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16 Feb, 20 tweets, 8 min read
SCHOOL THREAD

So, R. Weingarten, President of the AFT and future recipient of TIME’s inaugural Worst Person of the Year award, is out gloating about how the new CDC school “reopening” guidelines are similar to what the AFT proposed in April 2020. Yes…one year ago. 1/20
First, it is obviously preposterous to look to guidelines (from a labor union) issued in the early stages of a pandemic (including raw case numbers despite 70x testing volume now) prior to much better data/science/studies being made available. But I’ll play along.
2/20
What did we know in April ‘20 about child/school transmission? Here are 15 studies/articles along w a key quote/synopsis from each.

Again, all of this has only been further solidified over the last 10 months. I’m just pretending we're stuck in April 2020 like the AFT-CDC.
3/20
1. April 14, 2020 – Iceland.
“Children…are less likely to get infected than adults...[E]ven if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease." "We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.”
sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/blog/hunting-d…
4/20
2. March 1, 2020 –Sweden
“None of the outbreaks...are linked to schools...also no clear scientific evidence that suspending healthy schoolchildren or closing schools would reduce the risk of contagion in society even if schoolchildren were infected”
5/20
folkhalsomyndigheten.se/nyheter-och-pr…
3. April 1, 2020 –Netherlands
“Data from the Netherlands also confirms the...understanding: that children play a small role in the spread of the novel coronavirus. The virus is mainly spread between adults and from adult family members to children.”
6/20
childcarecanada.org/documents/rese…
4. Netherlands (cont)
“There are no clusters in which schools would appear to be a hot spot” “And the closure of the schools has had no impact on the spread”
7/20
dutchnews.nl/news/2020/04/d…
5. April 17 and 29, 2020 – Switzerland
“It seems that it is adults who infect children, not the other way around.”
8/20
rts.ch/info/sciences-…
6. Switzerland (cont) “Swiss children under 10 allowed to hug grandparents as they 'do not transmit COVID-19'” “The country's coronavirus lead says scientists ‘now know young children don't transmit the virus’”
news.sky.com/story/coronavi…
9/20
7. April 11, 2020 – France
Case study of a boy with Covid-19 who, despite attending three different schools and a ski club, and interacting with 172 classmates and teachers while symptomatic, did not transmit the virus to anyone
academic.oup.com/cid/article/71…
10/20
8. France (cont)
Another study confirms children are not efficient carriers. If they catch it, it is almost always by an infected adult. And the risk of the disease in children is "extremely low, we can say a thousand times lower than in adults”
11/20
bfmtv.com/sante/peu-port…
9. April 26, 2020 – Australia
Among 735 students and 128 staff members in close contact with initial cases, just 2 children became infected. Even more strikingly, “no teacher or staff member contracted Covid-19 from any of the initial school cases”
12/20
ncirs.org.au/sites/default/…
10. Australia (cont)
"COVID-19 is not the flu. Far fewer children are affected by COVID-19, and the number of transmissions from children to children and children to adults is far less." “evidence does not support avoiding classroom learning"
13/20
health.gov.au/news/getting-o…
11. April 20, 2020 – Norway (Date Schools Began Reopening; Article is from May)
“Getting young people back to school … has a positive effect on limiting the spread of infection compared to keeping schools closed.”
14/20
dn.se/nyheter/varlde…
12. April 3, 2020 – Canada
“There is no documented evidence of child-to-adult transmission. There are no documented cases of children bringing an infection into the home, from school or otherwise."
15/20
bccdc.ca/Health-Profess…
13. April 6, 2020 – Lancet: Child & Adolescent Health
“We know...that school closures are likely to have the greatest effect if the virus has low transmissibility and attack rates are higher in children. This is the opposite of COVID-19”
16/20
ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/apr/…
14. April 18, 2020 – Italy
“We found that none of the children...in the study tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection...despite at least 13 of them living together with infected family members. This is particularly intriguing”
17/20
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
15. April 17, 2020 –CDC
“short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve" "modelling also shows that other mitigation efforts...have more impact on both spread of disease and health care" "Those places who closed school…have not had more success"
cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…
*Bonus: Notice something? Other than the ignored CDC guidance, these are all outside the US. You might also be interested in knowing that the US just fell out of the Top 10 most innovative global economies, primarily due to education scores. 🤔
19/20
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Anecdotally, my 2 daughters attend separate schools. Both schools have had cases. Each time it was a parent that infected the child and the child served as a "dead-end" with no further spread to other kids, faculty, or staff.
20/20 @kerpen @KelleyKga @karenvaites @angrybklynmom

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9 Feb
COVID LESSONS FROM THE FREE MARKET: Among other places, much of my career has been in the capital markets. Such markets are not perfect, but they are an astonishing force to behold with much wisdom to bestow upon those willing to listen. So what lessons should we learn from
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29 Jan
California. According to media, it reopened this week! NO. There is virtually nothing open in California and-PUNCHLINE-this thread will show it will NEVER reopen under its current tier system as, big surprise, it is mathematically flawed b/c it doesn’t account for testing volume
First, let’s dispense with the MSM “reopening.” Literally 99.9% of the State’s population is in the “Purple” tier, which means no schools, no gyms, no indoor dining, no bars, no offices, no museums, no arcades, no having visitors at home, no churches, no Disneyland, no nothing
Ok, now the reopening math. Each county’s tier is based on the WORST of two metrics: (i) positive PCR tests per 100k population and (ii) test positivity %. Of course there is some BS woke “equity metric” that factors in tree canopy, but let’s put that aside for simplicity.
Read 17 tweets
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21 Jan
Lockdowns don’t actually work (see pinned tweet). One reason is that it’s preposterous to think one can just halt an interwoven societal fabric. So “lockdown” is instead just poor people risking exposure to continue providing goods/services to rich people sheltering in place.
1/
A thousand books can (and will) be written on the harms of lockdowns. This thread will instead focus on its epic exacerbation of the divide between rich & poor. Last week I let 30 studies do the talking; this time I will let 23 pictures tell the story.
1. High earners are the ones that can work from home:
Read 29 tweets
Brumby Profile picture
15 Jan
Wow. Thanks to everyone who read, retweeted, and commented (including those taking the other side without being nasty). Since I had 4 followers at the time of my first tweet (certainly bots) I hoped 100 people or so might somehow see the thread. As of today (2 days later) it has
apparently been viewed over 1.2 million times.

I genuinely (naively) thought I might be able to have dialogue with all those interested. Fortunately/unfortunately, that has proven unrealistic given the response. Accordingly, I wanted to clarify a few things (if you couldn’t
tell from my original thread, brevity is not my strength, so apologies for another thread):

1.I believe in nuance and balance; Twitter rarely allows for either
2.I am certainly not a COVID denier. It’s a very real and horrible thing that has killed millions of people.
Read 26 tweets
Brumby Profile picture
13 Jan
This will be my first and possibly last tweet (thread) as I am mostly here to learn. It is prompted by a recent study questioning lockdown efficacy that is getting a lot of attention. It appears people believe it to be the first of its kind, but I have been collecting similar
studies since March 2020. Below are 30 published papers finding that lockdowns had little or no efficacy (despite unconscionable harms) along with a key quote or two from each:
1.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

“there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (“lockdowns”) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020”
Read 42 tweets

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