Despite widespread concerns, two new international studies show no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of the coronavirus. And a third study from the United States shows no elevated risk to childcare workers who stayed on the job, according to a report by NPR.org.
Combined with anecdotal reports from a number of U.S. states where schools are open, as well as a crowdsourced dashboard of around 2,000 U.S. schools, some medical experts are saying it’s time to shift the discussion from the risks of opening K-12 schools to the risks of keeping them closed.
READ THE FULL STORY AT NPR.org
Do any of us really know the answer? We’re not experts on this subject and the experts we would normally trust have been politicized.
Don’t sell yourself short. You too can be an expert. Open your eyes, reality is all around you.
Do you see people dropping in droves?
If it wasn’t for the media bombarding you with Covid warnings would you even know there was a “pandemic”?
@yoyo hop
Considering I personally know multiple people who have died from it, yes I would.
Seriously PHGiant??! I have only heard from the mouth of 1 person who said they had it and through the grapevine on 3 other people who claimed they had it. I am sorry for those you “know” who have passed, but Yoyo is right, with the exception of my household moving from middle class to near poverty due to loss of our jobs, it is difficult to notice that there is a “pandemic”. Oh, unless you watch the biased news channels.
phgiant@ Being generous with the numbers, the death rate is 1 in a 1000. So the odds of knowing two people who died of it would be 1000 x 1000 = 1 in 1,000,000. The odds of knowing three people who died of it = 1 in 1,000,000,000.
So I’m not going to say your full of S***. I’m just going to say its more likely than not that you’re full of S****.
@yoyo hop
I really don’t care if you believe me or not.
My fathers cousin, my sisters father in law, and my uncles stepson(not technically my cousin because he was from her previous husband)
It’s easy to callous and dismissive when it affects people who aren’t close to YOU.
@yoyo hop
Also that’s not how statistics work….
Many experts, particularly in pediatrics, have been banging this drum for months. It is long past time to prioritize kids and consider schools essential. The harm from closures is major, and the risk of adding to the spread is relatively minor. Everything in life involves trade-offs. This one should be a no-brainer, *especially for K-6 and *especially for areas with low levels of the virus. (Like us for the past couple of months.)
It’s easy to debate exaggeration if you’re not a teacher or other school staff on the front line.
“The front line” is a military term. Comparing teaching kids to troops is quite a stretch. Troops are willing to die to achieve their mission. Teachers are afraid of catching a cold. False equivalences are lame and see through. Try making an argument without trying to use skewed language to make your point. I makes you sound desperate and untrustworthy.
Fear mongering should illegal
Exactly right @ Sam
Alan, you are not on any “Front line”, neither are teachers and staff. You looking for some stolen valor here, buddy? Even using it for the medical workers directly interacting with COVID patients was a stretch, and I have a medical professional friend who died of COVID, caught while treating someone who had COVID. Teachers who refused to teach children, hiding behind their union, for political impact, making life unnecessarily difficult for tax paying parents….no. That is nowhere close to the front line.
@Alan, and it’s easy to dismiss the effect on kids of a year’s worth of social isolation and crummy education at best, no education for many, if you’re not a kid. Stuff that is of immense social importance and relatively low risk should be open, period.
I teach college kids, much more likely to catch it and transmit it. And I’ll be back in person before MDUSD!
@Sam. It’s not a cold. I get 3-4 of those a year from students.
This virus is not the common cold.
The governor can send his kids back to private school so he clearly thinks it’s safe enough. But he clearly also doesn’t care about public schools. All the kids should be back by now 5 days a week. Should have been since the beginning so the school year. The tier stuff is complete crap, also.
YESSS!
No. You can’t just open the schools, full attendance, without precautions. Example, Geaorgia.
Yes you can.
No, you can’t.
You’re apparently just referring to scary headlines from months ago. And nobody is talking about opening schools with *no* precautions.
Right, lets use the old information to make our decisions on. That’s progressive. 🤡
My kids are back at school – hybrid – 2 days in class, 2 days on Zoom, been working okay. No one’s complaining.
Gavid-19 stated his kids are remarkable.
He doesn’t care about the rest 🙁
They’re at a private school. Most of our private schools are open already too. The perks of having money to send your kids to private.
