Teachers should be considered front line candidates for COVID-19 vaccinations

I agree. A young relative (well, she's 40) teaches at a Catholic school (my S.O.'s niece) and is both teaching elementary age students in the classroom and teaching online from home. We think she should be teaching at a public school, where she'd at least be better compensated for busting her a**, but she's reluctant to move. To her credit, she's taking every possible precaution, but she needs to be vaccinated. All teachers should be.

I'll add that research which came out today shows that far and away the worst "super spreaders" are in the 20-45 age group. Can't say I'm surprised.

 

Then we agree. We're starting to open schools here and I support it.

My issue is that Texas has been highly negligent so I have a lot more sympathy for the complaints of teachers and staff. I think the desire to just move on doesn't excuse the ineptitude of the government of Texas. If Texas is going to let the infection rate stay this high, then my opinion is that teachers have to get priority for vaccines.

 

so what school you teach?

 

School district rules for reporting covid cases can be somewhat limiting as the definitions are narrow enough that I believe we’ve probably got a lot of underreported case numbers circulating.

I think it’s just as fair to say we have a lot of incomplete data as opposed to ‘data shows schools aren’t spreading’.

with an elementary kid myself and family who are educators, I know there have been some real bombs going off that have spread through families. Even if the number that shows up on the district chart is just 1 or 2.

regardless, it will be interesting to see years from now all the covid info we learn (like say finally figuring out what factors determine severity or symptoms) and the actual impact of schools will be high on that list for me.

 

Why teachers in this case though? There's no evidence that schools have any real spread problems or massive health issues. Most cases in schools seem to be isolated and come from outside the schools. And schools have the ability to isolate and quarantine because teachers work with the same small group of people every day - compared, for example, to a restaurant employee who's interacting with dozens of new and different (and unmasked) people each day. Why not focus on the places where people are actually spreading it? Or populations who are actually ending up hospitalized and dying?

 

In the simplest terms, if we vaccinate all the teachers, it makes us feel good about doing the right thing. But it doesn't really reduce the death rate (teachers are not the ones dying) and it doesn't really reduce the spread (schools and teachers are not a major way it's spreading).

 

But in part, that's because many schools are still on line only, and most of the ones that are back are in a hybrid scenario. I agree if all the guidelines would be followed, that would be great, but once schools open in person at full capacity there is no way to ensure that the guidelines will be followed.

 

Because reopening schools is extremely important for reasons beyond R0 of COVID19.

Aside from the profound losses and deprivations being inflicted on our children, let alone the parents, you're basically opening up childcare for ~100 million plus households and jobs for millions more. That's pretty big! Nobody's going to coffee shops when they're launching their kids zoom.

That's probably why closing schools and reopening them has had a vastly different prioritization in most industrialized countries other than this one.

 

These are all reasons why schools should be reopened. Everyone thinks that's a good idea. That's a different questions from whether teachers should be prioritized over those who are in the highest risk groups. Lots of people have been working in public-facing jobs (retail, food, transportation, delivery, etc.) without being vaccinated. They can't do their jobs by zoom. Teachers have better unions, not bigger risks, than folks like that.

 

Teachers can't do their jobs by zoom either. Half of their job is onsite child care. This is not really mentioned but providing a safe environment to take custody of kids while parents work is a huge part of why schools exist.

People don't realize this. Zoom school doesn't provide this.

 

So re-open schools. For all these reasons, schools in most places should have stayed open during the pandemic, like so many other sectors of "essential workers" did. The public health data suggests it's safe for them to do so now - without needing every teacher vaccinated.

 

Unless kids are a major spread vector back to home, where parent or grandparent face higher risk. That’s what the Dec 2020 UK study showed. And also this Jan 2021 study in Canada: https://globalnews.ca/news/7569457/montreal-study-schools-vector-coronavirus-transmission/

This thread go through the Dec UK study with link to gov paper.



Ps. Most of the studies that show school is not a major spread seem to be from Oct 2020 and earlier.

 

Once health care professionals and elderly are vaccinated, I think teachers should be considered part of essential workers.

