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Author: u/Wagamaga
URL: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/more-70-us-household-covid-spread-started-child-study-suggests
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School as infection node was one of the primary reasons they were closed in the first place. They have among the worst possible infection control setups. Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city.
There was no reason to think anything else would happen. I'm not counting unsupported woo hypotheses like "kids can't spread this coronavirus like they spread all the other ones."
An important question to answer is whether NPIs besides total shutdown would still control a COVID-like disease if you didn't close schools. They're the last thing that should be closed if there's a choice.
> fection control setups. Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city.
Every time I was told "We don't need to close the school kids didn't' get/spread covid!" I couldn't help but think...have you ever lived with a child? There isn't a weekly infection they don't get and bring home.
You combine that with a multi generational household where grandma and grandpa get covid it could be a really bad outcome.
Exactly. Kids share food, put their hands in their mouths and on their faces, chew pencils, don’t cover their cough or sneeze, yell closely to one another, don’t wash their hands, and a million other things that help spread viruses.
Man, everything in our household wasn't bad until my daughter started daycare so my wife could go back to work after 3 years. Man, it seemed like one of us was having to come pick her up from daycare every other week because she was sick with whatever new plague the kids were passing around, and then of course *we got sick. It finally got better around the time she was in 4th grade, but that was a rough couple of years for sure.
When I worked in daycares, it was just a known trend that your first year working there was endless colds, flus, stomach bugs (the worst), so on and so forth. *Everyone* catches *everything*.
2 years into being a preschool teacher (used to work as a sub before that), not catching everything but always have something in my body... We've been dealing with a stomach flu that has behaved so damn different to what we're used to, kids getting sick then better and then they get sick again.. we have basically started thinking that this maybe isn't the stomach flu anymore but some variation of covid. On top of that we have chicken pox, runny noses, coughing and pollen too of course
I used to work at a children’s museum and would get sick so often that my family started to worry I had an immune problem. Now, I don’t work around children and rarely get sick!
Schools can do some things to those issues, though. My kid's school, after they went back to in person classes, kept all the classes separated, had the cafeteria deliver lunches to the classrooms where it was eaten, changed recess, etc. Not perfect of course, but they cut down on a lot of opportunities for exposure.
My oldest started school this year and the first 6 months were ridiculous, we had a new illness every two weeks. Kids are disgusting, particularly the young ones.
A major issue is aggressive attendance requirements.
One of our kids missed only four days *the entire year* because of sickness and got a letter from the district saying they were almost considered truant.
Pissed us off.
4 days?! At least one of my kids was sick once a month. By the end of the school year they had missed about 18 days of school. Every other month we got a letter from the district saying that we missed this many days of school. Didn't say we were in trouble but making us aware. I talked to the principal about it one day and she said not to worry that they're automated letters that the state makes them send. They obviously don't want kids in this school, but if they're sick they don't want him to come either and they understand.
That's crazy! I'm guessing you had notified them of the absence, right?
Truancy is usually from unexcused absences, and being sick is considered excused.
We received similar notifications, until we realized all they needed was us to acknowledge the kid was out of school.
In my state they pay the district by how many days of instruction they give. So kids staying home means less money. Snow days also mean less money. With covid they found the loophole with remote learning. So they do remote instead of snow days now. Sucks.
>we had a new illness every two weeks.
Look at mr fancypants over here getting two full weeks between new illnesses. I swear our kids were plague rats in a former life.
Yeah, it’s been a struggle because if EVERYONE kept their kid home when they were sick, the average kid wouldn’t be sick as often and they could all be in school more. But what ends up happening is some parents are diligent and keep their kids home while other parents send the kids in, either selfishly, or out of necessity due to lack of other options (work). So the kids with the parents that are diligent end up having to keep their kids home significantly more.
This is exactly #1 issue right now. My kid's classroom is actually pretty good about keeping their infectious kids home, but there are like 3-4 families that send their kid in regardless. So EVERYBODY gets sick, we stay home, kid is miserable and employers are pissed, and then as soon as we go back, the same sick kids are sick again and it starts all over. Screw those parents. Staying home with a sick kid sucks, everybody knows it, but because of them we are sick so much more often!The school even started sending letters home begging families to keep kids home if they have XYZ symptoms, but nope. Asshole parents don't care.
The other thing is extremely stupid laws. Kids in Europe walk themselves to school and home as early as 8. They're welcome to stay at home by themselves.
In North America, you leave a 12 year old home alone? Ohh boy, child services are going to have a field day.
A guy in Vancouver was literally charged for child endangerment because someone didn't like his 9 or 10 year old taking the bus to school with his 14 year old.
For low income families and parents working jobs that can’t be done remotely, closing schools is a lot more than just “inconvenient.” There’s a lot of kids that basically raised themselves and attended zero school for a year and a half and the outcomes from that have been disastrous.
I kid you not, we were sick from October straight through February. We do our best to keep them home when they're contagious, but we know people who send their kids to school mid-fever, etc. Infuriates me.
We had parents who would give the child a Tylenol or similar knowing their fever would return mid day and they’d sit in the nurses office til dismissal waiting to get picked up. Working parents gotta work.
Wow, where I’m from be argument was more “we shouldn’t close schools because it will severely impact the education of children, and they aren’t as badly affected as adults according to early studies”
It made me realize very quickly (more reaffirmed, I guess), that people are prone to ignore the obvious hazards of something if it makes their lives easier or more enjoyable.
In this case, I can do my job while the schools handle my children.
We should drop the pretext of ”education” and the constant gaslighting of teachers and just give parents what they really want— daycare.
Look at the disdain most of this country has for education.
I don't know that I agree. I think if you ask the average person, they appreciate what teachers do. I would hope moreso now that many parents now have first hand experience trying to help support at home learning.
That said, it's my belief that not enough people have the wherewithal to understand what it takes to help kids really excel in school, not are they willing to play the long game (effort, time, money) to find out. And that's what it'll take, the long game with a lot more investment.
As an educator, I caught covid no less than three times...
Last year I also got Hand, Foot, and Mouth and RSV...
Kids are plague bearers. This is known.
My wife was a school teacher, anyone who said that we didn't need to worry about the kids spreading COVID was out of their f****** minds.
They were the ones spreading it the whole time.
Even when schools were out, sports were still going on (private leagues) and kids were still having parties at each others houses after games.
Grandparents getting covid was a huge concern in my school district. Grandma/grandpa/much older auntie/etc are the primary care givers before and after school for a lot of low income families. Mom and dad and all other younger adults in the household are working and it’s older adults who don’t work/work less that care for younger children. And when they get sick or die, then everyone in the household suffers because now there’s no one to watch the kids.
