Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Covid-19

  • Trego School Continues Distance Learning

    Trego School has adopted something of a wait-and-see approach to determining the date they will resume in-person learning.

    In any school, the requirement that individuals that have been exposed must quarantine themselves for fourteen days can quickly make in-person learning impossible. Substitute teachers are always difficult to find, and finding one that is able to teach two weeks’ worth of classes on short notice is even more difficult. School districts with multiple staff members required to quarantine can quickly exhaust their “sub lists”.

    In a smaller school, while there are fewer staff members and students to expose one another, there is also a greater degree of interaction. While in large school districts, kindergartners are seldom exposed to 8th graders, interaction among students is almost guaranteed in smaller schools.

    It’s worth remembering, especially as favorite places are closed and much anticipated events are postponed and cancelled, that the school board is not responsible for mandating/enforcing quarantine. Rather, they have the difficult challenge of figuring out how to keep education continuing. For further information on who exactly is responsible, I’ll quote the county health department.

    You can read the full text of the County Health Department’s COVID FAQ here.

    Updates on the number of active cases of Corona Virus can be found from the county health department, and from the state. Monday’s update has a total of 67 active cases in North Lincoln County, with no current hospitalizations in the county. While the county does break the cases down by location and age, it doesn’t combine the two.. The county had 53 cases in the 0-19 range, but knowing it at the county level isn’t as good as knowing it at the school district level. The requirements of quarantine create a situation that mandates quick decisions. The available data? Never as good as we’d like it to be.

  • Trego School moves to Distance Learning

    Trego School moves to Distance Learning

    In accordance with the school’s Health and Safety Plan, the school has moved temporarily to distance learning. The School’s Health and Safety Plan is a three part plan outlining the response to each potential scenario. Part A is “Traditional Learning with Precautions” and has been in place since the school year started in September.

    The screens around the desks are one of the precautions outlined in Part A of the Health and Safety Plan.

    The school had recently moved to Part B, “In the event a community member in School District becomes infected”. During Part B, traditional in-person learning continued with additional precautions beyond those outlined in Part A.

    As of Monday (October 19th), Trego School is in Part C: “In the event a student or staff member in School becomes infected”. Taking advantage of some very lucky timing, the school board has been able to put over two weeks between the date of potential exposure and on-site learning resuming with only a week of distance learning.

    How? As parents know, last week had some time off of school. While there were not holidays there was MEA, a statewide conference hosted by the Montana Educators Association. This, combined with well timed absences, will allow for two weeks between the potential exposure and on-site learning, with a single week of distance learning.

    In keeping with the Health and Safety Plan, the school bus will be delivering breakfast and lunch to students. On-site learning is scheduled to resume on Monday (October 26th). The school board, after taking input from parents, will be deciding whether to resume on-site learning in Part A or Part B of the Health and Safety Plan, but it regardless, students will be back to in-person learning on Monday.

  • Covid’s Mask and Pascal’s Wager

    According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) offers a pragmatic reason for believing in God: even under the assumption that God’s existence is unlikely, the potential benefits of believing are so vast as to make betting on theism rational.” As a stats guy, I could write this from memory, as a scientist, I need to cite a source.

    Pascal’s statistical argument is a gambler’s view of the universe – the cost of believing, of the ante, is so small compared to the infinite reward (the size of the pot).  I worked with an accountant who had a system for buying lottery tickets – his break from understanding Pascal was that both cost and reward in the statistics of lottery cards are finite – the odds really can be calculated.  Lotteries are a tax on people who don’t want to do the math.

    Covid is also a game for statisticians.  It’s still at a point where we have a bunch of unknowns, but there are fewer unknowns than there were 6 months ago.  Then the Diamond Princess was a horrifying news story – now it is data, as taken from statista.com: “A total of 712 people were infected with COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship – 567 passengers and 145 crew members. The cruise ship, which had more than 3,500 people on board, was quarantined for around two weeks. All passengers and crew members had finally disembarked the ship by March 1, 2020.”

    Wikipedia shows 14 deaths among the 712 infected people on the Diamond Princess.  Somewhere right around 2%.  About the same as Texas and California, and lower than New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

    We’re still looking at less than perfect representative numbers – but Diamond Princess has provided some data:  roughly 20% of those exposed between January 20 and February 19 wound up infected.  In March, we had estimated R0 values from 1.5 to 3.5.  Now, we have Rt values (Average number of people who become infected by an infectious person with COVID-19 in the U.S. as of October 17, 2020).  Those numbers vary from 0.91 in Mississippi to 1.31 in New Mexico.  Montana scored 1.2. 

    Generally speaking, in the absence of data, we have a tendency to assume the worst.  We have data now.  The actual infectivity is lower than the initial data – perhaps because the precautions have been effective, perhaps it is related to the fact that 80% of the people on Diamond Princess did not catch covid.  Correlation is not causation.  Causation is inferred from statistics, not proven.

    This week, an article from the American Society of Hematology stated: “Blood type O may offer some protection against COVID-19 infection, according to a retrospective study. Researchers compared Danish health registry data from more than 473,000 individuals tested for COVID-19 to data from a control group of more than 2.2 million people from the general population. Among the COVID-19 positive, they found fewer people with blood type O and more people with A, B, and AB types.”

    Making statistics personal is a challenge – data suggests that my risk factors are increased by age (70), height (6’3”), asthma, and diabetes.  How much we don’t know – for neither my asthma nor the diabetes scores particularly high.  My risk factors are reduced by my blood type.  So let’s look at masking.

    My mask is like Pascal’s wager – it seems logical that any level of masking will reduce transmission.  The question is: “How much?”  I don’t have that answer.  Does my mask protect me significantly?  When I have been in surgery, the surgeons and medical staff were masked to protect me.  Similarly, is my mask to protect others?   Business Insider offers an article comparing mask effectiveness, but cautions that “Mask studies should be taken with a grain of salt.”  My mask is like Pascal’s wager – and I hope wearing it adds a sense of security. It costs me little to wear it.