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Good Morning. Can teachers get vaccinated quickly? And can most schools safely reopen now? Yes and yes.
There are two obvious ways to reopen schools. One is to take precautions like wearing masks to minimize the risk of breakouts in school buildings. The other is to vaccinate the country’s teachers as soon as possible.
Both strategies now seem feasible – and yet none of them happens in many places.
Instead, about half of K-12 students still don’t spend time in classrooms. School closure rates are highest in Maryland, New Mexico, California, and Oregon, according to Burbio. Experts say the prolonged absences cause major learning problems, especially for lower-income students.
Today’s newsletter is about how American children can get back to school quickly and safely.
There are enough vaccine doses
The country now has enough doses of vaccine to get teachers to the top without significantly delaying vaccinations for everyone else.
Nationwide around 6.5 million people work in a K-12 school. It’s a much smaller group than the 21 million health care workers, many of whom were among the first group of Americans to be eligible for vaccines.
For reference, Moderna and Pfizer have released an average of more than a million new doses to the federal government every day this month. That daily number is expected to exceed three million in the next month. Immediately vaccinating every school employee would postpone everyone else’s vaccine by a few days at most.
Some states have already given priority to teachers, with Kentucky appearing to be the most advanced, according to Education Week. The administration of the first dose to the majority of K-12 workers who want one is complete. “This will help us get our children back to school safely faster than any other state,” Governor Andy Beshear told these children.
The schools are sure to open again
Even before the teachers were fully vaccinated – a process that can take more than a month after the first shot – many schools showed how to reopen.
It’s about “masking, social distancing, hand washing, adequate ventilation, and contact tracing,” as Susan Dominus wrote (in a fascinating Times Magazine story of how Rhode Island kept its schools largely open). That includes setting up virtual alternatives for some students and staff that they want. If schools have followed this approach, research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Others has shown it has usually worked.
In one of the most rigorous studies, a group at Tulane University looked at hospital stays (a more reliable measure than positive tests) before and after school reopened. The results suggest that at least 75 percent of U.S. communities are now in good enough control of Covid to reopen schools without triggering new outbreaks, including many places where schools remain closed.
The evidence is grim for places with the worst current outbreaks, like much of the Carolinas. And some schools seem unsafe to reopen, including a Georgia district that is the subject of a new CDC case study.
Even so, Douglas Harris, the Tulane economist who leads the research group, told me, “All studies suggest that if we focus on it, we can do this.” He added, “We can’t do school the old way, but we can do better.”
One final note: I’ve been writing recently about the cost of the overly negative message that many people are spreading via the vaccines, even though the vaccines virtually eliminate severe forms of Covid. Schools are another place you can see this cost – in Oregon.
Oregon, like Kentucky, has made it a priority to vaccinate teachers. However, some teacher unions there expressed skepticism about reopening even after teachers were vaccinated, as my colleague Shawn Hubler wrote.
THE LATEST NEWS
The virus
One morning read: After seven decades, Lucky Luke – a classic Franco-Belgian comic – adds a black hero.
From the opinion: Finding love in the pandemic is like “falling through space, compressing time further in isolation”.
Lived life: Ahmed Zaki Yamani, a Harvard trained attorney, was a longtime oil minister in Saudi Arabia and the architect of the Arab world’s aspiration to control its own energy resources in the 1970s. Yamani died at the age of 90.
ART AND IDEAS
The newest trend in baseball: lose now
Spring training has begun and Major League Baseball is suffering from a strange disease: some high-profile teams are not trying to win. The Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies, and Pittsburgh Pirates have dumped all of their top players in recent trades and made only a modest return.
It’s deeply frustrating for the fans. “On behalf of all the Rockies fans, can you file a complaint against the Rockies management with the Better Business Bureau because it’s just totally awful?” One recently wrote to the Denver Post.
What’s happening? Baseball teams are businesses, and winning isn’t always the best way to profit. The teams receive significant income from sales of goods, television contracts, and more. And the pandemic has destroyed the form of revenue that depends most on performance – people who buy tickets.
In response, several teams decided to reduce the payroll. Their executives promise fans that adding exciting young players later is part of a plan. “The idea of demolition – some call it refueling – isn’t new,” said Tyler Kepner of the Times. “But it’s definitely more common now.”
As Tyler points out, many gamblers are also frustrated and believe that the owners are acting like a cartel that keeps salaries down. The negotiation agreement expires after this season and the next round of negotiations could be difficult.
In Tyler’s recent columnsHe looks at three teams trying to win: the San Diego Padres, the New York Mets, and the New York Yankees.
PLAY, WATCH, EAT
What to cook
The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was a dormitory. Here is today’s puzzle – or you can play online.
