New CDC Guidelines to Reopen Schools, Based on Outdated, Cherry-Picked, and Misinterpreted Data, Put Students, Teachers, and Communities at Risk

I haven't been a hard liner on keeping schools closed and am trying to listen to science. If we were still at the original COVID I'd say let's go with the low rates for kids and teacher vax but variants are still a wild card and children seem to be susceptible. But consider the article and comments below including long-term lung scarring from even people with mild cases. Every single person I know who had it even a year ago complains of some shortness of breath or being more tired. I may never leave my house again. 

As usual the UFT and AFT are waffling. Do we think the CDC is suddenly not politicized under Biden who has promised to get schools open and viola, distances shrink from 6 to 3 feet.

Naked Capitalism - 

 New CDC Guidelines to Reopen Schools, Based on Outdated, Cherry-Picked, and Misinterpreted Data, Put Students, Teachers, and Communities at Risk

Posted on March 20, 2021 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Biden repeatedly promised to “follow the science” in developing Covid policies. But as has become the norm in American medicine, the science has instead been distorted in the interest of profits and political expedience. This post provides a devastating takedown of the Biden plan to reopen schools with little in the way of additional protections for teachers and students, particularly more ventilation (how about the simple expedient of opening windows?). It explains why Covid cases among children have been severely undercounted and where population-wide surveys were made, children were vastly more likely to introduce Covid into a household than adults. It also shreds the CDC’s astonishing assertion that distancing as little as three feet would be OK.

On the one hand, parents and children are suffering due to the lack of in-person instruction. Keeping schools closed is politically risky for Team Dem, particularly since it is seen as a staunch ally of the (formerly) powerful teachers unions. But simply pretending that schools can implement hand-wave level measures and everything will be hunky-dory is the sort of wishful thinking that is guaranteed to produce problems down the road, just like our insufficient test capacity and unwillingness to enforce quarantines and mask mandates. As a result, how much luck do you think schools and teachers will have in getting children to wear masks properly (particularly not take them off if they start to cough and keep them over their noses), and how much support will they have from parents if they try to discipline the non-compliant?

Lambert almost immediately challenged the CDC’s recommendations on schools for ignoring evidence on aerosol-based transmission. He also found evidence that they relied on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report that punted on the question of “indoor air quality of schools” because addressing it might mean spending money! In other words, they refused to consider the issue at all, even low cost mitigations. This article confirms his concerns and adds quite a few others.

Your humble blogger also expressed doubts about Dr. Rochelle Walensky as the new head of the CDC, that she had signed up for Biden Administration priorities (as in she appeared not to have attempted to negotiate the agenda), some of which looked like an impossibly big leap for a weak agency, and others looked unconstitutional. Two particular weaknesses look relevant to this fiasco:

Fighting yesterday’s war

Treating better PR as the solution to way too many problems

There’s much more information in this carefully argued and well documented piece, which I hope you’ll circulate widely. As we’ve been saying from early on, it’s the disease dynamics that are in control. Wanting that not to be true won’t begin to make it so.

By Deepti Gurdasani, Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning, The William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary, University of London; Phillip Alvelda, CEO & Chairman, Brainworks Foundry, Inc.; and Thomas Ferguson, Director of Research, Institute for New Economic Thinking and Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Decoded and Explained - The NYC DOE Reopening Plan - 109 pages of smoke and mirrors - Anonymous NYC Teacher

Trapping kids inside with 10 or 12 others with no airflow sounds like a recipe COVID soup!  ...I won't accept this as a "plan" for sending my daughter back, nor do I accept it as a teacher.....anon.

I received this over the transom from a NYC teacher friend who is staying

anonymous after having been persecuted by certain criminal supervisors, the very type of people we are supposed to trust to manage safe schools. The pushback from teachers and other school employees is related to two decades of dishonesty and mistrust and this plan only serves to embellish on that history with outright distortions. Note the mention of ventilation - an LOL moment for many teachers.

