–Highlights–

 

• 33,799,264 Cases World-wide (Johns Hopkins)
• THURSDAY and FRIDAY'S CONVERSATIONS
• A summary of reopening Lessons Learned from The American School of Japan
• Keeping Onsite Teaching and Learning Going:  The American School of Warsaw– research-based COVID-19 testing and school health management
• From Principles to Practice, The New School Project discussions begin again on Friday- we need your voice
• The questionable safety of restaurants

–QUICK LINKS FOR BUSY PEOPLE–

A Quote to Consider

 

"This virus has caused a pandemic in large part because it acted on three of our most human vulnerabilities: our biological defenses, our clustering patterns of social behavior and our simmering political divides."

–Dr. William A. Haseltine,

former Harvard Medical School professor and

founder of the university's cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments. 

THURSDAY and FRIDAY

LEADERSHIP CONVERSATIONS 

with International School Leaders Around the World

All international school senior leaders are welcome.  A Weekly CONVERSATION  between School Heads and Senior Leaders– #31. Our discussions continue to be contemporary, important and a time we teach each other.  With thanks to Will Richardson who has facilitated our Thursday CONVERSATIONS  since the very beginning. 

The weekly Thursday CONVERSATIONS between Latin America school heads and senior leaders resumes in collaboration with Tri-Association and AASSA. All are welcome to join the discussion. Our sessions are hosted by Sonia Keller and Dereck Rhoads.  

We're excited to remind you that starting next Friday, October 2nd at 8 am US EDT, we'll be reconvening our weekly conversations and working together on Phase II of the AAIE New School Project.

 

For those of you who were a part of the process to write the SEVEN PRINCIPLES last spring and summer, we can't wait to reconnect and celebrate what we've already accomplished.

 

For those who weren't able to join us in Phase I, we hope that you'll consider lending your voice to the important work ahead, to deepen our articulation of the principles, to clarify what the lived principles look like in practice, and to design some first steps that our school communities can take to effectively move into the future.

 

We're looking forward to another round of highly interactive conversations and passionate problem solving culminating in a living document/manifesto that AAIE schools (and others) can use to guide their work to bring real change to their schools. Hope to see you next Friday and each Friday following.  

An American School of Warsaw Whitepaper — Reopening School: The Case for Virus Testing

"As we have written in the white paper, it is our intention to collaborate with like minded schools to further cement the protocol.  We see paper version antigen testing on the horizon with a few candidates in FDA EUA process now.  We are using aggressive testing to identity, trace and isolate.  As a result, we have school back and are nurturing our social/emotional wounds and healing incrementally."  

–Jon Zurfluh

THE ASW WHITE PAPER

–by Jon P Zurfluh, ASW Director and

Dr. Dr. Jarek Oleszczuk, EpiXpert co-founder

–A Summary–

The American School of Warsaw reopened on 18 August 2020, ready to welcome students and prepared with a three-layer plan, STOP-PROTECT-REACT (Figure 1). We started the year by testing all students and staff. We were pleased to see no positive cases in that initial round of testing, and we started the year without delay. At the time of opening, 93% of parents chose to send their children back to in-person school and only 7% stayed in the offered hybrid mode. Over the first four weeks of school, this increased to 97% with roughly 3% in hybrid mode by the date of this publication. As previously shared, our STOP layer of the plan includes weekly surveillance testing, temperature checking at entrances, and daily attestation.

Shortly after opening, we were challenged with the first COVID-19 case in week 2. Outside testing identified one individual and our testing protocol detected altogether 4 pupils (out of 1000) and after implementing the crisis procedure (5-day hybrid model for three grade levels most affected by the outbreak and one-day hybrid for another grade level impacted by a single asymptomatic sibling) and moving to twice-weekly testing for tangential cohorts, the outbreak was stopped. On 10 September 2020, one additional case was identified in the upper school cohort and identified through pooled testing.

 

As of 15 September 2020, no further infections have been detected. These episodes increased confidence in our protocol and in the crisis response procedures developed to catch further infections and isolate them from the cohort and general population.

