July 29, 2020
Seth Abramson via Twitter
I’m an educator who’s served on a coronavirus task force in higher ed—and I’m terrified by the profoundly flawed conversation America is having about reopening our elementary schools and secondary schools. This thread explains why. I hope that you’ll read on and retweet.
The first problem is that we’re misreading the HARD DATA. Right now, U.S. “hotspots” are being compared to regions of the country with comparatively less community transmission of COVID-19—with the presumption being the former shouldn’t see re-openings, but the latter should.
Let’s take where I live—Hillsborough County, New Hampshire—as an example. New Hampshire, and northern New England broadly, is seen as among the “safest” regions in the county pandemic-wise, so the presumption is that if anyone should re-open schools, *we* should. That’s wrong.
Let me explain why. The CDC says that for every 1 newly confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, between 6 and 24 people have actually just contracted COVID-19. Yesterday New Hampshire had 57 new confirmed diagnoses—and my county historically experiences about half the state’s new cases.
Assume yesterday was a typical day in New Hampshire—meaning of the state’s 57 new confirmed COVID-19 diagnoses, 23 (we’ll round down) were in my county. Per the CDC, that means my county had between 138 and 552 new COVID-19 infections *yesterday*. And this is a “safe” county.
Extrapolating yesterday’s data to *1 week* in a “safe county” in a “safe state” in a “safe region,” that’s 966 to 3,864 new COVID-19 infections in one small county in New Hampshire over just 1 week. My county only *has* about 400,000 people in it. Those numbers are staggering.
So even as I sit in a part of America—assuming nothing changes whatsoever, a faulty assumption—considered “safe,” our weekly new infection rate is *way* beyond the capacity of our government to contact trace. New Hampshire *cannot* contact-trace *1,000 to 4,000 cases weekly*.
Of course, I’m talking about *actual* community transmission—what we’re supposed to be focused on in the discussion over re-opening our schools. But what if (to do the Trump agenda a solid) I pretended that *only* “confirmed” new cases exist? That’d still be 400 cases weekly.
New Hampshire doesn’t have the capacity to do contact-tracing on 400 cases weekly, let alone—given that COVID-19 victims suffer symptoms for weeks—the thousands and thousands of “active” cases that a 400/week transmission rate would mean for our state’s public health agencies.
The second issue is PEDAGOGY—a word we use in education to describe not just *what* is taught in schools but *how* it’s taught. One of the reasons Americans want their kids back in school in the first instance is that face-to-face teaching pedagogies are considered preferable.
Here’s the problem: your kids—if they return to school—aren’t going to *get* the face-to-face pedagogies that make face-to-face learning effective. In short, American parents are feeling nostalgia for a form of teaching that—as long as the pandemic is ongoing—*doesn’t exist*.
Face-to-face learning is valuable in part because kids can:
- learn to collaborate by working in groups
- move about freely to different learning stations
- work with a variety of different media
- balance work and play with recess time
- learn community-building skills
Everything I just mentioned is gone now. Mid-pandemic, here’s what face-to-face schools look like:
- kids unable to leave their desks
- kids unable to work in groups
- kids unable to go to recess/the cafeteria
- kids unable to do learning requiring more space than a desk
There is no evidence whatsoever that kids can or do learn better in school than at home when they are sitting at their desks for six hours straight, and working on solo projects whose dynamism is severely curtailed by the geography and community they are permitted to inhabit.
As importantly, the teachers who American parents so admire depend upon—in their pedagogy—all sorts of tools that will be taken away from them in a socially distanced classroom, whether it be working in groups, singing, field trips, or any of hundreds of other teaching tools.
I’m not saying learning won’t happen in mid-pandemic, socially distanced schools. I’m saying that when we measure the high likelihood of schools becoming COVID-19 hotspots if/when they re-open against learning outcomes, *don’t* imagine schools as they used to be pre-pandemic.
The third issue is SOCIOLOGY. That is, how groups of similarly situated persons act. (And in this case, we must also consider CHILD PSYCHOLOGY). While I did study sociology formally, I’m not a child psychologist by any means—so I’ll limit this to simply what all parents know.
What parents know: your 7 year-old ain’t keeping a mask on for 6 hours straight. Heck, probably not even 30 minutes. Kids will wear their masks improperly, take them off, *certainly* violate social distancing repeatedly, not wash their hands, touch their faces…you get it.
There is—I can’t emphasize it enough—*zero* evidence that kids can follow CDC safety guidelines, especially as we already know that *very few adults can*. Seriously, if half of America couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask even *once*, why do you think kids can for 6 hours/day?
Indeed, we mustn’t forget that those American parents who oppose mask-wearing have a *profound* effect on their children—who aren’t seeing safety procedures being followed at home, and therefore are less likely to be able to demonstrate them while at school (or pick them up).
But put aside mask-wearing and social distancing. Let’s assume that—contra all evidence on how kids think, act and learn—we create CDC-compliant elementary and secondary school classrooms that feel to kids, in many ways, like gulags. How will that affect them psychologically?
What sort of negative associations are we creating between kids and “school”—and “learning,” broadly—when we create CDC-compliant spaces that necessarily undermine best practices in both pedagogy and child psychology? Is that really better than learning in a home environment?
The fourth issue is LOGISTICS. This issue was central to my own coronavirus task force work—and is equally central to the work of every coronavirus task force in America. (And at this point there are tens of thousands of such committees doing urgent work at this very moment.)
