians focused on public health — largely agreed that it was safe enough for schools to be open to elementary students for full-time and in-person instruction now. Some said that was true even in communities where Covid-19 infections were widespread, as long as basic safety measures were taken. Most important, they said, were universal masking, physical distancing, adequate ventilation and avoidance of large group activities.
This is the part that bugs me: "adequate ventilation." What does that mean? How is it measured? Who decides if a classroom's ventilation is adequate? If a building is serviced by a commercial HVAC, that's fine. With little or no change, air conditioning systems will guarantee adequate ventilation. Unfortunately, a recent GAO study suggests that nearly half of all school districts have lots of classrooms with inadequate air conditioning systems:
And if a classroom doesn't have air conditioning at all? The EPA basically says you should open some windows and maybe use a few fans. There's not a lot more you can do.
But is that enough? It sure seems like we could use some quantitative guidance here.
POSTSCRIPT: It's also worth noting that although the pediatric experts believe COVID-19 transmission is minimal in classroom settings as long as precautions are taken, they also put a lot of weight on the negative effects of kids being out of school. To some extent, they're willing to accept a small amount of COVID-19 transmission as a price worth paying to get children back in their classes.
An article in the Post on testing for Co2 levels as a proxy for determining air circulation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/10/carbon-dioxide-device-coronavirus/
There's also some significant studies (mostly related to restaurants) very strongly suggesting that the HVAC system itself is a problem because it draws air potentially containing the virus across the room to the air intake. So even though the air going through the HVAC's filtering system might be clean, the air that's moving around inside the room is very, very, very dangerous.
It's not 'very very very' it's not more dangerous than otherwise. It just changes the spread pattern in a room.
Yes, it's much more dangerous. There's really no margin for any kind of spreading in a classroom situation. The HVAC changes things in that it potentially draws the particles across a fairly large space where there's going to be a lot of people.
This is a good description of what's know about indoor spaces:
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-opening-restaurants-is-exactly-what-the-coronavirus-wants-us-to-do
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-and-a-class-how-the-coronavirus-is-spread-through-the-air.html
Yes, you can make citations.
They do not agree with your assertion.
I think they do. The key point for indoor spaces isn’t exchanging and cleaning the air. It is the particles being expelled that linger in the air and drift in the direction of the air intakes that are the problem. That’s exactly what is described in the articles I cited.
Crissa-
I kinda agree with you on this.
But I have concerns. First here in the south schools are built on slabs so that floor level air intake would have to be either in hallways or exteriors wall. The exterior ones wouldn't be bad but the hallway ones would be as the hallways are designed to allow for maximum evacuation crowding for fire or tornado drills
The there's the gym where basketball games are played. Usually these have stands on two sides making ground level air intake restricted to the other two ends of the rooms
It's not as easy or as inexpensive as we wish to believe. Vaccinate and you solve multiple problems.
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There's a difference between an air conditioning unit that just recycles air in a confined volume, such as was in the Chinese restaurant where Covid spread, and HVAC. Cranking up air exchange will limit the build up of aerosols. Granted, poorly designed air flow can lead to local accumulations of aerosols--and being directly"down wind" of an infected individual would not be good.
Maybe a few HEPA filters, box fans and duct tape?
https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-air-purifier.html
The problem isn't with the HVAC system. It is comparatively simple to add components to even the HVAC systems for malls and huge office buildings. The problem seems to be that the air conditioning system itself creates good conditions for the spread of the virus before it reaches the HVAC system's filters.
This is demonstrated by the outbreak in the restaurant in Guangzhou you referenced. The air exchange through proper UV and filters will return safe air to the indoor space but the process of getting that air out of the dining room, classroom, or office is where the danger is found:
This is from the study:
"Virus transmission in this outbreak cannot be explained by droplet transmission alone. Larger respiratory droplets (>5 μm) remain in the air for only a short time and travel only short distances, generally 1 m. However, strong airflow from the air conditioner could have propagated droplets from table C to table A, then to table B, and then back to table C (Figure).