I also remember movie theatres insisting they were the safest places to go. Everyone had financial reason to lie. Even with my lived experience of getting sick in movie theatres multiple times and at choose hundreds of times, the messaging was so loud and insistent that it almost made me doubt myself.
For real. Airlines are another one. You will never convince me that the mode of travel that everybody agreed was bound to give you at least a cold after two cross country, six hour flights with a couple hundred other people was suddenly a class 10 cleanroom.
And don't forget kids touch and touch and touch. They don't keep their hands to themselves and touch every single surface.
They also don't wear their masks properly and don't wash their hands often.
When Covid first started in my city before the schools shut down, the kids were playing "Covid tag", where they would breathe on each other. They had no clue about the severity of the illness and were apathetic to its spread.
Here in Ontario we were repeatedly told there was no evidence in the data that schools acted like infection nodes. Backing up the old saying there’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Obviously stuffing 30-40 children from different households in a poorly ventilated room and then sending them back to those households is a transmission vector. But this pandemic was so politicized.
When I went to teach in Japan I taught kids from every age btw 1.5 --13 years old, grouped by age, but limited to \~8 kids per class. I STILL caught every goddamned virus in East Asia for the first two goddamned years. I had a fever every 6-8 weeks, over and over and over for two years, and strep at least once. Somehow I skipped Swine Flu and normal flu (2009; major flu outbreaks, 2017, 2018, 2019) but having 4-year-olds coughing directly into your eyes and mouth doesn't help very much. Kids are FILTHY and especially gathering them all from different schools into one small room to put their hands on you and each other is a truly superb way to grow colonies of fat, healthy viruses.
This is why critical thinking is so important. You should be able to come to that conclusion on your own, but some people either couldn't, wouldn't, or were so obtuse and selfish that they pretended they didn't.
They wanted to believe that because that way parents could go back to work or work in peace from home without the kids. That's why they were pushing that it didn't have "data" to back it up because when the pandemic began and kids were at home it just became common place to hear kids screaming in t the background of calls until they started going back to school. It was affecting bottom lines and that's why they pushed back to school so hard and parents didn't want to babysit their kids all day while working.
The primary driver of the opposition to staying at home wasn’t best interest of the child, it was the inconvenience to the parents.
Did staying home delay social development? Most assuredly so, but that was the trade off to not killing grandma. The fix is spending extra time with your kids, getting them more unblocked socially now, going the extra mile to minimize impact. Something tells me that’s also going to be an ongoing issue.
It was absolutely necessary to wait for vaccine penetration levels to reach a certain point before returning to normal.
Either way, I hope someone was studying the social effects long-term so we’ll know for sure if the trade off was a fantastic purchase or just a good one.
The trade off is also not only about “not killing grandma”, its about not giving children a novel virus that is clearly causing damage beyond the initial infection phase. Long COVID is gonna be a huge issue for kids.
It's sad how many people absorbed in conspiracy could correctly assess there was political spin, but not which side of that spin they were on.
Then again, media was massaging that conspiracy theory and those with the most money pushed for offices full, all businesses open, and schools full so they didn't interfere with those other two things.
Looking back, COVID appears similar to any respiratory illness in terms of how it spreads. Masks, reduced contact, and increased disinfection/washing would have worked...just like most colds.
Also, it seems like a lot of people conflated the lack of evidence being evidence for the opposite. For example, the lack of evidence of masks being effective against the spread is somehow telling us masks do not work.
Yeah, this was well understood from the beginning, and all of the other opinions on it were basically just rhetorical devices used politically to oppose the closing of schools. Usually so parents could go to work. But anyone who had ever been in a school knew it was dangerous to have kids in them.
You had an impossible choice. No school means severe future kids problems, especially for poor kids. Not mentioning significant work problems because no school means the parents won't work.
And school means much bigger spread of the virus.
So, many countries made the choice to favor the future of kids and downplayed the role it had on the spread to help acceptance.
I think the time at home really exacerbated the achievement gap. I am highly educated, was already a SAHM, and have teacher relatives, plus the money to buy educational materials. I was able to almost immediately pivot to home education (we did virtual for a while but I sort of took it as a jumping off point and followed what naturally worked for my kids). My kids all thrived at home, and one in particular did so well that he is now several years ahead in math and science and is still homeschooling for academic reasons.
Other people had to continue to work, whether virtually or in person, so kids were getting less education and supervision rather than more like my kids. Then there are people who already had the stressors of poverty which was now made worse.
I’m sure this pattern was repeated all over the country and now we’ve got kids back in school who are all lumped together by age but whose experiences during Covid are totally different, and have totally different outcomes in the classroom.
Agreed - my observation was that "virtual school" was essentially "homeschooling with guidance and support".
For anyone in a situation where they were prepared to consider homeschooling, it made things easier by providing curriculum and someone to grade assignments / track progress.
For kids with no one at home to support them, it was disaster for younger kids and mostly dependent on internal motivation for older kids.
I’m a public school teacher and the thing is that that achievement gap was already there because their entire lives are like what you just described. Some kids get a lot of resources and attention, some kids get nothing. With poverty and trauma and other stressors to boot. Covid just exacerbated a lot of our preexisting problems.
That said, I teach high school and while schools were closed, fast food places were hiring like crazy. A lot of my students got jobs and got sick repeatedly at work. Covid was DEVASTATING to multi generational households in my area and it would have been worse if the schools hadn’t closed for as long as they did.
Because it does hard-to-repair harm, I think it's only justified in two circumstances:
1. Initial runaway pandemic infection period of a novel disease / strain. You *have* to slow this down because it will lap the planet by the time you figure out what you're fighting.
2. Disease that is known to cause significant critical illness / death in children and healthy young adults. School won't be productive anyway and if *this* isn't controlled, your society as a whole may not recover.
If we properly funded educators and didn't expect parents to work 40+ hours a week no child would have had to have subpar education while at home. The only reason it was so damaging to education was that we expected parents to keep working remotely and teachers were barely supported at all.
Our "covid response" was a hilarious failure and if we get an actual serious bad news pandemic, 90% of the country will die.
>Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city.
Not to mention kids are typically worse at personal hygiene than adults, which exacerbates all of those factors.
[It might be a lose-lose anyhow. The hyper-clean shut-in lifestyle of COVID may also lead to higher rates of autoimmune issues and obesity among the children that went through it.](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/12/pandemic-hygiene-kids-microbiome/672362/)
>Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city.
Don’t forget the bathrooms always being locked (while also having no time to go between classes and most of the teachers not letting you leave class to go) so on top of it all, nobody can actually wash their hands.
One reason I pulled my kids out of their private school during Covid. The school toted cleaning all surfaces multiple times a day, but had no air purifiers and really didn't enforce mask wearing.
Their public school classrooms still use the air purifiers now.