Nobody cares. Go cry more. Your opinion doesn’t matter.
Oh no ! Hide behind the door so the China Plague doesn’t see us
I know. Both my kids have been in daycare or afterschool care almost continuously thru this and there have been zero cases at either facility.
I still know not one person who has tested positive, personally.
I clicked to see the NPR article. The first picture is of a classroom where the student’s desks are spaced well apart and all of the students are wearing masks. To double the distance between people you need to cut the class down by four times. Thus you need to build four times as many classrooms and hire four times as many teachers and other staff.
Locally, the MDUSD is refusing to hire more staff or build more classrooms.
The countries that have fully opened are also those that are able to fully contain the virus. For example, Thailand has not had a single instance of domestic transmission of COVID-19 since Easter. It helps a lot that their vice president during most of the epidemic is an epidemiologist.
Heard that MDUSD acknowledged the covid rise in the county. Wonder if that throws a wrench in their opening plans, or if they move forward with fingers crossed?
I guarantee that the school districts that have been open for months in other parts of the US have not hired four times as many teachers. And yet there is still no evidence of significant boost of spread.
S, I’m tempted to say the recent rise in numbers has confirmed the success of their not-opening plan. They successfully stonewalled their way through months of very low levels of virus, and now it will be deemed too dangerous to open with elevated case numbers. None of this has ever seemed like an organization that is actually moving towards reopening. It’s a stalling operation.
@led 61,000 cases in kids last week.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/more-61-000-children-got-covid-19-last-week-record-n1245851
@MDUSD, yes, cases are up significantly in most of the country. And that’s going to include kids – *particularly now that there is more testing of children.* They aren’t immune, even if it is rarely a serious illness for them. But is the rise correlated to school reopening? The article says nothing about that. And the rise is apparently regional – mostly in the states with the steepest recent curve – as you would expect if this is reflecting the prevalence in the community. This says nothing about whether areas with lower prevalence should have schools open, and says nothing about whether schools are *driving* the spread. It says nothing about the direction of transmission – everything we know so far indicates that kids are more likely to get it from adults than vice versa.
Another thing missing from this article: an age breakdown. We already know that adolescents and young children are different when it comes to transmitting this virus. Lumping 0-18 together is uninformative, consequently.
All this article shows to me, as it pertains to our local situation, is that we should have been in session, in-person, from August to November. Instead we squandered our time of lowest prevalence while the unions and the districts dithered or stalled. But even now our prevalence is low enough that schools should be in person, imo. And most of Europe agrees with me: they are deciding to shut down other things as cases spike (and I mean spike, not the modest rise CA is seeing) but not schools.
Raise your hand if you posted on Claycord that schools would re-open just after the election.
Here!
Not when Biden wins. He’ll have everyone locked up tight again
@PinkRanger- it is true that some people that have money send their children to private schools; however, a vast majority of people are not wealthy. The non wealthy individuals have different priorities (driving old cars, living in the same house for decades, living way below their means, etc) and budget to ensure that they can send their kids to private schools. Also, the vast majority of catholic and other schools offer financial aid and scholarships.
On a state level Governor Newsom gave all of the schools A total of $1.6B to be spent by Dec 31 2020 to handle PPE and extra cleaning supplies and hire extra staff to maintain current health guidelines.
MDUSD has not done any walk thru’s for the cleaning protocols or furnished any public information if they are able to provide a safe clean environment for students and teachers. They have not told the public if they have adequate cleaning staff. Currently there are no guidelines of how they will make sure they will not run out of cleaning Supplies.
Until we can get over this obstacle none of our schools are safe. If we need more money then the teachers union should be “demanding” the governor’s office and state legislature for the extra money.
I have saved more than 30 articles about schools opening. Some of them are studies, including Newsom’s State Health official that said the chances of exposure in school is no different than the normal odds of getting Covid.
The schools did get CARES money as well as state funding. 25 million.
Here is the big conundrum. If we get no vaccine or if it is only 50% effective, no difference between opening now or in a decade. The numbers will continue as they have been. Covid will be Endemic and will flare up forever.
So does that mean we close the campuses and were done?
Our Governor spends money like a drunken sailor on his pet projects. Time to beg for money again from the Feds…..
Cleaning supplies!? Well, I am not surprised to hear that the district hasn’t acted competently. They and the union are both pathetic.
