Today, Explained - Class is in quarantine

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

Schools in the US are reopening even though kids play a key role in community transmission of Covid-19. Georgia Public Broadcasting reporter Ellen Eldridge explains how going back to school in her state became a national controversy. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. If you were watching the Democratic National Convention last night, you saw Jill Biden give a speech from Brandywine High School in Wilmington, Delaware, a school where she used to teach. And as she almost immediately pointed out, Brandywine High felt eerie last night. You can hear the anxiety that echoes down empty hallways. There's no scent of new notebooks or freshly waxed floors. The rooms are dark as the bright young faces that should fill them are now confined to boxes on a computer screen. High schools, elementary schools, and colleges across the country are facing some really difficult decisions right now.

Keep kids at home where they don't get to really socialize, where they might fall behind because of a digital divide or a lack of supervision or a lack of meals, forego millions of dollars in tuition and housing needed to sustain massive institutions, or bring them back too soon. One of the biggest universities in the country to open during the pandemic just offered a case study in the latter. UNC at Chapel Hill opened on August 10th. Within a week, over 100 students tested positive for COVID, with another few hundred quarantined, and the school had to walk back its reopening and move all classes online. Mississippi reopened its public schools, and within week 71 of 82 of its school districts were reporting COVID-19 cases, with over 200 teachers testing positive and with over 2,000 now quarantining. And then there's Georgia, which you might have

heard about. Georgia was one of the first states to reopen its schools for the fall, but very much in the middle of summer. Cherokee County and Paulding County both opened for in-person classes on August 3rd. This is Ellen Eldridge. She's a healthcare reporter for Georgia Public Broadcasting, but she also has two kids who go to school in Cherokee County, Georgia. So she had direct experience with Georgia schools reopening a few weeks ago in the middle of summer. So I am just as confused as the rest of the world as to why Georgia goes back so early. But traditionally, my children who are now in second and fourth grade, they've gone back early August. And what's the process you go through as a parent when Cherokee County says schools are reopening in early August? The parents for Cherokee County schools were given a survey to fill out asking us

what our experience was in March and April when school shut down for the rest of the spring. And we ultimately had a quote-unquote choice to send our kids back to school virtual only, which it's slightly different. Actually, it's very different between elementary, middle, and high schools, or we could choose to send our children back face-to-face. And so that in and of itself created a lot of question and hands-wringing and decision-making because, of course, some parents work full-time, some parents are not working from home, some children have individualized educational plans or IEPs, special needs, what have you. So we had to make those decisions by July 17th.

I know you didn't send your kids back, but many parents in your county did. What safety guarantees were there? Social distancing?, masks? The superintendents and the school boards do have the ability to enforce mask mandates for their students. For the school board level for Cherokee County, Paulding County, Cobb County, what have you, it comes down to the school board and the superintendent. And so Paulding and Cherokee do not have a mask mandate. Huh. So no mask requirement, even though the CDC guidelines pretty clearly advise masks.

The mask issue in terms of why they did not enforce a mandate came down to a question of personal choice. A lot of parents said that there were students who would not be able to wear a mask or who would just choose not to follow the rules. It really is kind of hard to understand why they're holding fast to not mandating masks when the health experts and the CDC are saying so clearly that they do help. But ultimately, it comes down to personal freedom

and the people who feel very strongly about that. Tell me how the world comes to be aware of what's going on in these two school districts and in particular two schools there, right? Yeah, I think that because Georgia was one of the first states to open, if not the first state to open for business. And we had school districts planning to return not only to school, but to in-person school. The eyes of the nation were already upon us. But also when we returned to school, we had these pictures go viral right away. A group of seniors, all smiles. Guess what? Posing for the picture.