Virus-laden small (1 m (4). Potential aerosol transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome viruses has been reported (5,6). However, none of the staff or other diners in restaurant X were infected. Moreover, the smear samples from the air conditioner were all nucleotide negative. This finding is less consistent with aerosol transmission. However, aerosols would tend to follow the airflow, and the lower concentrations of aerosols at greater distances might have been insufficient to cause infection in other parts of the restaurant."
Only a fresh air intake and fans to mimic relatively safe outdoor conditions would seem to make any real difference. For schools in California, that's not a problem because we could actually have classes outside. For everyone else, it's definitely a problem.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article
Virtually every classroom I was ever in, except those actually in the basement, had large windows that were almost always open in hot weather.
I don't recall any air conditioning at all, not even at college.
It’s February here in New England.
When I was in school it was always February, so maybe that is the answer.
Sounds a lot like the schools I went to, though in HS the newer wing had AC. College was a mix of old and new with A/C. Didn't mix well with my allergies and childhood asthma.
Things are different today, but when I grew up schools did not have HVAC, only HV. I remember being at U. of Minnesota when it was illegal to aircondition public buildings in Minnesota, at least not for humans. Our lab was allowed to have air conditioning for our main frame computer, so we just propped the door to the computer room open all summer. In winter we were not allowed to have space heaters, but we kept some ancient (even then) vacuum tube HP oscilloscopes around which we could leave turned on to serve the same purpose.
It was illegal to air condition public buildings in Minnesota?
Because the traumatic winter is too fresh a memory?
From lead-crime is true to uncirculated air is not a COVID risk: Kevin Drum's journey to reactionary politics.
Noted: Commentor has followed Kevin but didn't bother to make their own argument.
Bugger off or offer something your own.
When life gives me Orange County, I make Sherbet.
"they also put a lot of weight on the negative effects of kids being out of school"
I feel like this is one of those mountains of BS that we collectively pretend is true, because the real reason is less savory.
Parents want and need to get back to work. I've personally witnessed the crushing pressure they are putting on local governments and school boards to make that happen. Of course this means risking our kids and teachers' health, which we can't possibly justify unless it's "for their own good wink wink".
I'd love to see data of kids from war torn countries who miss a couple years of school, and then come to America. I wonder how many ended up being doctors?
It's a bullshit argument. The parents making the argument are generally white and well-off. They are a loud minority.
Here in L.A., a survey of parents showed 75% are satisfied/very satisfied with remote learning. Most parents do NOT want kids to return to school right now. Health risks outweigh other concerns. The parents most willing to continue with remote learning are nonwhite and less well-off.
There really is not great science on any of this. Where some surveys show relatively little transmission in schools, that may be because kids are mostly non-symptomatic. In some L.A. schools where lots of testing was done on kids, there has been high prevalence of the disease, positivity rates above 30%.
Some are pushing for schools to reopen before teachers and staff are vaccinated. See: Chicago. Which is madness. To keep schools closed a full year but then reopen right before vaccinations arrive makes no sense.
Contact tracing is done to interrupt further spreading, it’s not intended for the more difficult problem of determining how someone became infected. Meaning we can’t generally know where school staff or parents were infected; the fact that students are not getting sick in large numbers does not imply that little spending is occurring. As you say, there isn’t enough science on this.
Vaccine is on the way, as is warm weather, when windows can be opened even in northern states. Many schools would be able to extend into summer, with at least morning sessions if afternoons are hot.
Also: universal formal education is a recent development in human history. I’m skeptical about the claims of widespread psychological damage to children who sit out a year. And for claims that the risk of abuse is elevated greatly, if we believed that, shouldn’t we have been monitoring home-schoolers for it?
I think the issue that these experts are raising is less about the education and more about humans as social animals and school are an important formative childhood experience.
