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In California, a child faces the new truth of the COVID-19 era.
Science COVID-19 reports are supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Schools around the world have once returned to the stage for a vast and largely out-of-control experience.
When schools from New Zealand to Norway and Japan re-opened in April and May, while the first wave of COVID-19 cases declined, the virus remained largely at bay. The school confrontation overcayed the threat of viral spread among young people and teachers, and schools with wider communities.
As a result, many establishments that had moved cautiously at first opened the doors of the study rooms in August and September. Schools in the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands have moved from small cycling organisations to full-size classes. Cities like Montreal that Closed Schools welcomed students into the house. In Manaus, Brazil, a city with one of coVID-19 deaths worldwide, more than 100,000 students have returned to class. Teenagers filled the aisles in Georgia, Iowa and Texas. the context is very different now: in many areas, COVID-19 has reached even higher degrees than at the beginning of the year.
In July, Science tested the maximum number of encouraging classes since the first reopenings, between schools in spaces where at least COVID-19 was leaked. In addition, a closer look at school openings in countries where the virus has resurfaced provides a more complex picture of the dangers and how they can be managed.
The virus has revealed disparities between and within countries, and among the most disturbing peaks are in schools; in many countries, such as India, Mexico and Indonesia, maximum schools remain closed. Angels to Chicago, who would likely struggle to provide enough soap and toilet paper, continue to be informed at home, while wealthy personal schools have set up tents to inform the outside and have hired more teachers to reduce the already small classes. “from school to school are unforgivable and heartbreaking,” says Tom Kelly, principal of The Horace Mann School, a personal school in New York that has leveraged many resources to open.
Early evidence, accumulated through researchers with young people at school or a coaching spouse, suggests that schools would possibly remain open even in the face of significant network distribution, given strong security measures and political will. Many countries are final restaurants, bars and gymnasiums, imploring citizens to avoid social gatherings in donations to engage spread and keep schools open. Sometimes this has not been enough: the Czech Republic, Russia and Austria have closed schools due to the large number of cases in October and early November.
“I think schools close at the end,” says Michael Wagner, a microbial environmentalist at the University of Vienna who is part of a consortium that reads the prevalence of the virus in Austrian schools, but warns that it is an illusion to recommend that open schools may not feed the spread of the virus. Closing them may be “one of the strictest measures we have, but also one of the most expensive” for children.
In Austria, schools lasted until 17 November. But other countries, such as South Korea and Australia, have closed many schools at the first sign of construction in cases where the government tries to cancel even the transmission of the modest network. “The verbal exchange is quite polarized right now about whether schools will be open or closed,” says Nisha Thampi, an infectious disease pediatrician at the University of Ottawa. “People interpret knowledge one way or another to justify one ending or another. “
The silent spread of the virus in hallways and study rooms is an anxiety that corrodes teachers and parents. Most schools have protective layers, such as masking needs or physical distance to prevent an epidemic if a student or staff member introduces COVID-19 into But with the outbreak of virus cases in many communities, those railings are undergoing a resistance test. “You’re always on pins and needles,” says Bradford Gioia, director of Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, an 800 -boys’ school for people ranging from grades 7 to 12.
So far, scientists say, outbreaks in schools appear to be less common than previously feared, but knowledge is scarce. At Duke University, Danny Benjamin and Kanecia Zimmerman, pediatricians and epidemiologists, are working with more than 50 school districts, as well as local fitness departments, to screen for COVID-1nine in schools. The effort includes gathering knowledge about groups and cases of singles from a subset of six school districts (50,000 academic and staff) during the first nine weeks of school in the user. Community spread in North Carolina has been high, with the team recording 1nine7 cases of COVID-1nine acquired outdoors from school and only 8 proved to be ‘secondary transmission’ or spread from one user to another. some other inmate of a school. These numbers are almost in fact examples of the absence of asymptomatic infections. But Benjamin thinks the knowledge backs up the technique North Carolina schools are using, with sleek little sizes and masks for one and all. He estimates that for every 10,000 more people in school, there will be between one and five cases of secondary transmission every two months or so.
Students are slashed in the aisle of a in Glasgow, Scotland.