 

www.theguardian.com /commentisfree/2021/jan/29/teenage-mental-health-crisis-britain-schools-shutdown-young-people
Behind closed bedroom doors, a teenage mental health crisis is brewing | Gaby Hinsliff
Gaby Hinsliff
7-8 minutes


It’s never been exactly easy to get a teenager up in the morning. But behind many of our children’s closed bedroom doors, something is now unravelling. During last spring and summer, parents of older children worried about them galivanting off for rebellious lockdown-busting parties. In the dark depths of January, the fear is more for kids with all the stuffing knocked out of them; teenagers spending the whole day huddled miserably under duvets, refusing to complete online lessons, or mentally checking out.

Illicit teenage parties were, of course, a health risk. But sad, withdrawn, angry kids who would rather roll over than face another day in lockdown represent a whole new medical crisis in the making.

This week, the children’s commissioner Anne Longfield warned that young people’s mental health services were “unable to meet demand” in a pandemic. Last weekend, a coalition of child health experts warned in a letter to the Observer that “children’s welfare has become a national emergency”. But these clinical terms can’t capture how it feels to have a once sunny-tempered child who suddenly won’t even dress or wash, let alone sit through hours of Zoom lessons, facing an ever-longer waiting list for counselling.

Fiona Forbes of the campaign group Sept for Schools, which argues for education to be prioritised through the pandemic, says the emails she gets from parents are becoming more desperate and frightened. “In the summer it was about juggling – ‘I can’t oversee small children and try to work’. Now we’re getting stories every day of children who, as one mum put it, are ‘crumbling before my eyes’. They can’t sleep, can’t eat, always in their pyjamas.”

Unlike toddlers barrelling into Zoom conference calls, distressed 13-year-olds prowling the house because they can’t sleep is not the stuff of cute public anecdotes. But ask parents privately how their children are coping, and the floodgates open.

Michael, whose 12-year-old developed OCD after the first lockdown, thinks that “not finishing primary school properly, missing friends and sport” were all factors in his son’s difficulties. Sarah has three sons, the eldest of whom is in his first year at university and is frustrated that he can’t go back; the youngest, having just started secondary school, is now visibly switching off from learning.

But it’s the middle one, in his GCSE year, who worries her most. He stays up too late, gaming with friends, angry and sad. “He’s starting to rage against the world. Nothing makes sense any more to him. He misses his teachers and his friends,” she explains. “Basically, for the first time since Covid was a word, I am now worried about the mental health of my children.” Both Sarah and her husband work in education and, as she points out, if they aren’t sure how to help, then families in tougher circumstances must have it far worse. “Every day it kills me thinking of the kids – ones I know, ones my husband knows – who will be having such a dreadful time.”

For parents of children with special needs, meanwhile, life has become doubly difficult. Jane, whose 17-year-old and 13-year-old are both autistic, worries that years of painstaking progress are being undone. “The mental health of young people is a national emergency.”

Educational provision has thankfully improved in leaps and bounds since the last lockdown, with many state as well as private schools now providing a full timetable of live lessons, at least for those lucky enough to have laptops. But concern over the emotional impact of months in isolation is rising with this second school shutdown, alongside new questions about the pressure-cooker effect of online learning.

At worst, headteachers fear older teenagers dropping out for good. At best, it’s all the drudgery of school without the fun bits. A Mumsnet survey of home-schooling parents found three-quarters thought their children were now more demotivated or disengaged.

Jill’s once-sunny year 8 daughter “approaches her laptop with trepidation every morning”, having started to dread the work set online; the teacher isn’t always around to help, so her daughter sobs over things she can’t figure out. Lucy’s 15-year-old daughter, who should have sat GCSEs this summer, is increasingly distressed about not knowing when or how her work will be assessed for the teacher grades now replacing exams. “She said to me, ‘I feel under so much pressure all the time because every piece of work I do could count’,” says her mother, who also worries that her 13-year-old is becoming sad and withdrawn, missing friends.

For older teens, biologically driven to crave independence, being kettled with their parents is a particular kind of torture. So they bury themselves in gaming or Tiktok, where their friends are. But as any doom-scrolling adult knows, overdoing it on social media simply risks accelerating a downward spiral.

Plenty of kids will, it should be said, ride all this out having suffered from nothing worse than boredom. For those who are very shy, or bullied, or children who struggle with conventional school, staying home may even be a positive relief. And since adolescence is a famously rocky ride, perhaps some of these teenagers would have struggled even without lockdown.

