There is no evidence that school closures had any positive impact on community spread, FWIW. Hell, even for Influenza, which kids are much less resistant to than they are for COVID, studies have often found that school closures are counterproductive due to actually ending up with an increased number and diversity of contacts/events.
> but I don't think we'd have been able to keep fully in-person school running last year anyway.
But why do you think this? Are you aware that many parts of the world have returned to fully in-person school for several months or longer at this point? That here in deep blue parts of the US we are unique in our rabid devotion to denying children in-person school?
> The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online cohorts.
[Citation Needed]
> The only way to fix it would have been a policy of having teachers & students who very likely were COVID-exposed but not actively ill-feeling come in until it was proven that they were COVID-positive—but that policy would also have increased spread, so I wouldn't guarantee that'd actually improve the situation of having too many staff out for quarantine.
First of all I actually reject the premise that avoiding spread is necessarily a good thing. Indeed it only prolongs the epidemic stage and as the rise of variants like Delta have shown, even rushing out vaccines in an unprecedented amount of time hasn't actually allowed people to avoid the virus. I should also mention that for teachers who are quarantining (which remember is also a result of policy, you're not talking about teachers being unable to teach due to being sick, but rather being forbidden from in-person teaching because they or someone they know hit a positive on a PCR test), they could still teach remotely to a class of in-person kids (yes you might need some other adult to oversee things, but I'd wager even without such supervision you'd still have far better results than the unmitigated disaster that "distance" learning has been)
The kids who have survived distance learning have done well in spite of it, not because of it. They have access to tutors and learning pods and actually have a quiet space at home to do work, and actually have parents that give a shit. Not everyone has those resources.
But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that, the only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been able to keep fully in-person school running last year" is purely itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine policies, and has nothing to do with an actual lack of staff nor an actual crippling health problem preventing people from being able to work.
> But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that, the only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been able to keep fully in-person school running last year" is purely itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine policies, and has nothing to do with an actual lack of staff nor an actual crippling health problem preventing people from being able to work.
I suspect we will eventually “discover” the same with hospital capacity. When you test everybody on the way in and then have all positive results follow strict, labor intense quarantine protocols regardless of patient symptoms… yeah you will have problems with capacity. Imagine if they tested all patients for other viruses and did this sort of thing…
A lot of the problems we’ve experienced the last year and a half are self-made. Testing everything under the sun for covid and then acting on positive results regardless of symptoms is gonna throw a wrench in just about any machine.
They don't need to prove that school closures aren't deleterious.
They don't need to prove that the supposed epidemic of long COVID is actually real.
They don't need to prove that the missed medical appointments and missed routine non-COVID vaccinations aren't going to outpace the supposed benefits of doing the epidemiological equivalent of hiding in your closet from the monster (SARS-2).
They don't need to account for second-order effects, such as the fact that "avoiding" COVID for a month or two is really just postponing it and that we exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium with the countless pathogens we're surrounded by.
No, they just get to assume that their intervention de jur is without harm, and conversely that COVID is the worst thing ever and that SARS-2 is 10 times as deadly as all the other shit we don't spend an excessive amount of time worrying about (Influenza, OC43, noravirus, rhinovirus, you name it)
It’s truly remarkable.
Can you link to those studies? The big story last year was that cases of/deaths from influenza dropped worldwide[1].
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-has-disappear...
There's a huge difference between "influenza plummeted worldwide" and "influenza plummeted worldwide as a direct result of school closures [or lockdowns, physical distancing, and universal masking]". Influenza did plummet worldwide. Indeed, it did so even in places that didn't go to nearly the same extent as the US did as far as school closures and the like. That should already hint at you that it's not actually related to what we did intervention-wise (which also makes sense given that everything we did was ineffective at slowing the spread of COVID more than a marginal amount [granted, SARS-2 spreads more easily than Influenza so it's theoretically possible the COVID measures were completely ineffective for COVID yet were completely effective for Influenza, but seems farfetched])
To me the most plausible explanation is that of viral interference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30950360/
> Since the interferon system can control most, if not all, virus infections in the absence of adaptive immunity, it was proposed that viral induction of a nonspecific localized temporary state of immunity may provide a strategy to control viral infections.
Briefly, infection with a virus causes one's cellular hackles to get raised, so to speak. That is to say, that infection with virus A leads to a ramp-up in innate immunity, particularly cell-mediated innate immunity, which decreases the probability of being infected by virus B in the ensuing days/weeks. The paper I linked is about leveraging that intentionally, but obviously it's a mechanism that occurs naturally as well. This next point is orthogonal to our discussion but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that SARS-2 is, in a sense, actually the ideal candidate for intentional exploitation of viral interference, given how readily it infects human cells and how in large swaths of the population it is very non-threatening (and yes, in a small proportion of the population it is very threatening)
--
So to tie it back to the Influenza dropping, I suspect that viral interference was quite significant, and that altered social interactions accounted for a big chunk of it as well. Specifically, it seems like social networks got much more "local". There was still people going out and doing stuff, but overall the average person was significantly less likely to visit extended family, attend large events, etc. This is somewhat related to the lockdowns/forced shuttering of businesses, but I think a lot of it was broader than that as well.
