Updating U.S. School COVID Policies for 2022–2023
Accounting for collective risk and better support of public education are both required for the 2022–2023 school year.
The 2022–2023 school year in the U.S. is rapidly approaching, and it will be our 4th year of school impacted by the pandemic. Dr. Joseph G. Allen, director of the healthy buildings program and an associate professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, recently laid out his thoughts on what school COVID policies should look like this year in a New York Times opinion piece. While I agree on the need to keep kids in schools, I am troubled by the piece’s lack of acknowledgement of a) our collective risk from continued waves of high transmission and b) the extreme stress being experienced by public school districts.
I did find the underlying sentiment of the following quote to be spot on: “Basically, adults could do whatever they wanted, while kids bore the brunt of the last vestiges of pandemic controls despite being the lowest risk for Covid. We cannot let anything like this happen again.”
But I would revise the statement to reflect the ongoing need to limit transmission. Kids, teachers, and schools are forced to bear the brunt of a) controlling transmission and b) the consequences of high community transmission when communities, politicians, and adults in general, aren’t willing to do their part to reduce it. This has occurred far too commonly during the pandemic and it needs to stop.
I also agree that districts should be updating their COVID policies based on the current suite of variants and what we know about the effectiveness of available risk mitigation strategies (e.g., getting rid of the plexiglass and avoiding additive air cleaning technologies), along with flexibly adjusting their responses based on changing conditions.
And it is important that local conditions be accounted for — local community transmission levels, local vaccination rates, the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of local tracking/monitoring, the local politics of COVID, AND the ACTUAL access that districts, families, etc., have to these risk mitigation strategies (including how that access is equitably or inequitably distributed). Not to mention accounting for increasingly limited district staffing capabilities (more on the great stresses and strains public education is experiencing later).
Others can debate what’s presented in the opinion piece regarding quarantining and testing. I do agree that ventilation and filtration are key risk mitigation strategies, and significant improvements to these were needed long before the pandemic started. School districts should make these improvements as soon as possible (reaping benefits that will extend long beyond the pandemic). And states and the federal government need to speed up the remaining distributions of the COVID relief dollars that will help facilitate this— though more $ will be needed.
However, I think the following paragraph is too flippant: “Masks should be a go-to, quick implementation strategy if something changes in a dire way. For example, a variant that disproportionately affects kids, or that has severe immune escape and resets us back to March 2020, God forbid.”
Evolutionary biologists, evolutionary virologists, and other relevant experts have been pointing out the dangers of high transmission rates since the beginning of the pandemic. Here’s one of the latest overviews of the risks for worse variants evolving posed by continued wide-spread transmission.
The above referenced paragraph from the opinion piece makes it seem that such a worst case scenario is outside of our control and that masks are simply an available reactionary strategy to such an occurrence, as opposed to being a key means for preventing worse variants or even a March 2020 reset from happening in the first place (via limiting transmission). By not limiting transmission we are in fact leaving things to chance (with the odds decreasingly in our favor the longer high transmission rates continue), potentially letting evolution take us to where we don’t want to go.
One-way masking is about protecting the individual (and I agree high efficiency masks like N95 respirators can be very effective for the individual). But group masking (when needed) is about protecting the most vulnerable. It’s also about protecting the collective from the impacts of high transmission rates — like the negative health care and economic impacts of Long COVID (Millions of Americans have long COVID. Many of them are no longer working; How Should Businesses Prepare for Long Covid?; Study Finds Long Covid Has a Significant Impact on UK Workforce; Two Years Later, We Still Don’t Understand Long Covid. Why?) or the potential March 2020 reset mentioned above. That is not an anti-masking message — it is simply recognizing the different impacts of individual vs collective mask wearing.
Though again, I agree that schools should not be bearing the brunt of limiting transmission. I also agree that masks can be detrimental to learning and communication in general (The Face Mask In COVID Times; Face masks impair nonverbal communication between individuals), which is why we should be a) doing a better job of limiting transmission at the community level and reducing the need for in-school mask wearing to begin with, b) understanding the underlying cultural/behavioral resistance to mask wearing, and c) finding ways to reduce the negative impacts of mask wearing when it’s necessary. That we haven’t spent more effort addressing mask wearing issues at this point of the pandemic is another collective failure.
Doing all of this would allow us to better optimize the learning experience (including keeping kids in school and avoiding further negative long term individual student and societal impacts from school disruptions) while also better protecting the most vulnerable and the collective.
But doing all of this will also require substantially better support of public education in the U.S. Laying out what schools need to be doing without acknowledging that the extreme stress public school districts are under limits what they can do doesn’t help make it happen. Overviews and examples of these stresses include:
Districts Continue to Struggle with Staffing, Political Polarization, and Unfinished Instruction
‘Never seen it this bad’: America faces catastrophic teacher shortage
Twitter thread — conservatives opposing ‘woke’ culture win seats on the Kansas Board of Education
Lawrence elected leaders face threats, polarization in a changing climate for public servants
This extreme stress is due to a long history of undervaluing and underfunding public education in this nation as well as ongoing attacks from various conservative and anti-public education politicians/activists/organizations, greatly exacerbated by the pandemic. Every article like this opinion piece also needs to acknowledge this stress, call out those who deliberately contribute to it, and lay out some strategies for better supporting public education (e.g., Kansas architecture, engineering and construction industry must step up to support public education).
I hope that the upcoming school guidance from the CDC and states mentioned in the op ed takes all of this into account (and benefited from the input of local teachers and administrators when putting it together). If it doesn’t, the guidance won’t likely be that helpful.