I was going to keep my thoughts to myself on that topic, but since you asked...
I'm 87% sure I'm not a monster
I'm 63% sure that the experts should continue to discuss whether the kids can go back to school
Based on a lot of what I've seen on the internet lately, most people consider it impossible for a non-monster to think we should consider sending the kids back. Since you asked, I'm hoping that you'll hear me out.
For the kids to go back to school we really need to determine only one thing: Is the risk posed by SARS-CoV-2 greater than the other risks associated with sending them back to school. If it's not the biggest risk of sending them back, by all means send them.
But that one thing is made up of a lot of little things, and that's where it gets complicated.
- What is the risk of a child contracting SARS-CoV-2?
- What is the risk of a child getting seriously ill from SARS-CoV-2, once they've contracted it?
- What is the risk of a child bringing SARS-CoV-2 home from school and passing it to an at-risk family member?
Based on information reported by the CDC and the Mayo Clinic, school-age children (3-18) react differently to this virus than adults do. Why is unknown, but it is clear that they contract the virus less frequently and they get seriously ill much less frequently. More to the point, children that are not in a well defined, well understood group are actually at very little risk. That group, as many of you already know, comprises those with type-2 diabetes, congenital heart conditions, certain conditions affecting the nervous system or metabolism and a few, rare genetic mutations. If kids in this group are kept home at first, the risk to the kids appears to be less than other, pre-existing risks that we have always taken to send our kids to school. The risk is not zero, but it never was zero.
This still leaves open the issue of kids bringing the disease home to family members, some of whom may be in at-risk groups. And this is by far the weirdest part of this disease to me. It appears that children who have the virus are far less likely to spread the virus than are adults. As with all of the other differences between children and adults in this thing, we only have theories as to why; no one really knows. What is clear is that the overwhelming majority of children who have contracted the disease have caught it from an adult, and that very few people seem to have caught it from children. This is not just the strangest part of this epidemic; it is the hardest part of it to study. There's nothing worth citing; no p-values to report; just a lot of doctors reporting what they see and researches staring at each other with open mouths behind their masks.
With all of these unknowns, why consider it? Well... Before I go there, it actually gets worse.
As many of you have heard, there is a new strain of the virus. It is actually more contagious than the previous version (and appears to have replaced it, worldwide). It may be more accurate to say that it is more tenacious than the original strain, the point being that this is something that the researchers do understand. So all of the information that we have about the kids... how much of that applies to the new strain? We don't know yet.
So with all of that, how could anyone consider it?
Because in the time-line of this disease, a lot will change in the next two months, and then very little will change for a very long time.
This is not like SARS. It's not going to go away; it's not that kind of virus. But it's not quite like the common cold either (though some doctors are saying it is, the VAST majority disagree with that point of view). If you follow the curves of certain places (Spain, Italy, New York, New Jersey) and compare it to the curves in the current hot-spots like Florida and Texas, it looks like we may have a very different landscape in those places in a month. Many places around the world seem to be in a post-epidemic phase of the disease. The disease isn't gone; but it's not going to be filling hospitals any time soon. The same will soon be true of a lot of other places. But the virus is not going to disappear completely for a long time, probably for several years at least.
Once the post-epidemic phase is reached, the schools should be reopened (unless the newer strain is unlike the old one in ways we don't yet know, in which case we're boned no matter what). At that point, SARS-CoV-2 will not be the biggest risk associated with sending the kids back to school. The important thing to realize here is that every state, and in some states every city, will have a different date when that can happen. Florida appears that it MIGHT be peaking right now. California appears to be still climbing, fast. Though they appear to be neck and neck, they will have very different time-lines, going forward. Some states that haven't seen much of this yet may be on fire with it in October. The timing needs to be handled locally.
All I'm saying is that the experts should continue to monitor the situation and make the decision when they have enough information to make it, which is not now. If the bureaucrats in a given locale are inefficient enough to require 2-months-notice to make a decision (we should not accept this level of incompetence, though we've come to expect it), then let them decide to delay (or start with distance-learning), for now. But at some point we're going to know if the current trajectories are going to hold. At some point they'll have to go back. If we wait until this virus is gone, we may have failed an entire generation of kids so that we could save a number that may end up being fewer than the number who will die in bus accidents over that time. (Please don't do "math" on that to try to prove it "wrong". Note the use of the word "may" in that sentence and the fact that any of the numbers that you do the "math" with will be based on conjecture while I'm suggesting waiting until we have solid numbers on the new strain, which we'll have in a month).
