In NYC, Public School Staff Might Be Getting Covid At Higher Rates Than The Surrounding Community
Liz Rosenberg
From December 20th-January 13th, incidence rates for students and staff were close to or higher than averages for the general population.
Incidence “refers to the number of individuals who develop a specific disease or experience a specific health-related event during a particular time period,” according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Here in New York City, our schools are open because our mayor has repeatedly claimed that they are “safe.” However, he has not walked us through the data. Each day there are more and more in-person staff and students testing positive for Covid. We, PRESS NYC, wanted to know if in-person students and staff are more likely to test positive than the general population. We also wanted to know if the mayor’s claim was accurate.
Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor’s senior public health advisor recently said that incidence, along with prevalence, is key to understanding reopening risks, “In order for schools to remain open, the rates of both prevalence and incidence in schools should be similar to or lower than those in the surrounding community.” The mayor’s message, that schools are “the safest places in NYC,” suggests that the incidence rate for Covid in our schools would be far lower than the incidence rate in the general public, but that is not what we found.
Caveat: We are not experts in analyzing data or in the field of epidemiology. But we have real questions about the safety of our schools. The questions we are trying to answer should be the priority of anyone with policy making power or influence in NYC, especially those that make decisions that impact the lives of families and educators. Our answers are as close to accurate as we can make them without full access to key information, like exactly how many students or staff were going into schools during the period discussed. NYC’s data changes as new results come in, but the school related data does not. We used the data that was available on January 14th to do our calculations in an attempt to make this as apples to apples as possible.
On January 13th, New York City’s Covid incidence rate was 58 per 100,000 (based on a 7-day average).
How does this compare to staff and students’ incidence rates for the same period?
We found that in-person students’ incidence rate was between 54 and 63 per 100,000 (as much as 9% higher).
In-person staff’s rate was between 66 and 80 per 100,000 (as much as 38% higher).
The Department of Education has not posted exact numbers of in-person staff, but our sources helped us arrive at an estimate of 174K (this includes Learning Bridges, cafeteria, and 3-K program staff). We ran the numbers for two possibilities. And hope that someone in the DOE will share more exact figures soon.
In the tables below the red lines show what the incidence rates would be if we use population numbers on the higher end and the yellow lines show what is probably a more realistic estimate of how many staff and students were going into schools during this period (given that many were in quarantine).
This data stands in stark contrast to the mayor’s narrative about school safety. Though even his senior advisor says, “Comparing the school test positivity rate to the citywide positivity rate “is not a perfectly fair comparison.” The mayor ONLY talks about schools using this unfair comparison and many news outlets repeat it daily.
The in-person testing that the mayor says is key to keeping people safe is not going as planned. Testers are leaving schools having not tested the full 20% promised. They show up the same day each week and therefore miss testing a whole cohort of students. Dr. Uché Blackstock, quoted in the New York Times last week, said her child, who has been going in person since October, has yet to be tested. City Council members sent a letter to the mayor detailing problems with the Situation Room, the city’s multi-agency Covid school command center. They describe principals who “report that COVID cases take over their lives leaving them little or no time to focus on instruction.” Errors in situation room data have not been publicly addressed, either.
Using Dr. Varma’s standards, that incidence rates in staff or students should not be higher than the general population, there are very real reasons to question if New York City public schools should be open right now.
Rather than alerting the public that they are noticing a troubling trend, the mayor is pressuring schools to bring more students in five days a week; he’s also forcing schools to administer the specialized high school exam, and he’s not taking into account the dangers of new variants and slow vaccine rollout that could mean even more in-person staff and students are at risk.
