Covid-19 in OKC (coronavirus)

[Jersey Boss]

I don’t have much doubt schools will close again. Just takes a few teachers getting ill and it is all over. There isn’t much teacher back ups or subs so this will go quickly. Colleges are the same way.

Instead of spending the summer coming up with ideas to teach our kids they just waited it out hoping it would go away and here we are.

Not only will this hurt kids but parents are in a place on where their kids will be while they work. There really is a no win situation happening this semester.

Well we were told by POTUS that the virus would just disappear when it got warmer.
Governor Stitt showed zero leadership and zero contingency plan.
Ditto for the State Board of Education(excluding Hoffmeister).
That is why nobody planned for a problematic fall semester.

[LocoAko]

I’ve read a couple pieces lately about parents saying it’s imperative that schools open because their kids are not not getting normal exposure to normal experiences and aren’t progressing as they should because of this.

This is what I don't get. I'm receptive to the argument in general, but the pandemic (and our handling of it) has other plans. What is going to be normal and a fun socialization experience of wearing masks, having glass screens between you and everyone else, group activities canceled, etc? In-person instruction will probably be beneficial but I don't know why people are demanding schools reopen so their kids can have some sense of normalcy. That's not coming back for a long while....

[d-usa]

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2769034

[d-usa]

This is what I don't get. I'm receptive to the argument in general, but the pandemic (and our handling of it) has other plans. What is going to be normal and a fun socialization experience of wearing masks, having glass screens between you and everyone else, group activities canceled, etc? In-person instruction will probably be beneficial but I don't know why people are demanding schools reopen so their kids can have some sense of normalcy. That's not coming back for a long while....

Schools are often the main source of food and many social services for many kids. But instead of exposing every kid and their families to get those services the country needs to focus on improving access to these services. The packed lunches provided to kids throughout the spring were essential for many.

But we are looking at many areas where people are basically looking at Schrödingers Schools: useless waste of money which shouldn’t exist and we should have vouchers and support private schools, while at the same time arguing that the country will socially and economically collapse of we don’t open up these useless institutions.

[PoliSciGuy]

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2769034

This study has several limitations. First, many states enacted additional nonpharmaceutical interventions concurrently with or shortly after school closure, making it impossible to fully isolate potential effects of school closure. Some nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as increased handwashing, could not be included due to lack of available data.

Second, analyses were conducted at the state level. The analyses did not account for resident travel leading to viral spread between states. Even though the study modeled state-level policies, some states had more restrictive policies locally (ie, by county).

Third, inadequate testing has impeded COVID-19 diagnosis. Testing variability was accounted for with the use of state-level testing rates as a model covariate; however, testing rates do not fully capture a state’s testing capability, infrastructure, and strictness of testing guidelines.

In other words, this thing is really limited because, as I teach my statistical methods students on day 1, correllation=/= causation. Schools shut down, then offices shut down, then people stopped moving, then stay at home orders went out, all within a week of each other. This study itself admits that other, nonpharmaceutical factors may have played "a significant part" in their findings. Since no state kept their schools open, we couldn't really compare the results across the US. Also, as the itself study states, testing limitations and other issues further lesson the strength of the conclusions

[Edmond Hausfrau]

Looking at CDC data for adults over 18 for the 2018-2019 flu season in Oklahoma, the vaccination rate was 49.8%. This is for a known entity with proven efficacy that helps prevent morbidity and mortality.
I find it hard to believe that anyone is this state will vaccinate themselves for Covid 19 at a rate higher than that of a coin toss, given our absymal flu vaccine rate.

[OKC Talker]

This isn't true. I already linked to two studies that show that kids are hugely, significantly less likely to spread it into the home, and this pattern is borne out in other studies in other countries:

https://www.rivm.nl/en/novel-coronav...n-and-covid-19 " Based on source and contact tracing from the beginning of the epidemic, we see the following: looking at 10 COVID-19 patients who were <18 years old, they had 43 close contacts, and none of them became ill, whereas 8.3% (55/566) of the close contacts of the 221 patients who were ≥18 years old became ill.

This isn't settled science by any means...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/29/dr-f...ls-reopen.html
"White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci warned parents sending kids back to school that children over 9 years old can spread the coronavirus as well as adults, saying that should be considered when deciding whether to reopen schools in the fall.

