There is heated debate over the wisdom and safety of kids returning to in-person school this fall. Every shred of data collected in this country shows that children are statistically at significantly low risk from harm from covid-19. It also shows that they tend not to be significant spreaders of the virus.
There does not seem to be any historical precedent for creating public health policy based on testing mass numbers of asymptomatic people. As a society we simply never have treated any other virus’s risk with a strategy such as this, and I believe that over time our country will recognize the mistake that has been.
Meanwhile, counting positive test counts is still all the rage and postivie tests are the numbers being looked at, in part, to determine if it is safe for children to return to school. Florida was one of the early states to push for schools to reopen and it didn’t take long for the headlines to start spreading fear like a farmer frenetically pitching hay around a barn (do they do that? Probably not, I suppose, but it is a fun mental image).
Here are some sample headlines with the links:
“Florida confirmed 9K new COVID-19 cases among children within 15 days as schools reopen”
“Nearly 9,000 Florida Children Diagnosed With Coronavirus in Two Weeks as Schools Reopen”
If the headlines (and articles) are to be believed, Florida has shown that opening schools is going to trigger a wave of covid spread throughout our communities.
Here is a quick glance at the numbers they are “reporting” on.
First, the Aug. 10th report showing data through Aug. 9th.
Next, the Aug 26th report showing data through Aug. 25th
The raw numbers they report are mostly accurate, but their meaning is the exact opposite of what they’d like you to believe. Let’s jump into them. I’ll include all my references along the way so that you can check this out yourself.
Florida Data Is Hard To Come By
When I wanted to look into this I quickly discovered that Florida does NOT make it easy to see trends for 0-17 covid cases over time. It took a bit of digging, but I finally found where they store their historical reports. (Here’s a link to that location.) I also found that they only started publishing a pediatric report that gave ages 0-17 numbers specifically on July 31st. The Newsweek and Hill articles reference those reports, but I found it instructive to open each one and copy the numbers out so I could see what happened each day.
I’ll also point out (and you will see) that someone in the Florida DOH screwed up and they had a 4-day window where they published a new daily report without actually updating the numbers—either that or covid mysteriously disappeared for 4 days (doubtful). After that, someone figured out the mistake and they updated the report and “caught up” the numbers all on one day.
That means that if we want to see the pediatric situation before and after Florida schools reopened we can compare the 7/30-8/6 numbers to the 8/9-8/25 numbers. (8/9-8/25 being the dates of the scary numbers reported by the news. ) Let’s take a look:
You can see the numbers reported every day and I’ve taken the liberty of doing the math to show you the averages. Open the reports yourself to check my source, and get out your calculators to check my math.
The Florida numbers clearly show that as they started opening their schools back up the average daily count of both pediatric cases and pediatric hospitalizations continued to drop.
The cases-per-day average fell from 615 to 540, or 12%
The hospitalizations per day average fell from 12 to 9.76, or 14%
I would also point out that because the news articles mentioned above used numbers from a report that had not been updated in 3 days, to get a better average number it would make more sense to go back to the last time that number had been updated, which would be the 8/7 report that include data up to August 6th.
If you do that, the true number would be
8/6-8/25 case-per-day average (20 days) 459.65, or 25.3% drop.
Stop Spreading False Fear
It might be too much to claim that school reopening is the cause of the dramatic drop in cases and hospitalizations (simple coincidence of timing doesn’t make something causative–keep that in mind when reviewing the data regarding the effectiveness of masks or lockdowns), but certainly the spread of covid in Florida continues to drop dramatically despite schools reopening.
Articles like these are lazy at best and dishonest at worst. If they would have bothered to give you the numbers in context then the headline would be how reopening schools in Florida has not impacted the rapid decline of covid spread in the state.
If people share these kinds of articles in order to convince you to be afraid, push back on them, look up the complete picture for yourself, and spread truth rather than fear.