Daily Admin Update
Day 49
Good Morning,
Obviously, I do not know what next year is going to look like as we are unable to predict the path of Coronavirus but everything that I am reading is looking like some sort of blended learning, social distancing for kids and staff (seems impossible) and everyone in masks.
This is not at all what I have imagined for our 2020-2021 school year. It is taking me some time to digest this and I though that I should plant a seed and share my thoughts. I think I told you before I had a mentor tell me, only report out what you know to be true. These are my conjectures, I am watching closely other countries that have brought kids back and their best practices. I will continue to keep you updated. I have also created a zoom parent meeting for this Thursday at 3pm. We will likely create more if you are unable to attend. There is no set agenda for the meeting other than to connect, ask questions, share best practices and so on. If you would like to attend the zoom link is below.
Thinking of and sending you love,
Sarah
Did you know that 2020 is a unique leap year? It has 29 days in February, 300 days in March and 10 years in April.
Let’s (Not) Shake on It
Handshaking for self-protection became anachronistic long before Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, said wistfully in early April that as far as even greeting one another, “we may never shake hands again.” As a personal defense mechanism and for sealing deals, though, it was outdated as soon as people began openly brandishing guns and hiring lawyers to vet contracts.
Habits are hard to break, however. We still hear “Bless you” in response to sneezes, although hardly anyone still believes Pope Gregory’s guidance that the expression would help ward off the plague. Also, this is not the first time in our history that an epidemic has weaponized a custom that originated as a means of assuring two strangers that neither was armed. After the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, the publisher Matthew Carey wrote, “The old custom of shaking hands fell into such general disuse, that many shrank back with affright at even the offer of the hand.”
“How did people first get into the habit of shaking hands?” Harper’s Weekly asked in 1870, and then answered: “In early and barbarous times, when every savage or semi-savage was his own lawgiver, judge, soldier and policeman” two strangers would offer each other their right hand — “the hand alike of offense and defense”— in order “to show that the hand was empty, and that neither war nor treachery was intended.”
Knights incorporated the practice into chivalry, although when removing their iron mail gauntlets proved too cumbersome, personal rectitude had to be assumed as a matter of faith.
The greeting was ritualized as expected gamesmanship and political etiquette between competitors in sports and politics, immortalized in contrived photo ops of movers and shakers, and became common to everyday encounters.
The Covid-19 Riddle: Why Does the Virus Wallop Some Places and Spare Others?
The coronavirus has killed so many people in Iran that the country has resorted to mass burials, but in neighboring Iraq, the body count is fewer than 100.
The Dominican Republic has reported nearly 7,600 cases of the virus. Just across the border, Haiti has recorded about 85.
In Indonesia, thousands are believed to have died of the coronavirus. In nearby Malaysia, a strict lockdown has kept fatalities to about 100.
The coronavirus has touched almost every country on earth, but its impact has seemed capricious. Global metropolises like New York, Paris and London have been devastated, while teeming cities like Bangkok, Baghdad, New Delhi and Lagos have, so far, largely been spared.
The question of why the virus has overwhelmed some places and left others relatively untouched is a puzzle that has spawned numerous theories and speculations but no definitive answers. That knowledge could have profound implications for how countries respond to the virus, for determining who is at risk and for knowing when it’s safe to go out again.
There are already hundreds of studies underway around the world looking into how demographics, pre-existing conditions and genetics might affect the wide variation in impact.
Doctors in Saudi Arabia are studying whether genetic differences may help explain varying levels of severity in Covid-19 cases among Saudi Arabs, while scientists in Brazil are looking into the relationship between genetics and Covid-19 complications. Teams in multiple countries are studying if common hypertension medications might worsen the disease’s severity and whether a particular tuberculosis vaccine might do the opposite.
Many developing nations with hot climates and young populations have escaped the worst, suggesting that temperature and demographics could be factors. But countries like Peru, Indonesia and Brazil, tropical countries in the throes of growing epidemics, throw cold water on that idea.
Draconian social-distancing and early lockdown measures have clearly been effective, but Myanmar and Cambodia did neither and have reported few cases.
One theory that is unproven but impossible to refute: maybe the virus just hasn’t gotten to those countries yet. Russia and Turkey appeared to be fine until, suddenly, they were not.
Time may still prove the greatest equalizer: The Spanish flu that broke out in the United States in 1918 seemed to die down during the summer only to come roaring back with a deadlier strain in the fall, and a third wave the following year. It eventually reached far-flung places like islands in Alaska and the South Pacific and infected a third of the world’s population.
“We are really early in this disease,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Research Institute. “If this were a baseball game, it would be the second inning and there’s no reason to think that by the ninth inning the rest of the world that looks now like it hasn’t been affected won’t become like other places.”
Doctors who study infectious diseases around the world say they do not have enough data yet to get a full epidemiological picture, and that gaps in information in many countries make it dangerous to draw conclusions. Testing is woeful in many places, leading to vast underestimates of the virus’s progress, and deaths are almost certainly undercounted.
Still, the broad patterns are clear. Even in places with abysmal record-keeping and broken health systems, mass burials or hospitals turning away sick people by the thousands would be hard to miss, and a number of places are just not seeing them — at least not yet.
Interviews with more than two dozen infectious disease experts, health officials, epidemiologists and academics around the globe suggest four main factors that could help explain where the virus thrives and where it doesn’t: demographics, culture, environment and the speed of government responses.
Each possible explanation comes with considerable caveats and confounding counter-evidence. If an aging population is the most vulnerable, for instance, Japan should be at the top of the list. It is far from it. Nonetheless these are the factors that experts find the most persuasive.
-NY Times Weekend Briefing