Acting from an assumption that an infectious disease spreads more if children from every family gather daily in crowded classrooms doesn't seem like an unreasonable one.
I would also love more data on this, preferably before the next pandemic.
There were lots of alternate futures, ranging from “the whole world, everywhere, utterly locked down schools for the past 2+ years” to “the whole world, everywhere, utterly refused to lock down schools for the past 2+ years”, and everywhere in between in terms of which schools, which policies, when, and for how long.
We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.
> We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.
Sure, and again, after the fact.
Refusing to take action as soon as data were available to justify better methods got people killed.
(Thanks for the link, btw. Had no idea “dildo” dates to the 16th century. The things you learn...)
That I have no idea if you would have wanted more lockdown or less lockdown or more masks or less masks, etc, etc, should indicate the difficulty in decision making.
But for the record, I'm not defending any decisions made by any government, I'm merely defending the difficulty of the process, and they will be dragged for any decision they make regardless because, again, there is no win scenario in a pandemic.
We know very few kids in school have parents or guardians that are "elderly" and that not many have parents or guardians that are "chronically unhealthy", and we knew that Covid (pre-delta) had a very low complication and death rate on school-aged children (not too dissimilar from the flu).
It seems like the smarter thing to do would've been to let parents have their kids stay home if they wanted, and let teachers stay home if they had an excuse, and make efforts to make the environment as safe as possible.
Instead - it became entirely political. One side wanted to go to the extreme for safety. The other side wanted to pretend like it was a hoax.
Once Delta came around - all adults had access to vaccines. Once fully vaccinated - Covid again is not materially worse than the flu (unvaccinated). Again - at this point - the decision for students could've been left up to the parents, rather than just forcing everyone to stay home.
Do we? 40% of US adults are obese.
The IFR for people under 50 (the vast majority of parents and guardians of school-aged children) is 0.427% [1]. If you assume the median age is 45, it drops down to 0.286%. at 35, it's 0.104%. When you factor in vaccines, these rates are reduced by >90%.
90% of these deaths come from people with co-morbidities. So you wouldn't multiply these numbers by 1.42 to get the IFR for obese people. It would be less than that. But I'll do that any way - for a worst case scenario.
Some 35 year olds might have their kids stay home because they'd have an extra 0.042% chance of dying (assuming their kid going to school means they definitely get Covid and their kid not going to school means they definitely wouldn't get Covid - which is a strange assumption). At 45, with those assumptions AND you being obese, it's about an extra 1 in 1000 chance of dying. Some people might not be willing to take that risk. A lot would gladly. If you're vaccinated - the rate is close to 1 in 90,000.
If you're 80, unvaccinated, and a 400 pound chain smoker - yeah, you definitely want to minimize your exposure as much as possible.
The reality is that you have about a 40% chance of getting Covid unless you live in a bubble. Sending your kids to school isn't even going to give you a 100% chance. So the risks of sending your kid to school are about cut in half (or less).
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
What’s your point?
I think I mistook you as agreeing with the GP that we had no chance to improve the outcome with the info at hand.
There was data from many flu pandemics. It led to the standard public health recommendation being against school closures. One more thing that just got tossed out without a moments thought for COVID. And no, COVID is not so novel that all prior knowledge of viruses and respiratory disease became irrelevant.
Calling covid "novel" is only true in some pedantic, insider-talk sense.
You’re also talking like we only get one chance to make the decision, rather than update that decision as facts roll in and more is known; as assumptions become proven unfounded and wrong.
So, yes, let’s see that data.
> Early evidence indicated that schools were low risk and children were unlikely to be very infectious, but it is becoming clear that children and youth can acquire and transmit COVID-19 in school settings and that transmission clusters and outbreaks can be large.
Most of the protocols (besides the baseline, do-nothing protocol) have some effect, but aren’t perfect.
> None of the mitigation protocols we modeled, initiated by a positive test in a symptomatic individual, are able to prevent large transmission clusters unless the transmission rate is low (in which case large clusters do not occur in any case). Among the measures we modeled, only rapid universal monitoring (for example by regular, onsite, pooled testing) accomplished this prevention.
But as it says there, prevention can be achieved by emphasizing frequent on-site testing (which is super consistent with what we know about avoiding spread events generally).
> Without closing schools down entirely, if we want to prevent large clusters from occurring altogether, this leaves approaches to detect potential index cases before they show symptoms. Pooled testing, wastewater monitoring and airflow monitoring have all been proposed with this aim [42, 43]. We simulated introduced cases and resulting transmission under the baseline of no regular testing (with the same baseline as above, symptomatic individuals going home) and compared this to weekly or every three day testing or environmental monitoring covering all individuals in the class. The results for the total cluster size are shown in Fig 6. Regular pooled or otherwise universal testing dramatically reduces the sizes of even the most unfortunate clusters (infectious index, higher-risk room), for example from a median of 12 to a median size of 3 if the index is asymptomatic. But even with regular pooled or otherwise universal testing, testing in a matter of hours (e.g. onsite) has a substantially greater impact than testing at a centralized laboratory (if that takes 2 days including shipping time).
This doesn’t seem like a strong argument in favor of virtual school?
It is in particular useful for cases where virtual schools are just not an option (on the top of my head, toddlers and lower age kids for instance. If their parents can't teach them for whatever reasons, in-person teaching will be critical to their development, and they can't wait 3 years that the dust settles)
Now this study might have a lot more different political stuff going on, but I generally think the situation with kids is complicated and there is no one single solution to the learning problem. We'd need to adjust to a lot of cases.
The paper concludes that an effective testing regimen can, in fact, contain spread. This is the lesson we should take from this whole experience. This is the heart of why Japan and South Korea did so comparatively well during the pandemic: test, trace, and isolate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7688188/
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...