Gonna guess that their main concern is “HIPPO privacy.” And to prevent panic. because their jobs get worse if there is panic, even (or especially) if panic is not the optimal reaction.
Im an idiot. My wife showed me the website last night. Man I feel old not being able to use the internet to find something simple. I think their website was designed for mobile app, so my 1999 ‘have to use a real computer to look at everything!’ was screwing me up.
The answer was 6. 6 cases in the Elementary school where my kids are this year.
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thanks for this advice- while in this case I was just missing it, its good general advice on how to deal with school issues.
in other news- My school was able to finally complete a public meetings after 2 failed attempts that were interrupted by a few angry parents. (one of those parents is still publicly loud, but I think was banned from the public meetings). They allowed everyone to speak in an orderly fashioned. The board simply listened without commenting.
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Better general advice: let wife handle it.
For shits and giggles, I typed “COVID” in the search of my local public school district: 0 results. Wondering if the search is not searching as best as it could.
Then checked for any info about COVID on the website of the school my wife works… daily announcements stop in March 2020. It’s possible that Facebook and Twitter are the primary means of communication, but who knows?
I’ll ask my wife if there is a secret, phone-only app to keep the olds from knowing.
We are up to 18 total cases since we started two months ago, staff and students combined. One “bad” week with eight cases, but spread out over different grade levels on different days so not a school-based outbreak. That was a couple weeks ago and only one additional case since then.
In our entire school district there have only been 3 elementary school outbreaks - 8 first graders in one elementary, 16 fifth graders in a different elementary, and 5 sixth graders in a third elementary. There are 68 total elementary schools in the district for reference.
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Around 0.2% of students in my district are in the “Positive for COVID bucket” on the district website. This has been fairly constant so far this year.
For each positive student, there are about 5 in quarantine and 10 additional close contacts. Close contacts it looks like are masked students 3-6 feet from a positive case.
School COVID-19 spread remains high in Minnesota
12:10PM
More than 16% of Minnesota’s 2,500 pre-K-12 school buildings listed with COVID-19 outbreaks of five or more infections in a two-week period.
details
School COVID-19 spread remains high in Minnesota
More than 16% of Minnesota’s 2,500 pre-K-12 school buildings listed with COVID-19 outbreaks of five or more infections in a two-week period.
By Jeremy Olson Star Tribune
OCTOBER 7, 2021 — 12:10PM
LEILA NAVIDI, STAR TRIBUNE
Evette Brinkley-Rock, 12, of Minneapolis, got her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine from registered nurse Beverly Propes during a vaccination event at Edison High School on Monday.
Coronavirus infections linked to pre-K-12 schools have risen to record levels in the first month of classes, but Minnesota health and education leaders remain confident the state could weather the latest pandemic wave with more mask-wearing and testing and fewer building closures and quarantines.
The Minnesota Department of Health on Thursday reported 1,973 infections in pre-K-12 buildings in the week ending Sept. 25, and 2,525 in the week before that — the highest totals since the start of the pandemic 19 months ago. The state also reported 405 outbreaks in which five or more students or staff members were in the same school building while infectious over a two-week period. That is an increase from 232 the prior week.
Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday visited Carver Elementary School in Maplewood, which he believed had a model strategy in place to prevent coronavirus spread. The school, along with others in the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale District 622, requires mask-wearing, installs portable air purifiers in classrooms and uses surveillance testing every two weeks of staff members along with rapid take-home testing for students with suspicious symptoms and members of their households.
Keeping schools open and children safe “are not mutually exclusive,” Walz said. “They [both] can be done. We’ve learned a lot in the last 18 months.”
While children are at lower risk of severe COVID-19, Walz said that coronavirus infections contributed to an “unacceptable” crowding of hospitals that left Minnesota with only two open pediatric intensive care unit beds at one point last week. State leaders also are concerned that children at lower risk can carry the virus to people at higher risk and increase Minnesota’s toll beyond the current 732,001 coronavirus infections and 8,275 deaths.
The total includes 2,674 infections and 32 deaths reported on Thursday in Minnesota, which a month ago had one of the lowest infection rates in the country but now has one of the highest as other states emerge from severe COVID-19 waves fueled by a fast-spreading delta variant.
Inpatient cases of COVID-19 in Minnesota hospitals increased to 881 on Wednesday and included 221 patients needing intensive care.
Despite the surge in pre-K-12 infections, schools haven’t been as quick to close buildings or switch to full or hybrid distance learning models. Edison High School in Minneapolis and Vaughan-Steffensrud Elementary School in Chisholm returned to in-person classes this week following brief closures in response to viral activity. Quarantines of entire varsity sports teams that cancel seasons or games haven’t been occurring as much, either.
