COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: K-12 schools

  • K-12 school updates, March 21

    Four items from this week, in the real of COVID-19 and schools:

    • New funding for school testing: As part of the Biden administration’s massive round of funding for school reopenings, $10 billion is specifically devoted to “COVID-19 screening testing for K-12 teachers, staff, and students in schools.” The Department of Education press release does not specify how schools will be required to report the results of these federally-funded tests, if at all. The data gap continues. (This page does list fund allocations for each state, though.)
    • New paper (and database) on disparities due to school closures: This paper in Nature Human Behavior caught my attention this week. Two researchers from the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy used anonymized cell phone data to compile a database tracking attendance changes at over 100,000 U.S. schools during the pandemic. Their results: school closures are more common in schools where more students have lower math scores, are students of color, have experienced homelessness, or are eligible for free/reduced-price lunches. The data are publicly available here.
    • New CDC guidance on schools: This past Friday, the CDC updated its guidance on operating schools during COVID-19 to half its previous physical distance requirement: instead of learning from six feet apart, students may now take it to only three feet. This change will allow for some schools to increase their capacity, bringing more students back into the classroom at once. The guidance is said to be based on updated research, though some critics have questioned why the scientific guidance appears to follow a political priority.
    • New round of (Twitter) controversy: This week, The Atlantic published an article by economist Emily Oster with the headline, “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma.” The piece quickly drew criticism from epidemiologists and other COVID-19 commentators, pointing out that the story has an ill-formed headline and pullquote, at best—and makes dangerously misleading comparisons, at worst. Here’s a thread that details major issues with the piece and another thread specifically on distortion of data. There is still a lot we don’t know about how COVID-19 impacts children, and the continued lack of K-12 schools data isn’t helping; as a result, I’m wary of supporting any broad conclusion like Oster’s, much as I may want to go visit my young cousins this summer.

    more K-12 schools content

  • Teachers can get vaccinated in every state, but we don’t know how many are

    As of this past Monday, K-12 teachers in every state are now eligible for vaccination. Teachers were already prioritized in most of the country, but Biden directed the remaining states to adjust their priority lists last week. The federal government also pulled teachers into the federal pharmacy program, previously used for long-term care facilities.

    This is great news, of course—teachers should get vaccinated ASAP so that they can safely return to their classrooms, allowing schools to reopen in person with much lower risk. Vaccinations have become a stipulation for reopening, in fact, in some states like Oregon, even though the CDC has said this should not be a requirement.

    But there’s one big problem: we have no idea how many teachers have actually been inoculated. Sarah wrote about why we need occupational data on vaccinations a few weeks ago:

    For example, NYC has included “in-person college instructors” in eligibility for the vaccine since January 11. Wouldn’t it be nice to know just how many in-person professors have gotten vaccinated? It’d sure be helpful if Barnard ever decides to do in-person classes again. Or what about taxi drivers? Again in NYC, because that’s where I live, they became eligible for vaccination on February 2. From a personal standpoint, I’d like to know if I could send my taxi driver to the hospital if my mask slips.

    The data situation hasn’t improved since February. New York’s report of vaccine coverage among state hospital workers is still the closest thing we have to occupation reporting. A recent article from EdWeek sheds some light on the issue, citing privacy concerns and a lack of data from vaccine administration sites themselves:

    Some state agencies and districts have said privacy concerns prevent them from tracking or publishing teacher vaccination data. Others say vaccine administration sites are not tracking recipients’ occupations and they are not in position to survey employees themselves.

    It appears that state and local public health departments were even less prepared to track occupations of vaccine patients than they were to track those patients’ race and ethnicity. But without these numbers, it may take even longer for students to return to classrooms, as evidenced by this quote from Megan Collins, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions:

    “We’re seeing a substantial disconnect. There are states not prioritizing teachers for vaccine that are fully open for in-person instruction, and others that are prioritizing teachers for vaccines, but aren’t open at all,” Collins said. “If states are going to use teacher vaccinations as a part of the process for safely returning to classrooms, it’s very important then to be able to communicate that information so people know that teachers are actually getting vaccines.”

