I am convinced that Trump and the entire Republican party have given up on trying to eliminate or effectively control the coronavirus. Instead, they want us to concentrate only on the economic damage that the illness has caused and how we (and Trump) have been suffering for it. This is what underlies the “cure can not be worse than the disease” philosophy of the Republicans. It also underlies their disastrous efforts to prematurely open up the economy to make sure that every bar, stadium, nail salon, restaurant and pool hall is open for business and packed with people.
So what is the only possible solution to the need to have everyone back at work: Force all the schools to reopen and send the kids back in for in-person classes. All of ‘em. No exceptions!
The reactionary conservatives know that if the schools are not opened up to regular classes, and the kids all stay home, it will certainly hurt the ability of their parents return to work and make money. This will further harm the economy and, in Trump’s careful calculation, be the thing that helps the Democrats to win in November. Never mind that we have already suffered more than 155,000 deaths due to the Coronavirus. Just get back people back to work and make the economy pick up by November 2.
And for the people who worry about the virus exploding if kids go back to in-class learning the Republicans have a ready answer: kids are not easily infected with the disease and they don’t transmit it very much. So there. Nothing to worry about. Get those backpacks on and get into class so mom and dad can go to work.
This philosophy of economics over health is insane. Sending kids back to school will result in the same damage as being too quick to open up the economy for various activities that mixed people together: you are going to get more infections, more deaths, AND, more economic damage. The cure is the cure and the disease is worse than the cure in every way.
But can we have all kids return to school without the a massive increase in infections and deaths?
Don’t count on it. Here’s why.
We now know that asymptomatic kids can carry a huge amount of the virus in them.
The New York Times, in an article written by Apoorva Mandavilli and appearing on July 30th, reports on a recently concluded study that shows that children not only get infected but can have huge amounts of the virus in them - and can shed to others. “It has been a comforting refrain in the national conversation about reopening school. Young children are mostly spared by the Coronavirus and don’t seem to spread it to others, at least not very often. But …. infected children have at least as much Coronavirus in their noses and throats as infected adults, according to the research. Indeed, children younger than five may host as much as 100 times as much virus in the upper respiratory track as adults, the study found.”
Surprise, contrary to what we have believed (in our still limited understanding of this new disease) young school age kids are susceptible to becoming infected with the coronavirus. And can carry a very, very heavy load of it. The New York Times article continues, “… Experts were alarmed to learn that children may carry significant amounts of the virus.” ‘I’ve heard lots of people saying ‘Well, kids aren’t susceptible, kids don’t get infected.’ And this clearly shows that’s not true’ said Stacey Schulz-Cherry, a virologist at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.”
Young kids can have the virus, and have a lot of it. But will they actually spread it to a teacher, or librarian or even take it home to mom and dad? Here’s what one scientist has already concluded from the new research, “It definitely does show that children do have levels of virus similar and even higher than adults,” Dr. Taylor Heald-Sargent (a virologist who has done research into the level of viral infections as measured by something known as their cycle thresholds), of the Lurie Children’s Hospital, said. ‘It wouldn’t be surprising if they were able to shed’ the virus and spread it to others.’”
There are plenty of susceptible grown ups who may be infected or transmit an infection.
Before we send millions of kids, and adults, back to the classroom for in-person teaching, we had better remember that teaching is a very manpower intensive activity. In other words, it takes a lot of people to do it. And even if young people are not highly susceptible to the coronavirus, or likely to pass it on, the more people you have working in close proximity to each other the more danger of infection and death there will be.
In addition to the students, in elementary school alone, you have teachers, principals, office staff, nurses, librarians, bus drivers, playground supervisors, cafeteria ladies, special guests who lead rallies, and people who do testing for hearing, vision and learning problems. If you have special needs students then each one of them may require one or two adult aids with them at all times. There will of course have to be janitors and repair personnel. And this does not even count the parent volunteers who may be on campus for the PTA meetings or other reasons.
And, as any elementary school teacher will tell, trying to make young students properly wear a mask all day, and maintain social distancing during recess (or any other time), and keep their hands washed is - well they’re kids, and it is hard.
In the junior high and high school grades, in addition to all of the above, you have football coaches, choir directors, band leaders, guidance counselors, visiting basketball teams, guards, outside tech support people, outside administrators coming for consultation, and the constant stream of parents who are on campus to drop off the math book their kid forgot to bring to class.
Of course schools need support. You can’t have have any kind of public school without having a district office full of administrators, lawyers, consultants, curriculum developers, financial personnel and many others.
