with Alexandra Ellerbeck
The state’s House and Senate, both led by Democrats, have passed legislation requiring schools to offer in-person instruction five days a week starting July 1. Under the bill, approaches being taken by large school districts in Northern Virginia — where students are offered in-person instruction right now two days a week — wouldn’t appear to pass muster. The Virginia Education Association supports the bill that passed.
The bill reflects mounting concerns for students, many of whom haven’t seen the inside of a classroom in a full year.
A majority of Virginia’s 133 school systems reopened this academic year. But roughly 40 of them — including prominent districts in Arlington, Fairfax, Alexandria and Loudoun — have offered almost no in-person instruction since March 2020. The situation has dismayed some parents and experts, who have raised concerns the approach doesn’t comport with evidence or official recommendations.
For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said being vaccinated shouldn't be a prerequisite for teachers to return to schools. Multiple studies in the United States and abroad have shown little transmission of the virus in K-12 schools. Plus, teachers are being given coronavirus vaccines ahead of other priority groups.
Teachers' unions have a variety of arguments for why they feel uncomfortable returning to schools, from lack of adequate protective gear, to a dearth of soap and water to maintain hand-washing to worries about budget cuts. But American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, an ally of Joe Biden, supports resuming in-person education even before teachers are widely vaccinated.
The fight is being waged on the local level here in the District, Maryland and Virginia.
The teachers union in Fairfax County has said it opposes a five-day school week next autumn and says schools shouldn’t fully reopen until all of the county’s 150,000 students are vaccinated and there have been 14 days without community spread.
The Fairfax, Loudoun, Alexandria and Arlington school districts agreed to reopen classrooms this month, after Gov. Ralph Northam (D) demanded a reopening by March 15. But students are being offered just two days weekly of in-person learning, with the rest of the time spent in virtual classes. Many teachers have been granted special exemptions to teach from home because of health conditions, requiring Fairfax County, for example, to hire hundreds of assistants to supervise students within classrooms.
The Virginia bill aims to get students in school five days a week — although it could contain a loophole.
It says schools must offer students in-person instruction for “at least the minimum” of instructional hours required by the state (which amounts to 15 hours a week). It clarifies the requirement wouldn’t be met by a teacher providing virtual instruction to students assembled within a classroom. Rather, the teacher would need to be physically present.
The measure also touches on a hot-button point of debate — whether high community transmission of the virus is enough to close schools, even if there’s no transmission discovered within the school.
The legislation seems to indicate community spread isn’t enough reason to halt in-person learning, but that spread would need to be detected within a school. It says schools can go to all-virtual “only for as long as it is necessary to address and ameliorate the level of transmission of covid-19 in the school building.”
The measure, spearheaded by state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant (R-Henrico), went through a few iterations to get enough Democratic support to pass both chambers. She agreed to soften a few elements, including setting its effectiveness date as July 1 instead of immediately.
There’s also a provision allowing teachers and staff members to cite a disability as a reason to get a special accommodation to keep teaching virtually.
Dunnavant, who spent weeks negotiating for the legislation, points to research showing little viral spread in schools and well-documented harms to children from keeping them at home full time.
“I can’t believe I had to legislate it,” Dunnavant told me in a phone call yesterday.
The measure notably doesn’t mention how far apart kids should be kept.
This is another sharp point of contention around school reopenings. Experts recommend keeping desks six feet apart — while acknowledging this might not always be possible. The CDC has recommended six feet “when feasible.” The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends “keeping desks at least 3 feet apart, and ideally 6 feet apart.”
But there are consequences when schools adhere strictly to the six-foot standard. That's why the Northern Virginia districts are bringing only half the students into a classroom at one time. If Dunnavant’s legislation becomes law, and districts must offer all students in-person instruction full time, it’s hard to see how a six-foot standard could be maintained.
It’s also hard to imagine a return to classrooms if communities must wait to vaccinate all children and community spread entirely subsides.
Northam will “review the bill.”
That’s according to his spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky, who said the legislation “aligns with the governor’s expectation that all school divisions across Virginia offer safe, in-person instruction options.”
Northam had engaged with legislators as they modified the bill but hasn’t said explicitly that he’ll sign it. But he did call last month for Virginia schools to offer some sort of in-person learning “to prevent irreparable loss and psychological damage.”
Northam noted that Virginia has allocated significant funding to provide school systems with personal protective equipment, my colleague Hannah Natanson reported at the time. He also noted that the state prioritized teachers for vaccinations, including them in the early “1b” phase.
“We are now equipped as a society to safely open schools and operate them in ways that protect students, teachers and staff members,” he wrote. “Now, we must work together to bring students back to school.”
Ahh, oof and ouch
AHH: Aides to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo removed a count of nursing home deaths from a state health report to save face.
Last June, senior aides to Cuomo (D) rewrote a report from state health officials that included a count of how many nursing home residents died from covid-19, the New York Times reports. The deaths numbered more than 9,000 by that point in the pandemic, and the aides were alarmed about the public finding out.
“The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths,” J. David Goodman and Danny Hakim report.
“After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes,” David and Danny write.
“After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes,” David and Danny write.
Cuomo is also being investigated for sexual harrassment claims levied by former aides.
- Our colleague James Hohmann notes in a Post op-ed Cuomo's “precipitous rise and fall in New York over the past year,” writing that Democrats had such a strong urge to identify a foil to Trump that Cuomo “emerged as the unlikely anti-Trump, despite his manifest flaws.”
OOF: Most coronavirus deaths have occurred in countries where the majority of adults are overweight.
