KIDS & COVID: Media mistranslation in action. So, you may have seen the below article going around - it’s an AP story that has gotten picked up by a ton of outlets.
Scary headline!
Will it surprise you to learn there’s more to the story? Let’s dig in.
abcnews.go.com/Health/wireSto…
The subhead is really alarming: “At least 41 schools in Berlin have reported that students or teacher have become infected with the coronavirus not even two weeks after schools reopened in the German capital.” Whoa! But I was curious...
Does that mean OUTBREAKS (within-school spread) or someone infected showing up in school, which would just reflect the fact that some % of the general population is infected (& German cases are rising)?
The AP story doesn’t say.
Luckily for us, the original source does.
The AP draws from the German paper Daily Berliner Zeitung. Happily, Berliner Zeitung has an English edition, so let’s head to the original article:
berliner-zeitung.de/en/corona-in-s…
First thing to note is the Zeitung headline: “Corona in schools: Individual cases but no outbreaks”
Well, OK, so that’s good to know!
Then there’s this quote, this quote that drives me *crazy* was not included in the AP story:
“The figures show that Berlin schools are not a hotbed of corona, the city’s top education official, Sandra Scheeres (SPD) said: ‘Infections are usually carried into schools from outside.’”
Oh! Well **that would have been good to know!**
(Btw, side note for those who read my thread yesterday about low cases in child care: “Only seven of Berlin’s 2,700 Kitas [daycares] are currently affected by a corona infection with one closed and others with individuals quarantined.”)
So what we really have is a situation where all we can say is that in 41 of Berlin’s 825 schools, someone who got COVID from outside walked into the building. That is a *very different narrative* than “omg Covid is blowing up in German schools!”
Look, this stuff is hard. And there’s nothing to say in another few weeks we couldn’t have evidence of school-driven spread in Berlin; the lack of in-classroom masks is worrisome to me. But we can’t say that now, yet it’s *clearly* implied in the AP story that got wide pickup.
The AP is overall a fantastic news organization. I am not trying to pick on them, this is just such an archetypal example of the problem: we have got to write with caution, nuance, and context about kids and Covid. The story is too important & too complex to do otherwise. /end
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