School Reopens. COVID-19 Cases Emerge. Rinse And Repeat ... 700 Schools and Counting

August 18, 2020

 
Children getting on the bus returning to school (U.S. Air Force photo by L.A. Shively)

Children getting on the bus returning to school (U.S. Air Force photo by L.A. Shively)

By Laura Clawson

Daily Kos

Despite the threat of COVID-19, schools keep reopening—and quickly experiencing outbreaks of the virus. We see scattered news reports on those school outbreaks, but it can be hard to understand the scope of the problem. Until now. 

A Kansas high school teacher is keeping a spreadsheet tracking COVID-19 in schools, and it’s up to 700 entries. That’s not 400 kids in one school, 200 in another, and 50 in each of two more. There are 700 different schools on Alisha Morris’ spreadsheet.

“We knew this would happen, and we had tried to make it known that it would happen, but seeing it on paper was, I think, the eye-opening part about it,” Morris told The Washington Post. “It’s just that terrifying moment when you open it up and just keeps scrolling and you’re like: ‘How can there be so many?’”

Morris started her spreadsheet on Aug. 7 and it quickly became so overwhelming and important that 35 volunteers are now helping her keep it going. Find the spreadsheet here.

And as more schools open—pushed to do so by officials ignoring the health and safety of students and teachers—the flood of stories of COVID-19 in schools isn’t exactly letting up.

  • On Sunday the University of North Carolina reported its fourth cluster of cases in three days. Also, a sorority at Oklahoma State University has 23 cases, and college parties in Alabama and Georgia are causing worries about what’s coming.

  • An Oklahoma high school student went to school knowing they’d tested positive but thinking it was safe because they were asymptomatic. That points to the importance of school officials in making decisions about safety, because individuals are not necessarily going to know all the facts. Twenty-two students who were in contact with that student and one other who tested positive now have to quarantine.

  • One Arizona school couldn’t open on Monday because of pushback from teachers, who refused to show up in person due to safety concerns.

  • Los Angeles is starting school all-remote, but working on a testing plan that could enable schools to open safely at some point, an effort detailed by Superintendent Austin Beutner.

  • Texas, on the other hand, has decided that the way to not have a coronavirus problem in schools is to refuse to track the data.

This is a rolling public health disaster, and while the original and ongoing failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic is fully on Donald Trump, the decisions to open schools when it’s not safe to do so have come from officials in state after state, and town after town.

Commentary, COVID-19Mark KarlinEconomic “Reopening”, CoronavirusComment