    Biden’s administration has also given schools more money for testing, allocating $650 million in grants to help public schools get access to tests, testing supplies, and logistical assistance. But of course, school testing isn’t being tracked either. New York continues to be the only state that reports detailed data in this area; see our K-12 school data annotations for more info.

    Related posts

    • COVID-19 school data remain sporadic
      On November 18, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s schools would close until further notice. The NYC schools discrepancy is indicative of an American education system that is still not collecting adequate data on how COVID-19 is impacting classrooms—much less using these data in a consistent manner.

  • Featured sources and federal data updates, Feb. 28

    We’re sneaking a few more federal updates into the source section this week.

    • CDC changed their methodology for state vaccination counts: Last Saturday, February 20, the CDC made two major changes to how it reports vaccination data. First, instead of simply reporting doses administered by federal agencies (the Department of Defense, Indian Health Services, etc.) as fully separate counts, the agency started reporting these doses in the states where they were administered. Second, the CDC started reporting vaccinations in the state where someone is counted as a resident, rather than where they received the shot. Both of these changes make state-reported counts and CDC-reported counts less directly comparable, since states typically don’t track federal agency doses and count doses based on where they were administered. You can read more about these changes on Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker methodology and analysis blog; Bloomberg is now using CDC data only to update its U.S. data.
    • VaccineFinder is open for COVID-19 vaccines: As of Wednesday, Americans can use this national tool to find COVID-19 vaccine appointments. Just put in your ZIP code and select a radius (1 mile, 10 miles, 50 miles, etc.), and the tool will show you providers nearby. For each provider, the tool provides contact information—and, crucially, whether this location actually has vaccines in stock. Unlike many other federal dashboards, VaccineFinder isn’t a new tool; it was developed during the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009. STAT’s Katie Palmer provides more history and context on the site here.
    • Government Accountability Office may push for more data centralization: The Government Accountability Office (or GAO), a watchdog agency that does auditing and evaluations for Congress, has been investigating the federal government’s COVID-19 data collection—and is finding this collection “inconsistent and confusing,” according to a report by POLITICO’s Erin Banco. While the GAO’s report won’t be finalized and made public until March, the agency is expected to recommend that data should be more standardized. It could call for the CDC to make changes to its data collection on cases, deaths, and vaccines similar to how the HHS revamped collection for testing and hospitalization data in summer 2020. CDC officials are wary of these potential changes; it’ll definitely be a big data story to follow this spring.
    • Global.health is ready for research: Back in January, I wrote about Global.health, a data science initiative aiming to bring anonymized case data to researchers on a global scale. The initiative’s COVID-19 dataset is now online, including over 10 million individual case records from dozens of countries. 10 million case records! Including demographic and outcomes data! If you’d like to better understand why this dataset is a pretty big deal, read this article in Nature or this one in STAT. I plan on digging into the dataset next week, and may devote more space to it in a future issue.
    • NIH COVID-19 treatment guidelines: In one of the White House COVID-19 press briefings this week, Dr. Fauci referenced this National Institutes of Health (NIH) website intended to provide both physicians and researchers with the latest guidance on how to treat COVID-19 patients. The website acts as a living medical document, featuring an interactive table of contents and a text search tool. Follow @NIHCOVIDTxGuide on Twitter for updates.
    • Burbio’s K-12 School Opening Tracker: Burbio, a digital platform for community events, is actively monitoring over 1,200 school districts to determine which schools are currently using virtual, in-person, and hybrid models. The sample size includes the 200 largest districts in the U.S. and other districts with a mix of sizes and geographies, in order to reflect local decision-making across the U.S. See more methodology details here.
    • COVID-19’s impact on LGBTQ+ communities: The Journalist’s Resource at Harvard Kennedy School has compiled a list of recent research on how the coronavirus pandemic impacted LGBTQ+ Americans. In many cases, the pandemic furthered disproportionate poverty and poor health outcomes in this community; they shouldn’t be ignored in COVID-19 coverage.
    • The Accountability Project: A repository of public data run by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the Accountability Project reached 1 billion records last week. The Project includes several COVID-19-related datasets, including a dataset of Paycheck Protection Program loans and data on hospitals and nursing homes.

