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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'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
"In the minds of our family, the evidence is clear. After considering all the objective criteria [nationally and locally], we'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
1/ I know Dr. Gupta knew this would be national news—after all, he's CNN's top medical expert, and the co-host (with Anderson Cooper) of the most-watched COVID-19 "town halls" on cable TV. It's clear he did his homework; I'm glad his column was so detailed as to his reasoning.
2/ While some will say Dr. Gupta's decision was based on his location in Georgia—and that consideration was clearly in the mix, per his column—it's equally clear that Gupta found national and international data about virus transmission among children (and generally) compelling.
3/ I'd note too that Dr. Gupta was at great pains to say that his kids are enrolled in a Georgia school that's doing everything *right*—meaning, the decision to keep his kids home *wasn't* made because their school wasn't fully complying with CDC-recommended precautions. It was.
4/ I have a doctor in my immediate family, but I'm not a doctor and I don't pretend to be. I'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've stayed on top of emerging studies and data on COVID-19 throughout. There is so much we don't know about this virus—but as Gupta points out, almost all the new evidence we've compiled causes us *more* (not less) concern about its dangers.
7/ Because I'm an attorney (and think like one), because I'm a researcher on the subject of COVID-19, and because I naturally play devil'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'd like to share it again here for any who haven't seen it yet, and ask you all to pass it on again: https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1287105643204227077
9/ I'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'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't be using their currently heartening data as a justification for taking steps they'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'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'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're weather conditions—checking daily to see what the conditions are and responding accordingly. That's not at all the situation, or how we should be responding.
14/ Why is Haseltine's metaphor bad?
When we react to weather, we don't change the weather by our actions.
Weather changes can be predicted and tracked in real time; we often can't judge what's happening virus-wise in real time.
Weather is more local than epidemiology.
When we react to weather, we don't change the weather by our actions. Weather changes can be predicted and tracked in real time; we often can't judge what's happening virus-wise in real time. Weather is more local than epidemiology.
15/ Under Dr. Haseltine's metaphor, when it'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's "cloudy," the chances of a "storm" tomorrow may well increase wildly.
16/ That's because (a) we don't know if it's *actually* only "cloudy" (due to testing lags, asymptomatic cases, lags between infection and symptoms/death); (b) cloudy *weather* doesn'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're going to track virus transmission at the level of a town is foolhardy. We're more likely to look at county, state, and even *regional* hard data.
18/ Dr. Gupta's article *gets* this. He doesn't just consider the "weather" (and precautions) at his kids' school—though he looks into that—and frankly doesn'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'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't know.
20/ My research suggests we're at "the second high plateau of the first wave of COVID-19 in the US"; we'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'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's a "high plateau"—really bad data—it'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's going to kill a bunch of people. Of course he didn't say "I'm gonna kill a bunch of people"—but all the data he'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/
25/ Americans must *accept* that we're in a once-in-a-century emergency—a national disaster that is, yes, on the order of a war. Though in this case, the war is on our soil.
*Any* actions that don't *dramatically* curtail our "normal" are ultimately in service of the virus. /end
*Any* actions that don't *dramatically* curtail our "normal" are ultimately in service of the virus. /end
PS/ One thing we still don't know about COVID-19 is what its long-term effects are on people who get it and recover—or even people who get it asymptomatically. Those who say kids don't get serious cases are dissembling: we *don't know* what the long-term effects of infection are.
