Badly Handled School Reopenings Are Absolutely Deadly-- Wave II Starting Overseas?

Leana Wen, who formerly served as Baltimore’s health commissioner and is now teaching emergency medicine at George Washington University, wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post Tuesday, Stop justifying school reopening based on false statements. Wen is furious that "people"-- meaning Trump and his sycophantic supporters like governors Brian Kemp (GA), Ron DeSantis (FL), Kevin Stitt (OK), Greg Abbott (TX), Doug Ducey (AZ), Mike Parson (MO), Bill Lee (TN), Chris Sununu (NH), Kristi Noem (SD), Kay Ivey (AL), Pete Ricketts (NE), Henry McMaster (SC) and Kim Reynolds (IA)-- keep saying that children don’t get sick from the coronavirus and don’t spread it. "These statements," she wrote, "are being used to justify school reopening, and they’re just not true.

First, children do get infected. In fact, a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association found that 338,000 kids have been diagnosed with covid-19 in the United States. More than 97,000 cases were diagnosed in the last two weeks of July. The majority of these infections were in states undergoing surges, suggesting that high levels of community transmission directly translates to infections among children.

It is true that children tend to get less severely ill than adults, particularly when compared with older adults with underlying medical conditions. But some children do become very sick and require hospitalization. Among children admitted to the hospital, 1 in 3 end up being admitted to the intensive care unit-- a similar ratio as adults. Racial disparities seen in adult patients are also mirrored in children: The rates of hospitalization among Hispanic and Black children are nearly eight and five times higher, respectively, than the rate in White children.

Even though the virus that causes covid-19 is transmitted through the respiratory system, that’s not all it affects. The virus can cause damage to multiple organs in children, just as it does to adults. There is even a rare but serious associated disease specific to children that we are just beginning to understand, the multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). In a New England Journal of Medicine study, 92 percent of children with this syndrome experience effects on their gastrointestinal system and 80 percent on their cardiovascular system. Some develop coronary artery aneurysms. There are case reports of children suffering from a toxic shock-like multi-organ failure, which has led to death.

Counting Sheep by Nancy Ohanian

It’s also true that children spread covid-19. The largest study involving children and transmission is one from South Korea that traced nearly 60,000 people. It found that children 10 and older transmit the virus at least as well as adults. Children under 10 appeared to transmit it about half as much-- though here the study was limited to only 57 younger children. Another study in JAMA Pediatrics found that children carry just as much virus in their nasal passages in adults; in fact, kids under 5 may carry 10 to 100 times more.

That children can transmit to one another and to adults around them is also evident in a case report from a Georgia summer camp. After a teenage counselor developed symptoms, the camp was shut down. By then, 260 of 344 campers and staff for whom testing data is available had the infection. Among children ages 6 to 10, more than half were infected. More than half of the staff, too, tested positive.

Some who support on-time school reopening point to European countries that have had few outbreaks after resuming in-person instruction. However, these countries undertook many safety measures, including enforcing social distancing and implementing regular testing. They also had far lower rates of covid-19 in the community than we do. A cautionary tale should be Israel, where rapid school reopening with few safeguards contributed to a resurgence across the country. One school had a superspreader event after which 154 students and 26 staff members tested positive. A month after reopening, nearly half of the country’s new infections were thought to have originated in schools.

Short answer: absolutely not-- completely false... another dangerous Trump lie

And countries that botched their school reopenings seem to have kicked off Wave 2. New cases are astronomical in Israel and Spain and rapidly on the rise in France, Germany and the U.K. These are the new cases for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in countries where Wave II seems to have started:

• Spain +2,873 ---> +3,632 ---> +3,172
• Israel +1,720 ---> +1,871 ---> +1,558
• Germany +1,219 ---> +1,030 ---> +1,320
• Japan +1,207 ---> +938 ---> +1,282
• U.K. +816 ---> +1,148 ---> +1,009
• France +785 ---> +1,397 ---> +2,524
• Belgium +781 ---> +468 ---> +388
• Netherlands +630 ---> +779 ---> +654

A new poll Morning Consult did for Politico indicates that most Americans understand the danger of rapid reopening on schools a lot better than DeVos, Trump and his band of criminal governors do. Among registered voters, the number opposing in-person elementary and high school openings rose from 53% in early July to 59% today.

