What To Do With CDC School Guidance

Why is it so hard to get actionable advice out of the CDC?

• Experimenting With The Rebirth of News

• The CDC’s Excruciating COVID Guidance

• Looney Tunes: One Froggy Evening

Experimenting With The Rebirth of News

I did a podcast with my friend Eigenrobot this weekend and it was a lot of fun for me even if I sound like a hyperactive hamster most of the time. I probably need to work on slowing down my response to *everything*. We talk some about COVID but also about institutional trust and how it seems to be eroding all around us at an accelerating pace.

Second, I’ve been talking about the pitfalls of the existing journalistic institutions and strategies and, holy cow, that is an entirely big thing unto itself. With the recent attack on Scott Alexander, I can’t help but feel like the New York Times has really let the mask slip and published something that had very little news value but enormous value as an exercise in using their reach and institutional power in an attempt to punish and destroy someone.

What is remarkable is that, not only did it not work, but it’s inspired a backlash such that it is clear that publishing this article was far more damaging to the New York Times than it was to Scott Alexander. It has led many individuals with substantial influence to compile mud-raking pieces and highlight that a significant portion of the press believes that their power comes through fear.

I have mostly given up on gathering news from news sources. But then what can I use to discover the things I want to know? So I’m engaging in an experiment. I’m recruiting individuals around the country to tell me about what the COVID response has been like in their state. My goal is to compile in the next few weeks a set of 50 interviews in which someone from every state reports on the COVID restrictions currently in place. I’m pulling together a list of requirements & paying individuals for their time. My goal is to compile and publish this information while fairly compensating people for their time and effort.

You can sign up here. I’ll be putting together an email list and trying to figure out the best way to finance it. I’m starting with $1,000 of my own money, but I’d like to see if I can raise the rest of it as we move along. My dear hope is that we can start finding ways of re-imagining a trustworthy way of reporting important and helpful information without any of the accompanying detritus of the existing news cycle.

The CDC’s Excruciating COVID Guidance

Last Friday, the CDC issued “Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools Through Phased Mitigation”. This updated guidance has been long-awaited, especially among parents and teachers who are quickly approaching a full year of online-only instruction. I was hopeful that we would get something that more concretely mirrored the fairly consistent “schools can safely reopen” guidance that we’ve heard from multiple CDC directors for many months.

The CDC’s guidance is really important because it is where most people point when they say “follow the science”. In the Democratic primary on February 29th, 2020, every single candidate answered the “what should we do about this coronavirus” with “increase funding to the CDC”. This should be the gold standard for clear, concise, actionable guidance.

It falls fairly short of that.

This document is about 20 pages long, but the two go-to charts are where the CDC defines their terms for low, moderate, substantial, and high transmission scenarios.

Because these are cases over the last 7 days, if we translate this to the charts I’ve been producing (which are new cases per-day smoothed over 7 days), we get the following rates:

• Low = 0-1.3

• Moderate = 1.3 - 7

• Substantial = 7 - 14

• High = above 14

Only in the “Low” and “Moderate” regions does the CDC recommend full in-person instruction for K-12 schools. The only difference between “Low” and “Moderate” is

Low => “Sports and extracurricular activities occur; physical distancing of 6 feet or more to the greatest extent possible”

Moderate => “Sports and extracurricular activities occur with physical distancing of 6 feet or more required”

I’m not able to tell you, practically, the differences between “requiring” 6 feet of distance and having 6 feet of distance “to the greatest extent possible” and I challenge anyone to be able to explain, in practical terms, how a school might respond if their region moved from yellow to blue.

In addition to this, we do not yet have any examples of any region in the United States moving from high transmission back down to low. We’re not even sure what that looks like or how it will happen. During the summer, the Northeast (particularly New York) was praised for the fact that they got cases down to about 2 cases per 100K residents.

And this was *really good* response. When we scale this against the winter surge, it basically looks flat.

What I’m not saying here is “we’ll never get down to blue again” but rather “we don’t know how far down we can go with COVID cases, this is uncharted territory.”

Ultimately, there is very little actionable guidance in the CDC guidance and that is excruciating. They recommend vaccinations, but say that vaccines are only one layer of a multi-layered approach. They recommend masks and 6 foot distancing at all times regardless of what phase a region is in.

The main problem of this guidance is that it contains no vision whatsoever of “here is the path back toward normalcy”. Maybe that’s because the CDC has no idea what that path is or maybe it is because that’s not the point of this document. But guidance like this is myopic and indicative of the overall weak points of our public health institutions.

The very laudable goal of this document is “list all the things a school can do to limit COVID exposure” as if that is the only thing we are trying to do in schools and there are no trade-offs to that. Where this guidance fails is that there is no incentive to actually follow any of the guidance.

Many states have open K-12 schools right this very moment, even though this guidance would have them close those schools. Those states are not seeing worse COVID numbers than states with a high percentage of closed schools. The CDC has nor provided a meaningful range of options that can encompass the existing reality in those states. The result is that they will look at this, roll their eyes, and continue moving along as they have been.

What could have been done to avoid this? That’s a big discussion, but I think the explicit rejection of contradictory or mushy guidelines would have gone a long way. The CDC’s position had been “elementary schools should be open” but then that guidance gets softened into the near-meaningless “Elementary schools in hybrid learning mode or reduced attendance”. Well… if a 50% reduction of attendance is good, then a 100% reduction of attendance must be better, right? There isn’t a single statement that can be interpreted as demanding that closed schools should be opening. Instead they talk around that reality with terms like “layered mitigation”, “respiratory etiquette”, and “contact tracing”. They provide lots of technically correct information but few actual recommendations or guidance that can be implemented tomorrow.

It’s not really a plan, but a series of statements letting us know that there is in fact a pandemic caused by a respiratory virus happening right now and here are the things that typically reduce transmission of respiratory viruses.

Looney Tunes: One Froggy Evening

This is certainly one of the greatest short cartoons of all time. Steven Spielberg called it “the Citizen Kane of animated shorts”. Every moment of this cartoon is either building up to the next punchline or extending the punchlines. The wordless nature of the short allows the cartoonists to go wild with the characterizations.

The main joke, repeated in increasingly delightful setups, is that a man discovers a singing frog and tries to get the frog to demonstrate this wonderous discovery, at which point the frog acts like a hapless and inert amphibian. My favorite moment is when, broke and homeless, the man is confronted by a police officer for the crime of singing opera in a public park and, like an exhausted and frustrated child, the man jabs his finger accusingly at the frog before he is marched by the office to the station for arrest. The wordless emotional communication of frustration and accusation is absolutely hilarious.