PUSD students (File Photo – PHS yearbook staff)
As an official tasked with following educational news, I am acutely aware that at the moment it is very difficult to follow the international response to the coronavirus pandemic.
By Patrick Cahalan
This difficulty has led to a cascade of recent reporting that is out of date and leads to some misperceptions of the conditions on the ground and the near-term impacts of major policy changes.
The current conversation about school reopening has a few talking points from which I believe important context is missing.
School Closures Worldwide
Talking point: “California is one of the only places in the world where schools have remained closed.”
This is misleading. It’s certainly true that the majority of California schools have been closed since March. However, the unstated implication is that this is an outlier on response, as opposed to an outlier on conditions.
Much of the conversation about school closures in the U.S. has referenced schools in the European Union. The situations are not close to parallel, and they have not been for much of the pandemic. In fact, significant numbers of EU schoolchildren have been out of school during the pandemic, during multiple windows depending upon the country, and in many cases since either the winter holidays or mid-January at the least.
The U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands all announced at least partial closures recently. A notable quote: “In the second wave we acquired much more evidence that schoolchildren are almost equally, if not more, infected by SARS-CoV-2 than others,” said Antoine Flahault, director of the University of Geneva’s Institute of Global Health. [1].
Germany’s schools had been closed since the holidays, and they were scheduled to remain so until February 22 at the earliest [2]. Ten German states reopened elementary schools and day care centers just yesterday, but there are concerns regarding the current conditions and they may not remain open [3].
Norway’s schools are partially open, but areas with lower case incidence than LA County were recently closed [4]. Their reopening rules have changed again.
France has had open schools, but has been testing schoolchildren as part of their federal response since the fall, and is considering closing schools recently in light of the current conditions [5]. In the United States, needless to say, there has been no federal testing provisions.
Italy reopened schools in September only to have to close them again under conditions that were more favorable than our conditions at the time [6]. They have only partially reopened [7]. Poland and Romania have been closed since March [8].
Other National Factors
In addition, most of these countries have had much more stringent travel restrictions than have ever been considered inside the U.S., where very little interstate travel has been restricted. Travel restrictions in those countries have been in place, with varying degrees of severity, since the beginning of the pandemic [9]. Most of the rest of the world has restricted travel from the United States in no small part because we as a country have instituted almost no internal travel restrictions, which has contributed to the spread inside the U.S.
Other countries have broadly dedicated much more significant direct funding to their citizenry, which has enabled their communities to voluntarily reduce exposure with less personal economic impact and, of course most broadly, fund public education better than the United States average. The United States’ average also is much better than direct funding here in California. Finally, health systems in other countries are almost uniformly better structured for surge capacity than the U.S. health care system, particularly in rural communities. These health systems have stronger emergency response capabilities, making any outbreak less likely to overwhelm local hospitals.
All of these factors make it difficult to draw strong conclusions as to how international studies of schools might generalize to conditions in the U.S. Overwhelmingly, the EU nations have engaged in much more stringent shutdown measures, community-wise, and committed to more economic relief. Both of these have altered the ways in which citizens of those countries can transmit the virus, as the simple number of interactions between potentially infected people is dramatically lower than in the U.S.
Studies of Reopening
Some of the arguments that “schools are safe to open” depend heavily upon studies that occurred from August-November, and many of those studies took place in areas where community prevalence was very low or was measured as “high” using contemporary measures that have dubious parallels to Los Angeles County.
One study that has been oft-cited among the “schools are safe to reopen” supporters was done in Norway [10]. In addition to the limitations noted above, this is not a compelling piece of evidence because Norway schools were closed under more advantageous conditions than we have had in Los Angeles County. Looking at closer-to-local studies, a U.S. based study often cited is a study done in North Carolina [11], which ended before November. On October 23, the day after the study ended, North Carolina had a seven-day rolling average of 2100 cases; three weeks ago North Carolina was at 5,000 cases, and most of its schools were closed.