    All featured sources

  • COVID source callout: Iowa

    Usually, we only update our K-12 school COVID-19 data annotations every two weeks. But it came to my attention during a COVID Tracking Project shift yesterday that Iowa has taken down a page on its dashboard that used to report test positivity by school district. The page now goes to a 404 error, and there’s no mention of school data elsewhere on the state’s COVID-19 website.

    Yes, test positivity is a fraught metric—it should be used with a combination of other factors, not as a sole determinant of whether a school district can open for in-person learning. But it’s still troubling that this state took down the closest thing it had to school data reporting. What’s up, Iowa?

    more source spotlights
  • New schools guidance fails to call for data reporting

    New schools guidance fails to call for data reporting

    This past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a long-awaited guidance on school reopening.

    While the CDC isn’t able to actually regulate what schools do, many state and local leaders look to the agency for advice on how to best follow the available scientific evidence. And, if you’ve been following the reopening debate, you know that there are a lot of differing opinions on how to best follow the available scientific evidence. Pro-opening advocates hoped to see the CDC strongly insist that schools go in-person, perhaps with limited cleaning and allowing less than six feet of distancing. Pro-closure advocates hoped to see the agency insist that teachers needed to be vaccinated before they could go back to their classrooms.

    Rather than strictly advocating for either closed or open classrooms, however, the guidance takes a moderate route. It emphasizes three strategies already familiar to school leaders: layering different COVID-19 protection methods (masks, distancing, ventilation, and so on); looking at COVID-19 cases in the surrounding community to determine whether it’s safe for you to open; and having multiple opening “phases” available depending on community safety. Frequent testing and vaccinations of school staff are included as “additional” options, which the CDC suggests schools should employ if they have the resources.

    New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, who has covered the epidemiological questions around reopening, wrote a Twitter thread that further explains why this is a moderate route:

    https://twitter.com/apoorva_nyc/status/1360641557586714625

    My big question of this guidance, though, was: what does this mean for data? As we’ve written in the CDD before, the Biden administration has the opportunity to correct a longstanding failure of its predecessor. Under Biden, national public health leadership could require that all public schools report their case counts, testing numbers, and enrollment numbers to the federal government—and publish these figures in a systematic way. But the new CDC guidance largely retains the status quo for school COVID-19 data.

    “Every COVID-19 testing site is required to report to the appropriate state or local health officials all diagnostic and screening tests performed,” the guidance says. This requirement has been in place since last spring. Similarly, the CDC says that school administrators should notify parents, teachers, and staff when cases are reported—again, such internal reporting systems are already in place.

    But there’s no mention of making these data public. The CDC is not promising a national school data dashboard, or even requiring state and local public health departments to put their data up on a portal with the rest of their COVID-19 figures.

    You’d think that state and local agencies wouldn’t need such a push, over a year into the pandemic. But, as we’ve reported in the CDD before, the vast majority of states currently fail to publish K-12 COVID-19 data in a way that makes it possible to actually track transmission rates in schools.

    While 34 states and D.C. regularly report counts of COVID-19 cases that have occurred in schools, 16 states report incomplete data—or no data at all. And for the states that do report case counts, most don’t report enrollment numbers, making it difficult to discern whether the virus is impacting a single family or running rampant in a school. (Four cases in a school with 4,000 kids in classrooms, for example, is vastly different from four cases in a school with 100 kids in classrooms.)

    New York continues to be the model state for K-12 data, as it’s one of only four to report enrollment numbers and the only state to report school-specific testing numbers. As the CDC seems to consider systematic school testing “optional,” it seems likely that this will continue.

    We can see that most counties in the U.S. have high enough community transmission rates—or, COVID-19 cases in the general public—that the CDC’s new guidance would categorize them as being in the “red zone,” a.k.a. too dangerous for schools to be open. But without case numbers for schools themselves, reported in a standard way, it’s hard to know whether the CDC’s assessment is accurate.

