Tomorrow

When Should Homeschooling End? Science can’t answer that question— now, or possibly ever.

School openings and our pandemic ignorance

the more we learn about covid-19 and the best practices with which to combat it, the clearer it is that we are living still in a valley of pandemic ignorance. Americans are suffering and dying at historic rates, but the laws governing the ebb and flow of the virus remain maddeningly inscrutable. Even when the news is good—with case rates stabilizing through a period of “reopening,” for instance—we don’t really know how to explain it. And when the news is scary—as it was when a new syndrome suddenly arose, affecting kids long thought practically invulnerable—we struggle to contextualize it.

Just weeks ago, no one outside a few hospitals had even heard of such a thing as a “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome,” or heard it described as “Kawasaki-like” and “covidrelated.” We still don’t know the nature of that relationship, as the who has just reminded us, pointing out that many of the children exhibiting symptoms of the new syndrome are not,

in fact, testing positive for covid-19. But the outbreak in New York is big enough to begin to use it as a rough guide for expectations. As of the second week in May, 110 New York minors had been diagnosed with the syndrome in a city with roughly 1.75 million minors and approximately 25 percent exposure to the disease. In the absence of ballooning case numbers in the next few weeks, this implies the risk of contracting it, assuming a coronavirus infection, is very low: about one 50th of one percent. Fatality is even lower: about 1,000th of one percent, the same as chicken pox. But this math is crude. And the data may well not be complete or reliable—this is what happens with new diseases. We live with considerable mystery much longer than we’d like or expect to.

At first, epidemiological models made projections that were too high, then too low; lockdowns first seemed our last defense against a pandemic deluge, but the benefits are growing increasingly uncertain. We have spent the past few months desperate to know everything— lecturing one another about mask-wearing, spending time on beaches or in parks, about the need for ventilators. But almost every single day, our best understanding of the disease and how to deal with it is being revised or even reversed, updated and complicated and caveated and questioned—we’re learning more each day, it seems, about how little we know. We may be living in that valley of ignorance for quite some time, observing the haphazard behavior of a “patchwork pandemic” whose shape only begins to make sense to us months, at least, down the road. Which is one big reason we should probably pump the brakes on any planning, or projection, or advocacy, about whether or not American schools should reopen in September. We simply don’t know much, yet, about those risks.

Thankfully, on the relationship of children to disease spreads, in a month or two we will almost certainly know quite a bit more. That’s because many other, less cautious nations are, effectively, running a global experiment whose results can inform decisions we make here—with schools already opening, in different ways, in Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, Japan, China, and Taiwan, to name just a few.

What happens in those places will be our best guide to school policy, and we will hear what they say by the end of June at the latest.

In the meantime, the strongest arguments that reopening schools would be safe come from anecdote—for instance, a single sick child visiting schools in the French Alps encountered 112 other kids and infected none of them. The data about the susceptibility of children to covid-19, too, is encouraging, all things considered. One study found that school-age children were about a third as susceptible to the virus as adults, though, if in school, they may also have three times as many contacts with others, which roughly counteracts their reduced susceptibility. An early study in Iceland tested 848 children and found no infections, a study from Italy showed basically the same thing, and there were no cases among those under the age of 20 in a survey of people in the Netherlands who went to the doctor complaining of flulike symptoms during the epidemic. And these are just infection rates; fatality rates, even for those children who do contract the disease, are minuscule.

The research on transmissibility is somewhat less reassuring. A much-cited German study showed that children with the virus carried as much viral load as adults, suggesting they were roughly as likely to infect others as adults—and that schools could become powerful vectors of the disease, even if most of the students weren’t much at risk of getting very sick. But follow-up analysis, using the same data set but correcting some math, suggests that the viral load in children was actually lower than in adults.

Nevertheless, more than two-thirds of American parents say they would not be comfortable sending their child to school, currently, even if those schools were to open. And in Israel, where schools have opened, this was a problem, with many parents keeping their kids home out of fear. Which raises the big-picture question: When considering when and in what

We’re learning more each day, it seems, about how little we know.

form to open schools, what standard is being—or should be—applied? Is it parents’ sense of safety? Public-health considerations related to the spreading risks to adults of opening schools and making children into vectors of disease? Social costs of school closures—to the kids, especially low-income ones, who will fall further behind, but also to parents, and even to those health systems and other essential services burdened by lack of child care? The dilemma is knotty, and complicated, not just because each of these considerations has its own embedded value set, but because in some cases those values run up against one another—meaning that the answer, when we arrive at it, won’t be statistical or scientific, however much easier that kind of resolution would be, but political and social. What level of risk are we comfortable with, and what social cost are we willing to endure to reduce it?

Presumably, we could be doing much more to make schools safe for children, and also for their families and communities, with rigorous testing and publichealth supervision and medical support— by treating students and staff, in other words, as though education itself was an essential, frontline service, like health care or food production. Of course, it is. Distressingly, though, we are not yet supporting many essential or frontline workers with that kind of protection—nor have we deployed it systematically to protect the most vulnerable group, the elderly. And if the only thing we feel can pull us out of that valley of ignorance is definitive data, chances are we will never get anything that satisfying, because the disease probably won’t cooperate.

Instead, the results from global school reopenings are likely to show what the early research has already suggested: that kids remain at significantly lower risk, but not zero risk, and that they help spread the disease somewhat, meaning that school openings do increase the likelihood of real outbreaks. Come June, we will know quite a lot more about the disease and how it affects children. But that knowledge will likely be, still, just partial, preliminary, probabilistic, and perhaps contradictory. Throughout the pandemic, we have heard again and again the refrain “Trust the science.” But science doesn’t speak in unison, or definitively, in “Yeses” and “Nos.” It is comforting to think that knowledge is binary like that—that questions about things like the reopening of schools could be adjudicated by the objective application of expertise. And to think that the disease will, in revealing itself over the next month, decide for us. It won’t. ■