Thread by @NAChristakis

Back-to-school special re #COVID19:

Here is an informative new tool via @dukeU @DEL_Duke for teachers and students to calculate their risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 over the course of a semester, via aerosol spread. …re-modeler-data-devils.cloud.duke.edu 1/

Though initially developed for use on college campuses, the calculator can also be used by K-12 schools to inform decisions on school re-openings and assess the effectiveness of different control measures for COVID19 in settings like classrooms, cafeterias, and gyms. 2/

Many caveats apply to using this tool for assessing faculty and student risk of COVID-19 in the classroom, but it is still informative. Write up here: nicholas.duke.edu/news/online-to… 3/

The uncertain parameters in this model of students and faculty getting sick with COVID-19 in the classroom, including virus prevalence, are crucial to the risk estimates. But the tool is still informative. 4/

Also, the risk calculations are only for disease transmission by aerosol route, and do not account for transmission by droplets (or from surfaces, which is anyway unlikely, we now know). 5/

The risk model also assumes that appropriate social distancing and hygiene protocols are strictly adhered to in the classroom to reduce COVID19 risk. To the extent that this is not true, the risk of infection will be higher than predicted by this tool. 6/

Users should also also bear in mind that the absolute estimates of predicted risk from this model are quite uncertain. 7/

Ventilation and masking are crucial to preventing spread of SARS-CoV-2, and vaccination of teachers should be mandatory.

While the benefits of masking in very young children are hard to weigh against the costs, moving classrooms outdoors, opening windows, etc., is easy to do. 8/

Moving classrooms outside (as discussed in #ApollosArrow) has been discussed for the COVID-19 pandemic from the beginning, and was used in the 1918 flu pandemic. nytimes.com/2020/07/17/nyr… 9/

Thanks to @PrasadKasibhat1 and to Jose Jimenez, John Fay, Elizabeth Albright, and William Pan (whose twitter handles were not easy to find) at @dukeU @DEL_Duke. 10/