Let’s start with the sub head:
“The coronavirus gospel of ‘within six feet for more than 15 minutes’ wasn’t enough—and the NFL had the data to prove it.”
The Cincinnati Public School board just voted that 3 feet of social distancing (aka NO DISTANCING) is enough at one of our high schools. Where did they get they data to back this up? No idea. Definitely not from the NFL.
https://t.co/irWJgHRvbo
Back to the NFL, and the linked article:
“The guidance was that someone had been exposed to the virus if they had been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes.
It was drilled into everyone for so long it became coronavirus gospel. But that wasn’t proving true during the NFL’s outbreaks.”
“People were testing positive for the virus even though they had spent far less than 15 minutes or weren’t within six feet of an infectious person—and the league had the contact-tracing technology to prove it.”
“‘That was a wake-up call,’ said Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer. ‘We had to be more precise in our definition of high-risk close contacts because clearly transmission could occur outside those basic boundaries of time and distance.’”
“In the days, weeks and months after the Titans’ outbreak, the NFL changed its rules to further reduce close contacts, for any length of time.... (cont'd)
It counted people as having been exposed to the virus if they had unmasked, indoor interactions with an infected person for any length of time. And it introduced lengthier quarantine periods for those exposed people—preventing them from further spreading the virus.”
Just going to pause here and say that Cincinnati Public Schools and the State of Ohio have done the opposite. They’ve decided that anyone who’s been exposed to COVID is A-okay as long as there was distance and it wasn’t more than 15 minutes.
It's not even reported. So your child could: be exposed, get infected themselves, and then give it to caregivers. All with no heads up that the crummy feeling you're having could be COVID and you should probably seek some medical help before it's too late.
We are being told by the Board, and others, that the “controlled environment” of a school is safe. Yet the NFL, which had a SUPER controlled environment, tells us the EXACT OPPOSITE.
What does SUPER controlled mean:
-everyone screened upon intake
-MASSIVE testing - almost a million tests for around 7000 people from August 9–November 21. How many tests have been administered to our 35,000 CPS students over the last 9 months? A grand total of….1,041.
https://t.co/G6krWYHbVX
-surveillance. MASSIVE surveillance. They didn’t rely on people’s faulty concepts of time, or memory. NOPE. They issued special devices to collect cold, hard data. From the study:
“Contact tracing was performed by trained staff members and supported by KINEXON wearable proximity devices that were required to be worn by players and personnel when in club environments. (cont'd)
Device recordings captured consecutive and cumulative minutes/seconds of interactions among persons within 1.8 meters (6 feet) of one another. (cont'd)
When testing identified a new COVID-19 case, trained staff members conducted interviews to identify contacts including and beyond device-identified persons (e.g., nonclub activities, social interactions, and times when the device was not worn).”
One other SUPER controlled feature: genomic testing. They were able to see exactly what was being passed around, and how, and from who, with genomic testing.
And here’s the best part! When they realized - THROUGH DATA COLLECTION - that what they were doing wasn’t working, THEY CHANGED COURSE:
“The league introduced new, strict rules for any team with a single positive. It started testing seven days a week, instead of six. Most critically, it supercharged its contact tracing to consider context that the movement-tracking devices couldn’t detect. (cont'd)
A masked encounter outdoors could then be treated differently than an unmasked shared car ride, for instance.
The NFL told teams to take meetings virtual, avoid indoor gatherings, even if they were distanced and quit eating together.
(cont'd)
If someone had done any of these things with a person who subsequently tested positive, they had to be isolated, regardless of how brief their interaction had been. “
That last point - eating - is important when it comes to schools. Right now, in CPS, kids are eating breakfast and lunch together. Pre-schoolers have breakfast, lunch and snack, AND naps without masks.
Our schools are giving out meals to every single family/child in the district that needs it - including through the entire summer. Why can’t these be eaten at home instead of school, having kids attend for half days?
To recap, the NFL - in its extremely controlled environment - clearly demonstrated that what we’re being told is not true. The walls of a school aren’t magical. Conversely, the NFL isn’t magical either.
The NFL had at its disposal the tools to do what the schools could not: collect massive amounts of precise data in order to make decisions that would keep their players (their INVESTMENTS) healthy. The question is whether we’ll decide to learn from it or not.
The question is whether we think our children and teachers are an important investment too.