As public school parents, all of this gives us a great deal of pause:
When the governor, mayor, chancellor, and teachers’ unions obscure the facts and only share information that aligns with their narrative, they put Black, Latinx and immigrant families at even higher risk. — Naomi Peña
Parents want the most transparent, user friendly, accurate data we can get, not spin or claims of the “biggest” or “best.” We want to know if there is a disparate impact on COVID-vulnerable groups, and we want these students prioritized with extra attention paid to keeping them safe. — Yuli Hsu
“There has been some pressure on the mayor to change some of the safeguards of school closures. Some of this pressure seems to be coming from a select group of people, while others have been shut out of the conversation. This is particularly troubling given these incidence rates and what we are learning about new dangerous variants. De Blasio should act fast on this information, that clearly shows schools are not safe for staff, especially, and wait until rates come way down and more people, teachers, parents and students have received the vaccine. This would at least protect the most vulnerable to this virus.”
— Kaliris Salas-Ramirez
We all experience trauma when members of our school communities become ill or die. This is why we have continually advocated for stronger in-person learning safety protocols. We are also thinking about the future. The more transparency we have, real thresholds, robust testing, safe ventilation, prioritization of the most vulnerable students, trust, mechanisms to truly be heard, the better, & more sustainable, our eventual return to in-person school will be. — Paullette Healy
Like every New Yorker, we long to be past this period. But in the next few months, our rates will likely continue to rise unless Mayor de Blasio issues restrictions; given the already untenable death toll (82 people today), we sincerely hope that he will.
Many eyes are on New York City’s school reopening, so we need our leaders to be real with us about the risks of in-person learning. We need this level of honesty nationally, as well. No matter how unpopular school closures are with some parents or business leaders, we need to heed the safeguards Dr. Varma has outlined — that in-person incidence rates should not be higher (and we would add, they should be much lower) than the community’s rates, and we need a data dashboard that continually helps us understand where we are with these metrics.
On Thursday, Dr. Fauci said that it was “liberating” to “let the science speak.” Science has not been speaking nearly enough in New York City’s reopening process, and it’s time for that to change.
###
PRESS NYC, Parents for Responsive, Equitable, Safe Schools, is a parent collective who hold the education press and the NYC mayor accountable. We lead on CECs, build learning communities with students, write anti-racist curriculum, have expertise in the challenges of navigating the system for students with disabilities, and demand that parents are able to engage with the DOE in their language. We expect the DOE to be responsive to the communities it serves, centered on equity, & grounded in health & safety.
Follow us on twitter and facebook @safeschoolsny
Watch the “tribute” we created as a boycott of the Panel for Education Policy.
Notes on the Data
Incidence Rates in NYC and In Schools The First Week In January
For NYC overall:
- Average number of cases per day from 1/7–1/13 was 4855 (as reported on 1.14).
- NYC’s population is 8,398,748.
- Incidence of COVID = 58
For students:
- Average number of student cases per day was 106 between 1/6–1/13 .
- Population of students going in is roughly between 196,000 and 166,000.
- Incidence of COVID = 54–63 per 100K.
For staff:
- Average number of staff cases per day from 1/6–1/13 was 115.
- Population of staff going in is roughly between 174,000 and 144,000.
- Incidence of COVID = 66–80 per 100K.
What does the Situation Room mean by a “case”?
When contacted for an answer, City Hall stated that a “case” is a student or staff member who attends in-person who has a confirmed positive PCR or rapid test.
This is an important clarification: Remote staff and students are NOT included in these numbers.
A note about NYC’s context for anyone who might want to use NYC as a model:
- The main reason that NYC school communities have not had higher rates is that on any given day only about 20% of a school’s population is in attendance.
- Students wear masks here all day except during lunch or snack times, when they share air. The only students who do not wear masks all day are students with medical exemptions.
- Most students participate in random testing, which is supposed to be 20% of in person students and staff once a week with a rapid turn around, but the rapidness is in dispute as is the 20%.
- Kids 5 and under are not part of the in-person testing, and district 75 students are allowed medical exemptions.
- A disproportionate number of white students attend in person (more).
- The number of Black, and Asian students attending school remotely is also disproportionate (more).
- The quality of ventilation in rooms is in dispute and there is no standard for testing it.
- And though most families chose not to send their children in-person, classroom density just increased because of the mayor’s push to have more students attend 5 days a week.
- Class size has been kept small in-person, but it’s breaking union rules in remote.
