I was talking to a guy I work with last week and he said his son’s school was going to start in person next week. It’s hard to wrap my head round why you would want more people together at the exact moment things are getting worse. I know it’s not easy being in government right now but you would think they would be pulling out all the stops to slow things down before winter starts.
There's your problem. Thinking.
Lots of push to get kids to go back to school in the communities with low disease burden. The kids need to go back etc. Haven't seen an epidemiologist yet who thinks this is a smart idea. I have seen various pediatricians, psych people saying it is SOOOOOO necessary. They are looking at the kids as if they were an isolated entity.
If we weren't a mobile society this might make sense. There isn't much disease and if they all stay in place nothing much comes in.
We are, however, a mobile society. Many of the people we have in my town commute an hour to get to work. If they are all in their containers then the traveling affects those they work with and their families. If they come home, expose the kids to it and the kids go to school then it seeds the community. The kids in the class come home and in turn seed their families who head out to work. In no time you have hundreds of people involved and interconnected.
When the kids were home then the only people we were worrying about were those who worked. Workplaces could attempt to mitigate exposure and risk. Now we add the kids in and we have a bunch of asymptomatic vectors.
It seems so simple to me. With a degree in Community Health it was drilled into us to find the source and isolate it. We still do this with little quibbling if the person has TB and that is a helluva lot less speedy to cause death. They shut schools, contact trace, test, treat and everyone is on the bandwagon.
When all the childhood diseases were rampant the public was much better at quarantine and we had a robust public health system. Now we have a gutted Public Health system, the CDC, FDA and HHS being run by unqualified people, a public who are selfish, spoiled and has no collective experience with how to deal with infectious disease. It is the perfect storm. Now we have the Vector in Chief and (words fail me).
My conclusion- We should tell people that folks with C-19 have TB. It would solve everything.