The only problem, no mask, no social distancing. They were criticizing the school district for taking such a photo being so close together and without masks. And Paulding County, very similar thing. One of the students decided to take a photo in the hallway, just showing the conditions. So the student was in the hallway with a look like any other day in high school, except the fact remains that we are in a pandemic. Students were not wearing masks. There was no social distancing. There appeared to be no staggering of the bell. And it was just a crowded hallway that when people saw it, they were shocked. And it quickly was shared on all the different social media channels.

15-year-old Hannah Waters, she says she posted the images of the overcrowded hallways here inside of North Paulding High School because she felt uneasy. She says her peers, most of them not social distancing, are wearing masks. And she didn't expect this photo to go viral. This virus is very serious, obviously. So I took that picture out of concern for the county and all the kids there and all the teachers and staff. So what happens after these photos blow up and are seen around the world? The leadership at North Paulding High School,

they weren't particularly thrilled that the school was getting so much attention for such a negative kind of thing. high school, they weren't particularly thrilled that the school was getting so much attention for such a negative kind of thing. And the powers that be at the school, I guess it falls on the superintendent and the school principal, they decided to suspend two students who had shared photos that went viral showing crowded hallways, saying that taking and posting those photos was a violation of the existing social media policy saying that you can't share photos of students without their permission or something to that effect. But obviously the public backlash came because it was being enforced in this moment because of the public and nationwide embarrassment and the attention on the school.

So just to be clear here, instead of saying, oh, we made a mistake, we should have adhered to CDC guidelines a little bit better, we should have protected these students, our teachers, they punish the students who share the photos? That is what happened. And there's been a lot of criticism as well saying, and I certainly remember from my high school days, if you wear a t-shirt with an expletive word on it, a curse word on it, or you wear a spaghetti strap halter top or something, they're going to enforce dress code. But yet they're saying that they would be unable to enforce a mask mandate in schools. How did the school counties, the state, the country react to that? Yeah, it didn't

go over well when they tried to suspend students for sharing just the truth of what was going on, what the situation was the first day, really, back in school. I firmly believe that it was the national attention and the public backlash that made the superintendent and the principal decide to cancel the suspensions and allow the students back in school. The whistle blowing teenager who was suspended for posting images of jam-packed hallways at her high school told me the principal is now lifting the suspension following an outcry of support. He apologized and he deleted the suspension so there's no, like, I can go back to school on Monday. Do the schools change their policies on mask wearing, social distancing, staggering hallway traffic?

They've most certainly not changed their policy on a mask mandate. Really? And in Cherokee County, it's still, it's the top story on the local TV news station here because Cherokee County, even though it's technically outside of the metro Atlanta area, we're farther north, Cherokee County is still making headlines because now I believe it's more than 2,500 teachers and students currently quarantined. Paulding County is currently reporting just over 50 cases of coronavirus, positive coronavirus tests within their school district. So that means that we've got classrooms where half of the students are out. They're trying, you know, they wanted to go back to school face to face. They wanted their in-person instruction. But because of the transmission of the coronavirus, they're now in a situation where they're trying to keep up from home. And the teachers have to have double the work, if not more, because they've got to keep

up with their in-person students as well as those who are now quarantined at home. How is that being justified? COVID is spreading, schools are open, still no mask mandate. A lot of the language, even from the superintendent in his emails to parents, it seems contradictory because it sounds like out of one side of their mouths, they're saying, get ready for schools to close. And the other side, I mean, I believe that they do want to stay open, that it is important for students to see their teachers and to be in person. But it seems like everybody is just waiting for that tipping point when the schools will close down. Although the people in

charge of making that decision have not said that that's going to be what happens or when. Just the optics of this situation where you had packed hallways, no masks, no social distancing, group photos, suspensions of the students who spread the word, then recalling those suspensions, and then having increased community spread in these respective counties. That to me just feels like a disaster. It just feels like a lot of drama that could have been avoided. I cannot say I disagree that the drama could have been avoided, but I can also tell you that in Cherokee County here, we do have a group of parents and supporters, school board members, who are part of a group dedicated to staying positive, as it were. And I reported myself, they held a positivity rally to support the teachers and the board for staying in person. This group of parents,