But spread from surfaces is not the main route of infection. And there is nothing fancy required. It really shouldn’t be that impossible to have desks, chair backs, and doorknobs wiped down with a bleach cleaner between classes. That’s the cheapest stuff imaginable. A school district can’t figure out a plan to buy bleach, rags, and rubber gloves?
PPE is a bit more serious, but KN95 masks are widely available now. This really should not be a major obstacle, let alone a deal breaker.
This is from Ashish Jha, dean of the public health school at Brown: “The focus on cleaning surfaces is completely misplaced. It’s expensive and it does nothing. Get some Lysol wipes, make sure you have hand sanitizer around. I’m not saying don’t have people wash their hands. Use basic hygiene. But I’ve had districts say, “We can’t reopen because we can’t get touchless sanitizer dispensers.” This is insane. Taking days off to do deep cleaning? I don’t even know what “deep cleaning” is. ” https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/11/03/schools-need-to-be-bolder-about-reopening.html?cmp=soc-twitter-shr
Agree with all of you. Not fair. Just stating that his kids attend a private school that can fund being open just as the private schools in our area can too and are also open. Can’t hate on those who can afford private school (or not afford of they’re on tuition assistance but have pushed for a private school education). Speaking of which, from what I hear, enrollment is low at some of the private schools. If you are unhappy with the district and their slow motion, call around and get your kids enrolled in private school.
Walnut Creek, Mt. Diablo, San Ramon, Acalanes all have job openings starting in January in their school districts. They were listed on the EdJoin employment website. So yeah, school will be back in session.
Moat likely SCHOOLS WOULD REOPEN FOR A FEW WEEKS, and then be shut down again from Covid the Clown and Freddie the Flu coming to visit.
@iota, You are apparently not very well informed about this. Most European countries, for example, have now committed to keeping schools open even as their numbers have spiked recently. California *is* low prevalence. Especially Northern California. At least, we were for the past three months, when we should have been educating kids…
@sam. Your trolling opinion matters?
Speaking of nobody cares….
No, my opinion doesn’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is truth and facts. That means the schools should have never closed.
Cool name. What is this some MDUSD internal war? So here you guys are fighting like the children you teach. Way to prove what we already know. Teachers are just overgrown children. 🤡
@MDUSD Teacher/Parent
It is not a cold .. but it is not a death sentence.
As for no one cares, the teachers union (not individual teachers) is showing that they do not care. They want politics brought into the classroom. You want all these ‘special’ requirements met when other schools are already open. You need al; this ‘extra’ time to prepare online lessons, well how did you prepare in person lessons? Kids are getting 8 hours a week of interaction with a teacher … 8!!!! They used to get 5-6 a day … now they get 8. The teachers union has failed our children.
So speaking of nobody cares … that is the teachers union in a nutshell.
You sound like a typical modern crybaby “teacher”.
BTW, you can stop blaming others for giving you a cold and maybe clean up your diet.
Basically, you’re all just doing Homeschooling…….the thing you have all mocked and despised.
What are you talking about we got such a wonderful hybrid option that seems to be worse than distance learning while simultaneously threatening to force your child to change teacher and/or schools? They managed to piss off parents and teachers at the same time! This is great! All is well!
At least next year we can blame Joe Biden for everything.
I think school is essential. I don’t know of too many families that designed their lives to be a one income household in the Bay Area. We now get to pay daycare $75/day on some days to make sure our kiddo is signing into class. We are blessed to be able to do so, but it’s feeling like paying for private school. Public school is essential for many families.
Now that Biden is likely to be declared the winner, the left is willing to have a conversation the about kids going back to school. No surprise there.
@regular guy
Who on the left is talking about opening schools again? I know I’m not.
Most of the private schools do offer financial aid!! You do not have to be rich to have your kids there.
@parent.
I’ve had 5 students have family members die from this virus.
So yea. For some people. It is a death sentence.
@Anon
Parents send their children to school sick and with fevers.
Thanks for caring about my diet though.
Most trolls on here, including yourself, seem to think you know what’s going on, but unfortunately, you don’t. My students are learning. My biological children are learning. It’s a lot more difficult, but it’s happening.
But thanks for sharing your 2 cents.