They don’t have serious cases at the same rate as adults, of course. You can look up age-specific hospitalization and mortality data for any state and see that younger people are more likely to have mild infection outcomes. The fear is not that 12-year-old boys will end up in ICU if they return to school this fall.
The fear is that mom and dad will end up in the ICU after junior becomes infected at school and brings the virus to their homes.
And yes, that basic point needs to be re-expressed sometimes because some very powerful people seem unable to understand it, even five months after this nightmare.
Governor Mike Parson: “These kids have to go back to school … And if they get COVID-19, they will, and they will when they go to school, they will not go to hospitals … They will go home and they will get over it. “https://t.co/yEtHbYf3sZ pic.twitter.com/SzoieUGPOh
– St. Louis Post-Dispatch (@stltoday) July 20, 2020
The South Korean study attempted to measure children’s infectiousness based on circumstantial evidence, looking at several thousand people who were the first to report symptoms in their homes and then following up on contacts to try to determine where they got the virus. That can be tricky with children, since they are apparently less likely to have symptoms, but the scientists who spoke to the Times about the study were impressed by its rigor and methodology. Outcome:
Children under the age of 10 were about half as likely as adults to pass the virus on to others, according to other studies. This may be because children generally exhale less air, and therefore less virus-laden air, or because they exhale that air closer to the ground, making it less likely that adults will inhale it.
Still, the number of new infections planted by children may increase when schools are reopened, the study authors warned. “Young children may show higher attack rates when school closes, which contributes to Covid-19 community transmission,” they wrote. Other studies have also suggested that the sheer number of contacts for schoolchildren, who interact with dozens of others for a good part of the day, may cancel out their lower risk of infecting others …
The study is most concerning for middle and high school kids. According to the study, this group was even more likely to infect others than adults. But some experts said the finding may be a fluke or it could be due to children’s behaviors..
The results of this study were released over the weekend and have not yet fully penetrated the culture. I am sitting here wondering what will happen to the support for reopening the schools once it does. In the past few months there has been a hope / suspicion that children are largely immune to infection because they rarely develop severe cases. If that’s not true, the trend to keep schools closed, at least middle and high schools, will accelerate. This is where things are today:
Support for the full reopening, as Trump wants to do, is very soft and is meant to be softer. Even Republicans cannot reach a plurality in favor. There is also a gender divide, with 55 percent of men in favor of reopening schools at least partially versus only 36 percent of women. (Ironically, men are more likely to die of COVID-19 than women.) In fact, a majority of women, 48 percent, want schools to close or just online. The study of South Korea and the prolonged failure of the United States to control the epidemic will continue to push people to keep things closed.
Which can lead to a dystopian result even by 2020 standards. We can end a three-tier education system this fall. For poor children, who don’t have computers and fast Internet, and whose parents work at jobs that can’t be done from home, classroom instruction, and the increased risk of infection that comes with it, may be the only option. For the most exclusive kids, who have computers and parents whose work can be done remotely, remote learning with its many shortcomings may be the way to go. And for him Really fancy children, whose parents have money to spend, there may be a concierge service. Why send your child to school when you can bring them to school?
Fed up with remote education, parents who can afford have a new plan for the fall: importing teachers into their homes …
Across the country, families meet strangers on Facebook groups and friends via text message to pair up. Teachers are being recruited, sometimes stealthily, to work with small groups of children. A Facebook group dedicated to helping families connect and learn how to do this drew 3,400 members in nine days, with at least seven local groups already separated.
“This is one thing now,” said Phil Higgins, a psychotherapist in Salem, Massachusetts, who joined two other families to hire a woman to create a “pseudo summer camp” for her four children this summer. They are now considering hiring this woman, who normally works as a behavior specialist at school, as a teacher for 40 hours per week during the school year. She would help the children to work through their remote learning offered by the school.
I am terribly fascinated by the possible repercussions for the teaching industry. Are school districts going into bidding wars for teachers with groups of wealthy families who have joined “learning groups”? If you are a teacher without a contract, how do you say no to an offer of $ 100,000 per year to teach, for example, six children in someone’s spacious and well-equipped house? (That’s what it can cost to attract a teacher outside of a public school, an education consultant told WaPo.) What happens to the local public school if there are enough wealthy parents to rob a significant number of teachers from their faculty? Are poor children just … not educated?
Can the school district threaten blackball teachers who are considering leaving the ship to discourage them from doing so? For example, “You will not be hired again after there is a vaccine if you rescue us now.” And what about the “learning group” if the school closes in the fall but then we get a vaccine or some effective treatment and things reopen in January? Does the teacher receive their full salary for the year from the parents or do they also return to school, assuming the school even withdraws them?
The WaPo story is amused by the many quotes from parents who struggle with the fairness and injustice of the “learning pod” scheme. One said she would quit her job and teach her son before hiring a teacher because the latter scheme is too privileged. Others think that you should do the best for your children that you can, and if that means you can hire a teacher for them while their poorer classmates have to do without, that’s what it means. Some looked at the navel on how they would hire a teacher, but would feel guilty for the narrow class confines of their social circle. The truly dystopian stage will come when / if this idea takes off nationally and suddenly there is a teacher career in every upper middle class community. “I just found out that Mr. Harris and Mrs. Jones are out of the market, excited to learn groups in that new gated community. We need to hire someone now before there is nobody left.“If you thought people were behaving irrationally and desperately about hoarding toilet paper in March, wait until you see how they react to the hoarding of professional instruction for their precious children.”
One last point about the reopening of schools. Bloomberg reported a few days ago that children and teens account for a “growing” percentage of COVID-19 infections in the US In California, the proportion of infections in the under-18 population is close to 10 percent. In Florida, 31 percent of all children tested have been positive. Much of that is a function of increased testing: Now that testing is more abundant, children with few or no symptoms that would have gone unnoticed a few months ago are being tested and found positive. That does not mean that children who are largely asymptomatic are necessarily as infectious as others, but they are clearly very capable of becoming infected. And if you think that South Korean scientists, above a certain age, are quite capable of transmitting it.
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