No quarantine?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The public interest is kids being back in school, not constantly home for weeks. And if you're finding this that upsetting, I don't know how you made it through schools being closed last year and bars and restaurants being open, or how you're dealing with masks being required in public except if you have a drink on your table, but gyms not being allowed to require vaccinations instead. Policy decisions are all political decisions, but this one at least gets kids back to school.

Yeah, I’ve been constantly screaming into what feels like an abyss for *20* months now. I’m exhausted on a personal and professional level.

But beware the sunk cost fallacy; all of those things doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take reasonable action now. Especially when there are dire consequences for our pediatric healthcare systems if what we’ve been seeing in school openings so far plays out on a much wider scale. Early data indicating that ~1% of cases require hospitalizations. We don’t have the beds or peds HCW to handle that. Remember flatten the curve? We need to take steps NOW to do that for our kids, and instead we are sticking our heads in the sand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My family attends school in suburban Philly. They are treating COVID like the flu. Stay home if you are sick, but no reporting, testing, quarantine.

Good luck with that. Let us know how it goes. But I suspect we will see you all on the news.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m confused. CDC requires you either get a test or quarantine if you’ve had an exposure. How is sitting 3-6 ft from someone infected with covid not an exposure according to DCPS?

CDC updated its requirements (and DCPS followed suit) to recognize that if students are masked, then they aren't exposed when one of them tests positive. This is consistent with studies last year which showed that when students attend school while masked, exposures were not happening at school, and to the extent students did test positive, it was a result of exposure at home or elsewhere outside of school.

This is absolutely bonkers. As someone who has expertise in an adjacent area of public health, I’m so angry that public health guidance is a reflection of political interests rather than the public interest.

There are limited studies about transmission in the classroom, but they were all conducted *before* the Delta variant was prevalent. Epidemiologists know that Delta doesn’t need 15 minutes of exposure; it’s more contagious, and 15 minutes isn’t a magic number. Municipalities are already seeing school, camp and daycare-based transmissions. Preprint papers are talking about transmission happening in seconds, not minutes.

The whole point of the multi-layered, “swiss cheese” approach is that implementing multiple mitigation efforts reduces the risk and can make classrooms safe. But what’s the point of a cohort if they’re not going to be tested or quarantined when there’s an outbreak? CDC specifically does not count mask wearing when contract tracing for adults, but does for children. This just does not align with evolving data about the predominant variant constituting 97% of cases; it’s about politics and convenience. (Although CDC *does* say only “well-fitted and consistent” mask use is an exception to the “close contact” guidance, which honestly no student really meets).

Making politically convenient policy decisions and then justifying them by mischaracterizing the science makes my blood boil.

I am sorry, are you claiming expertise based on being in an “adjacent field?”

Whatever her credentials, she is right.

Yes, she is. And that’s why people are so upset at her post. The facts are very inconvenient.

What all three (?) of you fail to understand is that opening schools is in the “public interest” just as much (or now that we have vaccines more) than controlling the spread of the virus. It’s not a matter of “political convenience”; public school is an important public good. The failure of many virologists and public health experts to recognize this is what lead to the disaster that was the last school year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My family attends school in suburban Philly. They are treating COVID like the flu. Stay home if you are sick, but no reporting, testing, quarantine.

Good luck with that. Let us know how it goes. But I suspect we will see you all on the news.

Sorry. This is my extended family. We live in DC area. But they aren’t worried. They all had COViD (cold like symptoms and kids asymptomatic) and the adults are vaccinated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My family attends school in suburban Philly. They are treating COVID like the flu. Stay home if you are sick, but no reporting, testing, quarantine.

Good luck with that. Let us know how it goes. But I suspect we will see you all on the news.

Sorry. This is my extended family. We live in DC area. But they aren’t worried. They all had COViD (cold like symptoms and kids asymptomatic) and the adults are vaccinated.

Like I said. Let us know how it goes. I’m glad your family all recovered or vaccinated. I’d like to know how the school ends up working out for everyone. Based on what we see elsewhere…..it’s not going to look good, even with it treated like the flu

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The public interest is kids being back in school, not constantly home for weeks. And if you're finding this that upsetting, I don't know how you made it through schools being closed last year and bars and restaurants being open, or how you're dealing with masks being required in public except if you have a drink on your table, but gyms not being allowed to require vaccinations instead. Policy decisions are all political decisions, but this one at least gets kids back to school.

Yeah, I’ve been constantly screaming into what feels like an abyss for *20* months now. I’m exhausted on a personal and professional level.

But beware the sunk cost fallacy; all of those things doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take reasonable action now. Especially when there are dire consequences for our pediatric healthcare systems if what we’ve been seeing in school openings so far plays out on a much wider scale. Early data indicating that ~1% of cases require hospitalizations. We don’t have the beds or peds HCW to handle that. Remember flatten the curve? We need to take steps NOW to do that for our kids, and instead we are sticking our heads in the sand.