Access to COVID-19 vaccine is one key reason, school officials said, even though immunization rates remain lowest in eligible school-age children.
“Athletes take that very seriously because they want to be able to continue to play,” said Christine Tucci Osorio, superintendent of the 622 district. “When students are exposed, if they’ve already been vaccinated, they aren’t out of the picture now because they’re … protected.”
The first-dose vaccination rate among eligible Minnesotans 12 and older is 73.7% according to state data, which is lower than the rate reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because it doesn’t include doses provided at federal facilities. That rate declines to 59% among Minnesotans 16 to 17 and 54% among those 12 to 15 who are eligible for the Pfizer version of vaccine.
Walz said he expects eligibility to drop to age 5 by November. Pfizer on Thursday applied for emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to provide vaccine to this younger age group based on clinical trial data. Walz commended schools such as Carver and predicted that broad use of COVID-19 testing will reduce quarantines and school closures.
“This building has done it,” he said outside Carver. “Those kids are in there learning and they are about as safe as we can make them. In about three weeks, we can make them a lot safer when we’re going to be able to get the vaccine to them.”
Staff writer Glenn Howatt contributed to this report.
Jeremy Olson • 612-673-7744
Where I am it’s pretty diverse. We have multiple elementary schools. One has 5 cases all year. The one that I am closest to (and really close to the 5 case one) is at 38.
There’s not a lot of difference in the size of school, or communities in terms of income, political lean, or anything else.
I think we have more Orthodox Jews where I live due to proximity to a synagogue. But I think their vaccination rates aren’t so low any more, after all the issues in NYC? I doubt they’re a material portion of kids at the school either… don’t they tend to home school or go to a special private school? So I kinda doubt that’s the reason.
But I’m not sure what the reason is other than random variation.
“Orthodox Jews” is actually a pretty broad category. The sort of Orthodox Jews who send their kids to public school tend to be doctors and tend to have a very high vax rate. The ones who had a low vax rate tend to live in somewhat insular communities, keep their kids in schools run by their communities, and have a lot of the same issues with “distrusting outsiders” as many other minority groups. I don’t know if those communities have signed on to vaccination, but they aren’t the ones sending kids to your local public school.
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my district has 5 such schools. as of last friday at least. had to shut down one 5th grade class and one 4th grade class (different buildings). They update the website friday PM, so…could be more!
That said, 5 cases over a 2 week period as the threshold of an outbreak seems lowish. The buildings have 400-400-400-700-1000-1200 students in them. Is 5 the right number? maybe, maybe not.
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I suspect it’s the first group in my community then, so probably not the reason the elementary school 1 mile away has 7.5x the infections of the one 4 miles away.
Modeling is hard. Note they predicted 39K and they had 10K. School age population of roughly 780K.
Utah Health Department model overestimated school-age cases by nearly 29,000 for September, officials say
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah saw about 29,000 fewer COVID-19 cases in school-age children in September than previous models estimated, according to the Utah Department of Health.
“In August, we estimated there could be 39,000 COVID-19 cases in September among school-aged kids in Utah. We were way off. The actual number was 9,957, well below our projection,” the Utah Department of Health said in a recent tweet.
Officials with the department acknowledged that public health modeling is “complex,” as it attempts to predict behavior based on past measures.
“Our modeling relied on factors like vaccination rates of teens, potential immunity from past cases, and transmission rates,” the department said. “These factors strongly suggested that school-age cases were going to be a lot higher this September than September last year.”
Summary
The rates were 3.6 times higher than last year, but not 13.9 times higher as predicted. Officials called the data from the first few weeks of the school year “promising.”
“We will continue to be transparent and provide accurate information to all Utahns about #COVID19. We will continue to learn and grow as we respond to this disease,” the department tweeted.
Salt Lake County case rates
In Salt Lake County, which has been one of the largest hotspots of the disease throughout the pandemic, 3,125 school-associated cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed since the school year began, said Dr. Angela Dunn, executive director of the Salt Lake County Health Department, during a County Council meeting on Tuesday.
About half of those cases have occurred in elementary schools, according to Dunn.
The lowest case rates for the first 40 days of school occurred in Salt Lake City School District, she tweeted Tuesday.
The district is the only in Salt Lake County with a mask mandate, which was ordered by Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall after a K-6 mask mandate requested by Dunn was overturned by the County Council.
In the first 49 days of school throughout the county, 33 children under age 18 required hospitalization due to COVID-19, Dunn tweeted.
