At this time of year, school trustees and district administrators are normally putting the finishing touches on plans for reopening schools — student headcounts, staff assignments, classroom readiness and the budgetary implications that flow out of all that need to be taken into account.
People who run public school systems can normally look forward to things coming together and settling down by the end of the first week of school, certainly by the end of the first month.
Not this year.
What makes this year so different is that on Sept. 7, 600,000 kids K-12 (ages about five to 17) will descend upon 1,600 public schools and be met by 44,000 teachers — but about half those kids will be younger than 12 and ineligible to receive even a first dose of a COVID vaccine. All this will be happening in a provincial environment where, in the past month, the number of daily active COVID cases in the province has quadrupled from about 10 a day to more than 40 and is reaching levels not seen since May.
There are now more active cases per capita in B.C. than Ontario. B.C. had a seven-day rolling average of just 35 cases in early July, but last week the average passed 196.
It is against this background it seems reasonable for trustees and superintendents to be considering “what could go wrong?”
That depends who you ask.
CTV News asked Dr. Bonnie Henry whether the steady growth in cases and increase of the prevalence of the ultra-contagious Delta variant in more than 60 per cent of cases in British Columbia, and the fact students under 12 are still not eligible for vaccines, had prompted her to consider changes to the plan for the start of school.
Henry said she doesn’t “currently” intend on changing the back-to-school plan. As one of the most experienced epidemiologists in the country, Henry sounds as if she may be hinting to trustees and superintendents to keep their options open as the science evolves.
Nothing is certain or even predictable when it comes to a rapidly mutating virus.
While school-based data across B.C. and the rest of Canada is not readily available, or, in some cases, even apparently contradictory, early data from studies of K-12 schools in the U.S. do not confirm fears that bringing students together in properly prepared classrooms will inevitably create COVID-19 petri dishes — although the absence of a standardized national database of school cases both here and in the U.S. makes it impossible to know for sure.
Part of the problem, apart from the convoluted politics that seem to undermine rational thought in the U.S., is that COVID-19, as scientists are learning, “is not just one condition or one set of symptoms.” So says Dr. Nipunie Rajapakse, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at Mayo Clinic: “People are describing a variety of different symptoms, like profound fatigue, muscle aches, pains, sore throats, fevers, breathing difficulties, and each person almost has a unique kind of constellation of these symptoms. These symptoms can go on for varying periods of time and be of varying severity.”
One of the largest U.S. studies on school-age children, led by Brown University economist Dr. Emily Oster, analyzed in-school infection data from 47 states over the last two weeks of September 2020. At that point the U.S. had experienced a quarter of a million reported deaths from COVID-19 — the highest number of any country.
But among more than 200,000 students and 63,000 staff who had returned to school and took part in the study, Oster reported an infection rate of 0.13 per cent among students and 0.24 per cent among staff.
After 28 days, more than one-third of the six- to 13-year-olds had shown no symptoms.
That finding poses implications for school systems here and elsewhere that are bringing kids back to class, and begs the question about whether elementary and middle schoolers who show no signs of infection will spread the virus to other kids and staff.
The good news is that low infection rates support what other researchers have seen in smaller samples.
“What we haven’t seen are super-spreader events” that ignited in schools, says Sallie Permar, a professor of pediatrics and immunology at Duke University. “The fear that you’d have one infected kid come to school, and then you’d have many other kids and teachers and relatives [at home] get infected — that hasn’t happened.”
And here’s the kicker, and maybe the last word on reopening B.C’s schools on Sept. 7. Benjamin Linas, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine, who has advocated opening schools under strict safety measures, suggests: “You can only open your school safely if you have COVID under control in your community.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