It's especially galling given well-to-do white people on both (far) left & (far) right are the most likely to be hot on the homeschooling tip AND autodidactica as superior to formal education, but then are the ones begging for a return to classroom learning during COVID.
These pissant provocateurs cannot have it both ways.
We should be monitoring home-schoolers for all that and more. Unless it's a case of a kid too sick to be in a classroom or a genius kid miles ahead of his local school, home-schooling is mostly about indoctrinating kids into the parent's cult.
Do you have test statistics showing this lack of impact on the kids?
Just ya know, pointing out your assertions.
I think of the many upstate NY rural schools - an astonishingly large number of which were built by the WPA in the 1930s - with steam-heated cast iron radiators in each room. Air circulation takes place every 40 minutes when the classroom door is opened and classes change. Open the windows? It's February in upstate NY.
It is my understanding (I could just be full of it) that even though we have an excellent understanding of air flow requirements in various buildings and how to meet them.
But...not a lot of people fully grasp the subject. Even many in the HVAC biz only have a limited understanding of it. (This often leads to oversized AC units for a given space.)
Even if someone quantified "adequate ventilation," it would be quite a project to determine the needs for all the classrooms out there. Given the required skillset, it would take a lot of time.
There is no mystery about air flow in rooms. Semiconductor Fab engineers have understood this for decades. Air in fabs flows ceiling to the floor so as not to distribute contaminants on wafers.
Experienced engineers could design similar systems for classrooms, restaurants, and such. The complementary point is that you need a scrubber for the air. This is also not hard. Basically a scrubber is a small box with lots of surface area in it (think nested plastic balls with lots of large holes). You spray water on these as air is forced through. Everything in the air is captured in the water which can be sterilized with UV. These don't need to be changed like filters. Just change the water from time to time.
Technically we can provide clean air in enclosed spaces. The problem is the will and the cost. My guess is that if Biden opened up a one month or two month competition we'd see hundreds of designs and the top two or three would be fairly inexpensive and very effective. I mean, we are talking about a small fan, a water pump, and maybe some cheap cardboard tubing.
The benefit, in addition to clearing the COVID-19 virus, would be to clear every other virus and allergen thereby reducing flu, cold and asthma.
I would love that. My allergies are killing me.
Here, here, my allergies were awful when I was at my office.
I agree that this is easily doable and inexpensive. The problem is that the virus lingered in the air and drifts towards the HVAC intake/exchange. That means the significant exposure takes place before the air is cleaned as you describe.
I’ve never been able to figure out how to break up that situation and reliably push everything to the ground. If you could figure that out you could open up indoor dining.
That's why the intakes are at the floor level and at many points in a clean room. The entire floor is grates, creating downdrafts that swallow particles that have been put into the air.
Controlling and channeling the return air is important.
But, as we’ve seen in the Korean and Chinese studies, the particulates are capable of traveling considerable distances before ultimately being drawn into the intake. The downward drift is partly due to gravity and partly due to the HVAC but the particulates seem to potentially encounter a lot of people before being removed from the room or fall below the point where people inhale them.
I haven't looked at this in terms of classrooms but for restos the problem is that it's hard to force down or breakup the virus-laden particles without essentially having dinner in a wind tunnel. If you could solve that problem, I think a lot of resturants could open with small subsidies for renovating to create those conditions.
Uh ... we're talking about schools here, many of which are in OLD buildings, others of which are in newer but very bare-bones buildings, and almost all of which have crowded rooms and are managed by chronically underfunded school systems. State-of-the-art semiconductor-manufacturer HVAC is just not a realistic standard for classrooms, and especially not as a retrofit.
There was a PNAS article about schools in Sweden. Sweden closed upper grades, but left early grades open last Spring. Assuming no major diff between primary and secondary teachers, they conclude:
+100% higher rate of infection among primary teachers
+30% higher for teacher's spouses.
+17% for parents of kids in primary school.
