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1/ SCHOOL REOPENING DEBUNKING MEGA THREAD. Despite rising COVID numbers and overflowing hospitals, there has been a massive effort on the national and local level to get kids back in school ASAP.
2/ Many of these arguments use false, misleading and out-of-context information in an effort to force schools to open before it is safe to do so. I will address the most common arguments and concerns.
3/ Please know that I am not trivializing the concerns many families are having with remote learning. Remember that many of us teachers are parents too. This is not easy for any of us.
4/ In-person is ideal for most kids, but we also have to remember that we’re in the middle of a pandemic. We all have to make sacrifices and adjustments. This is a temporary situation. Let’s begin.
5/ CDC Director Robert Redfield said schools are one of the safest places for kids. First of all, this is an opinion, not a fact. We don’t make school opening decisions based on opinions, but facts and data.
6/ So how did he come to this conclusion? Redfield was referencing data over a 2-week period from an unofficial crowdsourced COVID-19 School Response Dashboard. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/11/24/health/cdc-schools-coronavirus-website-redfield/index.html
7/ The dashboard is a project of pro-open activist Emily Oster, an economist, NOT an epidemiologist, virologist or public health expert. She even said herself it was “bananas” that the CDC was relying on her database. https://twitter.com/wsbgnl/status/1331429819666481152
8/ There are numerous problems with Oster’s data. As of Oct. 25, only about 1% of schools in the country were reporting, according to a Prospect article. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/why-reopening-schools-has-become-the-most-fraught-debate-of-the-pandemic/
9/ At the time her widely publicized Washington Post op-ed declaring schools safe was published, her database had only 550 schools, including 200 that were FULLY REMOTE. Reporting data from remote schools and using that to proclaim schools are safe seems rather deceptive to me.
10/ Her database included no urban traditional public schools in 27 states and a disproportionate number of private schools. According to Prospect, her tracker had 20 states with zero traditional public schools reporting. ZERO.
11/ Rebekah Jones ( @GeoRebekah), a FL data scientist, has her own database, @thecovidmonitor, that includes 6,000 school districts. She offered to share her data with Oster, “But she basically decided to just pick what data she wanted, not what’s available,” Jones said.
12/ You can read more about some of the issues with Oster’s data, including what epidemiologists have been saying about it, in the Prospect article above.
13/ Back to Redfield. Even if you believe schools are safe, his statement makes no sense. Students aren’t going to school instead of being at home. They’re going to school in addition to being at home.
14/ Which means the virus can spread from home to school and school to home in addition to workplaces and wherever else families are going in the community. School just adds one more possible transmission source to the list.
15/ Studies have shown that opening schools increases the R rate, the number of people that one infected person will, on average, infect. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/coronavirus-r-rate-school-closures-lockdown-lancet-study-b1251617.html
16/ As a side note, let's also make it clear that schools were never closed. Only the buildings. When I say schools are closed or open, I'm referring only to buildings. With limited character counts it's just easier.
17/ Back to Redfield, his statement only focuses on children, and completely ignores the impact that school openings have on adults, including staff, families and the greater community. It also ignores the unknown long term affects of COVID. We'll get more into that later.
18/ Another argument we constantly hear is that schools have been proven to not be a source of community spread. Most of this proof is traced back to Oster (debunked above), but there is plenty of other evidence this is false.
19/ Jones' COVID Monitor (referenced above) has found that case rates for school districts are often much higher than case rates in the community. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-12-02/shut-them-down-why-schools-might-not-be-safe-during-covid-19
20/ "Our data demonstrates that schools are not the safe havens or silos some believed they would be, and that they in fact contribute to the spread of COVID-19." This seems like common sense to many of us.
21/ I know many of you are still skeptical, so let's take a look at some examples around the country.
22/ This is in St. Charles County, Missouri. There are currently 1,836 community cases linked to a K-12 school case. https://twitter.com/JenRoesch/status/1333462224774574085
23/ Please note, the numbers are constantly changing. I am relying on articles & other research so if I accidentally get something wrong or misinterpret something, please feel free to correct me and know that it is in good faith. I am trying my best to put out accurate info.
24/ I have much more to add but must turn in for now. I will keep adding to this thread over the coming days and weeks, so please follow for updates.
25/ Too much to Tweet, too little time. I'll add more examples, hopefully later today. Some upcoming topics after I finish the US outbreaks: Europe, kids falling behind, low income/minority/SpEd issues, socialization, abuse, suicide (yes, I'm going there) and more.
26/ Unfortunately, most school systems are not as transparent with their data and most systems don’t track in-school transmission like St. Charles County.
27/ Another huge issue with much of the data we have is that it doesn’t account for possible asymptomatic transmission. According to a recent study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, one-third of children with COVID are asymptomatic. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/early/2020/11/23/cmaj.202065
28/ And the numbers in the Canadian study are conservative. I’ve seen other studies showing much larger numbers of asymptomatic kids.
29/ Most children who have no symptoms are not getting tested. If asymptomatic children are spreading COVID, it is often not traced back to the school because no one knew they had the virus. It’s kind of like a don’t ask don’t tell sort of thing.