Question: what happens if your child’s teacher gets sick? Do you—does anyone—think a random substitute teacher can be placed before your child’s class for the next three months and do anything like the job your child’s *original* teacher could do teaching your child remotely?
Question: what happens if *one* kid in your kid’s class of 20 students gets sick? Do you—does anyone—believe that the class won’t *immediately* go remote *anyway*, as every kid (and his or her teacher) must now quarantine 14 days? These classes are ticking clocks—all of them.
Question: how do you socially distance kids on a school bus? Many parents will be unable to drive their kids to school—and there’s no way to keep six feet of social distancing (the *minimum* CDC guideline) on a bus. And kids can spend 20 to 50 minutes *daily* on school buses.
Question: why would we put our precious kids in what the CDC says is the most *dangerous* environment for COVID-19 transmission—by *far*—in America? That is, an a) indoor space, b) in which many are congregating, c) for a long time, d) with limited or problematic ventilation.
The responses to these queries offered by COVID-19 deniers are preposterous. For instance some will say, “Kids get sick and miss school—it happens.” No—just *no*. COVID-19 is 5 to 10 times deadlier than the flu, is 2 to 3 times more contagious, and *lasts* for *weeks* longer.
Which brings me to the final key consideration in this conversation that we are—at present—getting profoundly wrong: SCIENCE. No matter what lies the White House tells, the *fact*, per actual medical experts, is that we *don’t understand* how COVID-19 interacts with kids yet.
We don’t know if kids can get COVID-19 as easily as adults. We don’t know if kids can transmit COVID-19 as easily as adults. We don’t know if COVID-19 is as dangerous to kids as adults, once we factor in the *long-term effects* that have yet to be fully studied by scientists.
Every week, we discover new evidence of how COVID-19 affects the young. A rash of baby infections and baby deaths from COVID-19 has just occurred. A harrowing new “multisystem inflammatory disorder” (a version of Kawasaki Syndrome) recently popped up all over NYC in children.
You *can’t find a medical expert* who agrees with the White House’s rank political propaganda on how COVID-19 affects the young—because actual medical experts will either say the data is bad, the data is inconclusive, or we don’t have enough data yet. Let’s listen to experts.
Right now the chief delusion in the “re-opening schools” debate is that there’s a good option. There’s no good option. All the options are staggeringly bad. All options will cause damage. The question is how do we cause the *least* damage, first and foremost to kids’ health.
While I’ve served on a coronavirus task force—so I know there are other issues, notably LEGAL and ETHICAL ones, I haven’t addressed here, but that all coronavirus task forces must and will—you don’t have to take my word for any of this. Ask *anyone* on a COVID-19 task force.
The chief thing upsetting me about the whole “reopening” debate is that there’s precious little conversation happening between media and *folks who are on a COVID-19 task force at an individual school*. The moment you’re “inside the room” with a task force, you’re like, “Oh.”
Doctors are focused on saving lives, and *suspect* the logistics of reopening are impossible. Those serving on coronavirus task forces *know* the logistics of reopening elementary/secondary schools are a no-go—because when you so serve, it becomes *immediately apparent*. /end
PS/ I left out certain logistical minutiae: for instance, that temperature checks are pointless for a variety of reasons, that kids (per experts) are more likely than adults to get hard-to-catch symptoms, and so on. This thread is the “tip-of-the-iceberg” case against re-opening.
PS2/ I also left out all the pandemic info in my forthcoming book Proof of Corruption: e.g., the list of hard-to-catch COVID-19 symptoms; the medical research on how long aerosolized particles linger, and how far they travel; data on pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission.
TYPO/ I wrote “23” in Tweet 4 but should’ve written “28”—which means the data in the thread is far *worse* than I thought. It’s actually 168 to 672 daily new infections in my county—or 1,176 to 4,704 *weekly* new infections. Countywide, even just *confirmed* weekly cases are 200.
NOTE/ Imagine how bad the data is in a COVID-19 *hotspot*, if in New Hampshire—one of the safest spots in America—even White House *propaganda* concedes the state must track 800+ cases *just in my county* each month, and the *real* monthly data is *exponentially* worse than that.
(NOTE) I’ve received a number of requests from folks with podcasts, blogs, social media feeds, newsletters, and local newspapers asking to use the text of this thread. I hereby give permission for anyone who wants to use it to do so with attribution. The message needs to get out.
Via Twitter.
Over a quarter-century career in higher education, publishing, criminal investigation, journalism, and the law, Seth Abramson (MA, MFA, JD, Ph.D.) has worked for Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, Wesleyan University, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin-Madison, New Hampshire Institute of Art, and the New Hampshire Public Defender. A 2001 Harvard Law School graduate and an attorney in good standing with the New Hampshire Bar Association and Federal Bar for the District of New Hampshire, Seth is a political columnist for Newsweek, a professor teaching journalism and legal advocacy at University of New Hampshire, and a New York Times–bestselling nonfiction author and Poetry Foundation–bestselling poet who has authored thirteen books and edited five anthologies—receiving national honors for both his creative writing and his journalism. He has been a regular contributor, in the Trump era, to CNN and the BBC, and in 2018 was named to the National Council for the Training of Journalists’ list of the most respected journalists in the U.S. and the UK—one of only nine freelancers so honored.