Finally, they conclude that this is all just fine, because these are not national drivers of the disease. I'm not sure how the bioethics works. In the last 3 months, 10% have been infected nationally. If a teacher has double risk, then maybe 20%? So, asking teachers to work through the current outbreak is like asking them to accept that 10% of teachers will be avoidably infected? Maybe this is all worth it. I would just like it if the Epi was in an Epi paper and the bioethics was in a bioethics paper.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2020834118
Perhaps the authors should spend a few months going from school to school and presenting their findings to full classrooms.
Perhaps you should examine all the ways your suggestion doesn't match schools following the guidelines.
I kinda got a strong whiff of snark from the comment, but maybe I'm wrong.
😉
[caveat: I didn't read the article, b/c FTFNYT and paywall]
From what I can see, they didn't actually interview public health experts who deal with the general adult population. We know that kids don't generally get hit with covid severely., but we *also* know that they spread it to their caregivers. So while it's great to ask pediatric infectious disease specialists, they're not exactly the best source for information about this issue. The people they treat, aren't the ones who'll be dying of this disease.
Also, the JAMA article that was behind the CDC guidelines about reopening schools was pretty clear that community spread needed to be under control, in addition to all these other remediations.
175 folks who should be used as "lab rats". Money where mouth is. Walk the Walk not just Talk the Talk.
I worked for a couple of years for a national manufacturer of industrial and commercial refrigeration and ventilation machines. I mingled mainly with architects and purchasing agents for general contractors. Our sales staff all had engineering degrees, carried slide rules (yes, I know), and knew how to calculate optimal sizing for HVAC installations. About half the time the equipment was properly installed and for all I know is still working and making everyone in those buildings happy and comfy and breathing clean air. The other half the time the workers installing the gear were making their own seat of the pants judgements about what was needed, where the vents, fans and thermostats should be located, and once those decisions are made and the walls sealed up, residents and workers in those buildings have just had to live with them. Mostly it's just uncomfortable, but Coronavirus makes it downright dangerous.
I was a kid just out of college and it was above my pay grade to know how to size an HVAC job, but somebody knows how to do it and it needs to be done, at least in our schools.
Quanta had an interesting write up on modeling of Covid 19 on a college campus. The professors from different disciplines set up the model, tested it, then concluded they could have students come back to campus--then there was a major outbreak. Was the problem that the modelers were not epidemiologists? Maybe. It turned out the model did not account for students testing positive, then ignoring quarantine restrictions.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hard-lessons-of-modeling-the-coronavirus-pandemic-20210128/
The CDC recommendations are good--but will they be followed?
We had better learn a lesson for any future pandemic - expertise in human behavior need to be involved in decisions of public policy, of protocols for workplaces, schools, businesses, public spaces. The CDC and Surgeon General made a serious mistake in the early messaging about mask-wearing, and it continues to affect compliance with safe-behavior rules. Certainly they are experts in their areas, but they are obviously not experts in safety behavior nor in communication to shape behavior.
I can't link to this but I get a daily Covid-19 update email from LA County Health Dept. This was in today's email/press release:
Public Health is reporting 15 additional cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), bringing the total cases in L.A. County to 90 children including one child death. L.A. County has experienced more than a 35% increase in children with MIS-C in last two weeks; on January 30, Public Health reported 66 children with MIS-C.
All 90 children with MIS-C in L.A. County were hospitalized and 41% of the children were treated in the ICU. Of the children with MIS-C, 30% were under the age of 5 years old, 40% were between the ages of 5 and 11 years old, and 30% were between the ages of 12 and 20 years old. Latino/Latinx children account for 72% of the reported cases.
MIS-C is a serious inflammatory condition associated with COVID-19 that affects children under 21 years old. MIS-C cases tend to appear in children weeks after they had COVID-19, and sometimes even when a child or adolescent had no known prior infection. Symptoms include fever that does not go away and inflamed body parts, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. If you believe your child is displaying MIS-C symptoms, contact your primary care or an urgent care provider. Seek emergency care for critical or life-threatening conditions. If you do not have a primary care provider, dial 2-1-1 and L.A. County will help connect you to one.