Citation needed for your pediatric hospitalization number. You guys are completely dramatic, between this, “I’ll see you on the news,” and trusting people who have no qualifications. You need to take a breath. You and your kids are not going to be buried because of COVID this year.

[Anonymous]

Most of us *desperately* want schools to open.

And, presumably, most of us don’t want to contribute to a public health crisis.

Right now, we have a public health crisis staring down the barrel at us. Opening schools in a way that suddenly makes a bunch of kids sick (ie, opening right into the Delta wave) is not something we would normally do. It’s a little whacked when there are other options available (wait a few weeks before opening, open in hybrid mode, etc).

But none of us trusts our school leaders, especially, nor our fellow parents to manage this with rationality, creativity, and flexibility, so we all fear getting one of two polarized outcomes: (1) ridiculously prolonged school closures or (2) the equivalent of ‘emergency’ school closures in which half the kids are home sick and a handful of them are hospitalized, struggling for their lives.

Our experience of the past couple of years has everyone digging in their heels and failing to respond reasonably to an impending, visible threat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The public interest is kids being back in school, not constantly home for weeks. And if you're finding this that upsetting, I don't know how you made it through schools being closed last year and bars and restaurants being open, or how you're dealing with masks being required in public except if you have a drink on your table, but gyms not being allowed to require vaccinations instead. Policy decisions are all political decisions, but this one at least gets kids back to school.

Yeah, I’ve been constantly screaming into what feels like an abyss for *20* months now. I’m exhausted on a personal and professional level.

But beware the sunk cost fallacy; all of those things doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take reasonable action now. Especially when there are dire consequences for our pediatric healthcare systems if what we’ve been seeing in school openings so far plays out on a much wider scale. Early data indicating that ~1% of cases require hospitalizations. We don’t have the beds or peds HCW to handle that. Remember flatten the curve? We need to take steps NOW to do that for our kids, and instead we are sticking our heads in the sand.

Citation needed for your pediatric hospitalization number. You guys are completely dramatic, between this, “I’ll see you on the news,” and trusting people who have no qualifications. You need to take a breath. You and your kids are not going to be buried because of COVID this year.

Look. I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as Texas is right now but it’s not going to be good either. Our vaccination rate is still not where it should be. There will be hundreds of kids sick within the first month. We know this, it’s inevitable. There will be large scale quarantines (even with the new guidelines).

Look school needs to open but pretending this is September 2019 is dumb. This is not going to be a “normal” school year and to pretend it will be is delusional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Citation needed for your pediatric hospitalization number. You guys are completely dramatic, between this, “I’ll see you on the news,” and trusting people who have no qualifications. You need to take a breath. You and your kids are not going to be buried because of COVID this year.

https://twitter.com/denise_dewald/status/1426318422808449029?s=12

[Anonymous]

This piece does a pretty good job summarizing the need to flatten the pediatric curve. And it links to another piece that lays out what good mitigation efforts look like — we can keep kids in school if we quarantine *entire classrooms* and rapidly test. But we can’t expect masks alone to do the herculean effort of protecting our kids under an exceptionally contagious virus.

https://insidemedicine.bulletin.com/2370680396397133

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This piece does a pretty good job summarizing the need to flatten the pediatric curve. And it links to another piece that lays out what good mitigation efforts look like — we can keep kids in school if we quarantine *entire classrooms* and rapidly test. But we can’t expect masks alone to do the herculean effort of protecting our kids under an exceptionally contagious virus.

https://insidemedicine.bulletin.com/2370680396397133

He lost me with this disingenuous footnote:
“Some may notice that other sections of the CDC’s influenza website estimate that far more children are hospitalized for influenza than the numbers used here. That’s because the CDC takes raw numbers of flu hospitalizations reported and then multiplies that by around 25 to get its final estimates. Around 45% of this multiplier accounts for the percent of hospitals the CDC's influenza network covers. The other 55% is meant to compensate for under-reporting and false negative tests. Such adjustments are not being made for Covid-19. Also, the Covid-19 data being reported by HHS that we used to make the visualization above covers most, but not all, US hospitals that accept pediatric patients. Therefore, the real number of pediatric Covid-19 hospitalizations is likely a bit higher than even these figures.”

This completely ignores the fact that ALL children coming into the hospital for ANYTHING are tested for Covid, which isn’t the case for the flu or other respiratory infections. This is the reason why studies have shown that at least 40% of “Covid” hospitalizations weren’t because of Covid at all and the children were asymptomatic. He completely ignores that fact in order to argue that Covid hospitalization numbers of children are higher because we don’t compensate for underreporting in the way we do for the flu, when the testing situation is completely different and suffers from the opposite problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most of us *desperately* want schools to open.