Dunn said case counts across the county and COVID-19 intensive care unit use continue to decrease, even though the percent positivity rate has ticked up slightly. But Dunn said the rate is stable, indicating a plateau.
Case counts are decreasing in all age groups except those ages 40-49, she said.
Latest Utah data
Utah health officials reported 1,975 new COVID-19 cases and 12 deaths on Wednesday.
School-age children accounted for 434 of the latest cases — 187 cases were ages 5-10, 106 cases were 11-13, and 141 cases were 14-17, according to a daily updated given by the Utah Department of Health.
The rolling, seven-day average for positive tests is 1,422 per day, and the average percent positivity rate of those tested is 15.4%.
Health care workers provided 10,124 vaccine doses since the previous day’s report, bringing total doses given in Utah to 3,525,706.
In the last 28 days, unvaccinated residents have faced 6.4 times greater risk of dying from COVID-19, 7 times greater risk of being hospitalized due to COVID-19, and 6.3 times greater risk of testing positive for COVID-19 than vaccinated people.
Since Feb. 1, people who are unvaccinated are at four times greater risk of dying from COVID-19, 4.8 times greater risk of being hospitalized due to COVID-19, and 4 times greater risk of testing positive for COVID-19 than vaccinated people, data shows.
Of Wednesday’s cases, 397 were confirmed as “breakthrough” cases, meaning they had been fully vaccinated more than two weeks ago. The state also confirmed 17 new breakthrough hospitalizations and three breakthrough deaths, according to the data.
State health officials and doctors have noted receiving the vaccine does not mean someone will not contract the coronavirus, but in most cases it is protective against serious illness. The vaccine also does not cause a person to get COVID-19.
Since vaccines became available to the public early this year, the state has confirmed 19,806 breakthrough cases, 1,011 breakthrough hospitalizations and 131 breakthrough deaths.
On Wednesday, 575 patients throughout Utah were hospitalized with the coronavirus, an increase of 19 since Tuesday.
The latest deaths include:
- A Sanpete County man between the ages of 65 and 84, who was hospitalized when he died.
- An Iron County man, 45-64, long-term care facility resident.
- A Salt Lake County man, 25-44, hospitalized.
- A Duchesne County woman, 25-44, hospitalized.
- A Uintah County woman, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Washington County man, older than 85, hospitalized.
- A Tooele County man, 45-64, hospitalized.
- A Davis County woman, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Washington County woman, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Weber County man, older than 85, unknown if hospitalized.
- A Utah County man, older than 85, unknown if hospitalized.
- A Utah County man, 65-84, unknown if hospitalized.
They estimated that 5% of students would catch Covid in one month? That’s pretty pessimistic!
Although 1.2% in a month is nothing to sneeze at.
All models are wrong, but some are useful. - Wayne Michael Scott Gretzky
The definition of “outbreak” used in the recent CDC “study” based on 2 counties in Arizona was 2 cases over a 2 week period.
And yes, the study is hot garbage. Here’s a good summary of a few of the reasons:
https://twitter.com/Emily_Burns_V/status/1446158225754279939?t=G3vCHgT0fTSUMCfRdWed-A&s=19
Also, when are the mods going to correct this thread title for factual accuracy?
I wonder if Emily Burns would still be saying it was garbage if it showed schools with mask mandates had more outbreaks than those without.
The study advertises itself as a “crude”. I don’t think the authors intend it to function as the foundation beneath public policy. That tweet seems a bit shrill.
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I’ve been auditing MIT’s course on covid again this year
Wednesday at 9am
And the most recent lecturer was Rochelle Walensky, Director, Centers for Disease Control. She said that the CDC looked at how kids caught covid last year, and
- they were more likely to catch it when schools were open
- but they mostly didn’t catch it at school, especially at schools that used masks and had good ventilation. They mostly caught it at birthday parties and other social gatherings.
Which is why the CDC recommended in-person instruction with other mitigation techniques.
And yet, this “crude” was published by the CDC with the first sentence in the intro reminding readers what the CDC’s policy recommendation is, & it has been cited by many people who want to use it to influence public policy. I haven’t seen any of the authors state that it shouldn’t be used to support the CDC’s preferred policy.
I wonder if magillaG would call this tweet “shrill” if it were written by a man. 
Did she share how they know this?
Also, did she happen to mention whether CDC ever looks beyond US borders? We know the Secretary of Education isn’t familiar with data from abroad, but you’d think the CDC might be.
Huge swaths of Europe don’t mask school children, some places never have, and virtually nowhere in Europe has ever masked toddlers. Yet here we are.