I'm no expert. I will keep my remarks to grades K through 12
The younger kids are not as susceptible to catching the original C - 19, or the British variant. but initial studies showed they could be significant carriers and spreaders either to adults in the school system or bring it back to their home environment
If the main concern is to get kids back in school then expedite the vaccination effort for teachers, admin bus drivers and then the students themselves. Give the parents SOME form of assurance that the kids are safe. Of course mandate masks, expand cleaning protocols.
Colleges are another story altogether. Kids exposed to their first foray into "freedom". Lower the BOOM. No athletics - NONE. Cleaning and inspecting of dorm rooms. Gatherings severely limited. You want the education? Prepare to make some sacrifices temporary - but you HAVE to make them at this time.
I have read conflicting stories about whether or not the current crop of vaccines will work on the African variant. If K through 12 students start showing signs of getting ANY variant make it clear that schools WILL re-close. It took years to develop flu vaccines and they are modified every year. We may be faced with that scenario with COVID.
Adaptability may be the key for a couple of years.
Freedom does NOT mean you get to go mask free. Freedom means YOU wear a mask so I will be free from getting COVID from YOU.
I had COVID 45 days ago. The Mrs and I had mild cases. She has returned to normal. My sense of taste is still sketchy. I don't taste salt. Coffee seems bland. I have a runny nose still. But all symptoms are showing signs of slowly going away. While I was sick I was tired and ached all over. We were lucky. YOU may not be as lucky.
Quote: [Comm'l HVAC] With little or no change, air conditioning systems will guarantee adequate ventilation.
What!!?? Put a plastic bag over your head: there will be little or no air change. There may be air handling in commercial HVAC, but there is no little ventilation or "fresh" air. Most HVAC has minimal 'lick and a promise' air filtration; the primary purpose of air handling is tempering the air NOT doing substantial filtration.
"Adequate ventilation" is a catch-all reference to proper fresh air mix ratio, minimum air changes per hour, and filtration, and they are quantitatively described by ASHRAE 62.1.
Additionally, ASHRAE issued new, specific recommendations, which are lengthy and go beyond just ventilation to also include best practices for maintenance: https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/covid-19/ashrae-reopening-schools-and-universities-c19-guidance.pdf
The section specifically about ventilation starts at page 16, "New/Modified Facility Design Recommendations"
Prediction 1: The CDC will come out with reasonable, science-based guidelines on how to reopen schools safety.
The current story suggests that the guidelines will require masking, social distancing, frequent handwashing, and “adequate ventilation.” When these requirements are met schools can open up reasonably safely even in the absence of full vaccination of teachers and every other employee in the school system.
Observation 1: Adequate ventilation is most schools is impossible to achieve as now set up. Windows are mostly sealed, to keep down HVAC costs. HVAC systems are outdated and cannot supply the required air changes. Upgrading these systems takes time and money. It cannot be done overnight, even if the money is available. School systems are often funded by local taxes, and local tax bases have collapsed.
Observation 2: The majority, apparently, of school districts in America are controlled by Republicans. These are the same Republicans who have always campaigned on “lower taxes” and who have deliberately defunded public school systems to make this possible.
Observation 3: The majority of teachers in these school districts are older females. They aren’t at the head of the vaccination lists in many districts.
Prediction 2: The school systems will open up and tell the teachers it’s somehow safe when they have done absolutely NOTHING to make it so. The teachers will wait patiently in line for vaccinations that won’t be available until, sadly, in some cases they’re dead and in their graves, from Covid.
What are they considering "adequate precautions"? Our kids' school wouldn't be able to maintain 6 ft distance if they were full in-person. They'd have to settle for 3 ft at best. And most parents weren't comfortable with that. As it is, the district is doing hybrid with about 15% of kids in full remote and we've still been getting Covid case notifications from the elementary school at least once a week since mid-December. The idea that we're going to be able to get fully back before the end of the year is a pipe dream.