Juno News - March 31, 2021


Schools are not superspreaders of COVID-19


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

193.61519

Word Count

748

Sentence Count

47


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 One of the things that is so frustrating about our coronavirus conversation here across Canada,
00:00:11.200 particularly where I am in Ontario, is this insistence that so many people have to adamantly
00:00:17.100 cling to the notion that kids remain super spreaders of the virus and that schools are a
00:00:23.360 hotbed for it. And that's practically what's driving transmission. That's where it's spreading.
00:00:27.880 That's where it's coming from. Despite the fact that officials, particularly pediatric experts,
00:00:32.960 more and more of them are stepping forward and saying, that's just not true. It's not the case.
00:00:38.480 It's not what the facts show. It's not what the evidence shows. So how come there are so many
00:00:43.100 people who think otherwise? Well, in some respects, it's hard to blame them based on the media
00:00:48.180 conversation and the government data and reports that fuel that conversation. So the government,
00:00:54.160 the Ontario government, they have a website where they list all of the cases in schools.
00:00:58.920 Now that leads people to believe, oh, well, you got a case spreading in school. Cases in schools does
00:01:04.740 not mean the case was acquired in the school. It simply means that somebody who has tested positive
00:01:10.940 for coronavirus has appeared in that school environment, whether they're a student or whether
00:01:15.680 they're a teacher and so forth. So it's interesting already that we report it that way because we don't
00:01:20.080 have a reporting module, an open data module that lists all the grocery stores, for instance, in
00:01:24.960 your neighborhood. And whenever someone tests positive for coronavirus, we ask, well, which grocery
00:01:28.900 stores have you been to in the past 14 days? And we mark that off. And then we say, cases in your
00:01:34.200 local Loblaws. No, we don't do that. We only do reporting and say a case in a grocery store if it's
00:01:39.980 believed to have been acquired in the grocery store. And by the way, practically hardly any cases have
00:01:45.260 been acquired in grocery stores. But I digress. So that's one thing that's kind of problematic about
00:01:50.440 the conversation around cases in schools and also how we talk about that, how it gets reported.
00:01:56.320 The other is this phrase outbreak. Now, often I will say post a story that I've written about an
00:02:02.140 asymptomatic testing project that has found practically no spread going on in schools of the
00:02:07.260 virus. And someone will just send me a link to a story of a school in their neighborhood that school
00:02:12.740 will shut down after outbreak and so forth, as if to say, well, Fury, you're just completely wrong.
00:02:17.440 Hold on a second. Do you know what that means? An outbreak has occurred? What that technically means
00:02:24.200 is that there has been two cases, two or more cases of coronavirus detected within a 14-day period
00:02:32.740 of two people who are in the same cohort, meaning they're in the same class together, in the same sort
00:02:38.720 of outdoor recess module, or they're on the school bus together, that sort of thing, that situation.
00:02:43.780 Now, they're not confirmed that one of these got them from the other. They're just saying, okay,
00:02:47.120 well, they were in close contact, and they were, and it was within the same 14-day time span. So
00:02:53.160 perhaps one got it from the other. And that's it. That's what the phrase outbreak means. I mean,
00:02:58.800 as someone who was a young man in the 90s, he had all these disaster movies. One of them was called
00:03:03.260 Outbreak. You think it's like, you know, everybody getting this all of a sudden. It's like this,
00:03:07.600 you know, flash mob of outbreak going on. But that's not actually what it means. Two cases.
00:03:12.220 Two cases that may not actually even be linked. They're just not really sure. Now, to be sure,
00:03:16.740 there are some instances where there are five or six reported at one school. But by and large,
00:03:21.700 you go through that website, and you see the numbers you see are 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1,
00:03:26.720 1, 2, 2. And then, again, you get a few higher numbers. But the vast majority of outbreaks in
00:03:31.740 Ontario are also two. And it's unknown if they are even directly connected to each other. And I think
00:03:38.020 a lot of Ontario parents don't understand that. And I think a lot of people who are so adamant,
00:03:43.300 insistent to believe that, yes, schools are the super spreaders, well, they need to know this
00:03:47.840 information. Because what they're saying just isn't true.