 

ASW Surveillance Screening Protocol

 

The weekly surveillance testing protocol has been based on using antigen tests that have a Limit of Detection under the threshold considered as infectious. Their sensitivity and specificity are remarkably high at 96,5% and 99,7%. Such an alignment is well above the minimum threshold considered by the FDA as adequate for EUA.

 

We settled on a weekly protocol based on discussions and consensus from institutions using this approach. We also built into the protocol an increased frequency of testing after a positive case — to twice per week for a defined period (or until no positive cases detected).

 

Based on a recent outbreak, we can say with some confidence that this protocol did indeed detect asymptomatic cases and by implementing the crisis protocol, ASW managed to limit the outbreak to just 4 individuals with no major long period lockdowns. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THE ASW RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE SURVEILLANCE PROTOCOL

FIGURE ONE (below):  The ASW partnership for testing and heaatlh management

TODAY'S CONVERSATION SUMMARY

The American School in Japan–

From Reopening to LESSONS LEARNED

–THE NEWS of COVID-19–

33,799,264

Cases Worldwide (Johns Hopkins CSSE)

COVID-19 Fatalities May be Double What is Reported–

A Virus that Complicates Quantifying

The world officially recorded 1 million deaths from Covid-19 in one of the most sobering milestones of the pandemic, but the real tally might be almost double that. Actual fatalities from the worst outbreak in a century may be closer to 1.8 million -- a toll that could grow to as high as 3 million by the end of the year, according to Alan Lopez, a laureate professor and director of the University of Melbourne’s global burden of disease group. The coronavirus’s rapid spread and ability to transmit in people who show no signs of the disease have enabled it to outrun measures to accurately quantify cases through widespread diagnostic testing. (Bloomberg News)

Thirty-Minute Virus Testing

Tests for Covid-19 that show on-the-spot results in 15 to 30 minutes are about to be rolled out across the world, potentially saving many thousands of lives and slowing the pandemic in both poor and rich countries. In a triumph for a global initiative to get vital drugs and vaccines to fight the virus, 120 million rapid antigen tests from two companies will be supplied to low- and middle-income countries for $5 (£3.90) each or even less. The tests, which look like a pregnancy test, with two blue lines displayed for positive, are read by a health worker. (The Guardian)

 

Less Stress on ICUs

Public health officials in the U.S. could take heart at the end of the summer. Even as the new coronavirus continued to spread, fewer people were winding up in the hospital because of Covid-19, and fewer were dying. Now, as the seasons turn, there are signs suggesting there will be more deaths and serious illness ahead. Data collected by the Covid Tracking Project shows that the number of people hospitalized has plateaued at about 30,000 in the past week, after a decline from nearly 60,000 that began in late July. Deaths, meanwhile, averaged about 750 over the seven days through Sunday, higher than the roughly 600 deaths a day in the first week of July. (Bloomberg News)

 

 

Impact on the Poor Increases Across Asia

The number of poor people in east Asia will rise for the first time in 20 years as the result of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Bank warned on Tuesday, with up to 38 million people set to remain stuck or be pushed back into poverty this year. Without swift action by governments to liberalize their economies and increase social safety nets, the Washington DC-based development bank said that the “triple shock” of Covid-19, lockdowns and the global recession would hamper growth and stoke poverty in years to come. (Financial Times)

 

 

Vilified Early Over Lax Virus Strategy, Sweden Seems to Have Controlled the Virus

After having weathered high death rates when it resisted a lockdown in the spring, Sweden now has one of Europe’s lowest rates of daily new cases. Whether that is an aberration remains to be seen.

 

Normalcy has never been more contentious than in Sweden. Almost alone in the Western world, the Swedes refused to impose a coronavirus lockdown last spring, as the country’s leading health officials argued that limited restrictions were sufficient and would better protect against economic collapse.