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> Can you link to those studies [regarding influenza and school closures]?
I'll start with one review that does seem to suggest a benefit in school closures for Influenza: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/2/e002149.short. It has the usual problems associative studies do, but in this case specifically the confound of regression to the mean is incredibly great. They mention as such in the results:
> However, as schools often closed late in the outbreak or other interventions were used concurrently, it was sometimes unclear how much school closure contributed to the reductions in incidence.
Here's one from Hong Kong. I really like their discussion because it points out just how difficult it is to actually show a link, given the way epidemic curves naturally rise and fall and the delayed natural of intervention impact: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2609897/
> Although we can only speculate, given the limitations of an uncontrolled natural experiment on the population level, routine surveillance data did not detect a large effect from the school closures. In particular, we noted a decline in laboratory isolations of influenza viruses that preceded the intervention and the lack of association between school closures and Rt. In fact, sentinel data may not accurately represent the incidence of influenza in the underlying population because, for example, other cocirculating upper respiratory viruses contribute to overall influenza-like illness consultation rates. Laboratory data, however, should be less affected, and extra testing in response to the heightened awareness of influenza activity might have artifactually lowered the positivity rate. The epidemic curves generated from the surveillance data showed a decline in cases that may have naturally concluded without any intervention. We note the difficulty of making inferences directly from changes in epidemic curves because changes in the epidemic curve may lag behind changes in the underlying transmission dynamics by at least 1 serial interval, as has previously been shown for severe acute respiratory syndrome
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This next one is more about the ethics, but I think the abstract is pretty sensible:
"Mitigating Pandemic Influenza: The Ethics of Implementing a School Closure Policy" - https://journals.lww.com/jphmp/Abstract/2008/07000/Mitigatin...
> Pandemic influenza response plans have placed a significant emphasis on school closures as a community mitigation strategy. However, school closures raise serious ethical concerns, many of which have been largely overlooked. First, evidence of this intervention's efficacy has not yet been firmly established, calling into question whether it will be useful against the threat. Second, school closures have the potential to create serious adverse consequences, which will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. Thus, policy makers should focus on gathering more evidence about the efficacy of school closures and on strengthening communication and transparency about the strengths and weaknesses of any school-closure plan that they decide to adopt.
> But why do you think this? Are you aware that many parts of the world have returned to fully in-person school for several months or longer at this point? That here in deep blue parts of the US we are unique in our rabid devotion to denying children in-person school?
Because they're—US schools in my city—barely managing this year, due to staffing/substitute shortages? I'm not in a deep blue part of the US, incidentally.
> > The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online cohorts.
> [Citation Needed]
I have insight into districts that accidentally ran experiments for this, by running in-person and fully online programs concurrently. I can't share the numbers (they were in internal documents, with only some presented at school board meetings, which I certainly didn't save links to). Look at education & public policy journals in the coming years, should be some "fun" results (spoiler: everything was extremely bad, not just online learning)
> First of all I actually reject the premise that avoiding spread is necessarily a good thing.
.... ok.
> [quarantining teachers] could still teach remotely to a class of in-person kids (yes you might need some other adult to oversee things, but I'd wager even without such supervision you'd still have far better results than the unmitigated disaster that "distance" learning has been)
The amount of planning and support you need to make this work, on short-ish notice, under the constraints and in the environment schools were operating in, makes it unrealistic.
Overall, you're severely underestimating the disruption this has all had on in-person schooling, and the stress it's added for staff. You're overestimating how much extra work and (perceived, if you like) risk teachers were willing to take on, before they'd have simply quit.
> But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that, the only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been able to keep fully in-person school running last year" is purely itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine policies, and has nothing to do with an actual lack of staff nor an actual crippling health problem preventing people from being able to work.
I 100% guarantee you there'd have been a significant loss of staff at schools in our area if you announced a policy that all staff & students were to come in unless actually too ill to attend. You'd have had serious problems with sick-outs among the rest. Again: schools would have been crippled due to staffing reasons. You may disagree with what those people chose to do in response to that policy, but it's what they would have done. Source: I know a shitload of teachers in my area, and all of the ones who could afford to walk away from their job, spent most of last year right on the cusp of doing so, and they were absolutely serious about it. That kind of policy would have pushed every single one over the edge, instantly. Again, I'm not even in a "deep blue" area (rather more red than blue, in fact). I assume that effect would have been even worse in "blue" areas.