    School data continues to be a massive gap in America’s pandemic tracking. Readers, I urge you to see what data are available for your state, county, and district—and push your local officials to be more transparent. 

    Dashboard by Benjy Renton.

    Related posts

    • COVID-19 school data remain sporadic
      On November 18, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s schools would close until further notice. The NYC schools discrepancy is indicative of an American education system that is still not collecting adequate data on how COVID-19 is impacting classrooms—much less using these data in a consistent manner.

  • Federal data updates, Feb. 7

    Since our main stories this week focused on NYC, here are a couple of updates from the federal public health agencies.

    • CDC releases demographic vaccination data: This past Monday, the CDC published a MMWR report on characteristics of Americans vaccinated during the first month of our vaccine rollout, December 14 to January 14. Race/ethnicity data are missing for almost half of the vaccinations recorded here, but the existing data show white Americans getting vaccinated at higher rates than Black and Hispanic/Latino Americans.
    • CDC vaccination dashboard now includes time series: As of Thursday, the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker now includes a page called “Vaccination Trends,” which shows daily counts of total doses administered, people receiving 1 dose, and people receiving 2 doses. The doses are assigned to the date they’re administered, not the date they’re reported, so they may not match time series on other dashboards. Time series aren’t yet available for individual states.
    • KFF reports COVID-19 vaccinations by race/ethnicity: The Kaiser Family Foundation’s “State COVID-19 Data and Policy Actions” tracker now includes a dashboard with vaccinations by race/ethnicity, including data from 23 states as of Feb. 1. KFF says the data will be updated on a regular basis.
    • U.S. Department of Education surveying COVID-19’s impact for students: On Friday, the Department of Education announced that the Institute of Education Sciences would collect “vital data on the impact of COVID-19 on students and the status of in-person learning.” Data gathered in the survey will include the share of America’s schools that are open in-person vs. remote, enrollment by various demographic metrics, attendance rates, and information on the logistics of in-person and remote instruction. Notably, the survey does not promise to collect data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths associated with K-12 schools.
    • At-home tests are coming: This week, the White House announced that the new administration has contracted with diagnostic company Ellume and six other suppliers to produce tens of millions of at-home tests by the end of the summer. Ellume’s test is an antigen test, and, though the other test suppliers haven’t yet been announced, we can assume they also make antigen or rapid nucleic acid amplification tests; neither test type is currently reported by the federal government. If these tests do become a significant part of America’s COVID-19 response—and some experts are skeptical that this will happen—a major change in test reporting practices will be needed.
    more federal data

  • Experts say schools could reopen, but data are still scarce

    The medical journal JAMA released an article written by three CDC officials about opening schools. The conclusion was that it appears that reopening schools safely is possible—but before we turn everyone loose, there are a lot of caveats. And critically, protective measures that need to be taken are not limited to the schools themselves. 

    When experts say that schools can be reopened safely, it means that so far, schools haven’t been driving community transmission the way other public spaces remaining open have. In a case study comparing 154 students who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and 243 who had not, schools posed much less of an infection risk than other social activities. The paper also cited two case studies, one from North Carolina and one from Wisconsin, where cases in general were fairly uncommon, and the vast majority of the recorded cases came from cases acquired from the community, not the schools. 

    It’s clearly inaccurate to say that COVID-19 simply hasn’t hit schools. Indeed, if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t need our school trackers. And while many US school outbreaks have mostly been small, it’s not impossible a future outbreak could be anything but. The JAMA paper cites an outbreak in Israel where out of 1161 students and 151 staff members tested, 153 and 25 cases were found in students and staff, respectively, within two weeks of reopening. “Crowded classrooms…, exemption from face mask use, and continuous air conditioning that recycled interior air in closed rooms” were cited as contributing to the outbreak. Additionally, school-related activities such as extracurriculars and athletics could also pose a higher risk.

    For longtime readers of this newsletter or even for anyone who’s kept up with the news, the path to reopening schools may sound familiar. Measures taken need to include universal mask use, a robust screening program, physical distancing, and hybrid models of education to reduce classroom density (including online options). But, critically, the article also stresses that measures need to be taken in the surrounding community to reduce spread, singling out indoor dining in particular. Indeed, schools are not isolated islands; the health of students returning for school depends on if a community can control the spread. Schools themselves may not be driving much community spread, but if COVID-19 is running uncontrolled in the community, it’s still not going to be safe to hold in-person classes. 