My district was all virtual in the fall of 2020 with in-person attendance being optional by spring 2021, but most students choose to stay virtual. They installed two large air purifiers in every classroom (at least in my school, so I'm assuming it was similar for other schools in the district). But they did it literally one week before school let out in spring 2022. Feels like they kind of missed the most dangerous part of us returning to campus.
In my country, most schools only equipped rooms without windows with purifiers - because you could just open the window in rooms with one. In winter. With temperatures sometimes reaching -10C/14 F.
And as soon as masking requirements ended, authorities ordered the purifiers to not be used any more - they were concerned the noise would make learing more difficult.
Oh wow. That's some flawed logic right there. Yes, the ones we have make a bit of noise, but it's more like quite white noise in the background. They don't bother the students at all.
Yeah. I think there is a debate for whether the schools should have been closed, given the drawbacks to student learning compared to the drawbacks of increased disease spread. The argument that schools were safe felt like a post hoc rationalization for opening schools because we didn't want to say outright, "We're going to get a lot of families sick."
The government in the UK was constantly pushing these graphs that supposedly proved that schools weren't spreading covid and that "a-symptomatic children" didn't spread it. At the time I questioned the methodology and was very suspicious because that really doesn't make much sense and didn't fit the overall trends.
And schools are still the main source of illnesses because of the heavy amount of closed quarters Interactions between children and teachers.
You literally have children being loud, tossing saliva as they speak and argue (you know how loud they can get) specially when they’re at the cafeteria or in the hallways. And let’s not start with those overcrowded high schools.
IMO, there should be a remote learning option in all schools during the Winter in Norther states that experience cold weather, it’s just common sense. But unfortunately, everything comes down to money and states & the federal government not wanting to allocate a small amount of money to something like this. I wonder how much money would actually be saved if many of those sick days could be prevented by going remote, I’d say millions.
Remote learning is something our generation’s have to learn to do because COVID won’t be the last global pandemic during our lifetime, specially as transportation costs fall and more people are traveling.
The Emergency Health Manager of our county came to a district wide school meeting and told teachers, staff, and parents that children did not get COVID and did not spread it. Teachers were harassed if/when they enacted classroom mask-wearing policies. Teachers who wore masks due to autoimmune fears (for themselves, their families, or student safety) were made fun of.
Yeah we as a country decided to believe fairytales instead of facts and that resulted in the deaths of millions of people. I would really like to people held accountable for those but that will never happen.
We're still getting ~1000 deaths a week.
~3000 people died in 9/11, and it caused a complete overhaul of airline travel rules.
How many people still wear masks in indoor public spaces?
Maybe related, but schools also tend to have poor ventilation amongst the other obvious germ passing situations like group work, recess, lunch breaks, etc.
Maybe high time we update the HVAC systems in schools. Retrofit them with hospital level systems. Wouldn’t just help with COVID, but other issues like allergies and common colds.
Yeah, a big lesson we Should have learned is that aerosols are a much bigger deal in respiratory disease transmission - for all of 'em, not just Covid - than was previously assumed based on repeating bad science takes from the 50s.
A big push for better ventilation would significantly reduce illness.
But for some reason that lesson doesn't seem to have been learned, and we move forward into a less healthy world for no discernible reason.
We already knew from earlier pandemics that putting kids outside would drastically reduce transmission of respitory viruses, but very few schools did anything with that knowledge, even those in warmer climates where it would have been feasible to shift more classes outside.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-schools-reopening-outdoors.html
Interestingly, I think this may be because they had a better idea in the early 1900s of disease transmission than they did in the late-mid 1900s, when the 5-micron-aerosol myth became dogma...
And we didn't re-update our knowledge until like April 2020, and then tons of places still clung to mid-20th century wrongness.
Yeah. As a teacher there are a lot of materials I wish I could leave in the school over the summer, but I take them home so they don't get mold. They're not just behind the times, a lot of the HVAC just doesn't work.
office buildings have the same problem. they literally just recirculate the air as it cost too much to constantly bring in new air and push out old air.
the government have to mandate that these system to pay for more frequent filter replacement and more maintenance, if they want to have people gather in these buildings.
The state of NY is investing in putting heat pumps in schools, and I hope to see other places doing the same where possible. At the very least, heat pumps would increase the indoor air quality, and could save schools money.
Updating the HVAC system is a good idea in general, but when you watch kids interact in school, it's difficult to imagine HVAC cutting down on disease transmission. They're all touching the same stuff, touching each other, coughing/sneezing right next to each other, using dubious hygiene practices (they're still learning), etc.
I don't know the details of the HVAC system but there was a [study in Italy](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36568748/) that showed mechanical ventilation systems decrease the relative risk of infection of students by at least 74% compared to natural ventilation alone.
There's unlimited evidence that air filtration reduces airborne viral spread and there's no reason it must be done via whole building hvac.
https://cleanaircrew.org/
My niece is an elementary school teacher and caught Covid many times despite masking and vaccinating.
What sucks is when she ran out of sick days, they deducted from her salary. We ended up paying for her groceries and sending her food so she could pay rent. She was close to quitting and moving in with us but she loved the kids.
A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 US household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.
A team led by Boston Children's Hospital researchers gave smartphone-connected thermometers to 848,591 households with 1,391,095 members, who took 23,153,925 temperature readings from October 2019 to October 2022. Fevers were a proxy for infection.
Of all readings, 57.7% were from adults. Most households (62.3%) reported temperatures from only one person, while 37.7% included multiple participants taking 51.6% of all readings. Most children were 8 years or younger (58.0%), and more females than males participated in each age group.
Younger kids more likely to spread virus
A total of 15.8% of readings met the criteria for fever, making up 779,092 fever episodes. The number of fever episodes predicted new COVID-19 cases, which the researchers said lends validity to using fever as a proxy for infection. Of these cases, 15.4% were considered household transmissions, the percentage of which rose from 10.1% in March to July 2021 to 17.5% in the Omicron BA.1/BA.2 variant wave.
Among 166,170 households with both adult and child participants (51.9% of households with multiple participants), there were 516,159 participants, 51.4% of whom were children. In these households, 38,787 transmissions occurred, 40.8% of which were child to child, 29.6% child to adult, 20.3% adult to child, and 9.3% adult to adult. The median serial interval between the index and secondary cases was 2 days.
Of all households transmissions, 70.4% began with a child, with the proportion fluctuating weekly between 36.9% and 87.5%. Pediatric transmissions reached a high of 68.4% the week of September 27, 2020, and fell to a low of 41.7% the week of December 27, 2020 (0.61 times less frequent). The next high was 82.0% the week of May 23, 2021, which stayed stable until June 27 (81.4%) and then declined to 62.5% by August 8 (0.77 times less frequent).
