4 ms·

It's a human aspect, but to be blunt, it's not a significant consideration as long as you aren't opening schools in an area with high community transfer (e.g. H

It's a human aspect, but to be blunt, it's not a significant consideration as long as you aren't opening schools in an area with high community transfer (e.g. Houston today). IF you additionally filter out high risk-group teaches (known pre-existing health conditions, older than 65, etc.) excess death risk is quite low. (e.g. in the Bay Area, dying in a car crash remains far more likely (~10x) if you meet the criteria earlier noted) (Children actually have had negative excess death rates this year: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-mortality-over-time-ons-update-2nd-june/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-mortality-over-time-o... --- reduction in travel, etc. has more than offset covid)

newacct583 6y ago
How does one isolate "high risk group" teachers, though? What's the plan for that? Is it a volunteer thing? Are you going to lay people off? How do you fill the void in the resulting empty positions? What about the family members of those not-high-risk teachers? I'm not a zealot on this. Areas with low infection rates should definitely be looking at schools as an early candidate for reopening. But I genuinely can't understand the outrageous partisanship on this subject that says we have to pick a fight with everyone, right now, on this subject. Why schools? Seriously? Why schools? Why now? What focus group told who this was the hill to die on?
morelisp 6y ago
> You shouldn't be having high risk-group teachers Uh, why? What specifically about diabetes, high blood pressure, or the still largely random distribution of many types of cancer, prevents one from being a teacher?
- usaar333 6y ago
  (In the context of in-person teaching during a pandemic, because of the risk to them. )
duderific 6y ago
> You shouldn't be having high risk-group teaches So who should take the place of these high risk-group teachers? There aren't infinite qualified people waiting around to teach elementary school.
thewebcount 6y ago
This strikes me as highly naive. We have states here in the US banning cities from implementing mandatory mask rules. Do you really think places like that are going to tell people older than 65 not to come in? Do you think if someone who's high risk refuses that they'll still have a job in a place like that? If you're over 65 and will potentially lose your pension for not going in to work, you're probably going to have to think twice about that before just saying no.
lubujackson 6y ago
At least 30 teachers have died of COVID in NYC alone. That seems significant for a viral outbreak that is nowhere near containment or exhaustion, and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually. But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismissive of the risk or forced to take risk to feed themselves. I think the real change will have to be less preciousness/protectiveness of the value of human life, sadly.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  Or there is the other option that we as a country acknowledge that being compassionate and finding solutions to feed these people is an all around better way to take care of our citizens. Why is the solution: Generate corporate profits or die. Or expose yourself to needless risk or die? Seems...sociopathic?
- usaar333 6y ago
  > and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually. I'm not proposing schools open in an NYC/Houston/Miami type situation. But in lower infection area (e.g. the Bay Area), where about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly, you are not "almost certainly" going to get the virus. Obviously, school opening should be gated by community transfer level. California seems to be using a 2 week target of < 100 confirmed per 100k people (with low test positivity), which seems reasonable to me.
  - BadCookie 6y ago
    > (e.g. the Bay Area), about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly I don't know if your 0.1% number is accurate, but let's assume that it is. If somehow cases remain completely level for the rest of the school year (which is far from a given, but for the sake of argument ...) over the course of 40 weeks, a randomly-chosen person has roughly a 40 * 0.1% = 4% chance of getting infected. But that is a randomly-chosen person, whereas it's not hard to imagine that a teacher exposed for hours daily to multiple young kids who aren't good at keeping their germs to themselves is (ballpark) maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person [1]. So then we arrive at an estimate of perhaps 24% odds of a teacher getting infected during the 2020-2021 school year using my assumptions (which you are free to disagree with). Is 24% "almost certain"? No, but by highlighting the tiny 0.1% number, I think you are potentially seriously misrepresenting the true risk to an individual teacher. Hopefully, all of the measures that school districts might put into place will make my 6x-elevated risk estimate incorrect, but it's really hard to know. It's also possible that kids just don't transmit the virus very often. There's some evidence that that's the case, but I don't think we have really solid data on the question. [1] "Teachers had six times more germs in their workspace than accountants, the second-place finisher ..." https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/dirty-ten-germy-jobs/story?id=6107063 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/dirty-ten-germy...
esalman 6y ago
Second Covid19 wave in Israel has been blamed on school reopening- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/israelis-fear-schools-reopened-too-soon-as-covid-19-cases-climb-11594760001 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/israel...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

