The COVID Playbook

This post represents my personal views and not those of the Winchester School Committee nor MassTLC.

A year ago, I ran a campaign focused on getting kids back to school safely, preparing future-ready graduates, and supporting the mental health and special needs that will enable ALL our students to succeed to their greatest potential.

While reopening our schools safely for more regular, full-time, in-person learning, was my priority, I also felt that we needed to maintain and improve our capacity to offer a remote option to provide flexibility during quarantine and for families to make personal decisions about the safety and wellbeing of their children.

No Remote Option

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), however, made a state-wide decision to take away the discretion for districts to offer remote learning. I disagree with this approach as I believe that individual districts are laboratories of innovation, are better situated to understand the needs of their students, teachers and staff, and should be encouraged to do what they deem best for their communities.

Since we are in an environment where the state will not permit remote learning, our focus must be on ensuring that in-person learning can continue safely and uninterrupted. Our district has done a good job with mitigation of COVID spread in schools, but this is not enough. With the explosive growth of the Omicron variant, community transmission outside our schools is the greatest threat to keeping schools open and preparing our students to reach their full potential.

COVID Playbook

We didn’t have a playbook in 2020, but now we do, and its pretty simple.

1. Get Vaccinated/Boosted - Strive for 100% of those eligible in our community to be fully vaccinated and boosted.

2. Test - Both adults and children should participate in regular surveillance testing and take antigen tests before gathering with friends and family. You can sign your Winchester students up for free safety tests here.

3. Stay Home - Anyone who has symptoms or tests positive should stay home and quarantine.

4. Avoid Crowds - Avoid crowded indoor venues.

5. Mask - Wear high-quality, well-fitting masks (e.g., N95, KN95, KF94, etc.) when going to indoor public places. Here are some mask sites: https://behealthyusa.net/, https://shopvida.com/, and https://masklab.us/

The CDC and media have not done well in communicating guidance, and people are understandably fatigued from over two years of pandemic life. There is talk about moving from the COVID pandemic to an endemic stage where we live with it. So long as a decade’s worth of people are dying each year (over 942,000 people have died of COVID over the past two years, since February 2020) as compared to the seasonal flu (on average about 34,000 people die each year from the flu), I do not believe that we are there yet. Someday we will be, but for now, talk of an endemic phase only leads to more complacency which extends the pandemic impacts.

Omicron

With the explosive growth of Omicron cases, there is pressure on the healthcare system as numbers of hospitalizations spike and healthcare workers are out due to infection. Some note that the severity of Omicron is less but with explosive growth driving a larger denominator, the smaller rates of a larger number still result in high case counts that overwhelm healthcare systems, not to mention the toll it takes on individuals and families.

Quarantine

It turns out that only a quarter of the population, according to some estimates, have been following the 10-day quarantine guidance. This, combined with the pressures on the healthcare system and on commerce, have led the CDC to revise its guidance to five days of quarantine followed by five days of masking, and if you take a test after five days and are positive, you should quarantine the full ten days. This is pretty confusing. The bottom line is that your viral load declines each day over about 10 days.

Photo credit: CNN screenshot

As best I can tell, this policy is aimed at making quarantine easier -- to increase the number of people who comply with quarantine requirements during the period of highest transmissibility in the first five days and get people back to work to alleviate pressure on healthcare and commerce. This tradeoff of societal values focuses on the good vs the perfect. Suffice it to say, if you are not a healthcare worker or can work remotely, you should continue to quarantine at home the entire 10 days at which point you are no longer likely to be shedding virus.

Mental Health

There is also a lot of discussion about student mental health, and I’ve heard national public figures cite mental health statistics and then correlate them to remote learning to advance a political agenda. Common sense would say that it is the pandemic that is causing, accelerating, and exposing the mental health epidemic in our community. And, certainly, there are some for which the changes in routine, family and economic stress, and isolation that comes with remote learning contribute to mental health issues. There are others, however, for whom change, masking, and anxiety about personal and family health during the pandemic contribute to mental health issues. There is a lot of change and anxiety in our community generally and we need to provide additional support here, and not use the issue as a political wedge to advance an agenda.

Personal Responsibility

There is also a lot of talk about personal responsibility and that schools are the safest place to be. We need to consider that there isn’t a common definition of personal responsibility and people have divergent outlooks on the pandemic.

• There are those for whom personal responsibility means taking responsibility for not contributing to the spread of the virus by getting vaccinated, wearing masks, not traveling, etc. For these people, schools may be their riskiest activity.

• Others see personal responsibility as getting the vaccine and taking responsibility for the fact that their actions attending parties, travel, personal choice on masking, etc. may lead them to get mild illness. For these, school with their layered mitigation strategies are the safest place for their children and having kids in school is less disruptive of their work and personal schedules.

New Variants

So much of what has happened during the pandemic to date has been foreseeable and yet we wait to prepare and are continually caught off guard by not being ready for the next curve ball. Consider this: every new infection provides another opportunity for mutation. The high transmissibility of the Omicron variant combined with lesser symptoms that entice infectious people to be active, thereby spreading the virus, means that new variants are increasingly likely.

With the Omicron variant we saw two significant changes:

1. the virus became very highly transmissible like the Measles virus, and

2. the respiratory infection moved from the chest to the head, reducing the severity of symptoms.

Mutations that lead to new variants are random, but as we increase the number of mutation opportunities, we increase the likelihood of variants. Imagine the devastating impacts on society if our current, highly transmissible Omicron variant moves back into the lungs, with all the severe consequences we saw in the first wave.

Hope Is Not a Strategy

It is foreseeable that there will be more variants and, while people hope things get milder and we move from a pandemic to an endemic phase where we live with COVID like the seasonal flu, I’d caution that hope is not a strategy and that we’d do better as a society if we took personal responsibility – especially in a climate where public officials are balancing public apathy and business concerns against public health measures -- for helping ensure that we are doing everything we can to reduce the spread of COVID in the community.

What Can You Do? Follow the COVID Playbook

1. Get Vaccinated/Boosted if eligible

2. Test Regularly (Opt-In to School Safety Checks)

3. Stay Home When You’re Sick or Test Positive

4. Avoid Crowded Indoor Venues

5. Wear High Quality Masks in Indoor Public Places