CDC says 3 feet of social distance is enough for kids at school https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-3-feet-is-enough-social-distance-for-school-kids-2021-3 The CDC changed its physical distancing guidance for K-12 schools on Friday. The agency says 3 feet of space is enough between students, in most circumstances. 6 feet of space is still advisable between staff, and when students can't wear their masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shifted its physical distancing guidance for K-12 schools across the country on Friday, saying three feet of distance is generally enough between students in the classroom — as long as they're masked up. The change came after new research from Massachusetts published earlier this month showed that it made little difference to coronavirus case rates whether students and staff in elementary, middle, and high schools in that state were spaced 3 feet or 6 feet apart. But the new 3-foot rule does not apply in every situation. The CDC says teachers and staff still need to maintain 6 feet The CDC's new guidance does not extend to adults and teachers in schools, who should still maintain 6 feet of distance between one another, the agency said. "Transmission between staff is more common," the CDC's new guidance reads, citing numerous studies that suggest the same. And, in "areas of high community transmission," everyone in middle school and high school should still continue to maintain 6 feet of distance at all times, unless classrooms are podding students together, the CDC added. More distance is also critical when masks can't be worn (such as in cafeterias where students are eating), and when kids are breathing heavily, as they do when singing, playing music, and exercising. "Move these activities outdoors, or to large, well-ventilated space when possible," the CDC said. The new 3 foot rule will make it easier to arrange classroom space Experts (including Dr. Anthony Fauci) have been heralding the change in recent days, knowing it will make a big practical difference in classrooms where there isn't always enough space to keep every child six feet from their classmates. "One of the things that's going to hamper return to schools is the 6 feet rule," Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health told reporters earlier this month, after the Massachusetts study came out. "I really think that the evidence right now does not back up the need for that," Jha added. "Teachers and students can be kept safe without that rule." Other strategies the CDC suggested to help curb the spread of disease in the classroom included facing students' desks in the same direction when possible, eliminating or reducing staff meetings and lunches, and more widespread screening tests. The new guidance also stresses the continued importance of cohorting students into distinct groups or pods that stay together throughout the day, to prevent widespread transmission if there ever is an outbreak. 6 feet was never a hard and fast rule built for every situation The guidance change is our latest reminder that 6 feet is an arbitrary number, and that people may be able to get away with less spacing (or need more) depending on the situation they're in, as well as what the coronavirus is doing where they live and work. Important factors to consider when deciding how much space you need to make between people from different households include: how old the people are, how rampant coronavirus transmission is in the area, how good the ventilation is, whether people have been tested and/or vaccinated, and if everyone is wearing masks, or not. "Everybody's gotta be masked up in schools," Jha said. The World Health Organization already recommends a 1-meter distance (that's about 3.3 feet) between people to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but the agency also stresses that "the further away, the better," and adds that indoors, people should be spaced out more than that. In addition to prioritizing more ventilation and adequate spacing in the new guidance, the CDC got rid of the agency's previous recommendations for more physical barriers (like sneeze guards) to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in schools. The CDC said there just isn't enough evidence to suggest such physical dividers really do much to prevent the spread of this virus between people at all.
And yet the info from Tsing Tao had examples showing the guy posting all over Twitter about moving to Austria.