“It’s been shown that children from 10 to 19 can transmit the virus to adults as well as adults can,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an interview Wednesday on MSNBC."



Here are some studies that disagree with you:
https://zoonosen.charite.de/fileadmi...atient-age.pdf
https://science.sciencemag.org/conte...6498/1481.full
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article



There's also this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/h...on-school.html
"Dr. Nuzzo also pointed to a study in the Netherlands, conducted by the Dutch government, which concluded that “patients under 20 years play a much smaller role in the spread than adults and the elderly.”

But other experts said that study was not well designed because it looked at household transmission. Unless the scientists deliberately tested everyone, they would have noticed and tested only more severe infections — which tend to be among adults, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Assumptions that children are not involved in the epidemiology, because they do not have severe illness, are exactly the kind of assumption that you really, really need to question in the face of a pandemic,” Dr. Hanage said. “Because if it’s wrong, it has really pretty disastrous consequences.”"

[PoliSciGuy]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/29/dr-f...ls-reopen.html
"White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci warned parents sending kids back to school that children over 9 years old can spread the coronavirus as well as adults, saying that should be considered when deciding whether to reopen schools in the fall.

“It’s been shown that children from 10 to 19 can transmit the virus to adults as well as adults can,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an interview Wednesday on MSNBC."



Here are some studies that disagree with you:
https://zoonosen.charite.de/fileadmi...atient-age.pdf
https://science.sciencemag.org/conte...6498/1481.full
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article



There's also this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/h...on-school.html
"Dr. Nuzzo also pointed to a study in the Netherlands, conducted by the Dutch government, which concluded that “patients under 20 years play a much smaller role in the spread than adults and the elderly.”

But other experts said that study was not well designed because it looked at household transmission. Unless the scientists deliberately tested everyone, they would have noticed and tested only more severe infections — which tend to be among adults, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Assumptions that children are not involved in the epidemiology, because they do not have severe illness, are exactly the kind of assumption that you really, really need to question in the face of a pandemic,” Dr. Hanage said. “Because if it’s wrong, it has really pretty disastrous consequences.”"

As I've said, these conclusions are generally true for elementary school aged kids, so I agree that 10 is a good cutoff for thinking significantly about reopening schools. As for the studies you quoted:

https://zoonosen.charite.de/fileadmi...atient-age.pdf

This is a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed, so conclusions need to be couched with that fact. Second, as the study itself says:

There are many other factors that complicate the determination of infection rates in, and transmission rates from children. For instance, the age profile during the early phase of the outbreak in many European countries makes it difficult to derive transmission rates from household contact studies. Early transmission clusters were started by travellers of adult age, making children less likely to be index cases in households (4). Another circumstance making children less likely to carry the virus into households is that kindergartens and schools were closed early in the outbreak in Germany. These combined effects will cause children to be more likely to receive rather than spread infections in households for purely circumstantial reasons.

Also, that study never actually tests transmission - it just looks at viral loads. So that preprint doesn't really disprove the articles I linked. Let's move on.

This one https://science.sciencemag.org/conte...6498/1481.full doesn't use hard data, but rather employs a model based on data, from China, from February. Given that the studies we've seen since have actual empirical data as opposed to models from a time of spotty testing and less understanding of the virus than we have know, the conclusions in this one have been subsumed. And, again, here the authors admit that causation is difficult to tease out from the data:

It is likely that population-wide social distancing, case-based strategies, and decontamination efforts all contributed to achieve control in Wuhan and Shanghai, and their effect is difficult to separate out in retrospective observational studies.

Finally, as for the South Korea study, that thing is significantly flawed because of this issue in the methods:

Because we could not determine direction of transmission, we calculated the proportion of detected cases by the equation [number of detected cases/number of contacts traced] × 100, excluding the index patient; we also calculated 95% CIs. We compared the difference in detected cases between household and nonhousehold contacts across the stratified age groups.

Emphasis mine. The study could not determine the direction of transmission. In other words, it is as likely that kids got sick from their household than they infected it. Given the other studies out there. For example, this comparison of Finland (which locked down) and Sweden (which went for the stupid herd immunity strategy) shows that households with children that went to school were no more likely to get infected than households with no school-going kids: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/...d-children.pdf

It's not enough to just copy and paste links, but to evaluate them critically and make sure the conclusions they make actually back up your point.

