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School Has Been Canceled!?!
ABRSD canceled school from Friday March 13-Friday March 20, with the understanding that the cancelation might go even longer. Other school districts and colleges and universities around the country and around the world had already canceled school, some of them for much longer. For example, school districts in Washington State, in Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties, canceled school through April. That is six weeks of No School! These cancelations happened because people are afraid that a disease called coronavirus (SARS CoV 2, or COVID 19, or several other names) will fill up our hospitals with people who have severe viral pneumonia and need oxygen and other medical technology to survive. If there are too many people in the hospital with those needs at the same time, the hospital will not be able to help everyone effectively.
How Does Canceling School Help Hospitals?
In general, viral disease can spread through touch. When a person with the virus touches another person, the virus can be transmitted. When a person with the virus touches an object, and another person touches the object, then the second person can pick up the virus from the object. When a person with the virus sneezes or coughs, viral particles go into the air and can land on surfaces, or other people, or be breathed in, and people can get sick that way, too.
The more people are crowded together, the faster the virus goes from person to person. By not touching each other, washing our hands often (in case we touched a virus on a surface), by avoiding touch our faces (where it is easy for a virus on our hand to go into our mouth or nose and thus make us sick), and by cleaning commonly touched surfaces (door handles, for example), we can slow this down. But the best way to slow transmission down is for people to have some distance from each other. At school, we are pretty close together a lot: on the playground at recess, in the halls and in the cafeteria at lunch. But also just sitting in the classroom, we are usually closer than 3 feet from other people. The recommended distance to keep from other people for effectively stopping transmission is 6 feet. That is very hard to do in a school.
By closing schools, the disease should spread more slowly. While young people mostly get very mild cases of this disease, they do not live by themselves. If a young person catches this disease at school and goes home, they might give it to a parent or other family member who gets very sick and needs to go to the hospital. If all young people catch this disease at school and go home, they might get a lot of their family members sick, and overwhelm the medical system.
How Long Will This Last?
We do not know.
Different people have different ideas about how long this will last. In China, the first case of the disease appeared in December of 2019, and while China is still monitoring very closely for more outbreaks, it looks like things in China were a lot better after about three months. They had to do many things to stop the disease, not just cancel school. They stopped almost all things in the city of Wuhan, and its province, Hubei, in order to keep the virus from spreading throughout China. It did spread, but other places were able to do things earlier to keep it from getting as bad in other cities and provinces. We are hoping that we can be more like those other cities and provinces, by canceling schools and doing more social distancing, earlier in this outbreak.
The virus is in other countries also. Italy is starting to do a lot of the things that China did in Hubei, to try to stop the virus. We do not know as much about what is going on in Iran, because it is much more difficult to learn about what is going on in Iran. Some smaller cities and countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, also had the virus, but they quickly identified through testing where the virus was, figured out who the virus might have gone to next, and carefully isolated those people early on.
[Why Do We Not Test People For the Virus in the United States?
We do not have enough tests. We tried to make a test back in December, when this first got started, but it turned out the tests we made did not work very well. We are trying to make better tests, but until we have lots of better tests, we cannot use the strategy that South Korea and Singapore used to identify who has the virus and who they might have given it to, to stop the spread of the disease.]
Because we cannot do things the way South Korea and Singapore did them, we cannot expect that the virus will be under control here as quickly as it was there. We should probably expect that things will take about as long to get under control here, as it took China to get things under control. That means about three or four months.
Flu and other diseases that affect breathing and make you cough (respiratory diseases) tend to be much worse in the winter (in our part of the world; rainy season in other parts of the world). We do not know exactly why this is true. Some people think that temperature or humidity make it easier or harder for the virus to live on surfaces for longer. Some people think that social distancing is naturally greater in summer than in winter (or the rainy season), and that is the reason. We do not know if this coronavirus will naturally get better in the summer. We hope that it will.
If we think it will take about three or four months to get coronavirus under control in the United States, that means we think it will be much better in June. If we think that summer will help get the coronavirus under control in the United States, that means we think it will be much better in June.
