This is meant to be a highly serious diary. It is meant to be a warning of the potential future. I DO NOT DO THIS LIGHTLY. IT IS THE SHORT TERM FUTURE IF WE AREN’T READY!
This has been a Year from Hell in educational world.
Part 1 talks about the risks and rewards of in-person instruction. I leaned towards the teachers and the risks as I am a former teacher. I took feedback from here and other sources about the rewards.
Part 2 talks about the benefits and drawbacks of a Zoom virtual education. It is balanced! It also opened up later articles for more radical solutions.
Part 3 was about the “hybrid on Covid” model, which works for parents but is the WORST for teachers and possibly students.
This is Part 4, and not the part with the worst case long term scenario. Wait until part 8!
I know the educational world well enough. I know the mental health world well enough. I know what this virus does to you as a Covid long hauler. I am well equipped to be the modern day Cassandra and claim that the end is nigh. Feel free to argue with me scientifically if you want. On this one, my purpose is to post the expert news. I am informing you this time. If you don’t want to accept my Cassandra role, that is not my fault. I did my due diligence in giving everyone the worst case scenario. If it doesn’t come to pass, go ahead and hit me then. The stakes are too high for recriminations right now. I DON’T DO THIS LIGHTLY!
It has to do with the actual situation in the UK, at least as far what has happened. They are in denial, because to admit it is to admit failure as a species. Parents love their children, except if they are really flawed and twisted. THIS EXPOSES THEM. If they accept that they were wrong about Covid, their bubble shatters. If they hold out, their children MAY NOW HAVE SKIN IN THE GAME.
Let’s lay out my case. Before I do so, note the time period of this study you will rebut me with. The UK strain was discovered and backdated to mid September.
It started with an increased R number, or rate of infectious spread:
New variant 'raises R number by up to 0.7'
I shared this study, which admittedly doesn’t have all of the answers:
Then came the data. Eric is called alarmist, but he is truth to me. He always hedges because there is no certainty in medical world:
Then came the check of hospitalization data:
Then came the personal anecdote. This slayed me.
It is the debate roiling the UK right now. I’d love to hear on the ground from people there. I’m too far away and too distrustful of the Brexit happy Boris Johnson government to discern the truth.
Here’s the rebuttal to the above claim:
No Increase in Severe Child Cases
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) said children's wards are not seeing any "significant pressure" from Covid-19.
It comes after a London hospital matron told BBC Radio 5 Live of having a ward full of children with coronavirus.
Laura Duffel said the surge in cases was "much scarier" than the first wave.
To be frank, this dodges the point. The teachers and community spread are the issue. The kids are now confirmed carriers.
The Debate About School Safety Is NO LONGER Relevant
For months, the debate about whether to open schools has centered on one question: Are schools safe? The only trouble is, this hardly matters anymore. Except in the few remaining regions with modest rates of viral spread, the transmission risk from and within schools is now beside the point. So many teachers and staff members are sick, quarantining, or have stepped down that many schools trying to remain open or to reopen just do not have the personnel available to do so well.
The children can be asymptomatic carriers now. LOOK AT THE BEGINNING DATA. Look at the following newest study!
They can have a mild illness and still have issues later in life. Just because you never went to the hospital, does NOT mean that you are in the clear. Look at my experience.
The worst part? There’s more than one player in the field right now. Meet the South African Strain.
That one is equally a problem, because it is similar to the UK strain but from a different branch of the family tree. Remember that Africa, due to the AIDS pandemic, skews YOUNG in its population below the Sahara.
South Africa has announced that a new variant of the COVID-19 virus is driving the country's current resurgence of the disease, which is seeing higher numbers of confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
The new variant, known as 501.V2, is dominant among new confirmed infections in South Africa, according to health officials and scientists leading the country’s virus strategy.
“It is still very early but at this stage, the preliminary data suggests the virus that is now dominating in the second wave is spreading faster than the first wave,” Professor Salim Abdool Karim, chairman of the government's Ministerial Advisory Committee, said in a briefing to journalists.
And it could be resistant to the vaccine… FUN!