Understanding why epidemics occur can help schools strengthen their protections. According to Benjamin’s data, an epidemic was attributed to an organization of teachers who shared lunch for lunch. Inconsistent masking in pre-K elegance in Tennessee was similar to a small epidemic there. Mann’s principal was alarmed when three teachers tested positive in quick succession. He closed high school and high school for two weeks, but touch seek warned that the cases were not similar and no one else tested positive for the closure.
Many scholars rightly raise considerations about school expansion, but the lives of other young people are intertwined and the virus has a good chance of infecting other young people outside of school. “Children have a dance class, a football class, a school bus,” says Gail Carter-Hamilton, a nurse at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health who supplies local schools.
Virus sequencing can help show if there are multiple cases in a related school. But it’s hardly ever done, says Trevor Bedford, a viral genome sequencing expert at fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “It’s frustrating,” he says.
Many experts lament that while fitness officials have a small number of cases in schools, recordkeeping is inconsistent, as is transparency, that is, in epidemic investigations. “Show us the knowledge,” says Amy Greer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Guelph. It recognizes that the coverage of individual privacy is essential, however, unidentified knowledge can still be studied and shared. “We want to be able to perceive what knowledge we have about school transmission,” he says.
Montgomery Bell Academy conducts on-site testing and, for several days, some students stay home after testing positive, and more are quarantined due to close contact with an inflamed person. Most of the cases were attributed to outdoor activities, 3 children in an examination room of six others contracted the virus. Transparency about viral success in a school can be difficult, but more and more Gioia is in the aspect of openness. “Most other people appreciate honesty,” he says.
Sports. Dated. Birthday Parties Orchestra Practice. When schools open, other student activities are more likely to resume, and that worries researchers.
“Families are turning to schools for what they’re doing well,” says Jennifer Lerner, who studies the psychology of judgment and decision-making at Harvard University. Even when schools are doing everything they can to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 inside their buildings, simply opening can send an involuntary message that the aggregate is benign, and provides more opportunities to do so.
Looking at how others assess risk, Lerner refers to a discovery paper published in 1987 in Science, in which psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon wrote that the more dubious and uncontrollable something seems, the harder it is for others. with the school they look familiar and controllable and therefore would possibly seem less difficult, Greer says. She found in a national survey that 40% of families have their children in at least one extracurricular activity, and some “have young people who participate in after-school activities five days a week. “
For many people, it’s hard to believe in a school without sport, but the possibility of the virus spreading there is imminent. In the United States, many epidemics in August have been attributed to football practices. Earlier this month, Iowa High School Girls Athletic Union hosted a state volleyball championship that brought together 20,000 enthusiasts and the school’s best players to an indoor stadium, while cases in the host city, Cedar Rapids, reached records and hospitals reached full capacity. In Ontario, Canada, outbreaks have been connected to youth hockey; It is not known whether the COVID-19 spread during the game itself or during meetings with family and friends afterwards. “Schools are going to have a really challenging time with sport,” Benjamin says. “It’s hard to protect them. “
High-level athletes held a volleyball championship in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where cases are increasing.
Holidays have also been a challenge around the world. In Cape Town, South Africa, a meeting of the best school academics in a bar sparked an epidemic that infided more than 80 people. At Lerner’s daughter’s school, all families signed a commitment that, among other things, she emphasized compliance with state restrictions on social communities. When several women were having a party, they had to be quarantined at home for two weeks.
For fitness officials, a sensitive balance may be required. The message to school communities, Lerner says, will have to be: “There is great merit in opening schools. To maintain this,” we want to make sure that we reduce the dangers in every other place imaginable. “
As temperatures drop in the Northern Hemisphere, many schools no longer radiate the comfort they used to do. The coronavirus pandemic has created a new routine: open windows, regardless of the weather.
In Germany, students wear winter coats and hats in class; in the UK, they are allowed to wear additional garments over uniforms. This is one component of an effort to disperse all the exhaled viral components before they can motivate them.
