“We can’t become immune to this level of suffering…Georgia is in no shape to open its public schools in most of the state, the virus levels are too high.”

                        Dr. Ashish Jha, CNN, August 10th

            “I don’t know how long we’re gonna keep playing Russian Roulette with our children, Andrea. It’s not safe to do.”

                        Dr. Lipi Roy, Andrea Mitchell show, August 13th

Dear students,

My grandson proudly started third grade this week. Virtually. The teacher and the school are in Georgia, but he and his family are in upper New York state, which thanks to the leadership of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the discipline of New Yorkers, is practically virus free. His sister will also be taking full advantage of the beauty and safety of upstate New York, as she attends a Georgia kindergarten virtually.

On the other hand, thanks to the “leadership” of Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia—along with the lack of discipline of its citizens—hospitalizations and deaths in our state have climbed relentlessly. My newest grandchild and his two moms were hiding out in our house in Atlanta from early March until his six-month birthday in late June. That was because Atlanta was much safer than their home city, Brooklyn. But by June Atlanta and Brooklyn had changed places, and they are much safer in their home than they would be in ours

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who lives in Georgia, weighed all the facts, including his three daughters’ need for education and a normal life, and he and his wife decided they would start school virtually. They did this after examining the school carefully and concluding it was taking all recommended precautions.

 

Georgia is famous now for the chaos and recklessness of its school openings. The photo of the school hallway, which you’ve seen if you haven’t been hiding under a rock, was taken by 15-year-old Hannah Waters, during a class change at her Dallas, Georgia high school. She was suspended for her pains, until an outcry forced school authorities to reinstate her. Meanwhile they threatened other students who might also be considering blowing a whistle on this deadly situation.

Hannah Waters is famous now too, because her photo immediately went, um, viral. She’d been planning to return to school, but students and faculty there began testing positive. There are at least 35 cases and counting, so Hannah will be learning virtually.

Let’s be clear though: the word “suffering” used by Dr. Jha above, and the word “deadly” in my last paragraph, do not apply to Hannah’s fellow students. They are very unlikely to suffer much and extremely unlikely to die. But this is not true of the teachers, cafeteria workers, and janitors. And it is not true of the parents and grandparents of the students. And it is not true of the others in the community they will infect.

Hannah’s fellow students will bring suffering and death to others, as they have throughout the pandemic, without suffering and dying themselves. This, we know, is the virus’s evolutionary strategy, and it is working like a charm. The virus can pervade the crowd of kids in that hallway like an invisible toxic gas or radioactive rays, except that unlike the gas or the rays, the kids can take the virus anywhere.

The chaotic process of Georgia schools and school districts opening, finding infected children, and closing down again has been so widespread and bewildering it’s frankly impossible for me to follow, and it’s happening in much of the rest of the country as well. Cherokee County, an Atlanta suburb, opened on August 3rd by unanimous decision of the school board, and reported that 1,193 cases of COVID-19 were quarantined by August 12th.

Some districts and counties around the state will have live options. The Atlanta City Schools will be all virtual, and of the nearest counties, Dekalb, Cobb, Fulton, plus the suburban cities of Decatur and Marietta, 100 percent will be 100 percent virtual. Go a little farther away from Atlanta and you’ll still be eligible to choose to put your kids at risk. Except that these rules are changing day to day.

Very confusing. Easy to follow though is the relentless Presidential drumbeat of Have-to-open-Have-to-open-Have-to-open-schools. The nation is marching to a different drummer. 35 of the 50 largest school districts in the U.S. will open online only, and others, like New York City, are reconsidering their plans for a safe hybrid open.

Let’s consider what little we know about COVID-19 and children. First, the good news, which won’t take long to relate: very few children have gotten very sick or died from the virus since the beginning. That’s good news for the virus too, since these kids can mobilize it like crazy.