    While it is exciting that schools reopening may be on the horizon, safe schools are nowhere near promised if governments and administrations aren’t willing to take necessary measures to control community spread. Closing restaurants and gyms is politically unpopular in many places. The economic incentives to keep indoor dining and to open movie theaters are hard to ignore. It may be a choice – open your schools and keep tight restrictions everywhere else, or loosen restrictions on dining and gyms and keep schools online. It’s not an easy choice. But, as the JAMA article points out, “Committing today to policies that prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission in communities and in schools will help ensure the future social and academic welfare of all students and their education.”

    Two days after the JAMA article was published, NYT columnist David Brooks published a column decrying teachers unions and insisting that schools reopen, citing financial concerns for students in the future and current mental health problems. He pointed out that typically, white students have had greater access to in-person learning than black and brown students, going on to say: “I guess I would ask you, do Black lives matter to you only when they serve your political purpose? If not, shouldn’t we all be marching to get Black and brown children back safely into schools right now?”

    The response was swift, with many pointing out that the pandemic has disproportionately affected black and brown communities in terms of infection and death rates, and that they are more likely to live in underfunded communities where it might be a lot harder to keep students and staff safe. and that teachers maybe shouldn’t be blamed for not wanting to go back to work when there is still uncontrolled spread across the country. This Twitter thread sums up a lot of the backlash. 

    Indeed, even if schools do open up, as we talked about in our January 17 issue, we’re still having a lot of problems tracking cases. There still isn’t a federal dataset; however, there is reason to hope that we’ll get some better federal data soon after Biden included a call for data to inform safe K-12 school reopening and data on the pandemic’s impact on teachers and students in his executive order on school reopening. (See the CDD’s K-12 school data annotations here.)

    We do know that black and brown children have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic; Hispanic/Latino and Black children account for 38.2% of cases in their age group while Hispanic/Latino and Black people account for only 31.4% of Americans. If schools do reopen in person, it’s clear that actions need to be taken to address structural inequity that would prevent them from doing so safely.

    Related posts

    • COVID-19 school data remain sporadic
      On November 18, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s schools would close until further notice. The NYC schools discrepancy is indicative of an American education system that is still not collecting adequate data on how COVID-19 is impacting classrooms—much less using these data in a consistent manner.
  • Schools are reopening (again), but we still can’t track them

    Schools are reopening (again), but we still can’t track them

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    K-12 schools across the country are open for the spring semester, even as America faces serious outbreaks in almost every state and a more contagious strain—more contagious for both children and adults—begins to spread. At the national level, we are still overwhelmingly unable to track how the virus is spreading in these settings.

    Perhaps the most newsworthy opening this week was in Chicago, where students returned to classrooms for the first time since last March. Chicago’s teachers union has waged an ongoing battle with Mayor Lori Lightfoot and district CEO Janice Jackson, whom teachers claim have not resolved ongoing safety issues in school buildings. The district is screening staff through optional rapid tests once a month; about 1,200 tests have been reported so far, including three positive results. Four Chicago students and 34 other staff members reported COVID-19 cases this week.

    Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden announced a $175 billion plan aimed at getting students back to in-person learning. The plan includes $35 billion for higher education and $130 billion for public K-12 schools, with a focus on increasing testing, PPE for students and teachers, ventilation, and other safety measures for which educators have been calling since last spring.

    Biden hopes to open “the majority of K-8 schools,” according to Education Week’s Evie Blad. A recent report by the CDC suggests that in-person learning for these younger students, when implemented safely, is not likely to seed an outbreak in the wider community. (College-aged students in the 18-24 range are more likely to cause such outbreaks.)

    The report says: “CDC recommends that K–12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely.”

