(2021-02-18) ZviM Covid CDC Issues New Guidance On Opening Schools

Zvi Mowshowitz: CDC Issues New Covid-19 Guidance on Opening Schools.

It's hard to root for the resumption of in-person education (schooling).

Still, I do root for it, for two reasons. First, I recognize that this is what almost all parents want for their kids, and second, that the alternative that is being implemented in practice is not home unschooling or kids getting to be kids again. It is ‘remote learning’ and it is a toxic cesspool that drives large percentages of kids into depression, makes it impossible for many parents to work or relax, and generally makes standard schooling look like paradise while also neither teaching the few things school successfully teaches nor offering contact with fellow human beings. It’s the absolute worst in every way other than not catching Covid, and it is saddening to me that more children are not withdrawn from school even under these conditions.

The controversy over how to deal with schools continues. Few on any sides are showing much sanity

CDC’s guidelines from last week

aren’t intentionally suggesting this insanity, which is also happening

there’s still the same number of humans in the rooms with children, except that the person isn’t a teacher, it’s a not-even-glorified babysitter that doesn’t have the political power to demand not being in that room,

This is the kind of thing that happens when choices are focused around requirements, guidelines and demands, with it being suspicious when someone advocates that which might benefit a human.

Let’s take a look at those CDC guidelines

I’ve seen worse starting aspirational principles. Masks and physical distancing are jobs one and two. Contact tracing has been a dismal failure in the United States, and it seems odd to tell schools to do it when no one else ever does it, but contact tracing is still worth doing

The big missing point of emphasis here is ventilation

When we looked at potential schools for our son Alexander, the default was that none of the windows opened due to safety and liability concerns

The first problem with this is that these guidelines are not going to be treated as aspirational. It’s a communication that schools everywhere and always need all students six feet apart in masks. That’s basically a non-starter

So what are these guidelines saying?

Technically they’re saying six feet to ‘the greatest extent possible’ in the blue and yellow zones, rather than saying it is required. The problem is that this is mostly being interpreted as a de facto requirement

The other problem with these guidelines is that they don’t adjust to other circumstances.

In particular, they don’t adjust to vaccinations

*But, you say, that’s not going to happen. Once vaccinations are readily available to all who desire them, the guidelines will change.

To which I say, maybe you are right. Maybe you are not.*

Also, there are places where vaccination should matter now, and the guidelines do not care

Thus, as written, someone fully vaccinated would still need to do full quarantines on exactly the same basis as everyone else, which by default will be 14 days regardless of test results.

The second test isn’t that bad, as the United States is currently averaging about 5% positive test rates.

The first test is a bit harder. The United States currently averages closer to 200 cases per week per 100k people than it does to 100. Most places are going to currently be in red.

And that’s… reasonable if you care about levels and want to make a control system and we applied the same standard to other things?

The issue is in part that this combines with lack of future-proofing in the form of vaccine accommodation, but also it doesn’t make sense to be reinforcing the control system here nor does this match up with the way we’re operating other things. In the CDC’s own words

Schools are defined as the most essential non-essential part of the community

So let’s accept the premise. Schools get in line behind ‘essential’ things (and oh my is that term loose in many places) but ahead of non-essential things.

That’s not at all what these guidelines mean in practice. For that to line up with what’s being suggested would imply that all non-essential businesses should be closed in what is defined as the yellow zones above, let alone orange or red.

Effectively these guidelines are an Isolated Demand for Rigor.

My suggestion for zones is that the zones be defined in terms of other community restrictions. Thus, if indoor dining or other non-essential activities are permitted, K-12 schools are fully open to the extent they can otherwise follow guidelines.

Mostly I don’t think using schools as part of the control system, outside of a true emergency, makes sense at all.

why should it much matter (outside of an all-hands-on-deck-close-everything scenario) how much spread there is?

It’s also worth noting that this ‘hybrid’ system, where everyone has to rotate where they go and what they do all the time, technically does a better job checking off some blame-avoidance boxes, but when you think about what kids will actually do, it might not be the way to ensure that a pandemic gets contained…

What matters are the written guidelines and how they will be interpreted in practice. Much of the discussion around the guidelines is interpreting the 6 feet as effectively mandatory at all levels, to the extent that I had to do a double take when I was reminded that this wasn’t what the guidelines actually said.

Walensky is the Director of the CDC and is making the ultimate CDC power grab. She is saying that now that we’ve established our level of safety concern trolling, and our willingness to shut everything down that isn’t fully safe, why stop with Covid? Why not demand equal safety with regard to everything else? We need to crack down on these unprincipled exceptions. Why, indeed, did we let people ever leave their houses?

At what point do we say, enough?

Biden says he wants the schools open. Assuming that’s true and he does think they should be open, given these guidelines, he’s utterly failed to do his job in creating conditions where that can happen, and shown he is unable to get his agencies to do things to benefit humans. It’s becoming a pattern.

My hope is that this is sufficiently over the top that many places will either treat the guidelines as purely aspirational during the pre-vaccination period

My other hope would be that, to the extent that students cannot attend school, that we can stop pretending that ‘remote learning’ that ties students to a screen all day lest they ‘get out of’ something be recognized as insanity, and students be given tasks and projects to do instead, plus some amount of zoom time in smaller groups

We like to think that the system will at least return to normal once there’s no reason for it not to, but there’s no reason to assume that will be the case. Once we raise our level of concern trolling about health to the levels that involve not wanting vaccinated teachers in rooms with children because of a disease that puts no one involved in meaningful danger, where does it end?

It’s also important because our de facto ban on children living their childhoods is both a gigantic tax on being a parent and a gigantic injury to every childhood. It drives our children crazy, makes them unable to learn self-reliance.