And, presumably, most of us don’t want to contribute to a public health crisis.

Right now, we have a public health crisis staring down the barrel at us. Opening schools in a way that suddenly makes a bunch of kids sick (ie, opening right into the Delta wave) is not something we would normally do. It’s a little whacked when there are other options available (wait a few weeks before opening, open in hybrid mode, etc).

But none of us trusts our school leaders, especially, nor our fellow parents to manage this with rationality, creativity, and flexibility, so we all fear getting one of two polarized outcomes: (1) ridiculously prolonged school closures or (2) the equivalent of ‘emergency’ school closures in which half the kids are home sick and a handful of them are hospitalized, struggling for their lives.

Our experience of the past couple of years has everyone digging in their heels and failing to respond reasonably to an impending, visible threat.

I think the part where you are wrong is the second statement. Most want schools to open, but they do not care about the public health crisis. This is not to say that closing schools is the only way to prevent the expanding health crisis, because it is not, but there are many on here who seem adamantly against smaller measures, such as quarantines, testing, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of us *desperately* want schools to open.

And, presumably, most of us don’t want to contribute to a public health crisis.

Right now, we have a public health crisis staring down the barrel at us. Opening schools in a way that suddenly makes a bunch of kids sick (ie, opening right into the Delta wave) is not something we would normally do. It’s a little whacked when there are other options available (wait a few weeks before opening, open in hybrid mode, etc).

But none of us trusts our school leaders, especially, nor our fellow parents to manage this with rationality, creativity, and flexibility, so we all fear getting one of two polarized outcomes: (1) ridiculously prolonged school closures or (2) the equivalent of ‘emergency’ school closures in which half the kids are home sick and a handful of them are hospitalized, struggling for their lives.

Our experience of the past couple of years has everyone digging in their heels and failing to respond reasonably to an impending, visible threat.

I think the part where you are wrong is the second statement. Most want schools to open, but they do not care about the public health crisis. This is not to say that closing schools is the only way to prevent the expanding health crisis, because it is not, but there are many on here who seem adamantly against smaller measures, such as quarantines, testing, etc.

LOL "they don't care about the public health crisis." Just stop. Try for half a second to get some nuance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of us *desperately* want schools to open.

And, presumably, most of us don’t want to contribute to a public health crisis.

Right now, we have a public health crisis staring down the barrel at us. Opening schools in a way that suddenly makes a bunch of kids sick (ie, opening right into the Delta wave) is not something we would normally do. It’s a little whacked when there are other options available (wait a few weeks before opening, open in hybrid mode, etc).

But none of us trusts our school leaders, especially, nor our fellow parents to manage this with rationality, creativity, and flexibility, so we all fear getting one of two polarized outcomes: (1) ridiculously prolonged school closures or (2) the equivalent of ‘emergency’ school closures in which half the kids are home sick and a handful of them are hospitalized, struggling for their lives.

Our experience of the past couple of years has everyone digging in their heels and failing to respond reasonably to an impending, visible threat.

I think the part where you are wrong is the second statement. Most want schools to open, but they do not care about the public health crisis. This is not to say that closing schools is the only way to prevent the expanding health crisis, because it is not, but there are many on here who seem adamantly against smaller measures, such as quarantines, testing, etc.

It's quite possible to care about it and be interested in common sense measures like symptomatic testing instead of asymptomatic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of us *desperately* want schools to open.

And, presumably, most of us don’t want to contribute to a public health crisis.

Right now, we have a public health crisis staring down the barrel at us. Opening schools in a way that suddenly makes a bunch of kids sick (ie, opening right into the Delta wave) is not something we would normally do. It’s a little whacked when there are other options available (wait a few weeks before opening, open in hybrid mode, etc).

But none of us trusts our school leaders, especially, nor our fellow parents to manage this with rationality, creativity, and flexibility, so we all fear getting one of two polarized outcomes: (1) ridiculously prolonged school closures or (2) the equivalent of ‘emergency’ school closures in which half the kids are home sick and a handful of them are hospitalized, struggling for their lives.

Our experience of the past couple of years has everyone digging in their heels and failing to respond reasonably to an impending, visible threat.

I think the part where you are wrong is the second statement. Most want schools to open, but they do not care about the public health crisis. This is not to say that closing schools is the only way to prevent the expanding health crisis, because it is not, but there are many on here who seem adamantly against smaller measures, such as quarantines, testing, etc.

It's quite possible to care about it and be interested in common sense measures like symptomatic testing instead of asymptomatic.

Except that defies common sense for a contagious virus that is very contagious at least one day before symptoms.