Obviously, we hope that school will be able to start sooner than summer! And we also are worried that just like the flu gets worse in the fall, this or a similar virus might come around again next fall or winter. What changes can we make longer term to help us avoid having to cancel school in the future?
Managing Future Outbreaks of Viral Disease
We can think about how to rearrange our society to have greater social distance built into it naturally. More people could work from home. More schools could have tele-learning all the time, or as an option.
We need to make sure that we get better at testing. The scientists and doctors who develop the tests, and the companies that make the tests, need to have enough money all of the time to be ready to create an effective test quickly when there is a new disease. Also, we need to listen carefully when scientists and doctors say that a new disease is spreading, and not try to stop them talking about it.
We can do things to reduce the amount of work the health care system has to do during an outbreak. Right now, if you have a mental health crisis, or you have broken your arm, or you have a fever, or you cut your hand while chopping vegetables, you all go to the same place: the hospital emergency room. If we could separate some of these things out during a disease outbreak, we could better use our resources and not overwhelm our system. In China and other places affected by an earlier coronavirus called SARS, they set up fever clinics just for people who had a fever to go to get tested. They carefully protected the health care workers who did the testing to make sure they did not get sick. South Korea has drive up fever clinics; people do not even get out of their cars. This also helps to ensure social distancing between the people with fevers, so if a person has a fever from the flu, and another person has coronavirus, you do not give the flu person the coronavirus and the coronavirus person the flu, thus taking two sick people and making them even sicker.
In Conclusion
School has been canceled, right now, here in Acton, for a week and a day. It might be longer. We do not know when we will go back to school yet. We are staying home, and avoiding large groups of people, to reduce the spread of coronavirus. We want to make sure that the people who do get sick can get good care at our hospitals, and that can only happen if there are not too many of them at the same time. Staying home from school, and not helping spread coronavirus, is how we can help prevent other people from dying of this disease. We probably will not get sick, and if we get sick, we probably will not get very sick. But other people might, and we care about them, too.
ABRSD canceled school from Friday March 13-Friday March 20, with the understanding that the cancelation might go even longer. Other school districts and colleges and universities around the country and around the world had already canceled school, some of them for much longer. For example, school districts in Washington State, in Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties, canceled school through April. That is six weeks of No School! These cancelations happened because people are afraid that a disease called coronavirus (SARS CoV 2, or COVID 19, or several other names) will fill up our hospitals with people who have severe viral pneumonia and need oxygen and other medical technology to survive. If there are too many people in the hospital with those needs at the same time, the hospital will not be able to help everyone effectively.
How Does Canceling School Help Hospitals?
In general, viral disease can spread through touch. When a person with the virus touches another person, the virus can be transmitted. When a person with the virus touches an object, and another person touches the object, then the second person can pick up the virus from the object. When a person with the virus sneezes or coughs, viral particles go into the air and can land on surfaces, or other people, or be breathed in, and people can get sick that way, too.
The more people are crowded together, the faster the virus goes from person to person. By not touching each other, washing our hands often (in case we touched a virus on a surface), by avoiding touch our faces (where it is easy for a virus on our hand to go into our mouth or nose and thus make us sick), and by cleaning commonly touched surfaces (door handles, for example), we can slow this down. But the best way to slow transmission down is for people to have some distance from each other. At school, we are pretty close together a lot: on the playground at recess, in the halls and in the cafeteria at lunch. But also just sitting in the classroom, we are usually closer than 3 feet from other people. The recommended distance to keep from other people for effectively stopping transmission is 6 feet. That is very hard to do in a school.
By closing schools, the disease should spread more slowly. While young people mostly get very mild cases of this disease, they do not live by themselves. If a young person catches this disease at school and goes home, they might give it to a parent or other family member who gets very sick and needs to go to the hospital. If all young people catch this disease at school and go home, they might get a lot of their family members sick, and overwhelm the medical system.
How Long Will This Last?
We do not know.