Worried yet? But wait, there’s more! This variant may be harmless, it may not.
The call on our overextended global response team has gone out:
A researcher who identified a novel coronavirus variant in Nigeria has cautioned against automatic assumptions that it poses similar risks to strains that have emerged elsewhere.
The new strain was uncovered last week by scientists at the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID) in southeastern Nigeria.
ACEGID director Christian Happi said the variant was found in two out of 200 samples of virus collected from patients between August 3 and October 9.
And it isn’t being taken seriously there:
Nigerians Largely Ignoring Covid-19
It is in the afternoon on the last day of 2020 and the sun is scorching inside the bustling Ogbete market in the heart of Enugu city. Chinenye Chukwu is haggling over the prices of her banana fruit with four customers who are standing around her. She is not wearing a mask. She does not even have one inside her bag. None of her customers have masks either. But Chukwu does not care.
She thinks the stories about the outbreak of the COVID-19, the fact that it has resulted in the loss of nearly 1.9 million lives globally, are untrue.
Luckily, there is a Nigerian health care hero working on it now. Preliminary data is not confirmed, but it is truly TERRIFYING:
Nigeria is seeing more infections of Covid-19 but it is not yet certain if that is from the variant, said Mr Omilambu, the director of the Centre for Human and Zoonotic Virology at the Lagos University College of Medicine and Teaching Hospital.
“What we could say clinically is that we have more people coming down with severe signs and symptoms,” he said, describing how one person can spread the disease to four or five family members, which is a higher rate of transmission than had been recorded earlier.
“That shows us that something is happening. There’s a surge so we are recording that but we are yet to sequence any of those isolates to determine if the increased transmissions are caused by the variant,” said Mr Omilabu.
Remember, this could always be true somewhere because we have such gaps now.
Why does this matter in educational world? It is already here.
All the previous research is thrown out the window. Here’s the current consensus:
A fully virtual educational setting is by FAR the safest one for everyone, at least until the science is fully understood. It allows them to bubble and still do their jobs. It allows students to bubble, and keep them safe. It prevents the need for expensive solutions of fully open classrooms which are a challenge to implement and require time to do so. The three new strains (UK, South Africa, Nigeria) loom in the background, and are TERRIFYING for schools. More on that in another post. The science is too new for me to be sure to reveal this yet to everyone. Dark times lie ahead.
Yes, the transmission in schools is low. Low does not mean NO. Teachers see this as yet another thing they need to implement, when their candle is already burned from both ends to the wick AND they feel like a beat rented mule politically.
Here may be the truth!
And here are SOME of the factors to consider making a TRUE Covid proof school:
- You would have to make the morning arrival protocol a public health screening for each student. Usually schools only have one or two entrances (thanks, school shooter protocols!). This process would take a LONG time and eat into instructional time. Honestly, I am afraid to ask my colleagues or ask Google this question. I don’t think this fantasy is happening.
- You need independent contact tracing, because the government has utterly failed us here.
- If you abide by 6 feet social distancing rules, you cannot fit 25 desks in an average classroom. In Arizona, I’d be doing a LOT of my instruction outdoors as one neat trick to get around this problem. I drove the secretaries insane! But it’s not foolproof in case of inclement weather — too hot in the desert southwest, too cold in the northern tier, and too much precipitation screw me over. But it’s the #1 problem.
- Classic small group instruction violates social distancing protocols. ALL one on one instruction violates social distancing protocols. Classic inquiry based learning violates social distancing protocols. The classic carpet space where you sit ‘criss cross applesauce’ violates social distancing protocols. The ONLY 100% traditional safe method is direct instruction (lecture), which is the lowest rate of retention. Or you sit them in front of computer screens, aka virtual education. Teachers will not innovate unless forced to when they are drowning. They will reach for the comfort food of lectures.
- School lunch and snack time have to be totally rethought, as it is the most vulnerable point in the school day for transmission. Now, cafeteria workers shuttle the lunches in bags to each classroom and kids eat in there. Remember the desks point above? This part of the day is where the problem above becomes REAL.