A Closer Look - The NYC DOE Reopening Plan Decoded Explained
---anonymous

I was excited when New York state governor, Andrew Cuomo, announced that all districts in the state were required to have a school reopening plan. I was looking forward to seeing what the plan was! I mean, we, the parents, needed to make a decision about the school year on August 7th, with no other information except the hybrid model for physical versus online learning. We're a month out from the start of school.

A mere days after Cuomo's announcement, the New York City Department of Education published a well-formatted plan with a table of contents! Since I had to work for two years without a classroom ceiling (the roofers hung thick contractor bags over the open roof, and water/snow would pool in the bags and drain out of a tear onto the floor, speaking of safety), I thought this was an astounding turnaround in efficiency for such a bloated agency!

Well, no. It turns out that New York City's so-called schools reopening "plan"  was 109 pages of smoke and mirrors. The DOE apparently believes that codifying the outsourcing of responsibility to the parents, and reducing their own duties to "precautions" such as educating families about the importance of mandatory home temperature checks (thermometers can be provided - how helpful!), passes as a measure of confidence. And safety measures, if underscoring hand washing and social distancing can be even be considered "safety" at this juncture or just survival, only represent a fraction of the plan. For example, this is everything under the heading, "Ventilation":

"NYCDOE’s Division of School Facilities (DSF) performed an HVAC survey to determine deferred maintenance needs. DSF is performing required HVAC maintenance (including windows) and filter changes. DSF and the SCA are working together on systems that require capital-level repairs. NYCDOE is continuing to perform maintenance and modify operations to maximize the supply of outdoor air for ventilation to the greatest extent possible."

Let me translate that. The first two sentences are fairly straightforward. A bunch of bureaucrats, DSF, who work in an air conditioned office building, sent out a survey to maintenance staff asking them where they are on their to-do list in terms of HVAC. These same bureaucrats are telling maintenance departments to perform repairs on windows and filters, and ostensibly other to-do's under the heading HVAC.

Here's where we need to start breaking things down a bit more finely. The pencil pushers keeping tabs on school maintenance are pairing up with the bureaucrats from the School Construction Authority. The SCA is in charge of taking a physical building, such the Franklin K. Lane brick and mortar, phasing out the school, displacing students but more importantly teachers, and creating more "schools" to address overcrowding by dividing the large former population of the school with smaller groups of students, attending different "schools". In other words, they don't physically construct schools. They reduce the number of students that you can house in a building because you need administration and staff for all the new schools. So, the third sentence from the "plan" is saying that DSF and SCA are joining forces for an interdepartmental project!

And now the fuzziness really creeps in. These two groups of office workers will make a list of things that need to be done that will require money. Really. That's what the fourth sentence says; it's specifying the project that the two groups of bureaucrats are going to be working on. And, to conclude, the closing sentence is saying that the whole DOE system is still fixing things and changing things in order to get some air inside, if they can.

I love this plan! Trapping kids inside with 10 or 12 others with no airflow sounds like a recipe COVID soup! There are still classrooms without AC! This example paragraph is found on page 36, under the trending coronavirus topic, "Lead". The language used requires either 20 years experience inside the DOE, or 20 hours of careful scrutiny. This is their plan!

Listen, coming up with something this visible and important is not easy. I don't understand the veneer of command and control, when they obviously have neither. Sometimes, it's okay to say, we don't have this under control, and we need your constructive input and patience. Here's what we've been doing, but New York is a big city, with a myriad of needs and experiences, and it takes a while to address everything. When you issue a decree from on high, with no chance for dialogue, it causes dissent and nowadays, we don't need any more anger and confusion. We, the people, need to set the priorities and come up with solutions. I won't accept this as a "plan" for sending my daughter back, nor do I accept it as a teacher.

I also want to go on the record to say that Mayor Di Blasio and Chancellor Carranza are misreading that highly publicized figure, 75% of parents opt for in-person. Yes, that's true. I'm one of them. And I am almost 100% certain that we will, in the end, opt out.