The World Obesity Federation found that 88 percent of deaths due to covid-19 in the first year of the pandemic were in countries where more than half of the population is classified as overweight, defined as having a body mass index above 25, The Post’s Erin Cunningham and Jennifer Hassan report. The federation urged governments to prioritize overweight people for testing and vaccination.
“The World Obesity Federation findings were near-uniform across the globe, the report said, and found that increased body weight was the second greatest predictor after old age of hospitalization and higher risk of death of covid-19,” Erin and Jennifer write.
Britain, Italy and the United States are among the countries that suffered some of the largest proportions of coronavirus deaths. More than half of the adult population in all three countries is overweight, according to the report.
Obesity is also one reason more Black and Hispanic Americans have been hospitalized and died at higher rates from covid-19. “Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black adults have a higher prevalence of obesity and are more likely to suffer worse outcomes from COVID-19,” according to the CDC.
OUCH: The World Health Organization plans to scrap its interim report on the coronavirus's origins.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Feb. 12 that the team of scientists who led a mission to the Chinese city of Wuhan last month would soon release an interim report. But the WHO is now scrapping that plan and instead opting to publish a full, final report in coming weeks, the Wall Street Journal’s Betsy McKay, Drew Hinshaw and Jeremy Page report.
“The delay in publishing the findings and recommendations from the Wuhan mission, conducted jointly with Chinese scientists and officials who will have to approve any report, comes against a backdrop of continued political and scientific controversy surrounding the search for the origins of the pandemic,” Betsy, Drew and Jeremy write.
Two dozen scientists on Thursday released an open letter calling for a new international inquiry, saying that it was all but impossible for the team members to conduct a full investigation. The signatories also said that the team was premature in dismissing the possibility that the virus could have originated in a lab.
Many leading infectious-disease experts are skeptical that the pandemic could have originated with a lab leak. Still, the letter echoes frustration from government officials in the United States and Britain and leading scientists who have said that China failed to provide sufficient data to the WHO.
More in coronavirus news
- The Senate voted to open debate on Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, as Democrats move forward without GOP support, The Post’s Erica Werner, Jeff Stein and Tony Romm report.
- Health insurer profits may suffer as providers see an uptick in people seeking care that they put off during the pandemic, Axios’s Caitlin Owens and Courtenay Brown report.
- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) defended his decision to roll back a statewide mask mandate, arguing that it wouldn't make “that big of a change” because people are now in the habit of wearing masks, Politico’s Quint Forgey reports. A number of retailers, including Target, Starbucks, CVS and Kroger, have said that they will continue to require customers in Texas to wear face coverings while in stores.
Demand for coronavirus tests has dropped precipitously.
The average number of tests being conducted every day in America has plummeted by 33.6 percent since January, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
“That statistic has many experts deeply concerned because it comes just as America’s recent decrease in infections and deaths is stalling at a worrisome high level. Testing is a key tool to stopping coronavirus transmission. Without it, the virus has the potential to spread unchecked,” The Post’s William Wan reports.
Some of the drop in testing may be due to declining cases, which have led fewer people to experience symptoms. But experts point to other factors, including the fact that many people do not want to quarantine or miss work because of a positive test. Some testing coordinators worry that an emphasis on how vaccines will end the pandemic has caused people to become less cautious.
Officials fear that the spread of new, more contagious variants of the coronavirus could lead to a spring surge in cases. Until more people are vaccinated, testing remains one of the main tools for combating the chain of transmission, William writes.
Risky roads
Traffic fatalities are up, even as driving is down.
“Pandemic lockdowns and stay-at-home orders kept many drivers off U.S. roads and highways last year. But those who did venture out found open lanes that only invited reckless driving, leading to a sharp increase in traffic-crash deaths across the country,” the Associated Press’s Tom Krisher reports.
The nonprofit National Safety Council found that 42,060 people died in traffic accidents in 2020, representing an 8 percent increase compared to 2019. The fatality rate per 100 miles driven spiked 24 percent, the largest annual percentage increase since the council began collecting data in 1923.
Ken Kolosh, the safety council’s manager of statistics, told the Associated Press that early data suggests speed to be the top factor, but that tests of trauma center patients also show an increase in use of alcohol, marijuana and opioids.
Elsewhere in health care
The number of migrant children crossing the border is overwhelming government resources.
Leaked documents obtained by Axios from the Department of Health and Human Services show that the Border Patrol referred 321 children to HHS custody in the week ending March 1.
“That's up from a weekly average of 203 in late January and early February — and just 47 per day during the first week of January,” Axios’s Jonathan Swan and Stef W. Kight report.
The documents also show that the shelter system is at 94 percent occupancy and expected to reach maximum occupancy this month, they report.
The administration has continued to use a Trump-era public health order to quickly turn away migrant adults and some families. But Biden has ordered his administration not to use the order to turn away unaccompanied minors.
The Post reports that the administration plans to call on the Federal Emergency Management Agency for assistance in responding to migrants and asylum seekers in South Texas.
Congress is questioning drug companies on opioid settlement tax deductions.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform is questioning whether large drug companies are using provisions in the Cares Act bailout package to deduct some of the costs of a landmark opioid settlement from their taxes, The Post’s Douglas MacMillan and Kevin Schaul report.
The Washington Post revealed last month that drug companies were seeking billions in tax deductions from settlements related to their role in the opioid crisis.
“Your attempt to reduce your settlement costs by taking advantage of a tax provision intended for businesses suffering coronavirus-related losses is insulting to every community suffering from the opioid crisis and the pandemic,” the committee said.