Public (and in many cases private) schools have tons of adults - male, female, young, old, middle aged, healthy, not so healthy, some with sick kids of their own at home - who are working together consulting with each other, coming into contact with students and with other adults repeatedly during the day.
Kids can infect adults, adults can infect other adults, either can bring home something to the family other than a report card. Are progressives the only ones who can see the danger in this?
Trump should have been paying attention to Israel - but didn’t.
One of the best indicators that Donald Trump’s negligence, of his almost total lack of interest in confronting the coronavirus and actually trying to solve it, is that he does not even both to look around the rest of the world to see what others are doing.
The Israelis could tell Trump a lot about the problems of reopening schools. They just did it and it did not go well. If Trump had merely paid attention to what was happening there he would not be so quick to see the reopening of our schools as riskless venture he obviously believes that it is.
The sad and alarming facts of Israel’s reopening of its schools was reported in an article entitled, “Israel Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains.” It first appeared, as far as I know, in the Daily Beast back on July 14th. It was also picked up for broadcast on the MSNBC on July 31.
Israel, a small country of about nine million people, opened up its school in May fully expecting it would be education as usual. Instead, shortly after opening up the schools for regular classes there was an explosion of coronavirus cases. with thousands of new infections. The Daily Beast article starts right off with giving us the total: of 1,400 diagnosed with COVID-19 last month (June), 657 (47 percent) were infected in schools. Almost half of the entire total!
Previous to this time Israel had done an impressive and effective job in controlling the spread of the coronavirus. In fact, the strong measures that the government had taken seemed to have worked brilliantly. As the Daily Beast article points out, “Importantly, on May 17 in Israel it appeared the virus not only was under control, but defeated. Israel reported only 10 new cases of COVID-19 in the entire country that day.”
How was this accomplished? In the two months prior to the disaster the entire country had been on a total lockdown. That was two months in which hardly anybody who was not really an essential worker was staying home. In this time the virus would have been starved of hosts.
On May 17 the government announced that the country’s entire school system would open for regular classes. There were dissenting voices, of course. Prior to the actual reopening there had been a cautious experiment of several weeks in which only children in the first, second and third grades, were brought back to school. And in a very controlled way. The were taught in small, non-intersecting groups, called capsules.
And this cautious approach really worked. “Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist at the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Hebrew University Of Jerusalem, and Chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians, said, ‘There was no measurable increase in contagion’ while the capsules for young children were being tried out.’”
So far, so good. The measured and cautious approach had managed to bring a limited number of young student back into a more or less normal classroom environment without ANY increase in infections. Slow, careful, and methodical seemed to be the key.
At this point further investigation into school-based infections carried out by the same group that had managed a limited but successful return of students to the classroom would have seemed to be a good idea. Such an investigation might have yielded valuable insights in COVID-19 transmission and infection of young students before a full scale return to normal school operations began. And in fact, the association (IAPHP) had offered to do just that.
But no. The government was not interested. “Then, Levine says, ‘contrary to our advice, the government decided to open the entire system all at once on May 17. What happened next was entirely predictable.’
“On June 3, two weeks after school opened, more than 244 students and staff were found to test positive for COVID-19. According to the Education Ministry 2, 026 students, teachers and. and staff have contracted OVID-19 and 28,147 are in quarantine due to possibile contagion. “Just in the first two weeks of July, 393 kindergartens and school open for summer programs have been shuttered due to cases of COVID-19.”
Israel went from lockdown with almost no coronavirus cases to opening up its schools, against professional advice, to immediately having thousands of new infections, people being forced into quarantine and schools and summer programs being shut down.
Is there is possibly a lesson in this for America? After all, we are only weeks away from the entire country going back to school. Isn’t there something here that Donald Trump could learn, if he just cared enough to look.?
-Are there lessons to be learned from the experience of Israel?
I think there are some very clear and valuable lessons to be learned from Israel’s experience in suddenly just sending all its students back to class to continue their schooling just as before. Please note:
-Lockdowns work well to stop the spread of the virus.
Israel was struggling with the coronavirus along with the rest of the world. But the lockdown instituted by the national government in the spring was successful in arresting the virus. According the Daily Beast article on May 17, “due to the nationwide lockdown on the day schools opened again, there were only ten new cases of the coronavirus in the entire country. At that level it looked as if the virus was not only contained, but possibly even defeated.” If only they had continued the lockdown for at least a little while longer they might have snuffed it out completely. Imagine that!
