What Parents Need to Know About School Coronavirus Case Data
Some reported cases come from districts that are operating fully remotely, or districts in which the cases occurred before school was open.
It is the start of a school year unlike any other. Many schools, especially in large urban districts, are fully remote. In New York, school opening was announced and then delayed. Some schools have opened and then grappled with quarantine. Others started closed and are now opening.
As this has been happening, I’ve been talking and writing a lot about school opening and the best ways for parents and educators to gauge the risks involved. My central message has been that we need to focus on the denominators.
What does that mean?
Much of the reporting on schools has focused on cases of Covid-19. There are several dashboards, including in The Times, which do an excellent job of collecting the available information on coronavirus cases in schools. That information is limited, but it has grown over time.
What these reports lack, though, is a sense of the size of the pool. Knowing that there are five cases associated with a school may be useful information, but it is difficult to interpret that information without knowing whether those cases occurred in a school of 15 students or a school of 1,500.
One way to think about it: If there are five cases in a school of 15, then if your child interacts with other children randomly, there is a 35 percent chance that they interact with someone who has Covid-19. If there are 5 cases in a school of 1,500, there is a 0.33 percent chance. That’s the denominator.
Denominators are part of the larger context, but they are not the only piece.
We also need to understand what schools are doing. Are they undertaking mitigation? Masking? Distancing? Are they open at all? Some reported cases come from districts which are operating fully remotely, or districts in which the cases occurred before school was open. In both of those situations, the cases have nothing to do with schools, they just happen to be among school-affiliated people. Without linking the cases to their context, it is very difficult to understand what the numbers mean. CONTINUE READING: Opinion | What Parents Need to Know About School Coronavirus Case Data - The New York Times