The Anchorage City School District Doesn't Have a Plan
Alaska DHSS released the COVID-19 Alaska Weekly Case Update this morning and says that overall, new cases in Alaska are increasing. The daily state case rate as of September 12, 2020, is 8.7 cases per 100,000 people, averaged over the last 14 days. That's up from 7.9 the week before and 7.0 the week before that, so the state's alert level for this past week remains at intermediate (orange).
Reproductive numbers, a measure of contagion, have increased to 1.02 and are projected to increase slightly. A reproductive number of 1.02 means that each person diagnosed with COVID-19 gives it, on average, to more than one other person.
Today's Weekly Case Update also notes that "An updated model epidemic curve now predicts Alaska's cases to rise over the next week, a reversal in trend from recent weeks when cases had been predicted to decrease," and continues, "Anchorage Municipality and the Northwest Region both remain in the high transmission category but have improved slightly from last week.
The meat and potatoes of the update can be found in this sentence: "The majority of new infections among Alaskans are from community spread, not from travel. Most Alaskans get the virus from someone they work, socialize, or go to school with."
On Wednesday, as predicted in a social media post I made earlier in the week, Superintendent Dr. Deena Bishop announced that ASD was effectively tossing out the science-based metrics that were originally sold to parents, teachers, and school staff, by stating that they were instead returning students using a phase-in system set to begin on October 19.
Concurrently, the ASD changed the high-risk banner on the ASD website from red to brown in what can only be understood as an effort to downplay the severity of the Anchorage COVID-19 alert level, which is still RED.
Dr. Bishop's new plan to return children to school, lacking in specifics, policies, and procedures, can rekindle the spread of the virus in our city and sicken the most vulnerable in our community.
Dr. Bishop claims that the return to school is not based on "outside pressure of parents or inside pressure." Still, it certainly soars in the face of the guidelines set forth by Alaska Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink and our state and local health officials.
Bishop also suggests that the district is "following the science," but children are well-known, efficient spreaders of COVID-19. They will interact with one another and return home daily, placing their families, our teachers, and school staff at risk.
Does Superintendent Bishop believe a vaccine is on the way? If so, she should note that Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned Wednesday that most Americans would not have access to a vaccine until the spring or summer of 2021.
Bishop also wrote in her September 14: Message from the Superintendent, "Last week, ASD allowed full high school sports practices to begin. This smaller, voluntary, and more controlled group has demonstrated that with detailed safety mitigation plans, student groups can safely begin returning to in-person educational environments," believing that little over a week is adequate time to determine whether these "detailed safety mitigation plans," which I've been unable to locate anywhere, are effective.
"ASD will be a symptom-free district and we know that the influenza might affect this, maybe just an allergy, but if we identify symptoms we have protocols in place to have children checked out," Bishop said lending to the idea that she either doesn't believe in, or isn't concerned about, the asymptomatic spread of the virus.
Furthermore, the school district has no plan to screen students for symptoms. Instead, it suggests that "parents/caregivers should conduct daily monitoring of their children for signs of infectious illness," placing more of the responsibility for returning students safely to school on the parents.
The Anchorage Education Association, representing 13,000 educators throughout Alaska, is hunkering down and has reiterated that their position on returning to school and online learning remains unchanged.
Still, Bishop is pushing forward with her "plan" unless there is a "mass spread of the virus in schools and the community." What Bishop defines as "mass spread" is anyone's guess.
Superintendent Bishop's plan to return students to classrooms raises far more questions than it answers, but as she told the Anchorage Daily News, "The plan is the plan."
