Reply to Want schools open: demand Bowser disclose contact trace data on source of spikes

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The problem is that those activities, which are causing spread, have even less likely hood of spread than 12 people talking in a room with masks on for 7 hours. Can you think of anyone in any place in the last 6 months where people have shared a regular room with 11 other people not in their household for 7 hours without spread? How is a classroom going to be different from the group homes and work places where people have been in close quarters for hours?[/quote]

Two words: Indoor Dining

That means indoors with 50% of 200 max occupancy with everyone without a mask

Classrooms will have masks mandated and won't have 100 people in the room like indoor restaurants in DC are allowed to for past month

Lunch at school will be outdoor only

Big Difference[/quote]

You are naive if you think that students will keep their masks on just because of a mandate.  Toddlers, grade schoolers and tweens are not going to keep their mask on for a full day or half day of school.  You will be lucky if half of them keep their masks on for the entire time, but it is probably going to be closer to 1/3 or 1/4.  Even teens in MS and HS are unlikely to keep them on the full time.  Teens are notorious for believing in their invulnerability and they will find plenty of excuses to take the masks off especially if they think no one is looking.

And while grade schoolers may be in one class for the entire stay at school, middle schoolers and high schoolers will be changing classes every period. It will be very difficult to maintain social distancing and still get everyone to their distance in less than a half hour.  And with the mixing of classes, the contact overlap of students between hallways and multiple mixed classrooms essentially means that if anyone in the school is infected, that there is an increased risk that more than half of the school has been exposed.

Then you have the problem with outdoor lunches.  What do they do when it rains?  How about if we get those odd September or early October days when you get late summer weather and the temperature puts the air quality into the condition red and people are asked to stay indoors?

There are a lot of health risks to opening up the schools fully.  There is no good solution, just ones that are better for some subset of the school population.  No matter what you choose, some families will have a problem with the solution.  The school board will have to establish their priorities and set a policy and everyone will have to live with it.[/quote]

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