The Washington Post is out with a piece that goes into the question of school’s and virus spread….
The piece points to data that seems to indicate that if school’s use good preventive methods with student’s…Virus infections are not prevalent from student’s being in school’s…
This is part of the effort to return children back to grade school after almost a year of some being absent from their school buildings….
Children DO get infected from their home and outside environments ….
It is now normal for school’s to have to send teachers and student’s home from classes that have infections…A good amount of school buildings in this country are old and have poor air circulation in crowed classrooms…..
But parents in some places have put pressure on school administrators to reopen their school’s as on-line learning efforts have their children falling behind in their education…
The subject IS a tough one….
It also has an economic side as local and state officials begin to do cut backs and lay-off’s from less staff needed if their buildings are closed and their tax revenue fall’s off due to jobless benefit claims also….
Come January as kids are supposed to return to school’s ?
There will be spikes in infection rates due to the holiday get togethers ….
More than nine months after schools closed, some of the answers to those questions are becoming clear. Emerging data on contact tracing — which illuminates the origins of infections — shows that the virus does not seem to spread much within schools when they require masks, urge social distancing, have good ventilation and when community spread is low.
But because of a lack of a cohesive federal response, huge gaps in the data remain, and many say new information about school transmission is not sufficient to make far-reaching conclusions. A dearth of data has plagued many aspects of pandemic response, and it has left governors, school superintendents, school board members and parents on their own to interpret the shifting body of knowledge as they make decisions that could affect the lives of everyone connected to school communities. This, coupled with soaring infection rates, has made these decisions especially fraught as school officials weigh whether to reopen their doors next month….