Different people have different ideas about how long this will last. In China, the first case of the disease appeared in December of 2019, and while China is still monitoring very closely for more outbreaks, it looks like things in China were a lot better after about three months. They had to do many things to stop the disease, not just cancel school. They stopped almost all things in the city of Wuhan, and its province, Hubei, in order to keep the virus from spreading throughout China. It did spread, but other places were able to do things earlier to keep it from getting as bad in other cities and provinces. We are hoping that we can be more like those other cities and provinces, by canceling schools and doing more social distancing, earlier in this outbreak.
The virus is in other countries also. Italy is starting to do a lot of the things that China did in Hubei, to try to stop the virus. We do not know as much about what is going on in Iran, because it is much more difficult to learn about what is going on in Iran. Some smaller cities and countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, also had the virus, but they quickly identified through testing where the virus was, figured out who the virus might have gone to next, and carefully isolated those people early on.
[Why Do We Not Test People For the Virus in the United States?
We do not have enough tests. We tried to make a test back in December, when this first got started, but it turned out the tests we made did not work very well. We are trying to make better tests, but until we have lots of better tests, we cannot use the strategy that South Korea and Singapore used to identify who has the virus and who they might have given it to, to stop the spread of the disease.]
Because we cannot do things the way South Korea and Singapore did them, we cannot expect that the virus will be under control here as quickly as it was there. We should probably expect that things will take about as long to get under control here, as it took China to get things under control. That means about three or four months.
Flu and other diseases that affect breathing and make you cough (respiratory diseases) tend to be much worse in the winter (in our part of the world; rainy season in other parts of the world). We do not know exactly why this is true. Some people think that temperature or humidity make it easier or harder for the virus to live on surfaces for longer. Some people think that social distancing is naturally greater in summer than in winter (or the rainy season), and that is the reason. We do not know if this coronavirus will naturally get better in the summer. We hope that it will.
If we think it will take about three or four months to get coronavirus under control in the United States, that means we think it will be much better in June. If we think that summer will help get the coronavirus under control in the United States, that means we think it will be much better in June.
Obviously, we hope that school will be able to start sooner than summer! And we also are worried that just like the flu gets worse in the fall, this or a similar virus might come around again next fall or winter. What changes can we make longer term to help us avoid having to cancel school in the future?
Managing Future Outbreaks of Viral Disease
We can think about how to rearrange our society to have greater social distance built into it naturally. More people could work from home. More schools could have tele-learning all the time, or as an option.
We need to make sure that we get better at testing. The scientists and doctors who develop the tests, and the companies that make the tests, need to have enough money all of the time to be ready to create an effective test quickly when there is a new disease. Also, we need to listen carefully when scientists and doctors say that a new disease is spreading, and not try to stop them talking about it.
We can do things to reduce the amount of work the health care system has to do during an outbreak. Right now, if you have a mental health crisis, or you have broken your arm, or you have a fever, or you cut your hand while chopping vegetables, you all go to the same place: the hospital emergency room. If we could separate some of these things out during a disease outbreak, we could better use our resources and not overwhelm our system. In China and other places affected by an earlier coronavirus called SARS, they set up fever clinics just for people who had a fever to go to get tested. They carefully protected the health care workers who did the testing to make sure they did not get sick. South Korea has drive up fever clinics; people do not even get out of their cars. This also helps to ensure social distancing between the people with fevers, so if a person has a fever from the flu, and another person has coronavirus, you do not give the flu person the coronavirus and the coronavirus person the flu, thus taking two sick people and making them even sicker.
In Conclusion
School has been canceled, right now, here in Acton, for a week and a day. It might be longer. We do not know when we will go back to school yet. We are staying home, and avoiding large groups of people, to reduce the spread of coronavirus. We want to make sure that the people who do get sick can get good care at our hospitals, and that can only happen if there are not too many of them at the same time. Staying home from school, and not helping spread coronavirus, is how we can help prevent other people from dying of this disease. We probably will not get sick, and if we get sick, we probably will not get very sick. But other people might, and we care about them, too.