Another U.S. based study was in Wood County, WI. The community prevalence was “high” by seroprevalence measures at the time, but Wood County, WI has a population density of 95 people per square mile. This is significantly different from Pasadena’s 6,000+ people per square mile. More people per square mile translates to, among other things, more dense housing, particularly among the residential poor, and more frequent interactions between potentially infected people, just as a matter of conditional probability.
Strong proponents of reopening schools have pointed to CDC guidelines on reopening schools, while in many cases ignoring that the CDC’s recommendations for community response include countermeasures that almost no U.S. municipality, including Pasadena, is considering [12]. This includes concerns about new variants, where the CDC has recommended that municipalities double-down on interventions [13].
I have strong concerns that the “headline reading” of selective reporting of schools opening internationally, absent an understanding of the significantly different underlying conditions in those places, leads some members of the public to believe that a widespread reopening of schools will have little or no adverse consequences on schools and schoolchildren or on their surrounding communities.
True, it may be the case that some adverse consequences are necessary or advisable, given the ongoing difficulties we are seeing in our distance learning environment. I can assure the general public that all of us on the Pasadena Unified School District Board, even those who have no school age children, are aware of those difficulties.
Some good news
It is important, however, to point to our existing good news. The United States, for all of the local and national reporting regarding vaccination difficulties, has vaccinated tens of millions of residents and is increasing its overall pace of vaccinations to about 1.4 million vaccinations a day [14].
It’s true that, at current pace of vaccine distribution, we’ll achieve about 50% vaccination distribution at the beginning of August 2021, and we won’t vaccinate 70% of the U.S. population until nearly Thanksgiving. It is also important to note, however, that in addition to shots in arms, a significant percentage of the population has been exposed to the disease and has developed antibodies. It’s also likely that our pace of vaccination will increase, albeit more slowly than anyone waiting for a shot would prefer!
While new strains will be an ongoing concern, we’ve also seen that vaccinated and previously exposed individuals are overall much less likely to experience severe cases of the disease [15]. In addition, there is good reason to presuppose that this will be true for variants as well, as the spike protein construction makes Covid-19 predictable.
As our percentage of vaccinated residents increases, fewer people are likely to be significant disease spreaders. Even those people who get the disease will be experiencing more mild symptoms and thus will be shedding a smaller quantity of the virus, which reduces the likelihood that other people will be infected.
What this means is that we are more likely to see out numbers decline than to see our recent spike rebound. This is by no means a guarantee, and it is important for everyone to take the community recommendations for Covid-19 seriously, as they are still our best defense against the disease continuing to spread. Wash hands, limit your contact with other people, and wear your mask.
Patrick Cahalan is a member of Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education. Patrick speaks for himself, with concurrence from the Superintendent and the Board President.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-schools-are-closing-again-on-concerns-they-spread-covid-19-11610805601
[2] https://www.thelocal.de/20210211/majority-of-german-schools-and-kitas-set-to-reopen-on-february-22nd
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-norway-idUSKBN29S079
[5] https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-will-french-schools-stay-open/a-56330811
[6] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/education/students-parents-fight-school-closures-in-italy/2069281
[7] https://www.euronews.com/2021/01/25/covid-19-four-further-italian-regions-reopen-their-secondary-schools
[8] https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/02/13/covid-19-school-closures-are-widening-europes-class-divisions
[10] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.26.1.2002011?fbclid=IwAR3xTfUVE21ZbboMJr_75YgNMXOtrnBpmoGSuB9AbRLkJoi_NbJyzsCvj-k
[11] https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2021/01/06/peds.2020-048090.full.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1e4pfTRCjuTeysmi5nF7TR6XDAtLkBTY_w0SrifMr3mL_M3eH06xgHw-s
[12] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/community-mitigation.html
[13] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/health/coronavirus-variants-spread-cdc-reports/index.html
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine-doses.html
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