- Recess in the younger grades has to be rethought. No unstructured play and no contact structured games allowed. Only socially distanced recess allowed if you were serious about it. I know a few games that work, but most do NOT. This year it isn’t recess — it is another lesson teachers must plan if they were serious about Covid.
- You literally cannot do normal transitions with typical block schedules at middle and high schools. It is chaos already. The hallway is a finite space, and everyone would have to move like synchronized Rockettes to make it work. Good luck getting defiant teenagers to do that!
- The young ones (K-2) have to be taught how to go to school. This is a chore (which I loved!) each early childhood specialist knows by heart. This year, we have to make sure we taught social distance and safety protocols ON THE FLY in addition to how to be in school. They will trade masks, trade food, touch each other and say YOU GOT THE RONA!, and do the 95 million other weird things little kids do at school that you have no clue about (but I love). Social distancing is possible at school, but only at the expense of the fun for these grades.
- Most teachers already pay for their own supplies. I paid out of pocket about $2000 per YEAR, and that was in addition to that school supply list every teacher annoys you with at the start of the year. We’re DEAD SERIOUS about the list! We had to add homemade plastic shields, lots of tape to make those social distancing Xs and lines, cleaning supplies time infinity, extra masks and gloves, and home made concoctions for wipe downs because normal things were too expensive or in short supply. Our personal budget got busted.
- Most schools run on an HVAC system that is not negative pressure. That is DAMN expensive to overhaul and the budget will not allow for it except through millage or bonds, and good luck getting those passed when people don’t have money! We aren’t hospitals that obviously get priority here. We did get some money from the feds to help, but nowhere near enough. These changes can also only be done at breaks. (Why hybrid will not work either).
- School bathrooms are always a disaster zone if they are communal, and would still be a germ vector even if every classroom had their own bathroom. It is also the biggest NON MONITORED area of the school for obvious reasons. If two kids wanted to break social distancing protocols to do something dumb, they do it in the bathroom. They would need wiping down after each use most likely; at the bare minimum at breaks and at the end of the day.
- The windows at the school do not open most times if they even exist. They are that way thanks to our lovely school shooting problem (Lord, don’t get me on that soapbox!). You can’t get fresh air circulation into the room unless you have an outside door you can prop open — which is a policy most schools do NOT allow (thanks again, school shooting problem!)
I can add school busses to the list, I can add walking home/parent pick up, I can add school activities, child care/latchkey, and many more problems.
Again, once UK variant gets to your town, in person school WILL HAVE TO be shut down. South Africa has also the potential to spread here. It may be even scarier. And think about Nigeria, the newest player.
We need to be mentally ready for Zoom for a while, because this strain seems to defy every measure the UK uses to lockdown the country. And the children shall lead. We don’t do that stuff here, because freedumb.
The problem is the power of compound interest. These variants spread more easily, thus infecting more at once, thus overwhelming the hospitals, thus leading to more preventable death.
Our health care heroes are already dead inside. Imagine them staring at a ward of intubated children, or ones on ECMO machines. They will lose what little sanity they still cling to.
So, if you have a child, tuck them to sleep tonight, think about whether you are willing to sacrifice them to keep a school open. That decision may be coming for you. The game may have changed; children could have skin in the game now too.
Find out what plan your school has. If there isn’t one, use this to spur thinking. Ask “What if Covid has outbreaks in our school?”, then go item by item on this agenda. If you don’t like what you hear, approach the school board. Then the city/town. Then, the county. Keep escalating.
Don’t alarm educators. This will only BREAK them. Carefully pass this scenario to your teacher friends, because it may be apocalyptic. They cannot take this information. Many are holding on to dear life as it is. The thought of losing ANY student is the end of them. Likewise, children will have insane grief over losing a teacher. DO NOT TELL YOUR CHILD. This MAY still be alarmist.
Be ready. Throw pie at me later if I turn out to be Cassandra. In the interim, think of the children. Oh, and get that vaccine ASAP. It may save more than one life. More on that next time. I’m really freaked out now.
I don’t come to this conclusion lightly. It is meant to save lives. It already is a lost year. Save the lives, and we can maybe fix it later (Part 7).