Reply to MCPS Officially announces schools opening as planned

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Why is MCPS tracking student cases over winter break? Will these be used to determine if/when the 5 percent threshold is hit?[/quote]

Yes, that is implied by this sentence:

"Currently, no school has reached the 5% threshold, so all schools are scheduled to open as planned tomorrow, Monday, Jan. 3."

Implication is that if a school had reached 5% before tomorrow, it would not be opening.

I said this in multiple other threads, but the logic is using that 5% as a proxy for community spread, not exclusively looking at spread in schools. Otherwise, according to the logic that the 5% only counts if a case was contracted in school (not possible to prove with certainty anyway) you would have to send kids to school even with 50% prevalence in the community because it technically "hasn't spread in schools yet." I'm relieved that was not their logic, at least. [/quote]

What?? [/quote]
That’s some fuzzy math. Wow. [/quote]

What is confusing here? Maybe I could have phrased it better, or maybe you're just objecting to MCPS's rationale?

Bottom line is that point of the 5% metric seems to have been to approximate spread and prevalence in the very local community. As in, it's a good way to measure if there's a lot of COVID floating around among kids and staff in the neighborhood/community in general. This seems correct to me. If 5% of students/staff have tested positive for COVID, why would it not be true that there was high hyper-local community spread? High in this case meaning likely 10% or more.

It's not a perfect metric, but there are none. But it does stand to reason that if your literal neighbors, families your kids play with, etc. have COVID at least at 5%, and that rate used to be 1% or whatever, then you are witnessing rapidly increasing community spread. Yes, yes, we could get into the weeds about how many play dates happened during winter break or whatever, but it's a fine enough metric.

That's because the entire point of it is to compare what apples to apples as much as possible.

Before the break, they were measuring how many staff and students reported positive tests and were within a contagious period at any given time.

They are simply comparing that number, which they have, to the same measurement now. They are saying if the same metric goes from 1-2%, which is where my school was, to 5%, then they know they have a problem.

The point is less that 5% is some magic number than that it is 3-5x what it used to be.

I'm not sure what other metric should be used. 5% "from spread within school" is much harder, if not impossible, to determine, and it doesn't necessarily mean anything-- the 5% part, anyway. Unless there's some scientific paper that says 5% itself is a tipping point for some reason.

[/quote]

If it was intended as a proxy for community infection rates, then it wouldn’t be tracked for individual schools. People don't work, eat, socialize, etc. within the boundary of their local elementary school.

Whether it is a sensible measure or threshold is a separate issue.[/quote]

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