Thread by @cfishman

Yesterday saw a turn in the approach to the summer wave of the pandemic.

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey backtracked on his 'Arizona is open' approach.

Monday, he ordered bars and gyms closed immediately (by 10 pm Mon night), & said opening bars had been a mistake.

AZ cases below.

2/ AZ Gov. Ducey also postponed the opening of AZ schools from late July & early August, their normal opening time, until at least Aug 17.

(The bar, gym, movie theater closings are good at least until Jul 27.)

azcentral.com/story/news/loc…

3/ Ducey last week was stressing 'personal responsibility' in contained coronavirus.

Monday, he concluded Arizona needed firm public rules.

At Monday's announcement, Ducey said the current growth of the virus in Arizona was 'brutal.'

4/ The interesting problem with schools is that they need to open to get their parents back to work. An economy without schools in session, mostly in person, won't be able to operate.

Ducey postponed opening of school in AZ for 2 to 3 weeks, depending on the local district.

5/ If the surge is making Ducey wary of re-opening the schools, does he imagine (or does he have some kind of predictive data), showing that Arizona's case growth might somehow slow, plateau or start to drop from what's happening now?

Can closing bars & gyms slow the AZ surge?

6/ Here, again, is the Arizona 'new cases' graph.

June 5 is marked. If you look at the days leading up to June 5 (and ignore the days after that), it looks like AZ is having a big surge up to June 5.

Then look at June 5 to 29. That's exponential growth.

7/ Schools — k-12 — are a complicated & subtle problem.

The research appears to show three things:

• Very few kids get the coronavirus
• Kids 17 and under who get it do not get very sick
• Kids do not *seem* to transmit it to adults, or to each other

npr.org/2020/06/24/882…

8/ That @NPR story cites two critical examples.

Nationwide, the YMCA has cared for 40,000 kids during the pandemic, ages 1 to 14, mostly children of essential workers. They were at 1,100 sites.

The Y says it has no record of more than 1 case at any location.

9/ The second example in that NPR story is a Brown University survey of US childcare locations, also taking care of children of essential workers.

Brown economist @ProfEmilyOster surveyed 970 child care centers.

Her results in the next tweet...

10/ At 970 US childcare centers surveyed by Brown's Emily Oster:

Children served: 27,234
Child covid cases: 42 (0.15%)

Staff at centers: 9,589
Staff covid case: 106 (1.11%)

More detail here:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

11/ Those are the children of front-line essential workers. So they were at risk at home, & their parents needed them both taken care of, & not bringing the virus home.

That's not a scientific study, but it is an essential & urgently revealing survey & piece of research.

12/ (It was also an incredible amount of work — imagine calling 970 childcare centers over and over again to get that kind of data. All hail to @ProfEmilyOster and the people working with her.)

13/ Trying to teach kids remotely, on computer screens, seems likely to cause a slow-moving disaster for students of all kinds.

Last Thursday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) came out in favor of striving hard to get schools reopened.

14/ The AAP is the association of the nation's 67,000 pediatricians — the doctors who care for children, and who are most focused on their health.

Their statement was blunt:

15/ '(T)he AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.'

Start with getting kids back into school.

The AAP didn't just issue a call for efforts to return-to-school.

16/ The pediatricians issued a set of school-reopening guidelines.

Masks?
Cafeteria management?
Special ed students?
School bus operation?
Playgrounds?

They've got advice.

services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-…

17/ But here's the really big problem.

Reopening schools in the US is a hard, complicated problem requiring thought, care, adaptation, the ability to see what's happening & change course — while communicating & maintaining credibility with parents, students, teachers, staff.

18/ The experience of the YMCA & the data gathered in the Brown Univ survey indicate it might be possible to reopen schools safely — if the reopening, & the management of the schools, is done with active care & surveillance.

It's not a throw-open-the-doors-and-go moment.

19/ And we sure do need the schools to find a way of operating, and operating safely.

Our children need that — they need to resume their education. Staying home may even have made them appreciate...school. And teachers.

Our country needs that.

20/ The problem: the leaders of of the United States, from county sheriffs publicly refusing to enforce their county's coronavirus rules, up to the White House holding rallies while not following the rules the White House itself has issued — the leaders have shown no such skill.

21/ We haven't shown we have the leadership capability in place to deploy the skill, the explanatory power, the consistency, the clarity, that doing something like reopening the schools will require.

But if you wonder, What *should* we be doing now?

22/ Back in late March & early April, we needed testing. We needed testing leadership. We need capability, but we also needed testing strategy, testing tactics, testing logistics.

We got none of it. We got a made scramble instead, that crippled the response—locally & nationally.

23/ Now, we need a national effort to reopen schools.

Schools are very much a local responsibility.

But if there were a school-reopening-czar — with an office, & staff, with guidelines, with the ability to answer questions — that's what a federal gov't could do to help now.

24/ Schools in rural Oklahoma & in urban Baltimore are very different.

There are, in fact, 13,500 school districts in the US.

We need them. They need advice.

Some have huge staffs & the capacity to figure out how to reopen. Some are small & have never seen a problem like this.

25/ If it's safe to send kids back to school — & even that question needs more very quick study & reassurance — imagine what that would do for the country in Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec.

(By the way: One job would be to keep kids from catching & bringing home flu. They do get that.)

26/ Aside from caring for people who are actually sick, & for testing, what priority could be higher for the nation as a whole than a comprehensive, thoughtful, & strategic effort to reopen schools safely?

If you're puzzled how we're failing to manage this, here's example #1.

27/ And that NPR story linked back in tweet #7 of this thread is by the great reporter @anya1anya — a former colleague @FastCompany who is doing thoughtful, careful, important work on education & coronavirus.

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