Thread by @Loretta_Torrago

Opening by calling quarantine “age old” as if, like leeching, it was largely quackery, @MonicaGandhi takes readers on a path of omissions & oversights before arriving, as if clandestinely, at a conclusion so sane, one suspects she is embarrassed by it.🧵
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/1…

Despite its age, much like leeching, quarantine has a modern-day place. Gandhi concedes as much in a paragraph mixed with a variety of platitudes about costs and benefits.

Though Gandhi is correct that “in many cases quarantines are probably doing more harm than good”, “probably” carries a lot of weight given that cases where quarantine would do more harm than good are indistinguishable from those where quarantine wouldn’t.

After all, it’s not as if we have a virus that politely tells us, in advance, to clear the room as it is about to launch into super-spreading mode.

And while it might be true the US kept schools closed longer than other “peer nations”, that is hardly a sign of either quarantine’s “popularity” or a demonstration of “inordinate fear”.

If anything, what quarantine’s use shows is that schools aren't equipped to keep kids in school despite + tests. Even by the CDC’s regrettable standards, masked students at least 3’ apart from a masked case don’t have to quarantine.

That schools can’t even do that, should be, to all of us, more of a problem than quarantines are.

Gandhi's case against quarantines includes “reproducible” studies that relied on multiple mitigations.

But where, in the US, are these multiple mitigations happening? In the study, North Carolina, for example, used screening, masks, 6 feet of distance and more as part of its Covid safety plan.

What’s more, even with teams in place to guide practices, compliance, especially amongst adults, was problematic raising a question as to whether these results are actually reproducible a full year after struggling to implement them in the first place.

Even worse for Gandhi, all of the studies cited used quarantine as part of their mitigation toolkit, so they hardly serve as proof that quarantine is unnecessary. Here is the guidance from the WI study.

Here is UT which used a stricter quarantine before adopting a modified quarantine reflecting current CDC guidance.

While admitting these studies are pre-Delta, Gandhi appears to console the entirety of the US based on LA schools' 0.5% infection rate.

Oh, would that the US goes as LA goes, with its low community case rates and strict protocols.

Pointing to the low rate of students who test positive after being sent home is nice,but what happens *if* sent home, doesn’t tell us *what would have happened* had they stayed.

Nor does it tell us how many of those sent home bothered with testing, much less reporting. We know from the NC study parents have little motive to test …

… unless it is to report a negative case which allows for abbreviated quarantine, a facet of LA school guidance Gandhi omits.

Placing her emphasis on the burden of testing negative to return earlier than 14 days,

Gandhi overlooks that only comes into play if there was less than 3’ of distancing.

Shifting to the burden of quarantine, Gandhi points out that food insecure families face a higher burden if a quarantined student was relying on meals at school.

However, if Gandhi were so concerned about that, it would be nice if she also alerted her readers to accommodations the USDA is making for just that scenario. fns.usda.gov/meals4kids

You might think, after all that, that Gandhi is against quarantine. You’d be wrong. At long last, placed in the penultimate paragraph, is what Gandhi actually believes about quarantines:

IOWs where:
district rates are acceptable;
in-school transmission is acceptable & stable;
the majority of adults are vaccinated;
schools are decently ventilated;
children are masked;
symptom screening is happening,
a policy of automatic,
14-day quarantine
is overkill.

It is beyond frustrating that, after engaging in the omissions, oversights and deceits that are sure to delight her fans, Gandhi lets us in on her little secret: what she believes isn’t as crazy as what she likes you to think she believes.

End