30/ I know asymptomatic transmission has been a point of debate in the scientific community. But according to the new guidance from the CDC, most COVID cases are spread by people with no symptoms. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/20/health/cdc-coronavirus-spread-asymptomatic-website-wellness/index.html
31/ According to the guidance, 24% of people who transmit the virus to others never develop symptoms and another 35% were pre-symptomatic.
32/ So what about children? A contact-tracing study of nearly 700,000 people in India found that children are silent spreaders, transmitting COVID to other children and adults. https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1311974600142708736
33/ A Princeton study also found evidence that children were "superspreaders" and key to the spread of COVID. https://twitter.com/Read4Ks/status/1311999873605136384
34/ Pediatric COVID cases are at an all-time high, according to data from the AAP and Children’s Hospital Association. https://twitter.com/BernieDogs4/status/1334342051106873344
35/ And this study was just published in Pediatrics. https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1334892741348761610
36/ In Florida, pediatric COVID cases are at an all time high. There are about 25,000 school cases. https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1334986985988104194
37/ And we’re supposed to believe that kids aren’t getting and spreading COVID at school?
38/ My thoughts exactly. https://twitter.com/RajBhardwajMD/status/1327635121667674113
39/ For more on school cases, read through this thread. https://twitter.com/BernieDogs4/status/1332156066168180737
40/ One more for tonight. This JAMA study indicated that school closures this spring saved lives. https://twitter.com/MaggieEThornton/status/1329796848803057667
41/ Next up, New York City.
42/ So what about New York City Schools? Wasn’t the school positivity rate ridiculously low? When NYC schools closed on Nov. 19, the in-school positivity rate was only 0.23%.* Sounds pretty safe, right? But not so fast.
43/ There are several factors that may have kept the positivity rate artificially low. One important note is that the positivity rate only includes random samples of students and staff who were tested AT school.
44/ Students and staff who got a test outside of school were not included in the rate. This is meaningful because those with symptoms or who were exposed and had to quarantine likely stayed home and were tested at an outside location. https://twitter.com/Jill_Jorgensen/status/1329848489208123392
45/ For example, if you’re a teacher and you’re coming down with symptoms, you call in sick and stay home. You go to a local testing center and your COVID results come back positive, but those results aren’t included in the school’s rate.
46/ Here’s another example. A student in your child’s class tests positive so the entire class has to quarantine and stay home. Those students' parents take them to get tested, but none of those results would show up in the school rate because they weren’t tested at the school.
47/ There are lots of anecdotal examples of transmissions that were not tracked. https://twitter.com/JenRoesch/status/1329886986757419010
48/ So to compare the city’s then 3% rate — comprised mainly of people who were tested because they were having symptoms or were exposed — to the school rate without clarifying information is dishonest.
49/ While it wouldn’t prove anything, it would be interesting to look at the city’s rate for school-aged kids to see how it has gone up in comparison to the adult cases since school has been open.
50/ But we have to remember that only about 25% of all students were in-person at the time the schools closed, so there’s no way to know which cases had anything to do with school.
51/ It's also important to note that at the time schools closed, 9% of all NYC school buildings were already closed due to COVID. https://twitter.com/MOREcaucusUFT/status/1329100307029221378
52/ But doesn’t the low in-school rate show that asymptomatic spread is not happening?
53/ Unfortunately the sample is not representative of the population. In order to get tested, parents had to sign a consent form. Around the time schools closed, only about half of the students had a signed consent form. https://twitter.com/ArchoProbato/status/1328162453776166913
54/ There are reports at some schools that some of the same teachers and students were getting tested every month. https://twitter.com/eapelosi/status/1329918510462627841
55/ Some reported no testing has happened at their schools. https://twitter.com/NellyK87334695/status/1328165265490784263
56/ There are lots of anecdotal reports like these, but there are too many to ignore. https://twitter.com/D75TeacherNYC/status/1327681493930561537
57/ Another huge problem with the sample: The majority of those getting tested at school were adults, not kids. https://twitter.com/Jill_Jorgensen/status/1329853790535766020
58/ None of this means that there was lots of asymptomatic spread in the schools, it simply means that we don’t have enough accurate data to know what was going on.
59/ When people celebrate NYC’s low positivity rate they conveniently leave out these crucial details.
60/ When schools reopen on Dec. 7, they will require consent forms from all students and test 20% of the school’s population each month, so hopefully we should have a more representative sample to understand if there is asymptomatic spread.
61/ If asymptomatic cases are still low, that would be amazing news. The goal of testing should be to get accurate, unbiased data, not prove a point.
62/ However, the school positivity rate should be reported with an asterisk because it’s not including students and staff tested outside of school, even though they may have contracted or spread the virus at school.
63/ Despite these issues, I do applaud NYC for at least doing asymptomatic testing. In order to get a full picture of what's really going on, they should include all testing from students and staff in the positivity rate, and media needs to explain this when it is reported.
64/ In my personal opinion, it's insane to open after Thanksgiving when COVID rates are skyrocketing. I feel for all teachers in NYC, but have a feeling your schools won't be long.
65/ Next up: Europe.