But the Mental Health of Children and Young People survey conducted last year by NHS Digital found the incidence of “probable mental health problems” in English five- to 16-year-olds rising from 11% in 2017 to 16% in July 2020. A quarter of children and young people suffered disrupted sleep, and one in 10 often or always felt lonely, with the children of parents who were struggling, financially or otherwise, at highest risk.

Referrals to child mental health services fell during the first lockdown, when schools were closed. But they rose in autumn, when teachers could once again cast an experienced eye over the kids they had been most worried about.

This week’s announcement that schools might start returning from 8 March does, then, offer some relief in sight. But almost all the parents I spoke to stressed that they didn’t want schools rushing back in the pandemic before it was safe. What they wanted was to be heard, and helped.

How best to do so? Longfield wants ministers to speed up the return to normality by using blended learning, with children dividing time between home-schooling and class. Opening up grassroots sport once it’s safe would give some teens a critical outlet too; and some heads are already quietly offering part-time places to teens on mental health grounds.

But above all, we must prepare for the aftermath of this pandemic, expanding mental health services fast enough to deal with whatever emerges from behind closed bedroom doors. As Jane put it: “We have to plan for when people come out of the darkness, but we find so many young people still stuck there.”

 

Agree with that - but you can re-open schools whether you vaccinate teachers or not.

For both of these, vaccinating teachers doesn't impact that. Vaccinated teachers won't change whether kids are following protocols and/or spreading it to each other and then back home. You'd have to vaccinate all the kids to stop that, and that's not what's being suggested.

What we have seen thus far, pretty universally in the hybrid schools we have - and the fully back-to-school situations in other countries - is that schools aren't super-spreader sites. Sure, a few kids infect other kids, and it spreads - but that's true across the board all across the society. But these aren't the places like bars/restaurants/churches/etc where people are spending extended time unmasked indoors and spreading it to the point where we can identify individual hotspots that led to endless numbers of cases. Schools seem no worse than a number of other essential businesses/services.

If the goal is to stop spread, vaccinating restaurant workers, construction workers, etc is more helpful. They have far more exposure to large groups of people, often in less-than-ideal conditions.

If the goal is to stop deaths, vaccinating high-risk groups is more helpful. In a school-related example here, you'd want to cover high-risk teachers and other school staff - like janitors, cafeteria workers, etc. When we talk about vaccinating teachers, it seems odd that all these other school support personnel - often older, less-healthy, more-impoverished, etc - don't get mentioned despite similar or higher exposure within schools.

 

No, it doesn't but vaccinating enough of the more at-risk population impact # of death and serious cases.

Actually, these more recent data shows that students are a major vector of transmission, the index case to household. This is more in line with expectation than what we have seen before. It shouldn't be a surprise. We already know children do get covid as easily and spread it as easily as adults. The reason they effectively spread it MORE easily is because they are typically asymptomatic (throughout infection). The CDC has already said a major cause of covid spread is index cases bringing covid home and quickly, silently infecting all in the family during the asymptomatic period.

The goal is a balance between health and education and economy. Teacher are already on the 1B list and that seem very reasonable to me. Students 17 and young won't be vaccinated until probably Fall at the earliest. School full re-opening should depend more on protecting at risk population.

The Biden admin goal of re-opening most school within 100 days doesn't make sense to me given where we are at. Sure, targeted re-opening in selected local places makes sense, but almost all - that's too risky too fast. CDC basically said >5% positive PCR tests is moderate to highest risk of transmission in schools. >10% is highest. Right now, 34 states are above 5% and 20 states are above 10%. We are near peak infection and spread for the past month. And we are almost there with protecting the at-risk population. May to July is likely the timeframe. There is about 4M of school days left and the admin has pushed for a new covid package that include funding for schools to meet "safe reopening" CDC recommendations (such as contact tracing, cohort, staggered scheduling, ventilation, etcs) - that package, the distribution of the funding and the school implementing those recommendations with those funds will takes month. Just not enough runway left. I personally consider 2020/21 covid school year and Fall 21 as the new norm for school year. That's where the energy and resources should be focused (during the 2021 summer break).

 

It impacts the teachers, and staff at the school. I know that with our school district we are talking about all of the school support staff as well as the administration. It may not be talked about in the media as much but it is part of the negotiations.

Obviously, the more people vaccinated the better. I agree with you about restaurant workers and construction workers.