they're going around creating chalk drawings outside the schools. Are the chalk drawings of dead bodies? No, Sean, they are not. The chalk drawings are saying, you know, we support our schools. And of course, there's people who criticize that, calling it toxic positivity, comparing it to the meme of the dog in the room on fire. Yeah, magical thinking. There's certainly something to be said for seeing the

bright side. But yeah, we're living through a pandemic. And while evidence is showing pretty strongly that younger people, for the most part, are not as seriously affected by COVID-19, it spreads. Children, young people are very capable of spreading coronavirus. And that means that those people in our society who are more susceptible are going to be more likely to get it and suffer the consequences. And some of those consequences include filling up the emergency rooms and the ICUs. Ellen Eldridge, she's a health healthcare reporter at Georgia Public Broadcasting. You can find and support her work at gpb.org. After the break, the science so far of kids transmitting COVID-19.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Lois, partially you've been covering the science of COVID for Vox. We just heard about these schools in Georgia and we know there are similar situations across the country.

Adding to the confusion are CDC guidelines, which changed after the Trump administration didn't like them. And adding to that confusion, surely, is President Trump himself claiming kids are practically immune to COVID. What do we really know about kids getting and transmitting COVID? Originally, people were thinking that kids might get COVID-19 less often than adults after they were exposed. Most children, we should say here, have mild symptoms. The most common symptoms in kids are a fever and a cough. But there's growing evidence that kids with pre-existing conditions like heart

disease have increased risk of having a severe case. And overall, even though kids are less likely to end up in a hospital, if they do get hospitalized, they end up in the ICU at comparative rates to adults. Some kids also have a multi-system inflammatory syndrome, which looks like a rash and it can end up being deadly. It mimics something called Kawasaki disease. This is pretty rare, but we should also say that we don't know about the long-term effects on children yet. Okay, bottom line, kids get this, kids spread this. Children of all ages can get COVID-19, and experts now think they might play an important role in community transmission. Do we know how much of a difference there is in risks between young children versus,

say, adolescents? And can we glean any relevant conclusions about whether we should be opening up an elementary school at one point versus, say, a high school at another? Yeah, that's a great question. And there does seem to be a difference in between younger kids and teenagers, both in terms of how likely they are to get infected and how likely they are to have a severe case if they are infected. It's still on the early side of being able to say much conclusively, but it appears that between the time of middle school, kids start to respond to COVID-19 at about the same rates as adults do. That means that middle and high schools might have different risks than elementary schools. What does it mean for teachers across the board, I suppose? I mean,

that's a big part of the equation here. There's 30 kids in a classroom potentially, but there's only one teacher. And if we lose said teacher, then there might not be anyone who wants to come in and teach the 30 kids, right? The U.S. Department of Education is not publicly tracking COVID-19's impacts on schools, like the number of students who are being quarantined or school closures anywhere. Why not? That's a great question. One Kansas teacher who was really disturbed by the lack of this data created a crowdsourced Google spreadsheet using media reports to track positive cases of COVID-19 associated with schools.

And there are some legitimate questions because it's crowdsourced about this spreadsheet's accuracy, but it shows that more than 2,000 students and staff have already tested positive for COVID-19 since early July. And that teachers in multiple states have already died. I just... That is so seriously unacceptable. We're letting our teachers die right now? How should schools and superintendents and politicians be thinking about community transmission as they consider reopening and reclosing and re-reopening and the potential loss of students' and teachers' lives here, Lois? So this is another place that the lack of federal leadership has really crippled our ability to respond to the pandemic.

