We Still Don’t Know How Many COVID Cases Are Reported in Schools
Sending children back to face-to-face education during an epidemic is an experiment of unprecedented proportions. The result can be disaster; none of us here will be surprised if all schools close again . But it’s starting to feel like we might not even know if outbreaks are spreading in schools and when.
The New York Times reports that only 12 states have released information on COVID cases at the school or district level. Some states only publish this data for the entire state, while others do not track it at all. So we spend a huge experiment on our children and do not even know if he failed?
The problems are multilevel. First, there is no federal consensus response to the pandemic or data tracking. The New York Times is doing its best to collect scraps of data, as has the National Education Association, which has built its own tracker based on messages sent in by volunteers.
Second, most schools do not require follow-up testing to help them know how many students or employees have COVID. Many testing sites do not test children , and not every parent can afford to spend hours or days looking for someone who can. I bet that only a tiny percentage of children with fever and cough will ever get tested, their parents speculate or hope they probably just caught a cold.
And then there’s the fact that a parent who has a child with COVID can get stuck. What if you need to go to work and you don’t want to leave your child to your grandmother? A Wisconsin health officer told a local news channel that she “never in [her] wildest dreams” envisioned parents knowingly sending their COVID-infected children to school, but they did.
The lack of collection and publication of data on COVID cases in schools is also a mistake at several levels. We won’t always know which schools have outbreaks, or if we do, it could happen much later in the game. And without this information, other districts and states will not be able to learn from the very experiment they are conducting. For example, does hybrid learning reduce the likelihood of spreading COVID or increase the risk due to the multitude of childcare options that parents must share? Will an outbreak of COVID in schools trigger larger outbreaks in the community?
It’s a shame that we don’t have this information, and we cannot use it to make better decisions about how and when we should send our children back to school. Again, the people we trusted for our safety didn’t keep us safe and didn’t provide us with enough information to make informed decisions to keep ourselves safe.