Your plan would not have worked, for staffing reasons. In-person school this year is barely working... for staffing reasons. That's just a fact, source: go talk to any public school teachers or administrators and ask them how the substitute supply situation is going, and how school attendance is going (80-85%ish daily attendance rates are common this year). Get ready for some stories. Attempting it last year would have gone even worse.
I'm Swedish, and none of my friends with school-age kids have mentioned any problems with this. Schools were open, and only older kids (16+) did hybrid or distance learning to keep them out of school and reduce spread, because it was deemed that they were old enough to handle it, while smaller kids weren't.
But there's no hysteria anywhere, everyone just kept chugging along. I have plenty of friends' kids who got infected, but recovered. Their teachers got sick, and recovered. I have teacher friends, I don't know if anyone of them got infected, but absolutely no-one has been afraid or hysterical about the situation or thinking about quitting their job because of the pandemic.
And everyone agrees that distance learning is absolute shit for kids, and those of my friends with high-school aged kids can clearly see that it was bad for their kids.
There's a difference in how US teachers are treated, under ordinary circumstances, versus those in Sweden, I expect, that accounts for some of this. I'd not be surprised if the average US teacher is always closer to quitting than the average Swedish teacher.
> But there's no hysteria anywhere
Whether it was hysteria or not, the fact was that an awful lot of US teachers were ready to quit last year, if they couldn't teach remotely or in an environment with masking + distancing + quarantine-after-exposure. Enough that there's no way they could have had normal in-person school last year, over the whole country, especially while also trying to do distancing and such (you can't go to 40+ kid class sizes to try to make up for lost staff, and still distance). Again, quarantine-after-exposure policies and burn-out mean they're having serious trouble staffing schools this year. It would not have gone better last year, and trying to open in person without quarantine policies or remote-teaching options would have driven out so many teachers that it would not have made matters better.
> And everyone agrees that distance learning is absolute shit for kids, and those of my friends with high-school aged kids can clearly see that it was bad for their kids.
All school have suffered for what'll be 2.5 years, when this school year is over—if we're optimistic, perhaps 2 years total, because maybe the second semester of this one will markedly improve. Most schools are almost entirely back in-person this year (some still have online options, but I don't think they've had as many takers as those options had last year) and it is not going great. Not as bad as last year, but it's still not normal. Hopefully next year is better.
Right, and this mindset simply doesn't exist in Sweden and many other parts of Europe.
This fear doesn't exist there.
The average American is horribly misinformed about the actual risks of covid, many young healthy Americans still believe the unvaccinated risk of death is about 10% for them, they're off in their estimate by four magnitudes. It's absolutely unbelievable how misinformed they are, and how they're allowed to perpetuate this unfounded hysteria unopposed.
I haven't seen similar surveys for Sweden or other European countries, but from talking to my friends and family, it's clear that their risk estimates are much more in line with actual reality. And consequently, their fear level is much more proportional and rational than that of the average American.
I'm sure that's a factor, and it may even have been the main one, but of the people I know who were talking about quitting, it was more like, "if you make me choose between ever letting my kids see my elderly parents for the entire school year, and working, I choose the former" or "my kid has cancer and is receiving chemotherapy, so, uh, yeah, I quit if you're gonna make me come in and risk COVID exposure". That kind of thing. It wasn't "this might kill me" (though, for a few older or ill ones I know of second-hand, it was) it was "this will limit my life in ways I don't accept, or it would be personally irresponsible" with some sentiment of "having schools fully open is socially irresponsible" on the side. All this on top of some serious burn-out from the COVID-stricken end of the 2019-2020 school year and the scramble and uncertainty of the Summer, which was its own special mess.
I agree with you that people in general have badly mis-calibrated their risk assessment when it comes to COVID, and concede that it's entirely possible that poor risk-assessment was actually the main driver of teacher resistance to returning, nationwide—though that's not what I personally saw.
Incidentally, there were lots of parents demanding a remote option last school year, too, not just teachers. The parents alone might have been enough to make it happen—though they may well have been acting on the same poor risk assessment you bring up, of course. That's possible.
IMO you are clearly making an unfounded assumption
That would be an unfounded assumption.
It was to protect staff & their families, and generally reduce community spread.
Schools this year, that are fully back in person, are barely holding it together. There aren't enough subs. Trying to go fully in-person everywhere last year probably would have fallen apart, for that reason. It still might, this year. It's bad.
I agree that the harm outweighed the benefit by a long shot if we're talking just about the kids, but I don't think we'd have been able to keep fully in-person school running last year anyway. The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online cohorts. The only way to fix it would have been a policy of having teachers & students who very likely were COVID-exposed but not actively ill-feeling come in until it was proven that they were COVID-positive—but that policy would also have increased spread, so I wouldn't guarantee that'd actually improve the situation of having too many staff out for quarantine.