Gossip and the News (Plague, Day 62, May 6, 2020)

~ Laura

As life… and death… chug along during this strange period, I find that I get my information from two sources — from gossip from friends and from the news. Now that I’m back to working on an article, I’m also getting information from various strangers who share their own gossip.

It will be years before the gossip is put together with concrete scientific research to flesh out the big picture. Each of us is experiencing this pandemic differently. Everybody has their stories right now, and not enough people are bringing those stories together to stitch together the big picture. Just as we need them the most, journalists are being furloughed or are sidelined with childcare responsibilities.

I think going forward, I’m going to use my daily diary posts on this blog to share the gossip, and I’ll follow up with links to the best journalism of the day. So what gossip can I share today?

****

One of my best friends got the virus last month. She’s out on Long Island, so she probably had the bad New York variety of the virus. You don’t want to get this. She was out of commission for two weeks; it is taking a long time to get her lung capacity back to normal. Her teenager daughters had mild cases. But weirdly, her overweight, asthmatic husband never felt ill.

She got the antibody test last week. She was told that her antibody test was one of the good ones, with a high validity rate. The test found that indeed she and her daughters had the antibodies, but her husband, who lived in the same house with all the sickness, did not.

In some ways, this was good news. Her daughters can get jobs over the summer, which will be good for family harmony. But they’ll bring in the virus into the house every evening and could infect their vulnerable dad. Theoretically, they could walk around in public without masks, but there is no system in place yet to identify who is safe and who isn’t. Going forward, government is going to have to figure out that.

***

Even as we hear more and more about states opening up, teachers and administrators tell me that they are nowhere close to opening up schools and colleges. Without camps, nursery schools, and elementary schools, the economy can’t open.

I’m also hearing lots of confusion by administrators about how they will open schools in September. These plans are particularly murky for classrooms with more intensely disabled children, who require lots of physical contact.

Each school is coming up with their own plans for the fall, just as they have done all along. The diversity of methods for handling this pandemic is truly amazing. The lack of centralized planning for educating kids has been stark.

If we are really going to have to reinvent education going forward, as Bill Gates and Andrew Cuomo discussed, centralization will have to be a big part of any plan.

Gates has tried to revolutionize education before, but hit major resistance from both the unions and conservatives. Neither have had a big voice during this pandemic, so this might be the right time for Gates.

***

We made a truly great meal for Cinco de Mayo yesterday. Steve made pulled pork in the InstaPot. His pork cooked in a mixture of beer and orange juice. I made jalapeño poppers, beans, and guacamole. A couple of friends joined me for a socially distant glass of wine before dinner.

Published by Laura

11 thoughts on “Gossip and the News (Plague, Day 62, May 6, 2020)”

  1. I know of another family (friend of a friend) in a similar situation – 4 out of the 5 tested positive for antibodies. In this case, it was one of the kids who was not positive. What’s the deal with the 1? I mean – in a family with lots of close contact, how does one person avoid getting it when they’re not actively trying to avoid getting it?

    I also don’t disagree that this may be a good time to do some fundamental thinking about education, but not sure how comfortable I am with the Gates Foundation leading the charge. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t buy into all the crazy conspiracy theories floating around about him. But these big money foundations seem to miss some really basic things about the politics of education.

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  2. You said:
    Each school is coming up with their own plans for the fall, just as they have done all along. The diversity of methods for handling this pandemic is truly amazing. The lack of centralized planning for educating kids has been stark.

    I want to cry. I am asking our admin to start developing multiple plans and scenarios for our district for the fall and I’m told “We’re going to wait and see.” Nothing is being put into place as far as options, planning time over the summer months, etc. etc. Yesterday I started making my own plans and am hoping for the best.

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    2. H in MN said, “I want to cry. I am asking our admin to start developing multiple plans and scenarios for our district for the fall and I’m told “We’re going to wait and see.””

      That’s awful.