Some other bad news:

1. Kids between 10 and 19—Hannah’s classmates—can transmit the virus just as well as adults. A new, large, careful South Korean study of 59,000 people who had been in contact with one of 5700 infected cases showed that kids 10-19 years old are very effective at infecting others. This study was done during a period of school closure.
2. Kids under 10 can also transmit the virus, and have been important vectors bringing it home to their families. The South Korean study above found that kids under ten were less likely than older kids and adults to transmit the virus to others, but they can and do transmit it. A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics showed that younger children carry more SARS-CoV2 viruses in their nose and throat than older children or adults. As Dr. Gupta notes, the jury is still out on how infectious they will be when schools are open.
3. The impact of #2 has been limited so far, since young children have mostly stayed home. Now that millions are going back to school, we will find out just how big a deal this sort of family transmission can be.
4. Some kids do get sick and die with COVID-19. For unknown reasons, a small percentage go through the same process as adults. A nine-year-old African-American girl became the fifth child in Florida to die of it; this was in July, and there have been many more since. Her family took her to the hospital, they sent her home, and she collapsed due to heart failure. SARS-CoV2 attacks the heart as well as the lungs, in children as in adults. Her name was Kimmie, she loved unicorns and making TikToks and YouTube videos. She had a contagious goofy laugh and she had no underlying conditions.
5. And there are also strange tragic accidents; the youngest victim in Georgia was a 7-year-old African-American boy who drowned in his bath when a sudden fever gave him a seizure; seizures are very common in children with COVID-19 fevers. It was only after his death that anyone knew he had the virus, and he had no underlying conditions.
6. Some children develop a rare but deadly post-viral disease known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children—MIS-C. Four children have died of it very recently in Louisiana alone. There have been at least 570 cases nationwide. It is not the virus itself, it is a process nobody understands that is triggered by the virus. It attacks widely throughout a child’s body. A 12-year-old girl named Juliet suffered cardiac arrest and was “about as close to death as you can get” according to her doctor. Jack, age 14, woke up in agony and with heart failure and was hospitalized for ten days and sent home with residual damage. It’s a horrible disease and in the worst cases it’s a truly horrible death.
7. And in a crowning irony, an 8-year-old named Hermione escaped on an evacuation flight from Wuhan Province in China where the epidemic first raged, only to contract COVID-19 six months later at home in America, after China had long since conquered the virus. Hermione’s father and grandparents also have the virus.

It’s worth noting that when we shut down schools in March, there were around 5,000 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. Now as we reopen them, there are more than 5,000,000.

I know, there are places where schools can reopen safely, but many places where kids are being pushed back into school are not in that category. I know, there are ways to make schools safer, but they are not being consistently implemented and even where they are children are still getting the virus. I know, virtual learning is much less effective than live learning. Trust me, I know. I taught more than 150 students that way starting in March and will be teaching another 250 starting next week.

But somebody help me out here. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Zoom (among others) have seen their shares go through the roof since the pandemic started. (Full disclosure: I like millions of others have participated, if only through retirement plans.) Is there nobody at these companies who can figure out a way to make virtual learning work better? To make it fun for kids of all ages? To get computers and tablets and broadband too into the hands of all who need them?

Our kids love screens. We fight constant battles with them to get them off screens. Now their lives depend on learning through screens. Is there no one among all the brilliant nerds and geeks in the United States of America who can design virtual learning that will engage children and really really teach them? Is there no one in the colleges of education that can ally themselves with the nerds and geeks?

I’m begging. Please.

Meanwhile, stay safe,

Dr. K

PS: In other news:

• The United States notched its largest number of deaths in a day for the summer so far: 1500. Most recent days have seen more than a thousand deaths each. Testing remains completely inadequate in our country, and contact tracing is almost nonexistent.
• The Russians are deploying a vaccine that is not ready for prime time—it has not been studied in anything like a proper way. Let’s hope that the people in Russia who are being used as guinea pigs get lucky. Bad vaccines don’t just fail to work, they can kill people.
• Georgia’s governor, whom my friend Kathy calls Deathcount Kemp, has dropped his lawsuit against Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to stop her from mandating masks in her (our) city. Like they say down here, she whipped his butt, scared him silly, and he crawled off with his tail between his legs, where a different anatomical organ was supposed to be.

PPS: Please don’t rely just on me. The best resource on what is happening specifically in the state of Georgia is Dr. Amber Schmidtke’s Daily Digest. More generally, I recommend the following: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Update, aka The Optimist; for the science of viruses, especially the new coronavirus, This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast; Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s podcast, Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction; COVID-19 UpToDate for medical professionals; and for the current numbers: Johns Hopkins University (JHU); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Our World in Data (OWiD); The New York Times Coronavirus Resource Center (NYT).