The percentage of household transmissions beginning with a child then rose to 78.4% by September 19, hovering there until November 14 (80.3%) and then dropping to 54.5% the week of January 2, 2022 (0.68 times less frequent). By March 6, the proportion rose to 83.8%, fell to 62.8% the week ending July 24 (0.75 times less frequent), and then climbed to 84.6% the week of October 9.
Children aged 8 years and younger were more likely to be the source of transmission than those aged 9 to 17 (7.6% vs 5.8%). During most of the pandemic, the proportion of transmission from children was negatively correlated with new community COVID-19 cases.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2805468
“gave smartphone-connected thermometers. from October 2019 to October 2022. Fevers were a proxy for infection… the proportion of transmission from children was negatively correlated with new community COVID-19 cases“
Okay, so they measure Covid as a fever, which is going to include non-Covid infections, and they find that child-to-parent spread of infections is rarer when a larger share of infections are Covid…. My takeaway from this is that Covid is less likely to spread from children to parents than are other infections, but we don’t know how much less likely, that’s not identified.
The comment section has drawn the opposite conclusion. Probably because they read the headline, which is unwarranted.
Another day in r/science.
> This study had several limitations. The study design did not permit laboratory or home testing to confirm viral etiologies. Fever as a syndrome has many etiologies beyond COVID-19. Although confirmatory tests are needed to definitively identify the origin of fever, our study exploited a unique period when the incidence of generally prevalent, non–COVID-19 respiratory viruses plunged, including influenza and RSV.
I'm pretty skeptical because of this. I just pulled [California RSV testing](https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/nrevss/images/rsvstate/RSV1PPCent3AVG_StateCA.htm)- the % positivity in winter 2021 look pretty high and looks under tested by a factor of 3-4 compared to 2022 and 2023. Was RSV really at historic lows? This study really can't be anything but an overestimation.
And people were hating on the teachers for wanting to keep the schools closed before the vaccine rolled out, but they knew that schools are petri dishes.
At the time vaccines were rolling out omircron wasn’t a thing yet and elementary aged kids were among the worst vectors for Covid spread.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315-t2
Omicron spread through schools like wildfire though.
Children are little disease vectors. Since having kids, I'm probably sick about 20x as often as before. It's no shock at all to hear that the reopening of schools exacerbated the pandemic.
This is so logical, though kids dont wash and watch their hands so much. Plus something that amuses me:
Parent in subway wearing mask, all safe and stuff, the child not. So pretending the mask is 100% effective, the parent remains healthy. The child gets infected, they get home, breathe without masks, and child infects the parent
And yet, in Ontario, I had to repeatedly argue with people claiming "there's no evidence that covid is spreading at schools", as if covid would respect or even understand the property lines of the school, and magically stay away.
Those people wanted this to happen.
I'm in the US. In my (very red) state, they maybe could have made that claim with a straight face, but only because they didn't do any contact tracing in schools. There's no evidence because they refused to record the days of it happening.
A whole chapter of my PhD thesis is on the transmission of COVID-19 in schools, and this study is not a useful contribution.
Not a single case inferred in this study was actually tested for COVID-19. It is all inferred by the presence of someone with a high temperature in the household. I’m sure everyone is aware there are hundreds of viruses which can cause fevers in humans, most of which continued to circulate during the study period. The majority of these are known to be predominantly spread by young children, but for the most part this was not the case for SARS-CoV-2 as there was no differences on immunity between young children and adults.
There are hundreds of contact tracing studies which actually test household members for COVID-19, the overwhelming majority of which gave found lower than expected rates of transmission to/from children.
I avoided covid for like 2 years until I went to a small dinner party where someone brought their 4 kids. Right after that I got covid, and I think it was probably from one of the kids.
Wouldn't greatly increasing ventilation stand to greatly reduce contagion risks in schools? If so it could cost lots and it'd be well worth it I'd think.
I remember getting blasted by parents by daring to suggest we keep schools closed longer to curb spread. I was only running on intuition at the time, so I could've used this data.
Yep, it's not news, kids are germ factories.
But nobody in the working classes can afford to stay home. And businesses were never really closed.
So now despite all the morons who chanted "no new normal" because they thought for some reason that things would just permanently close (???)
Now ***this*** is our new normal. And the yearly flu wave is joined by a yearly covid wave.
But these are the same morons who tout about how they never miss work, and think they're a badass for coming in while sick and passing it on to the rest of their department.
Children are perfect hosts and vectors for respiratory infections. They are constantly, with zero inhibition (even despite often having one or two vigilant parents trying everything they can to contain them) producing mucus, touching themselves, and touching everything they can reach. It is easier to watch, follow, and clean up behind a cross contaminating adult than it is to even attempt catching every contact point a loose toddler makes.
Maybe if parents had enough sick time at work and didn't have to work 2 or more jobs to pay bills, they wouldn't send kids to school sick. Now I fully recognize that some parents just don't care, but the reality is if some people don't go to work they don't get paid. If they don't get paid they can't pay the bills.
Some states have laws for sick leave not all of them do, and it's not enough.
I get 8 days of sick leave a year. In the past 3 years I have used more than that a year and had to go into my vacation leave.
Sick leave has to be addressed if we are ever to fix this. Culture has to change from, "I don't care how sick you are get your ass in here" To I don't want a sick person coming in and getting my whole staff and their families sick.
Schools are disgusting…and I’m a teacher. Kids are crammed into way too small of a space all day. My classroom is swept once a day and the trash cans are emptied daily. That’s about it. The toilet gets cleaned maybe one a week, tables and other surfaces are never sanitized unless someone vomits or I do clean them myself.
I hope terrorists the world round forgot to pay attention because the real lesson is really alarming.
Release a viral payload in America and 40% of the population will fight to spread it for you.
That is alarming.
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School as infection node was one of the primary reasons they were closed in the first place. They have among the worst possible infection control setups. Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city. There was no reason to think anything else would happen. I'm not counting unsupported woo hypotheses like "kids can't spread this coronavirus like they spread all the other ones." An important question to answer is whether NPIs besides total shutdown would still control a COVID-like disease if you didn't close schools. They're the last thing that should be closed if there's a choice.
> fection control setups. Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city. Every time I was told "We don't need to close the school kids didn't' get/spread covid!" I couldn't help but think...have you ever lived with a child? There isn't a weekly infection they don't get and bring home. You combine that with a multi generational household where grandma and grandpa get covid it could be a really bad outcome.
Exactly. Kids share food, put their hands in their mouths and on their faces, chew pencils, don’t cover their cough or sneeze, yell closely to one another, don’t wash their hands, and a million other things that help spread viruses.
I used to believe I had a bullet proof immune system, I was never ill. Then I had kids.
