Now that kids are back in school they’re getting COVID and spreading it around. Who could have ever guessed that would happen?
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Sunday said that a rise in coronavirus infections among young people is driving new outbreaks in some states, but he does not believe there will be a “true” fourth wave of the pandemic.
“What we’re seeing is pockets of infection around the country, particularly in younger people who haven’t been vaccinated and also in school-aged children,” Gottlieb said in an interview on “Face the Nation,” noting the rise in cases among school-aged kids in Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
“You’re seeing outbreaks in schools and infections in social cohorts that haven’t been exposed to the virus before, maybe were doing a better job sheltering, now they’re out and about getting exposed to the virus and they’re getting infected,” he continued. “The infection is changing its contours in terms of who’s being stricken by it right now.”
And yet they ALL, including Gottlieb, said that it was perfectly safe for adults to go back into classrooms without vaccinations and they would not get COVID if they just wore a mask and opened a window. These people insisted that teachers were being nothing but whiners for not wanting to sit in rooms all day with people who are unlikely to be following the guidelines to the letter in poorly ventilated rooms in the middle of winter.
All they asked for was to be given the vaccine which was well on the way before they returned. But no. They were browbeaten and insulted and the unions that are charged with protecting them as workers were vilified. It took massive resistance to get the states to prioritize school employees for the vaccines. Why?
Common sense said their assurance that it was perfectly safe was fatuous nonsense. A few studies in rural America were not enough to reassure anyone, but the pressure was so intense to open schools that the scientists just folded and the media went into a full scale frenzy. It was patently obvious that nobody had any idea whether kids would be spreaders of the disease or how many would get sick or have long term consequences because we had been protecting them throughout the pandemic by keeping them at home!
This was a big failure of the system during this thing but it did reveal just how low people hold public school teachers in their esteem. We already knew it by the fact that they refuse to pay them a living wage even as they are required to assume massive college loans and continue their education while almost always holding down two jobs just to pay the bills. And we knew that nobody would ever do anything about the violence they are exposed to in our rampant wild west of a gun culture that is so often focused on schools. But this was something else. They were told that they needed to not only put their own lives on the line, as they already do, but they needed to expose their families to a deadly virus based on thin science as well.
Everyone is wringing their hands over the lost education of their kids. I wonder if they’ll still be paying attention to the schools six months from now. Somehow, I doubt it.
Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm once strongly supported the idea of kids returning to the classroom full-time.
But late last fall, the U.S. began seeing its first cases of B.1.1.7, the so-called British variant of COVID-19. Now Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, has done a 180 on the subject.
“It’s a totally different virus in the sense of what it’s doing epidemiologically,” he said. “I think school openings today are going to greatly enhance transmission of B.1.1.7 in our communities, and I predict that within weeks we will be revisiting this issue, unfortunately, after we’ve had substantial transmission.”
In Massachusetts, that substantial transmission has yet to be seen but may already be happening.
On Monday, April 5, elementary school students go back to five-day-a-week in-person learning by order of the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education [DESE]. Middle and high school students go back later in the month.
Those orders have not changed, despite the fact COVID-19 cases among students and staff in Massachusetts schools have steadily risen for weeks. At the beginning of March, student and staff infections numbered 476 total. Last week, DESE reported 1,045 infections: 801 students and 244 staff.
Massachusetts only performs variant checks on a small number of positive COVID-19 tests, so it’s hard to say whether B.1.1.7 is dominant here. Thus far, the state Department of Public Health has reported to the CDC finding 712 cases of B.1.1.7 and more cases of the P.1 variant than any other state: 58.
But in Osterholm’s native Minnesota, health officials said B.1.1.7 rapidly gained ground last month, such that it’s now probably responsible for more than half of all infections there.
“We’re certainly seeing outbreaks in youth sports,” said Dr. Beth Thielen, a virologist and specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota. “School-based outbreaks are sort of cropping up, and I do think that that is quite worrisome.”
Also worrisome to Thielen, aside from the increased transmissibility of B.1.1.7, it seems to cause worse disease.
“Working in the hospital, and I can speak from personal experience, that I’ve seen some more severe cases in younger individuals than I have at prior points in the pandemic,” Thielen said. “I think there are some worrying trends that have been reported in multiple locations that suggest there may, in fact, be more severe disease and more transmissibility.”
What also concerns both Osterholm and Thielen is that the CDC school reopening guidance issued in mid-March seems to be based on safety data from what amounts to a different COVID-19 era, that is, the pre-B.1.1.7 time.
At that time, two things seemed to be true: the COVID-19 circulating at the time seemed less infectious to children, and Massachusetts school districts were largely operating under modified conditions with the primary goal of de-densifying classrooms so as to minimize possible exposure to the virus.
New CDC ‘back-to-school’ guidelines ease up on classroom distancing from six feet apart to at least three feet, which is what will allow for all students to return to in-person learning in Massachusetts and elsewhere.
They’ve known about these variants for months. The least we could have expected is that the scientists have told the public that they really didn’t know instead of insisting that schools could be reopened and adults were perfectly safe as long as the kids adhered to mask wearing and social distancing all day long which everyone knew was a pipe dream. And to not say upfront that adults in schools should be in the first tranche of essential workers to be vaccinated if you wanted to open up schools was just daft. The Biden team took too long to get there too for reasons that are still obscure but which I think had to do with the media attacking them for being pawns of the teachers’ unions. Not good moment.
Now that we have the new variants spreading around it looks like kids are getting this and nobody knows what means. If we could have just held on until everyone got vaccinated a lot of pain and anxiety could have been avoided. The vaccination rollout is so successful it’s entirely possible that will happen in just a couple more months. How sad.