What is the lesson for America here? That lockdowns do work. Our only drop in cases of new infections and deaths was back in the spring when the rapid rise of viral infections scared us enough to make people shelter in place and stay out of society. But after initial success in the lockdown Donald Trump, his economic advisors, the idiots on Fox Fake and Phony News and too many states, especially the conservatives ones, lifted the lockdown and started moving people back into the economy. People who defied and mocked recommendations to wear masks, or who moved faster than government experts recommended, were supported and their defiance countanced.
In another blog post on the coronavirus I will argue that what America needs is a complete lockdown for about two months. I think that period of time could help us to radically bring down the infection rates in even the heavily affected areas. With that, and strong national direction and support for testing and tracing, I think that we could have a good shot to contain or even eliminate the virus. More on this in a later blog.
-It’s really dangerous to reopen schools to full attendance when infections are still high.
When Israel reopened its schools to full attendance they had radically reduced the spread of infections and were down to only 10 new cases on the day classes started. Ten new cases in a country of about nine million people - no wonder they were hopeful.
Contrast that to America as we move to the start of the new school semester.
America now has 4.75 million cases of coronavirus infection - the greatest number in the world, with 157,000 confirmed deaths. And we have had several days of record new infections in both California and Florida. Nationally, for there are 1,418 infected for every 100,000 people.
How many people does Trump think that we can get into any kind of a classroom, even with precautions, before we start to see the same thing Israel saw: an explosion of new infections. Especially, because…
-Anyone can get the coronavirus, so it’s not just a matter of susceptibility in kids.
Trump and the other conservatives really do believe that because kids were thought not to be susceptible to infection by the coronavirus then there is no threat to them, or anyone else,by being back in the classroom. In fact, although the study showing that kids can carry ten times the amount of coronavirus as adults was reported on July 30, at his press briefing on August 3 he repeated the same belief (lie?) as before - that kids don’t get the coronavirus and therefore are not dangerous.
And adults, many of whom (older people) are particularly susceptible to infection, can bring the virus into the classroom and infect not only kids but other adults as well. And remember, it takes a lot of adults to run a school.
The Daily Beast article quotes Udi Klimer, the deputy direction of of the public-health services of the Israeli government, on what his ministry discovered about infection and transmission in the Israeli schools, “Adults, including teachers and other employees, brought it (the virus) into schools, which are, in the end, closed spaces.”
Kids can become infected and carry huge viral loads, adults can carry the virus, schools tend to be messy and somewhat chaotic places, and, they are closed spaces.
Imagine this scenario: in a typical elementary classroom (an enclosed space) a special needs student, who may have minor or even severe health issues, needs to be closely shadowed by an adult, maybe older than middle age, to make sure the student stays on task, does not fall or get hurt or does not disrupt another child.
The adult must stay close to the child. They could be touching the same desk or pencils or counters all day long. The student may be distanced from other students, but kids get up and walk around all the time. And who know who is going to get shoved, pushed or hit at recess. At the end of the day the teacher and the aid hand off the child to either a parent or a bus driver. After school there are books and other things that the teacher and aid will have to collect and put away. And of course, the janitor will be in later that night to sweep and mop.
After class the teacher and the aid will probably have to have a short meeting to compare notes on the student and his progress, which is common practice. And the teacher will likely meet with other teachers and/or the principal to compare notes, discuss the curriculum or/and prepare for the next day’s class (which they do a lot). Or the teacher may have an emergency meeting with a parent.
Students infecting other students, students infecting teachers, teachers infecting students, teachers infecting other adults, someone in the school infecting a parent who infects a child or adult at home who infects someone at an office or another school, etc., etc. world without end.
With school open for full in-person classes the possibilities are endless - and frightening.
Last note: We are progressives, we are the party and the people who understand that you can’t wish away problems, you can’t neglect them and, particularly with a pandemic viral disease, you can’t indulge in wishful thinking.
Trump and the reactionary conservative Republicans have no real goal, no real objective and no real plan for suppressing or eliminating the coronavirus. That is why, after only half a year, we have 4.5 million Americans infected and 157,000 dead. Whether Trump wins reelection or the Republicans keep the senate or not - don’t hold your breath waiting for a plan of action, especially a realistic one.
As a progressive I will offer up a tentative plan for what I think would be a realist goal to suppress the coronavirus and a way to eliminate it and return to some semblance of normal life. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts as well.