Everyone I've interviewed has said that ultimately community transmission is a huge and probably the most important factor in school safety. But what's safe enough for community transmission is a decision that's being left up to the states. They all tend to look at pretty similar things. Oregon, for example, says that counties must have fewer than 10 cases in 100,000 people. Arizona says less than 100 cases per 100,000 people, as well as other standards like hospital capacity. But basically, this is yet another place where school districts and families themselves are being left to make individual decisions about something that has a collective risk. Are there places doing this well, be they in the United States or elsewhere? Are there like a set of best practices that have been established at this point?

You can look at other countries where sometimes data is easier to find than in the U.S. But it's pretty hard to directly compare apples to apples between countries because there are other measures that have happened at the same time, which makes it hard to tease apart the data. But there's still a definite trend. Countries like Vietnam and New Zealand that have generally done a good job have successfully reopened schools. There are factors that can make reopening schools safer, like mask wearing and social distancing and regular testing and adequate contact tracing, many of which are not things that the U.S. is prepared to do right now. Yeah, it's a grim picture altogether. And that just brings us back to this really tough call that school districts are having to make, right?

Bring kids back to school where they can socialize, where they can learn new material, where they can get meals easily, or keep them at home where they experience, who knows, a whole raft of issues that people don't want kids experiencing, be it the digital divide, be it antisocial behavior, be it staying up till 4 a.m. working on a homework packet because all of a sudden you just need to turn it in at whatever time of day, right? Yeah, schools provide a lot of services that aren't just the teaching that happens in the classroom. We've heard a lot about schools provide free lunch for millions of children across the country, and they provide child care for working families. They provide important socialization for kids that's necessary for psychological development. Nobody wants children to not be able to go back to school. The only question is whether the alternative is worse.

All right, we've heard from a reporter and a reporter who's a parent, but what about the kids? We found one who was happy to chat with us between digital classes this afternoon. My name is Vivian. I'm in fifth grade and I go to Sixes Elementary in Canton, Georgia, which is not great because it was on national news the first day of school because there was a coronavirus case in second grade and the whole class is quarantined and stuff. I think there are like 70 something people quarantined in my school. It's crazy.

So what's quarantine school like? What's an average day for you like? I wake up, and maybe I take a shower, and maybe I don't, and then I get on the computer. But it's hard because, like, on the couple first days of school, I wanted to make new friends, because that's what you'd normally do at school. But I really couldn't, because every time I would try to interact with people, I would get in trouble for it and say it was disrupting the class. When normally on breaks, you would just be able to like lunch and stuff or recess. You would just be able to like talk and make new friends. But on this,

you just get off the computer. You can't make any new friends. Yeah. And like, as far as learning goes, how do you find doing division from home, from your room versus doing it in the classroom? I actually find it harder, but it's weird because I get better grades when I'm here, but I find it harder. I guess I just try harder or something. I don't know. How do your friends feel about it? Have you talked to them about it? Well, most of my friends aren't digital, but the one friend that I do have that's digital, her name is Izzy. She's probably going to watch this tomorrow because she thinks I'm famous. Should we say hi to Izzy? Hi, Izzy.

She isn't going to listen. She is doing digital in the same class as me. I don't really get to talk to her much on digital because we have to be focused all the time, but I do have her number. So I play Roblox with her and stuff. But she wishes her parents had let her go to school, but she knows it's for a good reason, kind of like me. My friends who are doing school, like my friend Peyton and Lacey, they've told me lots of stuff about the facts that masks aren't mandatory. And some of them wish they were, some of them wish they weren't. It's different. What would you like to see your school do to keep you safe so you can go back?

I think that they should make masks mandatory for students. Definitely make sure you get tested frequently, not a lot, but like every now and again, just to make sure you don't have COVID because all it takes is one person. I think that the teachers should wear masks mandatory and get tested as well. I think that they should probably have temperature checks every week or so. I need to protect my family. If I don't, I don't know what will happen and I don't want to know. Well, I think that's the right decision to make, Vivian. I hope you stay safe. I hope your family stays safe. Thank you for making time for us today. Thanks for chatting after school. Bye. Bye.