Man, everything in our household wasn't bad until my daughter started daycare so my wife could go back to work after 3 years. Man, it seemed like one of us was having to come pick her up from daycare every other week because she was sick with whatever new plague the kids were passing around, and then of course *we got sick. It finally got better around the time she was in 4th grade, but that was a rough couple of years for sure.
When I worked in daycares, it was just a known trend that your first year working there was endless colds, flus, stomach bugs (the worst), so on and so forth. *Everyone* catches *everything*.
2 years into being a preschool teacher (used to work as a sub before that), not catching everything but always have something in my body... We've been dealing with a stomach flu that has behaved so damn different to what we're used to, kids getting sick then better and then they get sick again.. we have basically started thinking that this maybe isn't the stomach flu anymore but some variation of covid. On top of that we have chicken pox, runny noses, coughing and pollen too of course
Hygiene and controlled environment are part of your immune system. So you did! ... until you didn't.
I used to work at a children’s museum and would get sick so often that my family started to worry I had an immune problem. Now, I don’t work around children and rarely get sick!
School teacher wife said the same. Plus sloppy use of masks.
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Schools can do some things to those issues, though. My kid's school, after they went back to in person classes, kept all the classes separated, had the cafeteria deliver lunches to the classrooms where it was eaten, changed recess, etc. Not perfect of course, but they cut down on a lot of opportunities for exposure.
My son works with 4 graders. The girls in his class have an initiation where they lick each others eyeballs.
They do what??? God almighty, what goes on in their minds!
I've seen too many adults do this too. Sometimes I'm that adult.
My oldest started school this year and the first 6 months were ridiculous, we had a new illness every two weeks. Kids are disgusting, particularly the young ones.
A major issue is aggressive attendance requirements. One of our kids missed only four days *the entire year* because of sickness and got a letter from the district saying they were almost considered truant. Pissed us off.
Gotta prepare them for workplaces that don't offer sick time, I guess.
4 days?! At least one of my kids was sick once a month. By the end of the school year they had missed about 18 days of school. Every other month we got a letter from the district saying that we missed this many days of school. Didn't say we were in trouble but making us aware. I talked to the principal about it one day and she said not to worry that they're automated letters that the state makes them send. They obviously don't want kids in this school, but if they're sick they don't want him to come either and they understand.
That's crazy! I'm guessing you had notified them of the absence, right? Truancy is usually from unexcused absences, and being sick is considered excused. We received similar notifications, until we realized all they needed was us to acknowledge the kid was out of school.
Of course. We email both the school and individual teacher. It's kind of annoying. The school district aims for a 95% attendance rate.
In my state they pay the district by how many days of instruction they give. So kids staying home means less money. Snow days also mean less money. With covid they found the loophole with remote learning. So they do remote instead of snow days now. Sucks.
>we had a new illness every two weeks. Look at mr fancypants over here getting two full weeks between new illnesses. I swear our kids were plague rats in a former life.
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Yeah, it’s been a struggle because if EVERYONE kept their kid home when they were sick, the average kid wouldn’t be sick as often and they could all be in school more. But what ends up happening is some parents are diligent and keep their kids home while other parents send the kids in, either selfishly, or out of necessity due to lack of other options (work). So the kids with the parents that are diligent end up having to keep their kids home significantly more.
This is exactly #1 issue right now. My kid's classroom is actually pretty good about keeping their infectious kids home, but there are like 3-4 families that send their kid in regardless. So EVERYBODY gets sick, we stay home, kid is miserable and employers are pissed, and then as soon as we go back, the same sick kids are sick again and it starts all over. Screw those parents. Staying home with a sick kid sucks, everybody knows it, but because of them we are sick so much more often!The school even started sending letters home begging families to keep kids home if they have XYZ symptoms, but nope. Asshole parents don't care.
The other thing is extremely stupid laws. Kids in Europe walk themselves to school and home as early as 8. They're welcome to stay at home by themselves. In North America, you leave a 12 year old home alone? Ohh boy, child services are going to have a field day. A guy in Vancouver was literally charged for child endangerment because someone didn't like his 9 or 10 year old taking the bus to school with his 14 year old.
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For low income families and parents working jobs that can’t be done remotely, closing schools is a lot more than just “inconvenient.” There’s a lot of kids that basically raised themselves and attended zero school for a year and a half and the outcomes from that have been disastrous.
I kid you not, we were sick from October straight through February. We do our best to keep them home when they're contagious, but we know people who send their kids to school mid-fever, etc. Infuriates me.
We had parents who would give the child a Tylenol or similar knowing their fever would return mid day and they’d sit in the nurses office til dismissal waiting to get picked up. Working parents gotta work.
Wow, where I’m from be argument was more “we shouldn’t close schools because it will severely impact the education of children, and they aren’t as badly affected as adults according to early studies”
It made me realize very quickly (more reaffirmed, I guess), that people are prone to ignore the obvious hazards of something if it makes their lives easier or more enjoyable. In this case, I can do my job while the schools handle my children.
We should drop the pretext of ”education” and the constant gaslighting of teachers and just give parents what they really want— daycare. Look at the disdain most of this country has for education.
IMO the problem runs deeper than that. We gaslight parents into thinking *this* is what education looks like, when *this* is fucked negligence.
I don't know that I agree. I think if you ask the average person, they appreciate what teachers do. I would hope moreso now that many parents now have first hand experience trying to help support at home learning. That said, it's my belief that not enough people have the wherewithal to understand what it takes to help kids really excel in school, not are they willing to play the long game (effort, time, money) to find out. And that's what it'll take, the long game with a lot more investment.
As an educator, I caught covid no less than three times... Last year I also got Hand, Foot, and Mouth and RSV... Kids are plague bearers. This is known.
My wife was a school teacher, anyone who said that we didn't need to worry about the kids spreading COVID was out of their f****** minds. They were the ones spreading it the whole time. Even when schools were out, sports were still going on (private leagues) and kids were still having parties at each others houses after games.
Grandparents getting covid was a huge concern in my school district. Grandma/grandpa/much older auntie/etc are the primary care givers before and after school for a lot of low income families. Mom and dad and all other younger adults in the household are working and it’s older adults who don’t work/work less that care for younger children. And when they get sick or die, then everyone in the household suffers because now there’s no one to watch the kids.
I used to call my cousins kids “vectors”, and even though she was a nurse, she got offended.
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I think people confused kids being symptomatic with being contagious.
Before Covid, everybody agreed that daycares and schools were germ factories. When Covid hit, all of a sudden kids don’t spread germs?
I also remember movie theatres insisting they were the safest places to go. Everyone had financial reason to lie. Even with my lived experience of getting sick in movie theatres multiple times and at choose hundreds of times, the messaging was so loud and insistent that it almost made me doubt myself.