[OKC Talker]

It's not enough to just copy and paste links, but to evaluate them critically and make sure the conclusions they make actually back up your point.

My point was that there's significant uncertainty among the experts and we can't state theories as fact. I don't have a dog in this fight, but it seems like you feel very strongly about this and that's fine. Please be objective and use that same standard of comparison on the marginally supported studies you posted.

[Bunty]

Johns Hopkins University says the US needs to reset its response to Covid-19:
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/...cf867d80cbc9ce

[RustytheBailiff]

New Your Times this morning reports:

At least 14 new coronavirus deaths and 848 new cases were reported in Oklahoma on July 29. Over the past week, there have been an average of 1,043 cases per day, an increase of 48 percent from the average two weeks earlier.

As of Thursday morning, there have been at least 34,605 cases and 523 deaths in Oklahoma since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times database.


STAY SAFE WEAR MASKS

[TheTravellers]

Yeah, but unlike other media forms, these platforms are designed to not just share—but amplify—the type of garbage that wouldn’t have aired on TV or radio or newspaper (not letting these mediums off the hook, but they’re different).

And that's one of the big reasons I'm not on FB or Twitter (although it seems Twitter is a bit, just a bit, more sane than FB).

[RustytheBailiff]

And that's one of the big reasons I'm not on FB or Twitter (although it seems Twitter is a bit, just a bit, more sane than FB).

If this is more sane than facebook, I'm certainly glad I don't do facebook....

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?...Ctwgr%5Eauthor



STAY SAFE WEAR MASKS

[jerrywall]

And that's one of the big reasons I'm not on FB or Twitter (although it seems Twitter is a bit, just a bit, more sane than FB).

Hrm... Twitter I can't seem to curate as well. Facebook at least I can control my circle, and I don't have that many crazy or trash people on my friends' list. Twitter just seems like unrestrained crazy some times.

[TheTravellers]

If this is more sane than facebook, I'm certainly glad I don't do facebook....

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?...Ctwgr%5Eauthor



STAY SAFE WEAR MASKS

Can't see it 'cos work blocks Twitter, but I assume it's Agent Orange's feed - c'mon, you know what I mean about being saner, that word *always* excludes him, no matter what form his BS takes (Twitter, EOs, press conferences, interviews, whatever).

And jerry - since I don't have a Twitter account, I just hit it here and there for useful info, can't say I get the same as easily from FB, so I guess I don't get the full Twitter experience.

Back on topic - totally agree with Bunty's post about needing to reset. Just about the only way the US can get a grip on this is to start shutting stuff down again, but our "leadership" won't do that, so it's going to be off and on, unpredictable shutdowns and in the end, the US is still going to be screwed. Cannot believe it's this hard for the US to do the right thing, we're not great, not sure if we'll ever be great again, this is most likely another step downhill, and just wait until the unemployment runs out and evictions start, Great Depression #2 here we come...

[jerrywall]

I don't know if this has been posted, but it's an interesting collection of the anti-mask thought process. The big takeaway for me was just how flat out misinformed so many of the responses were.

https://oklahoman.com/article/566790...virus-pandemic

[TheTravellers]

I don't know if this has been posted, but it's an interesting collection of the anti-mask thought process. The big takeaway for me was just how flat out misinformed so many of the responses were.

https://oklahoman.com/article/566790...virus-pandemic

I'm embarrassed to say these are my fellow citizens.

[TheTravellers]

Here's a nice little statistic - in the USA, one person dies from COVID-19 every minute right now (and probably for at least the next few days, if not weeks).

[jedicurt]

This isn't true. I already linked to two studies that show that kids are hugely, significantly less likely to spread it into the home, and this pattern is borne out in other studies in other countries:

https://www.rivm.nl/en/novel-coronav...n-and-covid-19 " Based on source and contact tracing from the beginning of the epidemic, we see the following: looking at 10 COVID-19 patients who were <18 years old, they had 43 close contacts, and none of them became ill, whereas 8.3% (55/566) of the close contacts of the 221 patients who were ≥18 years old became ill.

https://www.cebm.net/study/covid-19-...nch-alps-2020/
"Subsequent to identifying the index case in a French holiday chalet, SARS-CoV-2 was detected in 11 additional people: 5 in France (including 1 child), 5 in England, 1 in Spain: overall attack rate in the chalet: 75%.