The schools in North Carolina have been attempting to re-open at full capacity. They started with elementary schools first and now are moving to open middle and high schools at 100% capacity. It only took a couple of weeks for the elementary school openings to rapidly proceed to be a fiasco in some counties --- with many schools overrun by COVID and on the verge of totally shutting down. The enforcement of following CDC guidance for distancing, masks, etc. in schools varies greatly for school systems in the region. Lower income public school systems (e.g. Durham) lack the money, materials, and staffing to enforce the CDC rules. Wealthy schools systems (e.g. Wake) do a better job of enforcement due to better community support and additional supplement money from the county. The lack of any available subs when teachers are out with COVID is still a significant issue statewide; even with increased sub pay no one is willing to sub in schools. COVID cases back on the rise across Triangle, and school clusters are up in one county https://www.newsobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article250102914.html
The school situation in France serves as a cautionary tale about attempting to keep schools open when there is high prevalence of COVID in the community. France has a policy of attempting to keep schools open at all costs. It has reached the point where nearly all the teachers are out sick with COVID and the schools are just facilities where parents can park their children -- all the while furthering community spread costing lives of parents and teachers. This also brings up the question of why "open the schools" advocates never bring up studies regarding the COVID situation with schools in France. After all -- France is one of the world's leading countries in keeping schools open in the face of COVID. In Paris suburbs blighted by Covid-19, ‘schools are kept open at all costs – even without teachers’ https://www.france24.com/en/france/...kept-open-at-all-cost-–-even-without-teachers Twenty pupils have lost a parent to Covid-19 in a single school on the outskirts of Paris, underscoring the health emergency in the French capital’s neglected suburbs and piling pressure on a government that has taken pride in keeping schools open at all costs. Basking in the unseasonal heatwave that has suddenly swept France, Fatimata is untroubled by the television cameras and satellite dishes stationed outside her high school in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris. In fact it’s pretty "stylé" (cool), says the 15-year-old pupil, leaning against the iron and concrete perimeter fence of the Lycée Eugène Delacroix. The day is drawing to a close and yet Fatimata and her friend Basmala have spent a mere two hours in class. Under different circumstances, the girls might have relished the free time. But right now it is cause for alarm. “More and more teachers call in sick and are not being replaced,” says Fatimata. “We’re already weeks behind the programme and it’s only getting worse.” The school fence may be holding the cameras at bay, but Delacroix is already besieged from within. In recent weeks, the coronavirus has spread like wildfire through the school’s narrow corridors and unvented classrooms, infecting staff, pupils and their parents. The plight of the lycée has become a symbol of an increasingly heated debate on the merits of France’s “open-schools” policy, which the government has steadfastly defended even as infections surge in several regions including this one, driven by the so-called UK variant of the virus. “In order to stick to a political decision, the government is effectively agreeing to let the virus empty this school bit by bit,” says a history teacher outside the lycée, fresh from an interview in Italian with the local correspondent for Italy's La Stampa. The teacher, who declines to be named, is among 30 staff members to have downed tools citing the threat to their health and that of pupils. Some twenty other colleagues have been infected since the start of March, meaning the list of missing teachers on the school’s notice board is getting longer by the day. “The longer the list, the smaller the writing gets,” notes Eric Finot, a French literature teacher who has joined the protest movement. “Now you have to squint to make out the names.” ‘The government doesn’t care’ When Finot first joined the school twenty years ago, Delacroix had its own doctor and two nurses. Now, there is just one full-time nurse and another working part-time, looking after 2,400 pupils in a district pummelled by the third wave of the coronavirus. The Lycée Delacroix has been forced to shut a quarter of its classes after each reported at least one Covid-19 case, in line with enhanced sanitary protocols applied to high-risk regions such as this one. In recent weeks, the virus has also infected the school’s two deputy directors and forced two-thirds of assistant teachers to self-isolate. One figure has attracted particular scrutiny: a staggering 20 students have lost a parent to the virus since the start of the pandemic, a grim tally that explains why the cameras are here. While there is no evidence to suggest those deaths were linked to infections at the school, “either way the figure is an ominous reminder of the vulnerability of the local population,” says Aline Cottereau, another of the protesting teachers. Last week, Cottereau and her colleagues wrote a letter to President Emmanuel Macron to denounce the “alarming” medical and sanitary situation at the lycée. They asked for the school’s immediate closure and a temporary shift to full-time homeschooling – a request soon echoed by several politicians, medics and fellow teachers in the wider Seine-Saint-Denis area around Drancy. The poorest department in mainland France, Seine-Saint-Denis, referred to colloquially as the quatre-vingt-treize or neuf trois, after its administrative number, has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic’s successive waves. With almost 800 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, more than twice the national average, it is once again the area where Covid-19 is spreading fastest. While many people in Paris and other affluent areas have switched to working from home, the capital’s poorer suburbs have supplied most of the frontline