School safety economist Emily Oster reopens in Covid

A year ago, schools across the country closed their doors in hopes of delaying the spread of a strange new virus. What happened next depended on the parent’s zip code, income, political persuasion of state officials, and the relative power of the local teachers union. Without official advice or guidance, avoid the late summer warning from then-President Trump that “schools must open in the fall !!!”. — The embarrassed parents were forced to navigate through all the options they had available. At that time, many of them turned to economists, Brown University professors, and leading experts in pregnancy and parent-child relationships. Emily Oster Ask for help.

When the pandemic began, 41-year-old Oster had just completed her third book. (“Thank God,” says the two mothers, “because I never ended it.”) Her first 2014 Expect better things, Mined scientific data to dismantle the common wisdom about pregnancy (and, somewhat famously, included a revelation that it’s probably okay to drink a glass of wine once in a while). Expect better things Inspired enthusiastic fans who helped make the bestsellers from 2019, Oster’s second book Crib sheetScrutinized studies on sleep training and breastfeeding.Her third is Family companyInstead of providing answers, Oster will try to provide a framework for parents to make their own decisions, as scheduled for August. This is basically a cost-benefit analysis how-to for questions that parents may face. Assemble questions, mitigate risk, assess risk, assess profits, and make decisions. And in Covid’s challenges, the framework is more relevant than ever, as parents are forced to make very high stakes decisions with very few, often incomplete data.

Oster, an economist specializing in health policy educated at Harvard University, was accustomed to answering questions from anxious moms and dads, but since March last year their questions have been desperate. It was. What do you think about this? what should I do? This is my very specific situation: … I’m going to drive here, I’m going to stop at this break — is it a good break?”

But the most pressing question Oster faced was whether it was safe to send the children back to school. She tried to approach the problem in the usual way. It was to look for peer-reviewed studies that could provide insight, but the only researchers surveyed did not expect results until fall. Step 3 Without the data to complete the “risk assessment”, the framework would be useless.

“I wanted to understand the answer and who was collecting information about this,” says Oster. “And I realized that no one was there.” So, with the help of a handful of partners, she decided to collect the information herself.Result is Covid-19 School Response DashboardAn exchange of data collected from schools across the country, including mitigation strategies adopted and the number of confirmed cases. This was the first effort to systematically track how the school responded to the crisis. The database, which began monitoring the school with only 100,000 students at the beginning of the school year, now contains about 12 million students, about half of whom are directly instructed.

It didn’t take long for Oster to collect enough data to make a personal decision. In October, when she saw the person in front of her, she Include Atlantic ocean “In fact, schools don’t seem to be the main spreaders. COVID-19 (new coronavirus infection) (# If there is no character limit, add parentheses when it first appears.. Like Oster’s early pandemic advice, articles, dashboards, and conclusions were popular with parents looking for something to communicate their choices. Its popularity also targeted Oster: from teachers who felt their safety was jeopardized in a hurry to resume, and as an economist epidemiologist she thought she should stay in her lane. I noticed that I was receiving a backlash from others. Some critics said the dashboard was not properly representative (the first school to opt in was disproportionately high income in the suburbs). Others said the numbers gave parents false reassurance and put their staff at risk.

Appointed by Trump CDC, Robert Redfield quoted the dashboard as proof that the school wasn’t a superspreader, Oster went into further controversy. “We just went to this place where no one was willing to talk about reality,” says Oster. Anyone who said something like “Hey, kids have to go to school” was like a crappy right-wing job. ”

Oster says he was trying to find the kind of data he wanted to be confident in his decisions. “One of the things I realized through this process is that the data isn’t as useful as I am,” she says. However, there may also be the fact that she is more comfortable with some risk than others. She admits that many believe that “children cannot be sent back to school until they are found to be completely safe.” But she says. “That’s not the attitude we took about other things. We could have said,” If any one died on the way to school in a car accident, we shouldn’t have opened school. “

With CDC Data is now available Looking at the initial data from the October dashboard from the first semester of schools in different states that employ different mitigation strategies, Oster seems almost correct. Schools are not associated with substantial community communication. Today, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the United States, the U.S. Teachers Union, makes centralized data collection of Covid-19 cases in schools a central requirement for negotiations to bring teachers back into the classroom. .. Both the Biden Education Department and the CDC have begun efforts to collect better data about schools, but for a long time Oster’s database was the closest.

This experience seems to have only strengthened Oster’s belief that school should be fully reopened.she has Criticized New CDC Guidelines — Suggests that only areas with very low infection rates should be open for full-time face-to-face instruction. Today, only about 4 percent of school children will qualify under the rules.

Meanwhile, there is a great deal of risk of keeping schools closed.Mental health visits to the emergency room spike, The test score is Fall, Absence up, And it doesn’t count Millions Of students who dropped out completely. Disadvantageous students are far behind their wealthy peers.Parents, especially mothers, dropped out of the workforce by Millions — The impact that some financial analysts think may be comparable to a minor recession.And according to recent Pew Research PollingNow, more and more Americans are more concerned about the risk of students being late for school than the risk of students being late for school. Coronavirus..

This year was an intolerable year for a family full of painful choices — and it probably won’t change anytime soon. Vaccine trials for children are still in their infancy and promised that federal funding for improving ventilation, purchasing PPE and hiring additional school staff is still suffering. Even before the next start.

But as new challenges arise in the coming months, Oster’s advice will probably remain the same. Understand the risks, determine if there are ways to avoid them, weigh the risks and benefits, and be confident in your choices. At the end of the day, she said, “When making these choices, you need to put risks in relation to other risks, and by living you realize that you take some risks. I need to. “