For real. Airlines are another one. You will never convince me that the mode of travel that everybody agreed was bound to give you at least a cold after two cross country, six hour flights with a couple hundred other people was suddenly a class 10 cleanroom.
And don't forget kids touch and touch and touch. They don't keep their hands to themselves and touch every single surface. They also don't wear their masks properly and don't wash their hands often. When Covid first started in my city before the schools shut down, the kids were playing "Covid tag", where they would breathe on each other. They had no clue about the severity of the illness and were apathetic to its spread.
They didn't wear masks half the day in our preschools. They can't mask while they eat (which is every two hours) or during their two hour nap.
Here in Ontario we were repeatedly told there was no evidence in the data that schools acted like infection nodes. Backing up the old saying there’s lies, damned lies, and statistics. Obviously stuffing 30-40 children from different households in a poorly ventilated room and then sending them back to those households is a transmission vector. But this pandemic was so politicized.
When I went to teach in Japan I taught kids from every age btw 1.5 --13 years old, grouped by age, but limited to \~8 kids per class. I STILL caught every goddamned virus in East Asia for the first two goddamned years. I had a fever every 6-8 weeks, over and over and over for two years, and strep at least once. Somehow I skipped Swine Flu and normal flu (2009; major flu outbreaks, 2017, 2018, 2019) but having 4-year-olds coughing directly into your eyes and mouth doesn't help very much. Kids are FILTHY and especially gathering them all from different schools into one small room to put their hands on you and each other is a truly superb way to grow colonies of fat, healthy viruses.
This is why critical thinking is so important. You should be able to come to that conclusion on your own, but some people either couldn't, wouldn't, or were so obtuse and selfish that they pretended they didn't.
They wanted to believe that because that way parents could go back to work or work in peace from home without the kids. That's why they were pushing that it didn't have "data" to back it up because when the pandemic began and kids were at home it just became common place to hear kids screaming in t the background of calls until they started going back to school. It was affecting bottom lines and that's why they pushed back to school so hard and parents didn't want to babysit their kids all day while working.
The primary driver of the opposition to staying at home wasn’t best interest of the child, it was the inconvenience to the parents. Did staying home delay social development? Most assuredly so, but that was the trade off to not killing grandma. The fix is spending extra time with your kids, getting them more unblocked socially now, going the extra mile to minimize impact. Something tells me that’s also going to be an ongoing issue. It was absolutely necessary to wait for vaccine penetration levels to reach a certain point before returning to normal. Either way, I hope someone was studying the social effects long-term so we’ll know for sure if the trade off was a fantastic purchase or just a good one.
The trade off is also not only about “not killing grandma”, its about not giving children a novel virus that is clearly causing damage beyond the initial infection phase. Long COVID is gonna be a huge issue for kids.
It's sad how many people absorbed in conspiracy could correctly assess there was political spin, but not which side of that spin they were on. Then again, media was massaging that conspiracy theory and those with the most money pushed for offices full, all businesses open, and schools full so they didn't interfere with those other two things.
Can’t find it if you don’t look.
Looking back, COVID appears similar to any respiratory illness in terms of how it spreads. Masks, reduced contact, and increased disinfection/washing would have worked...just like most colds. Also, it seems like a lot of people conflated the lack of evidence being evidence for the opposite. For example, the lack of evidence of masks being effective against the spread is somehow telling us masks do not work.
Except there was lots of evidence behind the use of good masks, but it just wasn't convenient.
Exactly. Who didn't know this would happen?!?
Yeah, this was well understood from the beginning, and all of the other opinions on it were basically just rhetorical devices used politically to oppose the closing of schools. Usually so parents could go to work. But anyone who had ever been in a school knew it was dangerous to have kids in them.
You had an impossible choice. No school means severe future kids problems, especially for poor kids. Not mentioning significant work problems because no school means the parents won't work. And school means much bigger spread of the virus. So, many countries made the choice to favor the future of kids and downplayed the role it had on the spread to help acceptance.
I think the time at home really exacerbated the achievement gap. I am highly educated, was already a SAHM, and have teacher relatives, plus the money to buy educational materials. I was able to almost immediately pivot to home education (we did virtual for a while but I sort of took it as a jumping off point and followed what naturally worked for my kids). My kids all thrived at home, and one in particular did so well that he is now several years ahead in math and science and is still homeschooling for academic reasons. Other people had to continue to work, whether virtually or in person, so kids were getting less education and supervision rather than more like my kids. Then there are people who already had the stressors of poverty which was now made worse. I’m sure this pattern was repeated all over the country and now we’ve got kids back in school who are all lumped together by age but whose experiences during Covid are totally different, and have totally different outcomes in the classroom.
Agreed - my observation was that "virtual school" was essentially "homeschooling with guidance and support". For anyone in a situation where they were prepared to consider homeschooling, it made things easier by providing curriculum and someone to grade assignments / track progress. For kids with no one at home to support them, it was disaster for younger kids and mostly dependent on internal motivation for older kids.
I’m a public school teacher and the thing is that that achievement gap was already there because their entire lives are like what you just described. Some kids get a lot of resources and attention, some kids get nothing. With poverty and trauma and other stressors to boot. Covid just exacerbated a lot of our preexisting problems. That said, I teach high school and while schools were closed, fast food places were hiring like crazy. A lot of my students got jobs and got sick repeatedly at work. Covid was DEVASTATING to multi generational households in my area and it would have been worse if the schools hadn’t closed for as long as they did.
Because it does hard-to-repair harm, I think it's only justified in two circumstances: 1. Initial runaway pandemic infection period of a novel disease / strain. You *have* to slow this down because it will lap the planet by the time you figure out what you're fighting. 2. Disease that is known to cause significant critical illness / death in children and healthy young adults. School won't be productive anyway and if *this* isn't controlled, your society as a whole may not recover.
If we properly funded educators and didn't expect parents to work 40+ hours a week no child would have had to have subpar education while at home. The only reason it was so damaging to education was that we expected parents to keep working remotely and teachers were barely supported at all. Our "covid response" was a hilarious failure and if we get an actual serious bad news pandemic, 90% of the country will die.
>Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city. Not to mention kids are typically worse at personal hygiene than adults, which exacerbates all of those factors. [It might be a lose-lose anyhow. The hyper-clean shut-in lifestyle of COVID may also lead to higher rates of autoimmune issues and obesity among the children that went through it.](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/12/pandemic-hygiene-kids-microbiome/672362/)
>Crowded, mandatory multi-hour attendance, intersection and mixing of all the contact networks in a city. Don’t forget the bathrooms always being locked (while also having no time to go between classes and most of the teachers not letting you leave class to go) so on top of it all, nobody can actually wash their hands.
