Non-pharmacological interventions at schools to slow virus spread remain controversial.
Nevertheless, viruses do spread differently in schools.
Even non-pharmacological interventions at schools to slow virus spread during the COVID-19 pandemic remain controversial. Nevertheless, viruses do spread differently in schools.
Most people will not be interested in this kind of story, but if you really want to know why schools are different in regards to transmission of viruses… This is the origin and explanation:
The following is an adapted excerpt from “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story” By Michael Lewis. Published in 2021.
In 2003 a new coronavirus had moved, probably from an animal called a civet, into humans, infecting 8000 and killing 800. A mutation here or a mutation there, and the virus could have wreaked havoc on American life. Yet the threats posed by nature were not of high concern at the time in the national security policy circles. Then in the summer of 2005 everything changed when George W. Bush read John Barry’s book, “The Great Influenza” and asked, What’s our strategy?
“We don’t have a strategy,” replied a staff member…
The president said, ‘This is bullshit!’ ‘We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?’ And how were you going to stop hundreds of thousands of Americans from dying while they wait for a vaccine?’ If anything like the 1918 flu occurred, the basic functions of the society would come to a halt, it would distort American life in the most extraordinary ways, and leave it forever changed. No one in the federal government seemed to be worried about it. The president was pissed!
And so, the George W. Bush administration put together a brain trust that worked to create a playbook that could be used in case the country was beset by a catastrophic pandemic like the 1918 flu. Over the course of 2006 they plotted what a fast national response to a deadly virus could look like. Should schools shut down? Should businesses?
A man named Carter Mecher was part of this brain trust. He worked timelessly to create computer programs that would graphically show how respiratory viruses spread in different environments. The picture that emerged from his computer model shocked him.
The graph illustrated the effects on a disease from various crude strategies such as: isolating the ill; quarantining entire households when they had a sick person in them; socially distancing adults; giving people antiviral drugs; and so on. Each of the crude strategies had some slight effect, but none by itself made much of a dent, and certainly none had the ability to halt the pandemic by driving the disease’s reproductive rate below 1. One intervention was not like the others, however: when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff. (The model defined “social distance” not as zero contact but as a 60 percent reduction in kids’ social interaction.) ‘Holy shit!’ said Carter. “Nothing big happens until you close the schools. It’s not like anything else. It’s like a phase change. It’s nonlinear. It’s like when water temperature goes from thirty-three to thirty-two. When it goes from thirty-four to thirty-three, it’s no big deal; one degree colder and it turns to ice.
Carter tried not to let himself or his team get too excited. He thought:, ‘Okay, this is just a model, so now we need to go and talk to the really sophisticated modelers’. They had the three expert computer academics with their big, complicated models more or less on call. And when you fed into those models the question “What happens if you do nothing but close schools and reduce the social interaction of minors by 60 percent?,” they responded, slowly, but as one: that works.
Carter said, “Is there something about kids and schools that I don’t know enough about? Is there something I haven’t thought of?’ I’m going to have to dig deeper.
He learned that there were more than one hundred thousand K–12 schools in the country, with fifty million children in them. Twenty-five million rode a bus to school. “I thought, Holy crap, half the kids in the U.S. hop on a school bus.” There were seventy thousand buses in the entire U.S. public transportation system, but five hundred thousand school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire U.S. public transportation system. A lot of the talk in the White House pandemic planning room had been about grown-ups: how they worked and traveled. “We’d been talking about the New York subway and the DC Metro,” said Carter, “but for every person hopping on public transportation in one day, there are two kids taking the school bus.”
How kids got to school was one issue; what happened once they were there was another…
And so, by request, the Department of Education dug out blueprints of America’s schools that enabled Carter to calculate just how much space each kid had. He did some math and reckoned that each elementary school child spent the day in a space with a radius of just three and a half feet, which, when they reached high school, expanded to four. That can’t be right, he thought, it’s too small. He decided to plan trips to schools to see if the information was correct.
From the moment they got in the car during these journeys, he started to view the world through a new lens. Look! he said, as they passed children waiting for the school bus. Look at the way kids stand at the bus stop. When adults stand at a bus stop, they give each other space. Kids are like those close talkers on Seinfeld. He then entered the school. Look! It’s just a sea of humanity. I could almost walk across their heads! He watched the way they horsed around and jumped on each other’s backs and behaved in ways that he no longer did. Look! They’re so different. They’re not little adults. They have a different sense of space.
They reached the classroom, Carter sat at one of the kids’ desks, as it allowed him to get a feel for how jammed together the students were during class. He reached out his arms in either direction. Look! he said to himself. It’s three feet. I can touch the person next to me. Leaving the school, he saw a bus and boarded it, with a tape measure. The seats turned out to be forty inches long. “They estimate kids’ hips are thirteen inches across so they can put them three to a seat,” he said. The aisle was narrower than a normal bus; paramedics knew not to bring a normal-sized stretcher onto a school bus, he later learned, because it wouldn’t fit down the aisle. “I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit”
To illustrate this point he created a picture, of a 2,600-square-foot home, but with the same population density as an American school, then turned it into a slide. “The Spacing of People, If Homes Were Like Schools,” read the top. The inside of the typical American single-family home suddenly looked a lot like a refugee prison, or the DMV on a bad day. “There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
The more Carter and and his team learned, the more excited they became. “Imagine if we could affect the weather,” Carter wrote, in one of his long memos. “Imagine if we had the capability to reduce a category 5 storm to a category 2 or a 1… Now although the Federal Government is not at the threshold of significantly reducing the potency of a hurricane, it is at the threshold of doing just this to another natural disaster, a respiratory virus pandemic!”
Carter began to deliver talks to small groups of important people about how respiratory virus disease spread differently in schools than in other places. And how the model confirmed his hunch that there were non-pharmacological methods for reducing virus spread during a pandemic that could be implemented before the development of a vaccine.
Excerpts and adaptions from
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
Michael Lewis