    But, as Blad points out, it will be difficult to track the impact that more school reopening would have on broader communities, as data on COVID-19 cases in schools are still limited and fractured. There is still no federal dataset on COVID-19 in American public schools. State datasets are fully unstandardized; and most states only report case counts, making it difficult to actually analyze how school outbreaks compare across schools.

    As of our most recent K-12 state annotation update, only Delaware, New York, and Texas are providing enrollment numbers, and only New York is providing testing numbers.  (Thank you to intern Sarah Braner for doing the update this week!)

    In last week’s recommended reading section, I featured an op ed in Nature by school data leader Emily Oster calling on President-elect Biden to develop a unified, national system for tracking COVID-19 in schools. I wanted to highlight it again this week because I absolutely agree with Oster here. As important as her and others’ compilation efforts have been in filling the school data gap, no outside dashboard can replace the work of the federal government:

    We need to be able to identify the virus spreading in schools and work out what went wrong. The data we do have suggest that outbreaks in schools are not common, but they do happen. We need a way to find them systematically.

    As far as I can tell, there is no mention of data-gathering in Biden’s K-12 COVID-19 plan.

    And here’s one more school-related metric we should be tracking: teachers are starting to get vaccinated. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of state vaccination priority groups, 31 states have put K-12 and childcare personnel in their Phase 1 group. In Utah, teachers and childcare workers are even included in Phase 1A. California and New York, two of the biggest states, started vaccinating teachers this past week.

    (If you want a heartwarming read this long weekend, I recommend this piece from THE CITY that profiles NYC teachers and other essential workers getting vaccinated in the middle of the night.)

    But most states are barely reporting basic demographic data for their vaccinations, much less telling the public the occupations of those who have gotten shots. Without knowing how many teachers have been vaccinated, it will be difficult to factor these inoculations into reopening decisions—or determine how vaccination impacts future school outbreaks.

    more K-12 schools content

  • School data update, Jan. 3

    Many school districts across the nation will once again open for in-person instruction later this month. But data on how COVID-19 spreads in schools remain inadequate.

    At the request of one of my readers, I’ve updated my annotations of state K-12 data reporting, first published on December 6. The annotations are posted on a new resource page, which also includes notes on the four major national sources for COVID-19 school data.  I’ll be updating this page every two weeks.

    Here’s how the state data stand, as of January 1:

    • 34 states and the District of Columbia are reporting COVID-19 cases in K-12 schools, in some form
    • 7 states are reporting incomplete data on school outbreaks or cases in school-aged children
    • 20 states are separating out school case counts by students and staff
    • 5 states are reporting deaths linked to school outbreaks
    • 1 state is reporting COVID-19 tests conducted for school students and staff (New York)
    • 2 states are reporting in-person enrollment (New York and Texas)
    K-12 data annotations

    Related posts

    • COVID-19 school data remain sporadic
      On November 18, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s schools would close until further notice. The NYC schools discrepancy is indicative of an American education system that is still not collecting adequate data on how COVID-19 is impacting classrooms—much less using these data in a consistent manner.

  • Schools go on winter break but discourse continues

    Rounding out the issue with a couple of updates on school data:

    • CDC issues new estimates for the cost of keeping K-12 schools safe: It would take about $22 billion for all public schools in the country to safely reopen in the spring, according to the CDC. The state-by-state estimates incorporate face masks, desk shields, cleaning supplies, transportation, and more. But these estimates are “significantly lower” than other estimates calculated by education organizations, as the CDC failed to include additional costs for face masks, food service, and contact tracing, according to U.S. News & World Report.
    • Rockefeller Foundation advocates for mass testing in schools: “Altogether, K-12 schools, their students, teachers and staff, will need approximately 300 million Covid-19 tests performed each month from February through June,” write the authors of a new Rockefeller report focused on safely controlling COVID-19 spread while vaccines are rolled out. The report provides detailed guidelines on testing and case studies from which readers can learn.
    • The College COVID-19 Outbreak Watchlist goes on winter break: After 15 weeks of updating his watchlist of colleges with high COVID-19 case numbers, Benjy Renton is taking a couple of weeks off. (From this dashboard, anyway.) Many schools have also suspended their COVID-19 reporting, as few students are on campus.
    more higher education content