workers who keep the metropolis running. The combination of cramped quarters and a lack of doctors has also left the local population particularly exposed. “The pandemic has only exacerbated existing inequalities,” says Marie-Hélène Plard, who heads a nursery school in Saint-Denis, the département’s most populous municipality, just north of Paris. “The dearth of medical facilities in the quatre-ving-treize affects everyone, schools included,” she explains. Plard says the number of cases reported in schools often underestimates the real extent of infections, with parents coming “under immense pressure not to report positive cases, which result in them being trapped at home with their children and possibly jeopardising their jobs.” Like other school directors, Plard spends much of her time juggling classes as she scrambles to replace staff who are infected or in isolation. She laments the government’s failure to put in place systematic testing, noting that social distancing measures are especially difficult to enforce in nursery and primary schools. Likewise, her repeated requests to replace fixed windows and install air purifiers have gone unanswered. “We always agreed it was best to keep schools open rather than leave children at home, but we should have prepared for this,” she says. “Instead, schools are being kept open at all cost – even without teachers. The government doesn’t care what is going on inside.” ‘French exception’ France has taken great pride in keeping schools open far longer than any other country in the European Union, a distinction Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has hailed as a “French exception”. However, teachers’ unions and medical experts have expressed dismay at how little officials have done to mitigate the spread of the virus, protect staff and ease their workload. >> Experts call for rethink of France's open-schools policy amid pandemic Mathieu Logothetis, a history teacher in Seine-Saint-Denis and representative of the SNES-FSU union, says his organisation’s repeated pleas to recruit more teachers and educators, improve sanitation and step up testing have gone unheard. He hopes the government will at least change tack on its vaccination strategy, which has so far ruled out fast-tracking jabs for the country’s 900,000 teachers. Under increasing pressure on the subject, Macron told reporters last week that he hoped targeted vaccination campaigns would be extended to teachers from April or May, though he remained non-committal. “Teachers are on the front line of the pandemic but they are not being protected,” says Logothetis. “The government seems content to turn schools into nurseries as long as it helps keep the economy afloat.” It’s a view shared by Coleen Brown, an English teacher at the Lycée Delacroix, for whom the health of staff and pupils is being put at risk “purely for economic reasons”. Brown is dismayed to see that her colleagues back in the US are being vaccinated even before schools reopen, while France is yet to offer teachers a jab. She is also shocked by the insufficient measures taken to protect staff in schools. “Social distancing is impossible, there are not enough cleaners, we don’t have gel everywhere and many windows can’t even be opened,” she says. “This would not be accepted in a private school and would certainly not be accepted at the education ministry.” Don’t nip the swagger The anger and frustration voiced at Delacroix is being echoed across Seine-Saint-Denis, with protesting teachers halting work at a growing number of schools also stricken by the virus. They include the Collège Claude Debussy in Aulnay-sous-Bois, the set of Olivier Babinet’s 2016 film “Swagger”, a vivid portrayal of the untapped potential harboured by some of the most run-down and ethnically-diverse suburbs of Paris, so close to the capital and yet so far removed from the Republican promise of equal opportunities. Striking the right balance between cultivating that potential and protecting the health of teachers and pupils is a genuine dilemma for schools in Seine-Saint-Denis, says Justine Brax, an arts teacher at the Lycée Alfred Costes in Bobigny, for whom “closing schools in the quatre-vingt-treize would be a catastrophe.” Brax says she is lucky to work in a spacious and functional environment, where sanitary measures are much easier to enforce than in most other schools in the area. Her experience of homeschooling during France’s first lockdown a year ago has cautioned her against repeating the experiment at her lycée, a vocational institute. “Distance learning just doesn’t work for my students,” she explains. “Some don’t have computers or have siblings to look after, while their parents often can’t help. Many don’t have the autonomy to work alone from home. Instead, they thrive when working together in our workshops at the lycée.” Back at Delacroix, the prospect of a return to full-time distance learning is causing similar qualms among pupils, who are already homeschooling part-time. While she credits her teachers with working extra hard to balance online and classroom teaching, 17-year-old Sarah* fears her class will fall too far behind if the school is shut. In fact, she says, “we’re already so far behind I wouldn’t be surprised if they cancel the baccalaureate exams.” At the same time, Sarah is worried about taking the virus home with her, while her mother recovers from surgery. That’s the real priority, says her friend Joël, for whom health considerations outweigh the rest. He adds: “If Macron doesn’t close our school after all this, then it really means he doesn’t give a shit.”
This is more likely a cautionary tale about not protecting the high risk better, while allowing allowing the healthy to develop immunity instead of cycling through lockdowns and then openings. Its not about kids bringing Covid home and killing their parents.... Did you read this quote... "One figure has attracted particular scrutiny: a staggering 20 students have lost a parent to the virus since the start of the pandemic, a grim tally that explains why the cameras are here. While there is no evidence to suggest those deaths were linked to infections at the school, “either way the figure is an ominous reminder of the vulnerability of the local population,” says Aline Cottereau, another of the protesting teachers."