Unvaccinated teacher infected half her students with Covid, CDC finds

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/28/unvaccinated-teacher-infected-half-her-students-covid-california-cdc

by georgecmu • 5 years ago

34 48 5 years ago

newbamboo4• 5 years ago

Imagine how many more it might have been if she were vaccinated but a breakthrough case. Because the vaccine reduces severity but not viral load [1] it might have taken much longer to detect the problem. Vaccines are not a silver bullet. We pretend they are I’ve noticed (recall the cdc saying no more masks last June). We do so at our own peril.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1

api3• 5 years ago

Yes that’s possible, but it still doesn’t excuse idiots who get their health advice from YouTube, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.

The vaccine reduces the odds of getting the virus (even without symptoms), and if there were no antivaxxers this thing might be almost dead. The fact that 40% of the population won’t vaccine because of quack nonsense is ludicrous.

I’m honestly not sure why anyone listens to celebrities about anything. Has a celebrity ever been right about anything but acting?

newbamboo4• 5 years ago

There’s not enough nuance in medical reporting for sure but some of the best information for laymen has been available on YouTube, despite early censorship of those warning of the impending pandemic. I’m referring to MedCram and Dr John Campbell specifically. The racaniello podcast as well.

(Edit to correct racaniello’s spelling.

CozyBearNotSoy• 5 years ago

Who should one be listening to for health advice? Anthony Fauci, InStyle cover model? Don Lemon? Bill Gates?

I bet if one group of people weren't threatening to ruin the other group's lives (deny them employment, access to education, custody of their children) you would see more in the second group willing to "vaccinate". Unfortunately the first group has taken an authoritarian posture on the matter and is consequently distrusted.

Proven• 5 years ago

What will they write about when the same happens to a mask-wearing vaccinated teacher?

glofish7• 5 years ago

I am sorry, this story just does not add up. BTW here is the same story with more details:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/28/delta-varia...

We have a teacher that is positive, infectious and is spending hours in a classroom even after exhibiting symptoms. Now that needs to be avoided in the future. Fix that first and foremost.

Where is the evidence that her wearing a mask would have changed the outcomes? The students did wear a mask after all. It either works or it does not. Bringing masking into the picture has the opposite effect - it creates the illusion that it would be fine to show up with symptoms if you have a mask.

Then simulations are bullshit ... you can simulate to generate any and every outcome you want - it all depends on the parameters. Sorry, does not take much to see that, just simply look at everyday observations.

There are plenty of schools with no masking requirement - yet NONE have exhibited anything close to the 91% infection rates (within 30 days!) that the CDC simulations predict.

warning263• 5 years ago

It either works or it does not.

You do realize that, in medicine, things "work" on a spectrum right? A pill might be x% effective at alleviating certain systems in particular cases, etc. Why shouldn't the case be the same for masks? There are far more variables than "bool masked = true". What kind of mask material was worn? Was it a well-fitted mask? Was it a particulate filter mask or a simple one? Was the infected person masked? The non-infected? Etc.

glofish7• 5 years ago

the point I was making is that the story, at least in my reading, is being presented primarily as scientific evidence on the effectiveness of masks in school.

Especially the WaPo article. If 50% of students in a classroom get infected after 2 days in school while wearing masks then, IMHO, masks can't be all that effective in the first place.

the whole article tries to suggest that the infections happened during that period she removed the mask ... there is no evidence for that whatsoever

Ceiling• 5 years ago

Where is the evidence that her wearing a mask would have changed the outcomes?

There is multiple studies that show masks are effective at _slowing down_ the spread.

It either works or it does not.

Huh? This is like saying, "chemotherapy works or it does not."

Sorry, does not take much to see that, just simply look at everyday observations.

Yep. I'm looking. There's mass deaths a day. Funny the activity is in the anti-mask states, huh?

yet NONE have exhibited anything close to the 91% infection rates

The CDC said 91% of kids live in high risk places... it has nothing to do with the infection rate. You need to _read_ sources and not just emotionally react.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/report-91percent-of-students-l...

glofish7• 5 years ago

There's mass deaths a day. Funny the activity is in the anti-mask states, huh?

I suggest you look at the actual data - no such correlation exists.

The majority of US states have similar death rates per population at around 2K deaths per 1M citizens. (with a spread of around +/- 15%) You can find examples for each,

Death rates correlate much better to wealth and way of living than local policies.

jessecurry• 5 years ago

There are lots of models, but the only study I’m aware of showed that blue surgical masks had ≈10% efficacy when worn correctly, with cloth masks and gaiters less effective.