“The airflow patterns you have internal make a big difference in your potential exposure,” says Paul Linden, who studies fluid mechanics at the University of Cambridge and published an article in September on how ventilation can prevent viral spread. But with the variability of weather conditions, ventilation systems, length and location of the windows, the recommendation is elusive. “It’s very difficult to be prescriptive,” he says.
Instead of delving into the calculations for each interior space, scientists like Linden adopt an undeniable alternative: high-quality carbon dioxide (CO2) monitors, which charge as little as $100. Because CO2 is exhaled while other people breathe, it can serve as an indicator of the amount of air exhaled and the possible virus that has accumulated. Outdoors, the CO2 concentration is approximately 400 portions consistent with millions (ppm). “What we’re proposing for schools is for CO2 to be less than 700 ppm,” even if everyone wears a mask, says José-Luis Jiménez, an aerosol scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who models the threat of transmission. In a Washington state church, where a March epidemic was born among choir members, Jimenez’s model suggests that CO2 degrees were approximately 2500 ppm.
In Bonn, Germany, young people open windows to improve outside airflow and minimize virus-laden aerosols in the classroom.
Preliminary evidence from CO2 monitors in schools suggests that more paints are needed. Linden found that CO2 grades in study rooms before the pandemic were approximately twice as high in winter as in summer. In Madrid, Javier Ballester, a dynamic fluid expert at the University of Zaragoza, discovered that when the windows are closed, a popular elegance with 15 academics exceeds 1000 ppm in just 15 to 20 minutes.
Part of the challenge is practical. If young people have “an icy cold, it may not help in their learning experience,” says Henry Burridge, a fluid mechanics specialist at Imperial College London. But Ballester’s calculations recommend that opening several 1. 5-centimeter windows each is probably enough. another compromise: the study rooms can leave the windows closed for 20 minutes and then open them wide for five minutes (Berlin schools had to install tens of thousands of new handles on the windows that had been sealed).
Some schools are adding professional-quality air filters to detect viruses, and scientists are coming up with other artistic solutions. Frank Helleis, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemischeck, has developed a bell formula over the offices of academics and He and his colleagues review amenities at a school in Mainz, Germany, where his wife is a teacher. Cone-shaped bells hang from the ceiling, connected to tubes leading to a window, where a fan blows air outwards. Hot air around a user rises, bringing exhaled aerosols to the hood, which collects about 90% of the aerosols before they can circulate, Helleis said. “It happens quickly, in 10 seconds. ” Built with materials that can be purchased in DIY stores, the design can be obtained for free.
Ballester, whose wife is also a teacher, tried to place a popular air purifier on a fan. Early tests show that it is almost as effective as professional quality machines. Most schools can’t spend $500 according to class, Ballester says, “but if it’s $50 or $60, they could. “Fans with clean outlets that purify indoor air” work very well,” says Jimenez, and are already used in spaces with wildfires or air pollution. These answers can be especially useful for study rooms with few or no windows, a non-unusual configuration in US schools. Which has prompted considerations about reopening.
Since May, teenagers at Carolinum Gymnasium, a school in Neustrelitz, Germany, have rubbed their throats twice a week. Along with students, staff and the circle of relatives from six other schools and a day care center, teenagers send the samples to Centogene, a biotechnology company. The company’s online page deceives: “School despite the coronavirus, but safe!To date, it has conducted approximately 40,000 tests, which, according to Volkmar Weckesser, Centogene’s leading data manager, have known” multiple “instances and without epidemics. “We can’t say what would have happened if we hadn’t been there,” he admits, but isolation of instances has suppressed his chance of triggering more infections.
Coronavirus testing in schools is scattered, reflecting key uncertainties, adding to the extent of the spread of the virus among young people and the varying precision of the tests. Some systems use follow-up tests, such as New York City, which has performed monthly tests at 10%. 20% of the staff and faculty in many public schools. Wagner of the University of Vienna and his colleagues are evaluating academics and teachers in Austrian schools, and this fall revealed that about one in 250 people were inflamed without symptoms.
Policy verification has its uses. But this requires potentially scarce resources and can give a false image, Benjamin warns of Duke. Even the most accurate checks would likely ignore infections at an early stage. “Your public aptitude interventions assume that everyone is infected,” he says.