 

It was an approach that transformed Sweden into an unlikely ideological lightning rod. Many scientists blamed it for a spike in deaths, even as many libertarians critical of lockdowns portrayed Sweden as a model. During a recent Senate hearing in Washington, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the leading U.S. infectious disease specialist, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, angrily clashed over Sweden.

 

For their part, the Swedes admit to making some mistakes, particularly in nursing homes, where the death toll was staggering. Indeed, comparative analyses show that Sweden’s death rate at the height of the pandemic in the spring far surpassed the rates in neighboring countries and was more protracted. (Others point out that Sweden’s overall death rate is comparable to that of the United States.)

 

Now, though, the question is whether the country’s current low caseload, compared with sharp increases elsewhere, shows that it has found a sustainable balance, something that all Western countries are seeking eight months into the pandemic — or whether the recent numbers are just a temporary aberration.

 

“It looks positive,” said Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, who gained global fame and notoriety for having kept Sweden out of lockdown in March. With a population of 10.1 million, Sweden averaged just over 200 new cases a day for several weeks, though in recent days that number has jumped to about 380. The per capita rate is far lower than nearby Denmark or the Netherlands (if higher than the negligible rates in Norway and Finland). Sweden is also doing far better, for the moment, than Spain, with 10,000 cases a day, and France, with 12,000. (New York Times)

 

 

German Chancellor Warns of Drastic increase in Covid-19 infections Over the Winter

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced an array of new measures aimed at stopping a recent spike in novel coronavirus infections in the country. 

At a press conference following a meeting with Germany’s state governors, Merkel announced that gatherings in public venues would be limited to no more than 50 people in areas with a large number of coronavirus infections. 

 

“We know that a more difficult time is coming, fall and winter,” Merkel said as she justified the news restrictions which also include fines of at least 50 Euros for patrons in bars and restaurants who provide false contact data used by authorities for tracing.  

 

Merkel also issued a strong warning saying that if the current trajectory of rising coronavirus infections continues unabated, Germany could see up to 19,200 new infections per day in in the winter months. “This underscores the urgency to act,” Merkel added. (CNN)

 

 

Read This Before You Head for a Restaurant

Linsey Marr has not dined indoors at a restaurant since the pandemic began, and she won’t until it’s over. Because she knows the risk, better than just about anyone. Marr, PhD, is a scientist at Virginia Tech and an expert on the transmission of the coronavirus through the air. She and several of her colleagues agree that the riskiest environments for catching Covid-19 are crowded indoor spaces, including restaurants.

 

“Restaurants are among the higher-risk activities because you’re indoors with other people without masks for some of the time at least.” The coronavirus spreads in three known ways: from infected surfaces, by large respiratory droplets that typically fall to the ground within a few feet, and in smaller droplets called aerosols that can stay suspended for minutes or hours — a particular risk in poorly ventilated buildings where the aerosol concentration can build up.

 

The risk of airborne transmission increases with several factors related to dose and duration.

• The louder a person talks, the more aerosols are released.
• If you’re closer to someone or more than one person in a room who is sick (even if they don’t know it), the risk rises.
• If you stay in an infected space for, say, an hour, your odds of getting sick are higher than if you spend less than 15 minutes there, but there are no firm thresholds given the many other variables.

The risk, they say, is much greater in a crowded, poorly ventilated restaurant than an uncrowded, well-ventilated one and much greater when people don’t wear masks.

 

Experts are calling it “Covid fatigue” — or why people want to get back to living normally, but under none of these conditions would the experts go to a restaurant right now. “I think there’s still too much of a risk there of getting sick,” says Richard Corsi, PhD, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University, “I’m not going to a restaurant because I know they’re not safe.”  (Elemental)

 

–Tracking the Virus Around the World–

–FROM JOHNS HOPKINS CSSE–

The Cultures of Dignity Resources for Supporting

Social-Emotional Wellness 

A Final Note: The AAIE COVID-19 Briefing is provided to support your leadership for the school community you serve. We encourage you to use these resources in any way, shape or form that helps you, your communications and toward furthering close relationships across your community.  – The AAIE Board