Additional ventilation seemed to have better efficacy.

diogenescynic• 5 years ago

Masks help infected people not spread COVID, they are less useful at preventing uninfected from catching COVID. Everyone has to wear them though because no one knows who has COVID at any given time.

glofish7• 5 years ago

alas, evidence to that efficacy of masks is severely lacking

tell me, why is that 16 months into this pandemic there are no definitive studies to measure the actual effect of masks, you know one with a control and masked people? Yet it is the easiest thing to measure ever.

We can test an actual life saving vaccine (that also carries huge risks while under development) with 40K volunteers but the mask seems to elude the scrutiny.

The CDC should just do the fracking study and put this issue to rest already. Strangely they are not.

newbamboo4• 5 years ago

The problem is lack of testing and slowness testing. The US I hate to say it, has been shameful in this regard compared to other developed nations. Teachers need to get tested and get results, quickly. That’s just not happening in the US. This case is the inevitable result of that lack of testing. Have you tried to get tested? I have and had to give up and go buy a test at CVS. It cost me 40 dollars and I was lucky they had tests on the shelf and I had time in my busy schedule to do it. Teachers probably have less time, less money, and may think they don’t need a test if they’ve been vaccinated.

MandieD• 5 years ago

$40?! Self-tests were 5 EUR each when they first hit the stores in Germany a few months ago, and are now about 1 EUR each.

The vaccination situation until July was frustrating, though.

doliveira• 5 years ago

It either works or it doesn't

Oh yeah, because percentages, probabilities, risk mitigation, etc aren't a thing. Everything is either 0% or 100%

But anyway, why aren't teachers at least using N95 masks?

warning263• 5 years ago

The biggest WTF part of this is in the subtitle:

Teacher read to class without a mask despite Covid symptoms

The key problem with anti-vaxxers isn't even necessarily the fact that they don't want to get the vaccine -- it's that anti-vax attitudes tend to go hand in hand with complete pandemic denialism.

criticaltinker3• 5 years ago

The key problem with anti-vaxxers

Before you turn this into a bitter vax versus anti-vax debate through unjustified insinuations about the teacher, you need to acknowledge two important nuances from the CDC report [1]:

1) Causation was not established. The delta variant was likely circulating throughout the entire school. For example, kids across multiple grade levels tested positive (these kids are not in the same classrooms). Also parents and siblings tested positive. It's very plausible that the teacher was not the 'index' case, even considering symptom onset dates (many infections are asymptomatic especially in children).

2) All 3 vaccinated adults were symptomatic, which speaks to the fact that although the vaccines are still effective at preventing severe outcomes, the delta variant has undermined the efficacy at preventing infection (from 91% to 66%) [2].

Among the five infected adults, one parent and the teacher were unvaccinated; the others were fully vaccinated. The vaccinated adults and one unvaccinated adult were symptomatic

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e2.htm

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e4.htm

endisneigh• 5 years ago

Fundamentally the issue is that teachers and teaching in general is too sensitive to disruptions. Unlike most other professions, teaching has the cascading effect of making the parents who have jobs also unavailable and so forth

For you computer people out there it’s a familiar problem. This teacher was sick, and she should’ve been removed. Are there substitutes available? Is there another teacher? If not then teaching simply stops for that class, this is not politically realistic nor is it necessarily advisable.

If nothing else this shows that are society needs a little bit more redundancy. That way the solution is simple - check for symptoms upon entrance and send sick people home. The end

That being said it’s baffling that the teacher took their mask off despite having symptoms. Surely that would’ve helped a little

angelzen2• 5 years ago

It is hard to speak through a mask if your respiratory capacity is diminished. There is a cost to masks.

belter2• 5 years ago

AP News: "Vaccinated people can carry as much virus as others"

https://apnews.com/article/science-health-coronavirus-pandem...

Nature: "How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1

CNN: "Fully vaccinated people who get a Covid-19 breakthrough infection can transmit the virus, CDC chief says"

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/05/health/us-coronavirus-thu...

National Geographic: "Evidence mounts that people with breakthrough infections can spread Delta easily"

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/evidence-...

