Teacher Vaccinations

I know a cluster now consisting of a nurse, her teacher daughter and her teacher son in law who have all tested positive. They don't know who patient zero was in their cluster. Nurse tired with congestion; son in law had it go after his bowels, and daughter/wife doesn't have a single symptom whatsoever. All the remaining family members with whom they have been in contact are being tested over the next few days.

 

Yes, it happens. But isolated anecdotes shouldn't guide public policy. Just as much as this one cluster did exist, there are countless examples of schools safely reopening, around the world, without these clusters.

The fact is that schools for young kids (at least K-6, if not all the way up to K-12) are some of the safest working environments in America. I've posted recently in my posting history a paper showing that schools are SAFER than the communities where the teachers live, shop, and play... So many of them are refusing to go to work in a SAFER place than where they live... why?

Should they be vaccinated? 28 states caved in and made of them a priority group. But me, I think the priority groups should remain focused on risks such as age and co-morbidities. Teachers shouldn't be a special category because they work in a SAFER place, unlike we healthcare workers who have qualified as a priority because we work in a LESS SAFE place than the bulk of society.

So, I see teachers' vaccination as another example of privilege groups that get ahead of other more vulnerable groups, based on emotions rather than logics. "God forbid some teacher infects my precious Johnny!!!" And "God forbid that brat Johnny infects me!!!" While actually teachers are more likely to catch Covid-19 from co-workers or from their communities than at school, the same being valid for children. Also, US states, Canadian provinces, and other countries that have reopened schools did not see a surge in community transmission associated with schools. Also, the idea that kids will catch the virus in schools and bring it to their families, while possible, is not the rule. Studies have shown that kids are rarely the index case in a family, that is, the first person to get infected in a household and the one passing it to others. Transmission usually occurs the other way around.

Regarding the risk for children stemming from Covid-19 caught in school of dying or having serious sequelae, it is extremely small and smaller than the risk of tuberculosis, meningitis, and school bus accidents. It's smaller than the risk for children of the seasonal flu, actually.

Now, the risk for kids (and the economic damage for working parents) of keeping schools closed are much more significant. Suicide attempts in youth have dramatically increased in association with school closings... kids suffer psychological, cognitive, and socialization delays by not attending school in person. Disadvantaged kids miss healthy meals and the school nurse's care.

Reopening schools for young kids is a situation where clearly the benefits outweigh the risks. That's what science says.

People react to this with what they think is common sense: "My wife and I never had the flu; when our kid got to school age we started catching it, brought home by our kid who caught it in school; Covid-19 will be the same."

Sounds correct, right? Just, it isn't. Kids are efficient spreaders of the influenza virus... but poor spreaders of the SARS-CoV-2.

As much as some people still think of Covid-19 in terms of the flu, they are NOT the same virus and they behave differently. For example, kids have a smaller concentration of ACE2 receptors in their upper respiratory tract, and these receptors are needed for the SARS-CoV-2 to infect cells and thrive. So the SARS-CoV-2 is at a disadvantage in the organism of kids...

What should we do with older teachers and teachers with medical conditions? They should receive vaccination priority like all other people their age and all other people with their medical conditions. But a young and healthy teacher should NOT have priority over, say, an older grocery store clerk or meatpacker worker, or a cop, or an EMS tech, etc., simply because the teacher is a teacher. If anything, the teacher should be further down in the priority list (if he/she didn't otherwise qualify thanks to age and comorbidities) because of how safe schools are.

This said, older classes in high school and in college won't have the same favorable risk profile of younger classes. Also, this said, I'm entirely for precautions in school before reopening, such as PPE for teachers, social distancing, isolating kids in pods/clusters, spacing out desks and increasing ventilation, etc.

Still, teachers should do their part for the betterment of society. You don't see a janitor who cleans Covid-19 units in hospitals refusing to go to work. Nurses don't. Respiratory therapists don't. Grocery store clerks don't. Cops don't. And so on, and so forth. And these are all environments that are riskier than schools.

 

Why? Why would she have to go to school when there are no kids there to teach? Does she not own a computer? Is she not doing remote learning classes?

Teachers who are forced to work for 30 years before they're allowed to retire?

Um, that's not how teaching works.

Are you sure you know anything about teaching?

 

Which makes it even worse, because it's not a teachers union keeping the teachers from going back to teach in the schools, it's the school administration and/or the teachers themselves that are opting to keep their cushy stay-at-home gigs going.

 

As I mention in the OP, I find that it is logically inconsistent that we have stay at home directives of such vast extent as to have fundamentally changed the very social fabric of civilization and yet it seems to be debatable the risk that reopening public schools poses of spreading this virus.

Reading through your post it strikes me that you have offered arguments which apply to most all of the aspects of society that have been sequestered in response to your profession's claims of the disastrous results should we have failed to do so.

I am surprised to see you banter about the word science in your post. It's become the political equivalent of the word safety in engineering discussions.

There is absolutely no chance that whatever paper it was you posted or referenced in one of your posts had anywhere near the statistically significant amount of data to prove that schools are safer than staying at home. It's logically impossible that staying isolated at home is statistically more likely to result in infection than attending any populated gathering of humans regardless of their level of ACE2 receptors. How many open school systems were part of the research? Stats posit that if you studied 30 samples then this would represent all samples with 95% confidence. Did your paper study 30 separate school systems? K through 12? East Coast to West Coast? Across 7 Continents? Seems like an impossible study to have been performed in the US given that most all of its public schools are operating virtually.

 

If they are using the PCR test to 'determine' whether they have it or not, they may as well toss a coin to find the answer. Heads you have it, tails you don't.

Why do people place so much faith in the diagnosis of a test not designed for diagnostic purposes? I guess it's because the propagandists in the mainstream media have been doing it for a year, and the masses are oblivious to knowledge and truth.