newacct583 6y ago

How does one isolate "high risk group" teachers, though? What's the plan for that? Is it a volunteer thing? Are you going to lay people off? How do you fill the void in the resulting empty positions? What about the family members of those not-high-risk teachers? I'm not a zealot on this. Areas with low infection rates should definitely be looking at schools as an early candidate for reopening. But I genuinely can't understand the outrageous partisanship on this subject that says we have to pick a fight with everyone, right now, on this subject. Why schools? Seriously? Why schools? Why now? What focus group told who this was the hill to die on?

morelisp 6y ago

> You shouldn't be having high risk-group teachers Uh, why? What specifically about diabetes, high blood pressure, or the still largely random distribution of many types of cancer, prevents one from being a teacher?

usaar333 6y ago
(In the context of in-person teaching during a pandemic, because of the risk to them. )

duderific 6y ago

> You shouldn't be having high risk-group teaches So who should take the place of these high risk-group teachers? There aren't infinite qualified people waiting around to teach elementary school.

thewebcount 6y ago

This strikes me as highly naive. We have states here in the US banning cities from implementing mandatory mask rules. Do you really think places like that are going to tell people older than 65 not to come in? Do you think if someone who's high risk refuses that they'll still have a job in a place like that? If you're over 65 and will potentially lose your pension for not going in to work, you're probably going to have to think twice about that before just saying no.

lubujackson 6y ago

At least 30 teachers have died of COVID in NYC alone. That seems significant for a viral outbreak that is nowhere near containment or exhaustion, and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually. But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismissive of the risk or forced to take risk to feed themselves. I think the real change will have to be less preciousness/protectiveness of the value of human life, sadly.

Avicebron 6y ago
Or there is the other option that we as a country acknowledge that being compassionate and finding solutions to feed these people is an all around better way to take care of our citizens. Why is the solution: Generate corporate profits or die. Or expose yourself to needless risk or die? Seems...sociopathic?
usaar333 6y ago
> and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually. I'm not proposing schools open in an NYC/Houston/Miami type situation. But in lower infection area (e.g. the Bay Area), where about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly, you are not "almost certainly" going to get the virus. Obviously, school opening should be gated by community transfer level. California seems to be using a 2 week target of < 100 confirmed per 100k people (with low test positivity), which seems reasonable to me.
- BadCookie 6y ago
  > (e.g. the Bay Area), about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly I don't know if your 0.1% number is accurate, but let's assume that it is. If somehow cases remain completely level for the rest of the school year (which is far from a given, but for the sake of argument ...) over the course of 40 weeks, a randomly-chosen person has roughly a 40 * 0.1% = 4% chance of getting infected. But that is a randomly-chosen person, whereas it's not hard to imagine that a teacher exposed for hours daily to multiple young kids who aren't good at keeping their germs to themselves is (ballpark) maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person [1]. So then we arrive at an estimate of perhaps 24% odds of a teacher getting infected during the 2020-2021 school year using my assumptions (which you are free to disagree with). Is 24% "almost certain"? No, but by highlighting the tiny 0.1% number, I think you are potentially seriously misrepresenting the true risk to an individual teacher. Hopefully, all of the measures that school districts might put into place will make my 6x-elevated risk estimate incorrect, but it's really hard to know. It's also possible that kids just don't transmit the virus very often. There's some evidence that that's the case, but I don't think we have really solid data on the question. [1] "Teachers had six times more germs in their workspace than accountants, the second-place finisher ..." https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/dirty-ten-germy-jobs/story?id=6107063 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/dirty-ten-germy...

esalman 6y ago

Second Covid19 wave in Israel has been blamed on school reopening- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/israelis-fear-schools-reopened-too-soon-as-covid-19-cases-climb-11594760001 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/israel...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]