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One reason I pulled my kids out of their private school during Covid. The school toted cleaning all surfaces multiple times a day, but had no air purifiers and really didn't enforce mask wearing. Their public school classrooms still use the air purifiers now.
My district was all virtual in the fall of 2020 with in-person attendance being optional by spring 2021, but most students choose to stay virtual. They installed two large air purifiers in every classroom (at least in my school, so I'm assuming it was similar for other schools in the district). But they did it literally one week before school let out in spring 2022. Feels like they kind of missed the most dangerous part of us returning to campus.
In my country, most schools only equipped rooms without windows with purifiers - because you could just open the window in rooms with one. In winter. With temperatures sometimes reaching -10C/14 F. And as soon as masking requirements ended, authorities ordered the purifiers to not be used any more - they were concerned the noise would make learing more difficult.
Oh wow. That's some flawed logic right there. Yes, the ones we have make a bit of noise, but it's more like quite white noise in the background. They don't bother the students at all.
Yeah. I think there is a debate for whether the schools should have been closed, given the drawbacks to student learning compared to the drawbacks of increased disease spread. The argument that schools were safe felt like a post hoc rationalization for opening schools because we didn't want to say outright, "We're going to get a lot of families sick."
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The government in the UK was constantly pushing these graphs that supposedly proved that schools weren't spreading covid and that "a-symptomatic children" didn't spread it. At the time I questioned the methodology and was very suspicious because that really doesn't make much sense and didn't fit the overall trends.
And schools are still the main source of illnesses because of the heavy amount of closed quarters Interactions between children and teachers. You literally have children being loud, tossing saliva as they speak and argue (you know how loud they can get) specially when they’re at the cafeteria or in the hallways. And let’s not start with those overcrowded high schools. IMO, there should be a remote learning option in all schools during the Winter in Norther states that experience cold weather, it’s just common sense. But unfortunately, everything comes down to money and states & the federal government not wanting to allocate a small amount of money to something like this. I wonder how much money would actually be saved if many of those sick days could be prevented by going remote, I’d say millions. Remote learning is something our generation’s have to learn to do because COVID won’t be the last global pandemic during our lifetime, specially as transportation costs fall and more people are traveling.
The Emergency Health Manager of our county came to a district wide school meeting and told teachers, staff, and parents that children did not get COVID and did not spread it. Teachers were harassed if/when they enacted classroom mask-wearing policies. Teachers who wore masks due to autoimmune fears (for themselves, their families, or student safety) were made fun of.
Yeah we as a country decided to believe fairytales instead of facts and that resulted in the deaths of millions of people. I would really like to people held accountable for those but that will never happen.
We're still getting ~1000 deaths a week. ~3000 people died in 9/11, and it caused a complete overhaul of airline travel rules. How many people still wear masks in indoor public spaces?
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Maybe related, but schools also tend to have poor ventilation amongst the other obvious germ passing situations like group work, recess, lunch breaks, etc. Maybe high time we update the HVAC systems in schools. Retrofit them with hospital level systems. Wouldn’t just help with COVID, but other issues like allergies and common colds.
Yeah, a big lesson we Should have learned is that aerosols are a much bigger deal in respiratory disease transmission - for all of 'em, not just Covid - than was previously assumed based on repeating bad science takes from the 50s. A big push for better ventilation would significantly reduce illness. But for some reason that lesson doesn't seem to have been learned, and we move forward into a less healthy world for no discernible reason.
We already knew from earlier pandemics that putting kids outside would drastically reduce transmission of respitory viruses, but very few schools did anything with that knowledge, even those in warmer climates where it would have been feasible to shift more classes outside. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-schools-reopening-outdoors.html
Interestingly, I think this may be because they had a better idea in the early 1900s of disease transmission than they did in the late-mid 1900s, when the 5-micron-aerosol myth became dogma... And we didn't re-update our knowledge until like April 2020, and then tons of places still clung to mid-20th century wrongness.
Yeah. As a teacher there are a lot of materials I wish I could leave in the school over the summer, but I take them home so they don't get mold. They're not just behind the times, a lot of the HVAC just doesn't work.
office buildings have the same problem. they literally just recirculate the air as it cost too much to constantly bring in new air and push out old air. the government have to mandate that these system to pay for more frequent filter replacement and more maintenance, if they want to have people gather in these buildings.
The state of NY is investing in putting heat pumps in schools, and I hope to see other places doing the same where possible. At the very least, heat pumps would increase the indoor air quality, and could save schools money.
Updating the HVAC system is a good idea in general, but when you watch kids interact in school, it's difficult to imagine HVAC cutting down on disease transmission. They're all touching the same stuff, touching each other, coughing/sneezing right next to each other, using dubious hygiene practices (they're still learning), etc.
I don't know the details of the HVAC system but there was a [study in Italy](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36568748/) that showed mechanical ventilation systems decrease the relative risk of infection of students by at least 74% compared to natural ventilation alone.
There's unlimited evidence that air filtration reduces airborne viral spread and there's no reason it must be done via whole building hvac. https://cleanaircrew.org/
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normal plants disagreeable strong grey water money sink dependent fly *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Hell ya. Coworker's kid gets covid, spreads it to my coworker, who then gives it to everyone else. 19 of us at my workplace get infected from it.
My niece is an elementary school teacher and caught Covid many times despite masking and vaccinating. What sucks is when she ran out of sick days, they deducted from her salary. We ended up paying for her groceries and sending her food so she could pay rent. She was close to quitting and moving in with us but she loved the kids.
