Reply to If DMV schools don't open in the fall, are you moving?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wish that before re-opening the Mayor would order another 2-week lockdown, she did in the spring. Is anyone else worried that with all schools re-opening Feb 1st this virus will shoot up in DC? Even teachers who have been vaccinated will not have had their round 2 yet,  and there will be lots more kids to manage in a distance way all at once, many of whom it will be the first time practicing mask wearing etc. I am just worried we will go from bad to worse in DC, with just 5% of the population vaccinated--we are a LONG way from 'herd immunity'.[/quote]

No, I am not, because I have looked at the data and studies they have done of spread in schools, and I am confident that schools are not significant drivers of community spread.[/quote]

I have not seen any done on this scale, by a system as generally messed up as DCPS. So sue me that I have way more confidence in, IDK, Germany. I am a former teacher for DCPS (not recent), but what I saw in terms of management, hygiene, yikes. It doesn't appear that DCPS did much maintenance during this hiatus... why would you trust them? NY has been opening and closing schools like whack-a-mole. Not sure there is a case that our large, horribly managed public school systems CAN handle a wide spread reopening well. On top of the surge and the new COVID variants that are hyper-contagious, are we not just asking for trouble here?[/quote]

Germany hasn't done any of the "maintenance" in schools that is being demanded here, at least not at a large scale. Their schools were open at full capacity with just hand washing and opening windows. They didn't even require in-class masking in the fall. They are still open at least hybrid in many places now during the lockdown (now with masks at all times). They did have cases in schools, of course (especially high schools, which are now remote in January), but nobody thinks in-school transmission was a major driver of the spread overall, which is believed to happen mostly at private gatherings. They didn't shut down entire schools, but quarantined exposed cohorts.

So yeah, I'm confident that DCPS could do what they did in Germany, and probably also other European countries. We just don't because we don't want to accept any amount of risk for the sake of kids being in school.[/quote]

They weren't testing in Germany or other European countries.  And now they are thinking it is the cause of the rise of numbers.[/quote]

They weren't testing everybody all the time, but they tested those kids who were potentially exposed at school and part of quarantine measures before they could come back. They also did studies. Especially for kids under 10, infection rates (determined through serial testing of samples in studies) have been well below the rates among the general population. And while everybody recognizes that there are cases and some transmission in schools, "they" aren't now thinking schools are the cause of the rise in numbers. It is a topic of controversy how much schools contribute (and how large the number of undiscovered cases among kids are), but the RKI (the German federal institute for infectious diseases) still believes that schools are NOT significant drivers of the spread, although especially teenagers are definitely part of the transmission pattern, whether in school or outside of it.

I don't have an English-language source, but here is an overview in German:

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/faktenfuchs-sind-schulen-infektionstreiber,SHFwU6a [/quote]

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