      At a minimum, I think everybody needs to be prepared for at least a one month shutdown.

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  3. “Theoretically, they could walk around in public without masks, but there is no system in place yet to identify who is safe and who isn’t. Going forward, government is going to have to figure out that. ”

    Really not true, because we don’t know how much immunity the antibodies are going to give people and for how long. Going forward, the government is probably not going to know “who is safe and who isn’t” with any great degree of certainty (though we can always hope). What I think is more likely is that we will have to decide what risks we will take, both individually and as a population.

    UW Virology thinks that the Abbott lab test is good and are using it to survey the Seattle (and UW) population to see how many exhibit antibodies. It will provide valuable epidemiological data, but it won’t tell people who are safe (though they may be at reduced risk).

    I have a friend who had COVID who would say she had moderate symptoms (not hospitalized) and no one in her family has seroconverted (they were all tested recently) except her. Another friend, in her 30’s was quite sick (though again, not hospitalized) an has remained not up to speed for over a month.

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  4. We received a planning email from kiddos college today. They are planning through three scenarios, none of which are ideal. But, they are planning.

    I also agree that these decisions become more difficult with some form of central guidance because schools will shoulder the risk if they make the decision on their own, which, in turn, may encourage more risk averse strategies (or, alternatively, dependence on the bottom line of their need for revenue, in the case of tuition dependent universities).

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  6. There was a big union call by the International Federation of Teachers this week. Our college faculty union leader said: “a zillion” members in our state would be on it. We have been starting to discuss the dangers to faculty members of in-person classes – who’s going to decide what’s safe? will students have to wear masks- and if they do, who enforces this? who wipes down the classrooms after every class?

    Glad to hear that asthma might be protective.

    I think the stories piecing together the anecdotes and the official acts are going to be fascinating, and I’m especially interested to see the stories about testing. My rural college town has seen confirmed cases go from 1 or 2 to 40 in the last week, with outbreaks in two nursing homes. Just yesterday a student living in the dorms tested positive. Students still on campus (a few hundred of them) are moving out this week, and students who left stuff behind (since we were on spring break when the move to online was announced) are coming back to pick up stuff.

    At least half of the cases are in their teens or 20s; the rest, what you’d expect, mostly 70s-80s-90s with a few in between. I have heard of several people trying to get tests a month ago and being turned down. Now they’re better, so it will take an antibody test (I guess?) to know for sure if they had it.

    In mid-March, at the time of my last flight, I wished that someone could do a test on 100 randomly-selected flight attendants to get some sense of what was happening. Although obviously we want to test for safety first (among first responders, etc.), I can’t believe almost two months later we don’t have data of that sort from a bunch of different states. I very much want to read the story of who made which decisions about what tests would be used, who would get them, and when.

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    1. I think that as of mid February it was nearly impossible to get a test unless you had been in a target country (with the list expanding with time). As I’ve recounted a number of times, community spread in the Seattle metro area was detected by the Seattle Flu study labs ignoring (violating?) the guidance of the FDA/CDC and running their own test on a flu-negative teenager. The chief of infectious diseases at EvergreenHealth (where the first deaths occurred) used personal contacts and desperation to get some tests done.

      The UW labs associated with the flu study have switched to COVID testing and are now running a antibody test using Abbott’s test. The UW reports the test as having a 100% sensitivity of detecting antibodies in those who have them (i.e. a 0% false negative). But, the specificity is 99.6% (meaning a 0.4% false positive). Those are good numbers, but, if say 20% of the approximately 500K people in Seattle actually have antibodies, then 116K would test positive, if 500K tests were administered. Of those 100K would have antibodies, while 16K wouldn’t, but would be false positives (or 14% of the positives would not have antibodies). If the rate was 5%, 44K would test positive, and 43% would be false positives).

      Take home: the test can be used to survey the population but not as evidene that can be applied to an individual (and that’s even if the test provided complete immunity).

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