My daughter's Elementary school is getting out of control. We have 12 cases this week alone. More then 20% of the school is in quarantine. The teachers that aren't exposed have their own children out.

I'm a little frustrated in this situation that we don't have more info. It's starting to feel like it's spreading in the kids. They will only tell us if it's a student or a teacher, but they aren't telling us if exposures are coming down sick. I feel like with these numbers, there has to be some level of spread inside the school. There's no way after punching through the worst of winter and the community numbers dropping that everyone is now bringing this in independently.

It's happening at a lot of schools right now. It's only happening at my wife's school lately because they're testing kids now. It's either test negative or stay home for however many days so parents are getting their kids tested now. They weren't back in Oct/Nov last year. And I don't think many if any of the kids have even actually been sick. But if one kid tests positive pretty much the whole class has to quarantine.

Ours got rid of the testing to come out of quarantine. From what I understand these 12 cases are true symptomatic positives. We had 4 early in the week, a lull for a few days, and 8 since yesterday.

There's no preemptive testing for students on campus. They started rolling out a program teachers Monday but I don't think it caught anyone unaware.

Edit: we also got a lovely letter that my daughter had been exposed to strep as well. So at least one of the sick kids tested negative for COVID and they went looking for other explanations.

I think ours has a lot more kids getting tested than before. If they would've tested them last year like they are now, I'm sure there would've been a lot of asymptomatic kids test positive that didn't even know.

It's just how things are these days. We get a message just about every other day from my kids daycare saying a parent of one of her classmates tested positive. But I'm not worried about continuing to send her.

I'd be okay with it in that case since it's clearly not spreading through the daycare. I was comfortable with it when it was clear by the numbers that it was one or two people bringing it in and it stopping there.

But man, the spread possibility has me a little nervous. We've managed to avoid it so far. I just wish we had more info.

It's definitely spreading more between students now, even in elementary schools. Quite a few of them are symptomatic, not hospitalized symptomatic, but symptomatic.

As for high school kids, 19 theater/choir students in a local high school were diagnosed in the last two days with symptoms.

I have 120 students and so far, only 1 has tested positive. 6 teachers and maybe 10 students at my school has tested positive. Crazy the differences.

That is crazy. Rural community?

My eight year old's third grade class had an outbreak a couple weeks ago with a third of them testing positive (including my son). All were mildly symptomatic/asymptomatic. My son's only symptom was some nausea/vomiting for a morning and then fine after that. Actually not a bad thing since I bet we have herd immunity in that class now.

cc_ag92 said:

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That is crazy. Rural community?

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Suburban but smallish school of about 400 students.

I'd imagine the slower decline has a lot to do with the weather difference. If it were 90+ and everyone could be outside getting their vitamin D, I'd bet the decline hits about the same rate.

Why include NM with the northern states, and not the southern states?

edit to add: I assume because it would have looked like an outlier and fit the trend of the northern states, but defeats the whole premise of seasonality and latitude.

No, it's not cherry-picking. It's altitude and winter. New Mexico has the bulk of its population in regions where it snows.

Albuquerque in December is nothing like Phoenix in December.

Keegan99 said:

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No, it's not cherry-picking. It's altitude and winter. New Mexico has the bulk of its population in regions where it snows.

Albuquerque in December is nothing like Phoenix in December.

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Oh s*** you are right. Was not even thinking about altitude and snow/skiing. Thanks.

The Big12Ag said:

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Oh, Twitter again has all the smarts. Someone should tell Vermont. Maine peaked when Texas peaked.

Latitude, seasonality, 20% burnout, light and vitamin D. Whats the next twitter theory that will be pushed?

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Seasonality of coronaviruses is knowledge that has been around for decades.


Virus transmission performs differently based on humidity and temperature. Here is a paper discussing it.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0037640

Quote:

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IV. CONCLUSION

We established a new relationship between weather seasonality and airborne virus transmission and introduced it to the SIR epidemiological model. The new model predicts pandemic outbreaks in connection with main weather parameters: temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity. The significant findings include the following:

Weather plays an important role in the pandemic outbreaks. Therefore, it must be included in epidemiological predictions.

The Airborne Infection Rate (AIR) index defined in this study through the concentration rate (CR) provides a direct link between multiphase fluid dynamics and the spread of the disease.

The results suggest that two pandemic outbreaks per year are more likely a natural phenomenon that is directly related to the weather seasonality during a pandemic evolution. The above puts in question large scale, strict lockdowns, but, indeed, the decisions for the above are associated with broader socio-economic issues.

The social protective measures, as well as the aggressive testing and contact tracing, using electronic tracking devices, and foremost checking everybody at the points of entry into a country and strict quarantine rules in designated places, can slow down the spread of the disease but cannot stop a second wave.

The proposed AIR index can be used in conjunction with any SIR or SIR-derived model.

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The Big12Ag said:

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Oh, Twitter again has all the smarts. Someone should tell Vermont. Maine peaked when Texas peaked.

Latitude, seasonality, 20% burnout, light and vitamin D. Whats the next twitter theory that will be pushed?

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Twitter theory on vitamin D? Isn't it widely known that vitamin D is a great indicator of disease severity or am I missing something?

Check out the paper above.

There are "sweet spots" with temperature and humidity where transmission accelerates.

Extreme cold, dry air is unfavorable. It explains why the Dakotas, Minnesota, etc. all peaked in November. Once the heart of winter set in, the conditions were no longer ideal.

Keegan99 said:

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The Big12Ag said:

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Oh, Twitter again has all the smarts. Someone should tell Vermont. Maine peaked when Texas peaked.