One paediatric case, with picornavirus and influenza A coinfection, visited 3 different schools while symptomatic. No resulting transmission was identified. "

https://pediatrics.aappublications.o...46/1/e20200961
"Among the 74 pediatric case patients included in this study, 68 had a definite exposure history, and 65 (95.59%) were household contacts of adults whose symptoms developed earlier. There has been no evidence showing the virus was transmitted from children to others."

https://pediatrics.aappublications.o...peds.2020-1576
"children do not seem to be a major vector of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission, with most pediatric cases described inside familial clusters6 and no documentation of child-to-child or child-to-adult transmission"

These are all peer-reviewed studies, and you can find similar outcomes from countries that stayed open and kept schools open.

direct quote from your first study....

The first part of the study has now been completed. The second part of the study is still ongoing. RIVM will be looking at the spread of the virus within families after a diagnosis of COVID-19 in a child. This approach gives us an even better opportunity to investigate how often an infection in children leads to further spread of the virus.

so even in this study they still say they don't know from their study about if a child is the one infected, and how it will spread to family, because that part of the study is still ongoing.

second study literally looked at just one case of a child who had two siblings in the home. not exactly a test that holds any scientific weight since it literally only has one case study involving children. probably why that study doesn't go on to talk anymore about the child anymore after the 4th paragraph of the paper.


on your third study... after your quote of

"Among the 74 pediatric case patients included in this study, 68 had a definite exposure history, and 65 (95.59%) were household contacts of adults whose symptoms developed earlier. There has been no evidence showing the virus was transmitted from children to others."

this is literally the next sentence in the discussion that you conveniently left out.

Among the 74 pediatric case patients included in this study, 68 had a definite exposure history, and 65 (95.59%) were household contacts of adults whose symptoms developed earlier. There has been no evidence showing the virus was transmitted from children to others. However, the relatively low attack rate of COVID-19 in children might be explained by the stringent implementation of home confinement and nationwide school closure as required by the Chinese governments.During the outbreak, public activities were discouraged, and children spent most of their days at home with strengthened protection from caregivers.

and on the fourth study... this line is very important

however, with our study design, we cannot confirm that child-to-adult transmission occurred.

so even the creators of the study state that because of the design, you can't confirm or deny child-to-adult transmission. infact the entire last two paragraphs of that study pretty much sum up that we don't know.. here they are

This study has some limitations. The study sample likely does not represent the total number of pediatric SARS-CoV-2 cases during this time period. Indeed, patients with milder or atypical presentation might not have sought medical attention. Moreover, the recall of symptom onset among HHCs might be inaccurate, although this seems for once less likely because of the confinement measures and anxiety in the community.

The results of this study are important because of the extensive HHC tracing and the almost absence of loss to follow-up. Extended diagnostic screening of suspected cases and thorough contact tracing are needed to better understand the dynamics of transmission within households.

so, back to my original statement. there is little evidence. but thank you for the sources to back up my claim. that was extremely handy.

[jedicurt]

It's not enough to just copy and paste links, but to evaluate them critically and make sure the conclusions they make actually back up your point.

funny you should say that.

[LocoAko]

Herman Cain has now died from the COVID he almost certainly acquired at the President's rally in Tulsa.

[Bill Robertson]

I'm embarrassed to say these are my fellow citizens.

Me too.

[PoliSciGuy]

Herman Cain has now died from the COVID he almost certainly acquired at the President's rally in Tulsa.

Ugh, awful

[Libbymin]

Herman Cain has now died from the COVID he almost certainly acquired at the President's rally in Tulsa.

Sad and yet completely unsurprising too.

[soonerguru]

Herman Cain has now died from the COVID he almost certainly acquired at the President's rally in Tulsa.

The rally was on June 20. Herman Cain, who railed against wearing masks, was seated next to Kevin Stitt, who thinks masks should be optional. Neither were wearing masks.

On July 2, Herman Cain was admitted to the hospital for Covid-19, where he remained until his death today.

He totally got it at Trump's rally, and one wonders if Stitt did as well.