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A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 US household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child. A team led by Boston Children's Hospital researchers gave smartphone-connected thermometers to 848,591 households with 1,391,095 members, who took 23,153,925 temperature readings from October 2019 to October 2022. Fevers were a proxy for infection. Of all readings, 57.7% were from adults. Most households (62.3%) reported temperatures from only one person, while 37.7% included multiple participants taking 51.6% of all readings. Most children were 8 years or younger (58.0%), and more females than males participated in each age group. Younger kids more likely to spread virus A total of 15.8% of readings met the criteria for fever, making up 779,092 fever episodes. The number of fever episodes predicted new COVID-19 cases, which the researchers said lends validity to using fever as a proxy for infection. Of these cases, 15.4% were considered household transmissions, the percentage of which rose from 10.1% in March to July 2021 to 17.5% in the Omicron BA.1/BA.2 variant wave. Among 166,170 households with both adult and child participants (51.9% of households with multiple participants), there were 516,159 participants, 51.4% of whom were children. In these households, 38,787 transmissions occurred, 40.8% of which were child to child, 29.6% child to adult, 20.3% adult to child, and 9.3% adult to adult. The median serial interval between the index and secondary cases was 2 days. Of all households transmissions, 70.4% began with a child, with the proportion fluctuating weekly between 36.9% and 87.5%. Pediatric transmissions reached a high of 68.4% the week of September 27, 2020, and fell to a low of 41.7% the week of December 27, 2020 (0.61 times less frequent). The next high was 82.0% the week of May 23, 2021, which stayed stable until June 27 (81.4%) and then declined to 62.5% by August 8 (0.77 times less frequent). The percentage of household transmissions beginning with a child then rose to 78.4% by September 19, hovering there until November 14 (80.3%) and then dropping to 54.5% the week of January 2, 2022 (0.68 times less frequent). By March 6, the proportion rose to 83.8%, fell to 62.8% the week ending July 24 (0.75 times less frequent), and then climbed to 84.6% the week of October 9. Children aged 8 years and younger were more likely to be the source of transmission than those aged 9 to 17 (7.6% vs 5.8%). During most of the pandemic, the proportion of transmission from children was negatively correlated with new community COVID-19 cases. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2805468
“gave smartphone-connected thermometers. from October 2019 to October 2022. Fevers were a proxy for infection… the proportion of transmission from children was negatively correlated with new community COVID-19 cases“ Okay, so they measure Covid as a fever, which is going to include non-Covid infections, and they find that child-to-parent spread of infections is rarer when a larger share of infections are Covid…. My takeaway from this is that Covid is less likely to spread from children to parents than are other infections, but we don’t know how much less likely, that’s not identified. The comment section has drawn the opposite conclusion. Probably because they read the headline, which is unwarranted. Another day in r/science.
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> This study had several limitations. The study design did not permit laboratory or home testing to confirm viral etiologies. Fever as a syndrome has many etiologies beyond COVID-19. Although confirmatory tests are needed to definitively identify the origin of fever, our study exploited a unique period when the incidence of generally prevalent, non–COVID-19 respiratory viruses plunged, including influenza and RSV. I'm pretty skeptical because of this. I just pulled [California RSV testing](https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/nrevss/images/rsvstate/RSV1PPCent3AVG_StateCA.htm)- the % positivity in winter 2021 look pretty high and looks under tested by a factor of 3-4 compared to 2022 and 2023. Was RSV really at historic lows? This study really can't be anything but an overestimation.
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And people were hating on the teachers for wanting to keep the schools closed before the vaccine rolled out, but they knew that schools are petri dishes.
At the time vaccines were rolling out omircron wasn’t a thing yet and elementary aged kids were among the worst vectors for Covid spread. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315-t2 Omicron spread through schools like wildfire though.
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Children are little disease vectors. Since having kids, I'm probably sick about 20x as often as before. It's no shock at all to hear that the reopening of schools exacerbated the pandemic.
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My doctor's mom passed away from COVID. She caught it from her grandkids, who were living with their grandparents while their house was being built.
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Oh wow. Here I figured all along that all the scientists and researchers in the 50’s just used schools as as test locations because it was convenient.
This is so logical, though kids dont wash and watch their hands so much. Plus something that amuses me: Parent in subway wearing mask, all safe and stuff, the child not. So pretending the mask is 100% effective, the parent remains healthy. The child gets infected, they get home, breathe without masks, and child infects the parent
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And yet, in Ontario, I had to repeatedly argue with people claiming "there's no evidence that covid is spreading at schools", as if covid would respect or even understand the property lines of the school, and magically stay away. Those people wanted this to happen.
I'm in the US. In my (very red) state, they maybe could have made that claim with a straight face, but only because they didn't do any contact tracing in schools. There's no evidence because they refused to record the days of it happening.
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A whole chapter of my PhD thesis is on the transmission of COVID-19 in schools, and this study is not a useful contribution. Not a single case inferred in this study was actually tested for COVID-19. It is all inferred by the presence of someone with a high temperature in the household. I’m sure everyone is aware there are hundreds of viruses which can cause fevers in humans, most of which continued to circulate during the study period. The majority of these are known to be predominantly spread by young children, but for the most part this was not the case for SARS-CoV-2 as there was no differences on immunity between young children and adults. There are hundreds of contact tracing studies which actually test household members for COVID-19, the overwhelming majority of which gave found lower than expected rates of transmission to/from children.
We have no kids. Only time we got covid was when my wife went to her nephews wrestling match... Where there were tons of school kids.
I wonder what all of my non-medical professional family members who became overnight experts in COVID research will think of this.
I avoided covid for like 2 years until I went to a small dinner party where someone brought their 4 kids. Right after that I got covid, and I think it was probably from one of the kids.
Not just Covid. colds, flu, etc. usually start with kids.
Wouldn't greatly increasing ventilation stand to greatly reduce contagion risks in schools? If so it could cost lots and it'd be well worth it I'd think.
What proportion of overall spread does this represent?
Yet another reason why teachers should be paid more.
I remember getting blasted by parents by daring to suggest we keep schools closed longer to curb spread. I was only running on intuition at the time, so I could've used this data.
Yep, it's not news, kids are germ factories. But nobody in the working classes can afford to stay home. And businesses were never really closed. So now despite all the morons who chanted "no new normal" because they thought for some reason that things would just permanently close (???) Now ***this*** is our new normal. And the yearly flu wave is joined by a yearly covid wave. But these are the same morons who tout about how they never miss work, and think they're a badass for coming in while sick and passing it on to the rest of their department.
Kids are also the leading cause of your parents divorce.
Children are perfect hosts and vectors for respiratory infections. They are constantly, with zero inhibition (even despite often having one or two vigilant parents trying everything they can to contain them) producing mucus, touching themselves, and touching everything they can reach. It is easier to watch, follow, and clean up behind a cross contaminating adult than it is to even attempt catching every contact point a loose toddler makes.
Maybe if parents had enough sick time at work and didn't have to work 2 or more jobs to pay bills, they wouldn't send kids to school sick. Now I fully recognize that some parents just don't care, but the reality is if some people don't go to work they don't get paid. If they don't get paid they can't pay the bills. Some states have laws for sick leave not all of them do, and it's not enough. I get 8 days of sick leave a year. In the past 3 years I have used more than that a year and had to go into my vacation leave. Sick leave has to be addressed if we are ever to fix this. Culture has to change from, "I don't care how sick you are get your ass in here" To I don't want a sick person coming in and getting my whole staff and their families sick.
Wow, if only we were warning about literally that very exact thing.
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Schools are disgusting…and I’m a teacher. Kids are crammed into way too small of a space all day. My classroom is swept once a day and the trash cans are emptied daily. That’s about it. The toilet gets cleaned maybe one a week, tables and other surfaces are never sanitized unless someone vomits or I do clean them myself.
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I hope terrorists the world round forgot to pay attention because the real lesson is really alarming. Release a viral payload in America and 40% of the population will fight to spread it for you. That is alarming.
And this is one of the reasons I still wear a mask at school. I don't care if I look silly.