Latitude, seasonality, 20% burnout, light and vitamin D. Whats the next twitter theory that will be pushed?

---

Seasonality of coronaviruses is knowledge that has been around for decades.


Virus transmission performs differently based on humidity and temperature. Here is a paper discussing it.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0037640

Quote:

---

IV. CONCLUSION

We established a new relationship between weather seasonality and airborne virus transmission and introduced it to the SIR epidemiological model. The new model predicts pandemic outbreaks in connection with main weather parameters: temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity. The significant findings include the following:

Weather plays an important role in the pandemic outbreaks. Therefore, it must be included in epidemiological predictions.

The Airborne Infection Rate (AIR) index defined in this study through the concentration rate (CR) provides a direct link between multiphase fluid dynamics and the spread of the disease.

The results suggest that two pandemic outbreaks per year are more likely a natural phenomenon that is directly related to the weather seasonality during a pandemic evolution. The above puts in question large scale, strict lockdowns, but, indeed, the decisions for the above are associated with broader socio-economic issues.

The social protective measures, as well as the aggressive testing and contact tracing, using electronic tracking devices, and foremost checking everybody at the points of entry into a country and strict quarantine rules in designated places, can slow down the spread of the disease but cannot stop a second wave.

The proposed AIR index can be used in conjunction with any SIR or SIR-derived model.

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I'm not debating seasonality as a contributor. The epidemiologists predicted a second fall/winter wave back almost a year ago for that very reason, but also discussed the fact that NOVEL viruses could behave differently. I'm just making fun of people turning to Twitter for some catch all explanation of everything, an in this case "@Humble_Analysis" posts the passive aggressive and far from humble sounding "Could it be a random coincidence that these 18 states have followed the same virus trajectory? They must have all applied the same level of diligence in masking and staying at home, right? It couldn't be that all our attempts to control and endemic respiratory virus were vanity." And then "proves" this with superimposing data to make it appear as the sole answer.

This happened with the "just take vitamin D!" tweets shared here and the superimposing of selected data to guess that "20% burnout" was ending the pandemic late summer and it wouldn't return. On an on, people trying to use the limited characters allotted to give the "one answer" for everything - no nuance, just black and white. I just find it funny.

People were discussing a drop in cases back in May - similar guesses. https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3114381
Currently it seems seasonality, some degree of herd immunity (if the CDC is correct and 80 million or so have already been infected, and there is some non-zero amount of vaccination contribution), and perhaps reduced gathering post-holiday and virus spike have all been contributors.

An article from way back before this pandemic https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(04)01177-6/fulltext discusses seasonality.

Keegan99 said:

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Seasonality.

The US has multiple regions. The upper midwest peaked before Thanksgiving. The mid latitudes in December, and the south in January.

So whatever decline existed in the upper midwest in December was more than negated by more populous southern states still on the upswing, resulting in an upward national trend.

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New York, Maine, Florida, and Texas all showed peak 7 day moving averages for new cases between Jan 10 and Jan 17. It's hard to explain solely by latitude or weather or seasonality, but it is a general north American pattern.

My kid's school shut down for the week. We had another 4 positives over the weekend and I personally have some friends getting their sick kid's tested. 23 cases total in two weeks now.

ExpressAg11 said:

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It's happening at a lot of schools right now. It's only happening at my wife's school lately because they're testing kids now. It's either test negative or stay home for however many days so parents are getting their kids tested now. They weren't back in Oct/Nov last year. And I don't think many if any of the kids have even actually been sick. But if one kid tests positive pretty much the whole class has to quarantine.

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I wonder about this strategy given the concern that people 3 months recovered can still test positive.

Say the kid had it 2 months ago and is now just getting tested because 1) they were asymptomatic, and 2) there was never a need to get tested. Then they test positive from lingering virus fragments or whatever but haven't been contagious for weeks. Now you quarantine the whole class for nothing.

I don't really have a better solution, but it is almost as if you want to test positive, get your 10 days out of the way and be done with the quarantining for the next 3 months.

BiochemAg97 said:

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ExpressAg11 said:

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It's happening at a lot of schools right now. It's only happening at my wife's school lately because they're testing kids now. It's either test negative or stay home for however many days so parents are getting their kids tested now. They weren't back in Oct/Nov last year. And I don't think many if any of the kids have even actually been sick. But if one kid tests positive pretty much the whole class has to quarantine.

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I wonder about this strategy given the concern that people 3 months recovered can still test positive.

Say the kid had it 2 months ago and is now just getting tested because 1) they were asymptomatic, and 2) there was never a need to get tested. Then they test positive from lingering virus fragments or whatever but haven't been contagious for weeks. Now you quarantine the whole class for nothing.

I don't really have a better solution, but it is almost as if you want to test positive, get your 10 days out of the way and be done with the quarantining for the next 3 months.

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If you can get this every three months vaccines and quarantines are idiotic.

But then again, what science says you can get it every three months, other than 26 people out of hundreds of millions over the last year?

Why is everyone fear-mongering and creating policy on the ability to contract this every three months?

Agreed. I had it back around Christmas and still tested positive last week even though I was only sick for half a day back in December.

I think the issue is that, while trying to do the best they can, these school superintendents and leaders aren't doctors. So they are coming up with these plans without fully understanding them. Not entirely their fault but it is what it is.

ExpressAg11, most districts are following current CDC guidelines. That's actually where the option to test to reduce quarantine after a direct contact. comes from.

I do also agree that the leaders are doing the best they have with the guidance and support they've been given by TEA and the CDC.