I am confused about why this is bad. It seems like an all-around excellent rule: if you see cases and you know where they came from, then just shut down the places where they came from—i.e. affected classrooms and close contacts. If you see cases and you don’t know where they came from, especially after explicitly attempting to trace, then that should set off giant wailing alarm bells and a voice on a loudspeaker yelling “ALERT! Hazardous unknown detected!”. Shutting down the whole school for ten days sounds like exactly the right move, when there are multiple cases popping up and we don’t know why.
As an added bonus, this policy should both incentivize cooperation with contact tracing (at least for anyone looking to keep the school open) and naturally lead schools to close more often as background cases in the general population rise. And these “bonuses” are not coincidental—they both involve the sort of “unknowns” which we want to detect, namely multiple measured cases for reasons other than traceable interactions.
Agreed. In addition, the quoted article is summarizing the policy incorrectly it seems: They write that the school will be closed when there is no evidence of in-school transmission, but that is wrong: if contact tracers find the source as outside of the school, the school will (presumably) not be closed.
If the school shuts down the kids will just go back to the street. We do not send kids back into school when we observe transmission from kids being out of school. The evidence from Emily Oster suggest that there isn’t much difference in transmission.
Also, I would argue that a small amount of transmission is worth educating our children, especially with 70-80% of the vulnerable vaccinated. Overall dividing life years lost by transmissions comes to 2 weeks per confirmed infections, so call that the base cost. Reduce it by 75% for targeted vaccination and each case is costing ~3 days of a persons life. And the student infections are the least dangerous kind. I could go either way on it if the alternative were no transmission. Since the alternative is about the same transmission rate but somewhere else, I say keep the schools open.
OTOH, the incentive argument is much stronger. Maybe the collective punishment forces the school to internalize the cost of transmission, leading to a pareto improving safe-school equilibrium.
I am confused about why this is bad. It seems like an all-around excellent rule: if you see cases and you know where they came from, then just shut down the places where they came from—i.e. affected classrooms and close contacts. If you see cases and you don’t know where they came from, especially after explicitly attempting to trace, then that should set off giant wailing alarm bells and a voice on a loudspeaker yelling “ALERT! Hazardous unknown detected!”. Shutting down the whole school for ten days sounds like exactly the right move, when there are multiple cases popping up and we don’t know why.
As an added bonus, this policy should both incentivize cooperation with contact tracing (at least for anyone looking to keep the school open) and naturally lead schools to close more often as background cases in the general population rise. And these “bonuses” are not coincidental—they both involve the sort of “unknowns” which we want to detect, namely multiple measured cases for reasons other than traceable interactions.
Agreed. In addition, the quoted article is summarizing the policy incorrectly it seems: They write that the school will be closed when there is no evidence of in-school transmission, but that is wrong: if contact tracers find the source as outside of the school, the school will (presumably) not be closed.
If the school shuts down the kids will just go back to the street. We do not send kids back into school when we observe transmission from kids being out of school. The evidence from Emily Oster suggest that there isn’t much difference in transmission.
Also, I would argue that a small amount of transmission is worth educating our children, especially with 70-80% of the vulnerable vaccinated. Overall dividing life years lost by transmissions comes to 2 weeks per confirmed infections, so call that the base cost. Reduce it by 75% for targeted vaccination and each case is costing ~3 days of a persons life. And the student infections are the least dangerous kind. I could go either way on it if the alternative were no transmission. Since the alternative is about the same transmission rate but somewhere else, I say keep the schools open.
OTOH, the incentive argument is much stronger. Maybe the collective punishment forces the school to internalize the cost of transmission, leading to a pareto improving safe-school equilibrium.