Thread by @SethAbramson

BREAKING: After many smug, premature "reopening schools in September was fine" articles, here are new infections since last Saturday:

Oct. 4: 33,972
Oct. 5: 41,599 🔼
Oct. 6: 44,666 🔼
Oct. 7: 49,356 🔼
Oct. 8: 56,653 🔼
Oct. 9: 60,558 🔼

Oct. 9 was the most cases in 2 months.

(PS) Keep in mind that many schools opened in mid-September, and many colleges and universities that reopened in early September didn't begin reporting their clusters until mid-September. And remember the incubation period of the virus. And this is what October looks like so far.

(PS2) We can't clearly say what's caused the current spike—but it seems too early for a flu-season effect and the weather hasn't changed so significantly that folks are suddenly regularly staying indoors. The most dramatic change in the last four weeks has been schools reopening.

(PS3) I've tried to isolate, here, the period of time beginning one week after schools at any level, and with any frequency, first began reopening (the last week of August, in many cases colleges and universities). This *isn't* a flu-season effect, it's something else altogether.

(PS4) Proponents of reopening claim we're not seeing a rise in community cases, and testing at many schools shows fairly low rates of infection. The problems with that: (1) yes, we *are* seeing a spike; (2) per-school rates are immaterial, the question is the *cumulative* effect.

(PS5) Moreover, (3) we don't know if this spike is going to become a plateau or continue growing, (4) this phenomenon—whatever its cause—will in about 2 or 3 weeks combine with flu season and changing weather patterns, and send us hurtling back to our horrific mid-summer numbers.

(PS6) The bad take below was *published* yesterday, but if you've been a freelancer you know that the *latest* this was pitched was October 2—which means the author formed her wrong opinion in late September, too early to draw any conclusions on reopening. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

(PS7) In fairness to Oster, she does seem to have right that in elementary/secondary schools we're seeing notable spread, but not yet a hothouse effect. I'm not sure the same can be said about universities—given the thousands of college clusters that have already been discovered.

(PS8) So the most significant clusters are in the relatively closed, discrete communities of colleges and universities—whereas minor outbreaks are occurring in those elementary and secondary school sites where students go home daily.

But the *cumulative* effect is still a spike.