Writing for the NY Times yesterday, Richard Fausset asked facetiously if 925 people quarantined for COVID-10 defines a successful school reopening. He starts off by describing Cherokee County as "a bucolic and politically conservative stretch of suburbs north of Atlanta." The county only gave Hillary 22.7% of its vote in 2016. Two years later-- the so-called "blue wave"-- and Cherokee County was all in on Brian Kemp-- 72.1% to 26.4% for Stacey Abrams. The county performance for the local congressional neo-fascist crackpot Barry Loudermilk was R+49. You got the picture? So they opened their schools idiotically and immediately, the kids started getting COVID-- in all 10 elementary schools. Over 900 in the first week (students and staff) and one of the high schools re-closed.

Trump counties in rural and suburban Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana have been reopened for two weeks. "Students and teachers," wrote Fausset, "have immediately tested positive, sending others into two-week quarantines and creating whiplash for schools that were eager to open, only to have to consider closing again right away. All of this has only further divided communities where parents and teachers have passionately disagreed over the safety of reopening. 'This is exactly what we expected to happen,' said Allison Webb, 44, who quit her job as a Spanish and French teacher in the district because of her concerns about reopening schools, and who put her daughter, a senior, in the district’s remote-learning program. 'It’s not safe' to return to the classrooms now, Ms. Webb said. But to Jenny Beth Martin, who wanted schools to reopen-- even appealing directly to President Trump in a visit to the White House-- the district’s return has been a rousing success. 'I think that the opening plan is working,' said Ms. Martin, a district parent and co-founder of the national Tea Party Patriots, a conservative political group. 'They’re checking, they’re making sure when people have tested positive that they’re watching the exposure and spread.'"

Cherokee County had its own firestorm. A photo taken outside Etowah High School on the first day back showed scores of students crowded shoulder to shoulder, smiling and unmasked. A similar photo from Sequoyah High School was also posted to social media. Beneath the photo, a commenter wrote, “Most of these kids are gonna be sick in the next few days … was it really worth it to appease the anti-mask parents? At what cost?”

The county’s reopening plan was unanimously approved by the school board on July 9. Families could choose online or in-person, five-days-a-week instruction, and masks would be encouraged, but not required, for the district’s 42,500 students.

Opposition began to coalesce almost immediately. Ms. Webb, the foreign language teacher, organized a group on Facebook called Educators for Common Sense and Safety. The group started an online petition asking for, among other things, a mask mandate for students and a delayed start to allow time to rework schedules, classrooms and the curriculum “to be safe and engaging for our students.” It attracted more than 1,100 signatures.

In mid-July, the group, which Ms. Webb said currently counts hundreds of members, picketed outside a board meeting. A former English teacher, Miranda Wicker, 38, became its spokesperson-- a necessity, she said, because current teachers lacked union protection and feared retaliation if they spoke out.

“They’re terrified,” Ms. Wicker said. “They’re being asked, literally, to risk their lives.”

...Late last month, Ms. Martin was an organizer of a Washington news conference featuring people who identified themselves as doctors and who made misleading statements about the coronavirus, including unsupported claims that the drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment. Mr. Trump tweeted a video of the event, which was later removed from major social media platforms on the grounds that it was spreading misinformation.

In early July, when the school board approved reopening, case tallies in Cherokee County, with about 260,000 people, had only begun to rise after remaining flat and relatively low-- an average of about 10 new confirmed cases a day-- for most of June. Since then, though, the numbers have climbed steadily, mirroring the state as a whole, with the county averaging more than 90 new confirmed cases daily over the past week. Sixty-four people in the county have died of Covid-19, including eight in the past week.

...Ms. Morrison said she and her husband do not wear masks either. “I feel like before we’re even born, God has a plan for when he’s going to take us to heaven,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”