Reply to All schools should offer an all-virtual option

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Right.   We need to be able to do both at once.  If schools aren’t able to pivot to virtual, either for entire classrooms or individual students who need to quarantine (because they are positive, they live with someone who is positive, etc), our choice is allowing these kids to continue to being covid to their classmates or for them to experience guaranteed learning loss.  Especially with all we invested in DL last year, we shouldn’t be facing this choice.

It very much seems that there would be plenty of “demand” for virtual classrooms next year, both from parents uncomfortable sending their unvaxed kids during delta, and kids who should be isolating.  [/quote]

The answer is NOT to demand virtual, but to demand mandatory vaccination of staff/teachers, and to use rational quarantine policies that exclude the fewest kids possible- for example by rapid testing every day instead of sending them home. [/quote]

The flaw with this plan is that testing is an opt-in and as detailed in the travel threads, lots of parents will refuse to opt in so they can travel without having to quarantine etc. There’s no way to make medical testing for kids mandatory, and I’ve harped on this before, there’s the religious exemption loophole so even when vaccines are available for all age groups, there will be parents who opt out.[/quote]

That’s parents not wanting to opt in to surveillance testing, bc they want their kid in school (and surveillance testing comes with a ton of issues, the basic one being high degree of false positives).  This is different, as the daily testing after exposure is targeted and woul allow kids to be in person.  I guess opting out of that would mean you have to stay home.[/quote]

You got that backwards. There are false negatives. Not false positives. [/quote]

No, in a symptomatic surveillance testing even with a high degree of test accuracy you get a high percentage of false positives when rates are low.[/quote]

Nope. Show us a source. [/quote]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/19/schools-covid-testing-cost/

"But there are downsides to systematic testing that have been insufficiently considered, including costs, lost learning time, logistics and stress for those subjected to such a regime. False-positive results — which say you are infected when you aren’t — pose particular problems. Overall, this kind of widespread testing fails cost-benefit analysis: It will drain already insufficient public school resources while doing little to improve safety. "

"First, classrooms have thankfully been found — in studies examining schools in multiple states — to be places of limited disease transmission, compared with communities at large. The rate of transmission within schools from individuals who test positive has been estimated to be on the order of 0.5 percent to 0.7 percent (and this includes people exhibiting symptoms).

A rate that low implies that a testing regimen would need to identify roughly 200 infected people to prevent one person from transmitting the disease in school. It would take an awful lot of tests to achieve those numbers. In New York City, where more than 234,000 asymptomatic students and staff members across approximately 1,600 schools were tested last fall, the overall rate of positive tests was only 0.4 percent. That suggests that — even during a time of high community spread — about 40,000 tests among asymptomatic individuals would need to be performed to prevent one in-school transmission."

"And how accurate are these tests? Rapid antigen and saliva PCR tests, which are frequently used in schools, can have a false positive rate of 1 or 2 percent. That may sound low, but statisticians know that, when testing in a setting of low prevalence of disease, even a single-digit false-positive rate can be extremely problematic.

The current prevalence rate for the coronavirus in the United States is roughly 15 cases per 10,000 people per week. (Prevalence in schools tends to be similar to, or lower than, that in the surrounding community.) If you give 10,000 people a test that produces false positives 2 percent of the time, that means you might get 215 positives: 15 true positives and 200 false positives. In other words, more than 90 percent of the positive test results will be incorrect." [/quote]

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