Sam Dick interviewed Aaron Yelowitz about research estimating the community-wide effects of reopening schools in Texas during fall 2020.
Participants
- Sam Dick: WKYT anchor and interviewer
- Aaron Yelowitz: Professor of Economics, University of Kentucky
Source
View the original WKYT story and recording.
Generated spoken-word transcript
00:00:00 — Sam Dick: Aaron Yelowitz, one of the UK researchers who looked into this, joins us now. Dr. Yelowitz, welcome.
00:00:04 — Aaron Yelowitz: Thank you for having me.
00:00:07 — Sam Dick: How did this idea, first of all, come about—to do this kind of research and to do it in Texas, with Texas people?
00:00:14 — Aaron Yelowitz: As everyone knows, the idea of opening schools is a gut-wrenching decision. It’s a highly animated discussion, and so it is one of those topics that clearly is of research interest. That drew us to asking whether reopening schools matters for the spread of COVID in the community as a whole.
We examined Texas. Part of the reason why we did that is that, relative to here in Kentucky, Texas opened up quite early in fall 2020. Each of the counties in Texas—each of the school districts in those counties—opened up at some point during fall 2020. As we know, here in Fayette County the schools by and large did not open up until the middle of March. This is a good example of trying to learn about the effects of school reopenings in an earlier part of the pandemic, before there were vaccines. What we find is that the reopening of schools, after two months, caused at least 43,000 more infections in Texas and at least 800 more fatalities in Texas.
00:01:26 — Sam Dick: Did you expect those kinds of numbers? They sound to me awfully high, but Texas, being the populated state it is, has a lot of students going back to class.
00:01:37 — Aaron Yelowitz: Right. The numbers, of course, have to be scaled. A way to scale them, perhaps, is to think that the number of infections or fatalities that we find is on the order of 15 to 20 percent of all the fatalities that happened in those subsequent two months. It really does matter.
You also asked whether we were surprised. The answer is that we were surprised. Our thought process going in—given reports from the Centers for Disease Control, which does contact-tracing surveys within schools to try to map out infections—was that there are not all that many infections within the school itself. But what that misses is that school reopenings are inextricably linked to other changes that happen at the same time, like parents going back to the physical workplace or just becoming more mobile—getting out and about when their kids go back to school.
00:02:33 — Sam Dick: So we can’t make the leap and say that many, or a lot, of these students were infected in school. It could have been outside of school.
00:02:43 — Aaron Yelowitz: Correct. In fact, we are looking at community spread, not the number of young kids who are getting infections. One very plausible story would be that the parent goes back to work, and in turn there is a whole set of additional ways in which infections could spread within the community. We are not saying that this is spread within the school itself, but rather that school reopenings go part and parcel with all sorts of other behaviors happening at the same time, caused by those reopenings.
00:03:20 — Sam Dick: I’m a parent in Kentucky. Let’s say I’ve got a middle schooler, an elementary-school child, or a high schooler. What does this research say to me? Is it apples and oranges, or does it apply at all to what we’re doing here?
00:03:31 — Aaron Yelowitz: First off, let me boast for a second: I have all three of those that you just mentioned. There are some differences. One reason Texas was particularly interesting to study in fall 2020 is that it had a summer surge that was very much unlike most other states, so Texas reopened at an unusually ripe time for the spread of the disease. That’s one real contrast with Kentucky. Everyone has had a rough ride, but Texas had a rougher ride than Kentucky.
Another part of that same question might be: how does that matter today, when we have a decent chunk of the state vaccinated, but nowhere close to where we want to be? Vaccines are, of course, a game changer in terms of all of these restrictions, including reopening schools, wearing masks, the degree to which restaurants can open, and so forth. The greater the amount of vaccination we can get in Kentucky, the easier it will be to reopen.
00:04:39 — Sam Dick: Dr. Aaron Yelowitz, one of the UK researchers looking into the situation in Texas, with a study of students going back to school and their COVID-19 numbers and even deaths. Dr. Yelowitz, thank you.
00:04:49 — Aaron Yelowitz: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much.