A student suffers from a coronavirus on the outskirts of Sao Paulo.
Several studies have resorted to controls to investigate a wonderful unknown: if other people without symptoms spread SARS-CoV-2 in school. At Charité University Hospital in Berlin, a team works with four8 schools and kindergartens to verify staff, academics and their families for the virus and antibodies. In Ashville, a team from Vanderbilt University will go to a school for a week and two weeks, where young people up to four years old spit in a cup and deliver their samples. “Is it vital that a small percentage involves detectable viruses in saliva, but that they are not symptomatic and hidden?”,” asks Ritu Banerjee, one of the 3 pediatric infectious disease specialists who led the study, along with Sophie Katz and Kathryn Edwards. his colleagues have collected four lots of more than 180 samples, one and carried out checks on 3 of them. A positive case gave the impression that they were both a lot and neither gave the impression that they had inflamed anyone at school.
In Montreal, David Buckeridge, a fitness surveillance expert, and Caroline Quach-Thanh, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at McGill University, are making plans for an experiment in two schools. Researchers in Montreal and Nashville have one thing in common: their own children attend the schools that have hosted the researchers. That connection, Buckeridge says, was essential to make the task possible.
Early school reopening has spurred optimism about safety, but many experts warn that this existing setback has limited relevance for regions with the highest current transmission. “The regions that opened schools in the spring . . . they had very, very few viruses circulating in the community,” says Matthew Oughton, an infectious disease specialist at McGill. But Denmark, for example, has had more than five times as many cases consistent with the week as in the spring and France more than 10 times. Public servants will have to make complicated decisions about when and when to close schools.
Scientific uncertainties don’t help. Initial studies indicated that children under the age of 10 were less likely than older children and adults to contract and transmit SARS-CoV-2, but the latest knowledge has erased the picture. The UK found no differences in age sensitivity. Antibody surveys in Brazil and southern Germany have yielded similar results. At a kindergarten in Poland, five young people, none with symptoms, inflamed nine members of the family circle. ‘I think asymptomatic infections have allowed young people to go unnoticed,’ says Zo-Hyde, epidemiologist at the University of Western Australia, Perth.
However, some countries are discovering that they can suppress the virus while schools remain open. In mid-October, Ireland closed the maximum public life, restricting others to less than five kilometres from their homes, however, face-to-face education continued. At the same time, the Netherlands closed restaurants, bars and museums, but also kept schools open. In both countries, new instances have declined significantly.
Without clarity about transmission to school, schools are looking for symptoms that indicate when to throw in the towel and move on to distance learning. Iowa officials will not complete local schools until the county’s check positivity rate exceeds 15%, while New York City today announced the closure of schools at 3%. Other spaces scan virus grades in the neighborhoods where a school comes from. The Berlin government is focusing on what is happening inside a school, assessing the number of new instances and others quarantined each week.
Hyde and David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, or that schools probably deserve to close if there are so many cases that it is no longer possible to locate contacts on the network. In the Philadelphia area, “the search for contacts is collapsing,” Rubin says. In mid-November, as transmission rates increased, he advised schools in the region to consider closure, especially for older children, until January 2021.
While the figures could provide guidance, many say that decisions about openness and final schools are both ethical and political and scientific. “I don’t think the right question is when we close schools,” Greer says of the university. Guelph. Instead, what do we want to do to keep schools open?
Like Ireland and the Netherlands, France, Spain and Germany kept academics in the classroom while other facets of public life ended. But U. S. cities, coupled with Boston and San Francisco, have delayed or cancelled the opening of public schools without strong corporate primary measures. “Many school districts don’t get what they need,” adding investment for protective measures, says Meagan Fitzpatrick, infectious disease modeler at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
In the end, he says, the researchers may not be offering much. Until the pandemic disappears, probably with a vaccine, officials, parents and teachers are faced with questions that are not scientific: “What do you mean by insurance? Degrees of threat are you willing to settle to open your school? »
With reports through Linda Nordling and Emiliano Rodroguez Mega.
Gretchen Vogel is a science mag correspondent in Berlin, Germany.
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