Coronavirus Newsletter - Schools

 

General Update / 90% Too Sensitive? / Colleges / High Schools / Conclusions

Today, let's talk about schools, but first ...

General Update

The numbers continue to go down! This is great. It appears that the masks are working.

All summer long, the growth rate itself of new cases and deaths has been lower when compared to growth rates at the very beginning of the pandemic. I think this is because of the warmer weather. But even with the slower growth, the base of actives at the beginning of this 2nd wave that hit "everyone but NY" was very high, so the actual counts of cases and deaths have been just as high as they were in the 1st wave.

As the 2nd wave is nearing an end, one big fear is that the colder weather could bring on a major resurgence in COVID-19 cases, and together with the onset of our next flu season, it could bring a major stress to our hospitals ... everywhere. The best way we can fight this is to keep working hard to get the base of active cases down even more. We've just started to go down from our high of a week ago. The lower we get it over the next couple of weeks, the better a fall/winter we're going to have.

So, keep wearing those masks, keep washing your hands, don't crowd, cooperate with contact tracers, keep working from home if you can -- if we all cooperate now the base will continue to drop dramatically and we can actually get this thing over with much sooner.

The NY Times Map shows a better situation overall for our country. There are still splotches here and there. Illinois and Missouri still look bad, as do western Tennessee and eastern Georgia. South Dakota and North Dakota had major increases (and just after how much they bragged about how well they did without locking down).

90% Too Sensitive?

Okay. Before we turn to schools, we need to clear something up. There's a NY Times article making a lot of traction lately -- basically a left-leaning newspaper published a health article saying that coronavirus tests are too sensitive. So, right-wingers have been using this article to say a lot of crazy things that the article just isn't saying. Click here for the article.

Perhaps later I'll come back and give this article more time, but as it relates to the school discussion, today I want to focus on the 90% number floating around.

The idea of the article is that there are too many false positives because dead virus fragments, or insufficient amounts of virus, are causing positive results when they should really be negative. These are people who are unlikely to be contagious at the time of testing.

Unfortunately, the article said this:

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

The first paragraph is fine, but the second paragraph is a common mistake of logic. So bad that I must say: Apoorva Mandavilli, give me your wrist. Bad bad! Slap!

To see the error of this logic ... how about we extend it to today's USA numbers? 6,636,247 total would mean 663,625 real cases total, but with deaths at 197,421, that would give us a 30% death rate? That doesn't sound right. (Note that once it gets to death -- we're usually pretty sure by that time that COVID really is involved.)

Where did Mandavilli go wrong? Look at the states she mentioned. Both Massachusetts and New York were hit hard by the virus early on, and Arizona got hit heavier later, but its population is small compared to Massachusetts and New York.

This means that a large chunk of the tests coming in lately from those states are likely to be re-tests from those who are seeing if the virus has left. In other words, the long-haulers, who are known to have dead remnants of the virus causing lingering symptoms, but who are also known not to be contagious.

So, no ... you can't transfer that 90% number to "new" cases ... not at all.

This is important to realize because when schools opened up, our country-wide New Case counts stalled briefly in their downward trend. Cases were popping up in noticeable clusters at several campuses and high schools, and not because of insufficient virus ... but because of super-spreader events. In other words, we can tell by the pattern of the spreads that these people are contagious. We can even trace it to parties that were held in late August, and there are several reports of students being sick -- though usually not so serious as to require hospitalization.

For the rest of this discussion, we can just throw out that 90% or 10% number. It's just wrong.

Colleges

Today you'll see a few articles from the New York Times. This is mainly because I think they're doing a good job compiling the data and putting together some nice dashboards. I may not agree with all their conclusions, but it's interesting stuff.

Several colleges have opened up their campuses. Some have kept the virus at bay while others haven't been doing quite as well.

You can check out how each school is doing by visiting this NY Times School Dashboard. Look at the map to see how each school is doing by color. And you can scroll down to your state to get a running total of cases reported at each school (though some numbers may be delayed).

In my city, Wake Forest is up to 56 cases. To get a sense of how they're handling the virus, you can check here. I also hear that Wake Forest is working with nearby hotels to help spread out the students living in on-campus housing. I present this as a school doing an okay job fighting the virus.

And then there's UNC, which as per the dashboard is up to 1,152 cases. Yeah ... whoa Nellie! And get this ... when the school saw that things were getting bad, they basically closed up on-campus housing and sent everyone home ... even the sick people.

This seems to be normal among several other colleges ... sending home sick students home so that they can all infect people at home and in transit.

The good news is that any bump from this new vector -- so far -- looks to be small. The schools just had to learn the hard way that opening campuses without proper preparation doesn't work so well, can lead to increased cases, and then infect the surrounding communities and contribute to more deaths.

BTW, xkcd ventures a guess as to why an optimistic model on schools turned out to be so wrong ...

High Schools

You can check out this NY Times Safe Schools Dashboard, which tries to show which areas are likely to be safe for opening up schools. It also shows some interesting stats. According to the map, it claims that my county of Forsyth should be safe to open up elementary schools, but not high schools yet.

I believe part of this is based on studies similar to the South Korea study showing that kids in the 10-19 age range are just as likely to spread the virus as adults are. And sure enough, we've seen several reports of immediate spread in the first week of high schools opening up, often resulting in moving studies back to remote.

These children have a much lower incidence of death, but can still be a vector, bringing home the sickness to their more susceptible parents and grandparents.

That same study seemed to indicate that kids in the 0-9 age range do not spread the virus as much, and thus the reason why elementary schools may be able to open sooner.

My child's high school is still holding remote classes. She really misses in-class learning, being with friends, and marching in the band. Though, with football season being moved to the Spring, there's hope that she may still get in some marching this school year. BTW ... I think marching itself could be quite safe, being outside and all, however inside practices could spread the virus as well as possible crowding in the stands.

Many have pointed out that schooling from home can be detrimental to the child's learning, and I can see why. It would be good to find any way to get them safely back to school.

BTW, you can keep up with developments among high schools across the states in this impressive database being maintained by the NEA. It attempts to report case counts and death counts (if any) from each individual school. Just look up your state and see if there are any reports for your school. (Note: if your school is remote, there's unlikely to be any reports yet.)

Conclusions

These younger students are less likely to die, but they can still get sick, and can still spread the virus, even if asymptomatic. Schools can be safely reopened if there is adequate preparation, cleaning, contact tracing, low-enough new case volume in the surrounding community, mask-wearing (for now), distancing, adequate ventilation inside, washing hands frequently, etc. Schools that fail to do this will spread the virus and/or end up closing. Those who succeed can enjoy having the students return safely.

I am happy to see overall counts dropping, so perhaps by January we can get our kids fully back in school. If we work hard now to keep counts low in the upcoming dangerous fall/winter months, it could help our kids get back to school much sooner.