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BREAKING: Top Medical Expert to Keep Kids Out of School
"In the minds of our family, the evidence is clear. After considering all the objective criteria [nationally and locally], we& #39;ve made the decision to keep our girls out of school for the time being." https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/12/health/covid-kids-school-gupta-essay/index.html">https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/1...
"In the minds of our family, the evidence is clear. After considering all the objective criteria [nationally and locally], we& #39;ve made the decision to keep our girls out of school for the time being." https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/12/health/covid-kids-school-gupta-essay/index.html">https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/1...
1/ I know Dr. Gupta knew this would be national news—after all, he& #39;s CNN& #39;s top medical expert, and the co-host (with Anderson Cooper) of the most-watched COVID-19 "town halls" on cable TV. It& #39;s clear he did his homework; I& #39;m glad his column was so detailed as to his reasoning.
2/ While some will say Dr. Gupta& #39;s decision was based on his location in Georgia—and that consideration was clearly in the mix, per his column—it& #39;s equally clear that Gupta found national and international data about virus transmission among children (and generally) compelling.
3/ I& #39;d note too that Dr. Gupta was at great pains to say that his kids are enrolled in a Georgia school that& #39;s doing everything *right*—meaning, the decision to keep his kids home *wasn& #39;t* made because their school wasn& #39;t fully complying with CDC-recommended precautions. It was.
4/ I have a doctor in my immediate family, but I& #39;m not a doctor and I don& #39;t pretend to be. I& #39;m a *researcher* whose longest chapter in his forthcoming book is about COVID-19—a chapter whose hundreds of citations consider local, national, and international virus-transmission data.
5/ I went into full self-quarantine with my family on March 7, in significant part due to my research on COVID-19; the data on virus transmission was/is incredibly troubling. Friends recall me expressing deep concern about it on the night of the New Hampshire primary in February.
6/ Though I finished my book in July, I& #39;ve stayed on top of emerging studies and data on COVID-19 throughout. There is so much we don& #39;t know about this virus—but as Gupta points out, almost all the new evidence we& #39;ve compiled causes us *more* (not less) concern about its dangers.
7/ Because I& #39;m an attorney (and think like one), because I& #39;m a researcher on the subject of COVID-19, and because I naturally play devil& #39;s advocate due to my temperament, I was also asked to serve on a coronavirus task force. So I have that experience to speak from as well, here.
8/ My July 2020 thread on the dangers of reopening elementary and secondary schools went viral—and was widely shared offline and on sites besides Twitter. I& #39;d like to share it again here for any who haven& #39;t seen it yet, and ask you all to pass it on again: https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1287105643204227077">https://twitter.com/sethabram...
9/ I& #39;m glad Gupta went public with his decision to hold his kids back from school because for a long time those of us who believe the reopening of schools is a bad idea—even in areas with low virus transmission—have felt orphaned, drowned out by Trump& #39;s huge propaganda machine.
10/ Areas with low virus transmission should be working toward universal testing, universal tracing, universal masking, and universal availability of therapeutics—they shouldn& #39;t be using their currently heartening data as a justification for taking steps they& #39;re not prepared for.
11/ Metaphors are powerful (sometimes dangerous) things—and scientists and theorists are historically terrible at metaphor-making, a potentially deadly blindspot in a mass-education campaign regarding COVID-19. I& #39;ve often heard Dr. Hazeltine (Harvard) on CNN using bad metaphors.
12/ As someone who was a working poet—I know, a seeming oxymoron—for many years, I consider metaphors to be *central* to public health in a pandemic. So while I like Dr. Hazeltine& #39;s analysis usually, his comparison of virus conditions to the *weather* is often damaging and wrong.
13/ Haseltine— @WmHaseltine; my apologies for the prior misspelling—says we should respond to virus conditions like they& #39;re weather conditions—checking daily to see what the conditions are and responding accordingly. That& #39;s not at all the situation, or how we should be responding.
14/ Why is Haseltine& #39;s metaphor bad?
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="1⃣" title="Tastenkappe Ziffer 1" aria-label="Emoji: Tastenkappe Ziffer 1"> When we react to weather, we don& #39;t change the weather by our actions.
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="2⃣" title="Tastenkappe Ziffer 2" aria-label="Emoji: Tastenkappe Ziffer 2"> Weather changes can be predicted and tracked in real time; we often can& #39;t judge what& #39;s happening virus-wise in real time.
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="3⃣" title="Tastenkappe Ziffer 3" aria-label="Emoji: Tastenkappe Ziffer 3"> Weather is more local than epidemiology.
15/ Under Dr. Haseltine& #39;s metaphor, when it& #39;s "cloudy" outside—only "mild" virus transmission—you just use basic precautions (e.g. masking and simple social distancing). But if everyone rushes outside when it& #39;s "cloudy," the chances of a "storm" tomorrow may well increase wildly.
16/ That& #39;s because (a) we don& #39;t know if it& #39;s *actually* only "cloudy" (due to testing lags, asymptomatic cases, lags between infection and symptoms/death); (b) cloudy *weather* doesn& #39;t often cause us to take *any* precautions, but even mild transmission calls for *great* caution.
17/ But also, whereas I can get great predictive and real-time tracking of the weather in my *town*, in epidemiology to say that we& #39;re going to track virus transmission at the level of a town is foolhardy. We& #39;re more likely to look at county, state, and even *regional* hard data.
18/ Dr. Gupta& #39;s article *gets* this. He doesn& #39;t just consider the "weather" (and precautions) at his kids& #39; school—though he looks into that—and frankly doesn& #39;t even *just* consider county, state or regional data. He looks at national and even *international* COVID-19 discoveries.
19/ My research on COVID-19 used Gupta& #39;s method *and* went back in time—adding a fourth dimension to the analysis—to see how COVID-19 evolves as well as moves through space. *And* I tracked the pace of new—troubling—discoveries. We need to gauge—as it were—how much we don& #39;t know.
20/ My research suggests we& #39;re at "the second high plateau of the first wave of COVID-19 in the US"; we& #39;re about to *ensure* "the third high[er] plateau of the first wave of COVID-19 in the US" by prematurely opening schools—just as business openings caused a second high plateau.
21/ Moreover, we& #39;re risking many elementary and secondary schools still being open at the start of the 2020-21 flu season, which means we may be simultaneously triggering *two* new "high plateaus"—the third and fourth of the first wave—with one foolhardy decision to open schools.
22/ By the way, I use the term "high plateau" because we have found, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that when scientists or government officials or journalists use the term "plateau," people think of it as a *good* thing. But if it& #39;s a "high plateau"—really bad data—it& #39;s not good.
23/ All this is of course worsened by what came before. When you add the fourth dimension of time to the analysis, you realize that our *past* decision to prematurely open businesses is not only still hurting America but will *compound* the dangers of prematurely opening schools.
24/ Consider: for the sake of his far-right politics, Jerry Jones has announced he& #39;s going to kill a bunch of people. Of course he didn& #39;t say "I& #39;m gonna kill a bunch of people"—but all the data he& #39;s seen tells him his announcement today *will* kill people: https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/08/12/cowboys-plan-to-play-all-their-games-in-front-of-fans/">https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/08/1...