NPR: "Vaccinated People With Breakthrough Infections Can Spread The Delta Variant, CDC Says"

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

New York Times: "Vaccinated People May Spread the Virus, Though Rarely, C.D.C. Reports"

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/health/cdc-vaccinated-del...

eloff4• 5 years ago

What argument are you making then? So I can tell you that you're wrong, despite all of the sources listed. Vaccines make sense if you're informed.

belter2• 5 years ago

The links above are not an argument against vaccination. They are an argument against blaming solely unvaccinated people for the spread of the virus. And many with serious immunity issues, or for example, know brain aneurysms who cannot be operated but do not cause immediate issues etc...Are not advised to take the vaccine. They should not be made second class citizens.

nate_meurer2• 5 years ago

Wrong in what way? It's true that the vaccines against covid don't provide durable sterilizing immunity, and they aren't expected to. In other words, the vaccines are not expected to prevent most people from getting infected, but rather only from getting seriously sick.

This is true of vaccines in general; vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, and almost none do. For example, flu vaccines don't keep you from from getting infected, and the virus is still able to spread even when vaccination rates are high. Rather, flu vaccines cause you to have less severe symptoms.

Vaccines are designed and tested to prevent disease in spite of infection. The current evidence indicates that the vaccines are doing a good job of preventing hospitalizations due to covid, and I wish the CDC would message this more clearly instead of fearmongering about "breakthrough" infections.

criticaltinker3• 5 years ago

The title and narrative of this article is an egregious misreporting of the CDC report, and was obviously crafted to be divisive click bait.

Pinning this exclusively on the unvaccinated teacher is unfair and not supported by any hard facts from the CDC's investigation and findings [1].

1) Causation was not established. The delta variant was likely circulating throughout the entire school. For example, kids across multiple grade levels tested positive (these kids are not in the same classrooms). Also parents and siblings tested positive. It's extremely plausible that the teacher was not the 'index' case, even considering symptom onset dates (many infections are asymptomatic especially in children). Most importantly, since the students were only tested after the teacher tested positive, the test results cannot determine who was the true index case.

2) All 3 vaccinated adults were symptomatic, which speaks to the fact that although the vaccines are still effective at preventing severe outcomes, the delta variant has undermined vaccine efficacy at preventing infection (decreasing from 91% to 66%) [2].

Among the five infected adults, one parent and the teacher were unvaccinated; the others were fully vaccinated. The vaccinated adults and one unvaccinated adult were symptomatic

3) This teacher should not have been at work if she had symptoms, which is partly a reflection of school policies and the lacking benefits of many elementary school teachers in general (eg limited paid time off).

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e2.htm

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e4.htm

MilnerRoute• 5 years ago

For what it's worth, the Guardian says "Infections corresponded to the classroom’s seating chart, with the students sitting closest to the teacher the most likely to be infected." CNN supplies a little more information.

"In the classroom of 22 students, 12 became infected -- including eight out of 10 students in the two front rows."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/27/health/teacher-covid-students...

criticaltinker3• 5 years ago

Yes this information is in the CDC report, take a look at the seating chart with annotated infection and symptom status [1].

12 became infected

Using the word became is disingenuous at best (and misinformation at worst) because it implies that causation was established, but it was not. Here is the exact language from the CDC report:

Students were seated in five rows; the attack rate in the two rows seated closest to the teacher’s desk was 80% (eight of 10) and was 28% (four of 14) in the three back rows (Fisher’s exact test; p = 0.036)

Because the students were only tested after the teacher tested positive, there is no way to determine causation from positive test results.

Even the evidence from genome sequencing could only establish correlation, but not causation.

Eleven sequences were genetically indistinguishable from one another [...] Among the indistinguishable specimens, six were from students of the index patient, four were from students in the separate grade, and one was from a sibling of a student in the index patient’s class, suggesting that infections occurring in the two grades likely were part of the same outbreak.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e2.htm#F1_down

tomohawk• 5 years ago

This should not be concerning.

Covid is endemic. Pretty much all of us are going to get it sooner or later.

If you are vaccinated, you will likely fight it off, and likely not even know it. Or, you may have mild symptoms. Only in rare cases will you get serious illness.

Ditto if you are a child, as covid goes after the ACE2 receptor that is activated at puberty, so children are at very slight risk.

As of today, there have been 385 covid "involved" (not same as caused) deaths in the US since the start of the pandemic that are for ages 0 - 17.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...

Thats compared to 54,062 deaths during the same timeframe from all causes in that age group.

angelzen2• 5 years ago

Nitpick: 0-17 data conflates infant morality with children mortality. 30k of the 54k deaths are in the 0-1 age group.

Alternate: For 5-14 age group, there have been 131 covid 'involved' deaths out of 9,038 total deaths, and unclear what the co-morbidities were. No reason to get concerned, no reason to mandate vaccines / masks for kids.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

Unvaccinated teacher infected half her students with Covid, CDC finds

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