Tag: news

A headline Monday afternoon in The New York Times‘ “Coronavirus Briefing” email newsletter snapped my head to attention, and not just because of the old-timey classic rock pun: “The kids are not all right.”

Like tens of millions of parents in this country, I have school-aged offspring and a non-insignificant amount of anxiety over just how they will be spending their time (and mine) a month from now. If, as the Times asserted in the first sentence of its write-up, “new research [is] reflecting just how vulnerable children can be to the coronavirus,” that could significantly alter my family’s decision-making process. I need to use this news.

Then I started clicking on the links. And lo! There was this troubling Wall Street Journal headline: “Latest Research Points to Children Carrying, Transmitting Coronavirus.” Given that the preliminary research as of three weeks ago suggested that elementary school-aged children, such as my 5-year-old, rarely contract, get sick from, or transmit COVID-19—so rarely, in fact, that a leading British epidemiologist was quoted in the Times of London as saying there hadn’t yet been a single case of a teacher catching the virus from a student anywhere in the world—then such a development would count as a major reversal.

“The latest research,” the Journal went on, “indicates children may be carriers just as much as adults.” Huge, if true.

Yet the only research presented in the article supporting the notion that children contract the virus “just as much” as adults came from a single overnight summer camp in Georgia, at which kids (though not staff) didn’t wear masks, and participated in singing and shouting exercises in unventilated rooms. That is not a useful representative sample.

A more helpful survey of the available literature comes not from the world of journalism, but from a website called COVID Explained, run by Brown University economist Emily Oster, Harvard Medical School professor Galit Alter, and others. Their gloss, as of Aug. 3:

There are a few [random sample] studies….An early one was conducted in Iceland. Researchers there tested about 13,000 random people, including 848 kids. Among the whole population, 0.8% of people (so, almost 1 percent) tested positive for COVID-19. Among children under 10, though, there were no positive cases. This difference was very unlikely to occur by chance.

Data from a single town in Italy which did very wide-spread screening leads us to the same conclusion: kids are much less likely than older people to be infected.

Another study uses mathematical models to estimate that people under age 20 are half as susceptible to infection as adults over 20….

Altogether this evidence suggests that kids are less likely to be infected with coronavirus than adults.

The Oster/Alter tentative interpretations may well be wrong, and the amount of random sampling is still maddeningly small, but their thoroughness of study-picking and cautiousness of conclusion inspire more confidence than 99 percent of the elite media I consume on this topic. There is an irritating tendency to elevate scary-sounding anecdotes over data, to collapse the definition of “children” into a single glob rather than as cohorts with importantly different characteristics, and to treat the science and the politics of this issue as national when it is actually a geographically variant and locally administered story.

Journalistic outlets have been pinning their school-reopening pessimism to this week on a new American Academy of Pediatrics report that says the number of cumulative COVID-19 cases among children—the definition of which varies by state, from between 0 and 14 (Florida) to between 0 and 24 (Alabama)—grew by 97,000 in the last two weeks of July, from 242,000 to 339,000. That is an increase of 40 percent over a short period of time.

Since mid-April, the share of coronavirus cases accounted for by children has marched steadily higher in each two-week reporting period, from 2 percent to the current level of 8.8 percent. What explains the steady increase? Many suspect the recent re-opening of daycare facilities and summer camps (on which more below). It is also true that as testing has become more widespread, it has detected more asymptomatic carriers (who previously would not have been tested), which is one reason why the case fatality rate has continued to fall.

Children’s share of coronavirus-related hospitalizations has remained disproportionately low, going from 0.8 percent in late May to 1.4 percent now. (The overall hospitalization rate of kids who test positive has been cut nearly in half, from 3.8 percent to 2 percent.) Happiest of all, just 86 people classified as “children” by the states have died, which means kids account for just 0.06 percent of all coronavirus deaths, and their case fatality rate is just 0.03 percent.

Before your eyes glaze over at all those single-digit percentages, remember this: Children are 23.1 percent of the United States population. That means that they account for 1 out of every 4.3 people, 1 out of every 11.4 coronavirus cases, 1 out of every 50 hospitalizations, and 1 out of every 3,333 deaths.

So it is flatly untrue that “children may be carriers just as much as adults.” What’s more, treating children as an undifferentiated mass is particularly unhelpful when making parental decisions and public policy, particularly as it relates to the pressing question of whether and how to reopen schools.

The Centers for Disease Control breaks out national coronavirus statistics by several different age cohorts, producing this startling number: Only 20 kids between the ages of 5 and 14 (from kindergarten through middle school) have died from coronavirus since Feb. 1. This group was two and a half times more likely to die from the flu, and four times more likely to die from pneumonia. Among the more droplet-swapping demo of 15-to-18-year-olds, only 31 have died. An additional 25 kids under 5 years old have also perished.

All of which means children so far have not been measurably “vulnerable” (to use the New York Times adjective) to coronavirus. But what about their ability to transmit the potentially deadly disease even when asymptomatic?

Here’s how The New Yorker treated this urgent scientific question: “Some studies have found that young children are not as likely as adults to spread COVID-19. But summer camps on Long Island and in Georgia, and schools internationally, have had virus outbreaks.” That’s one way of assessing things, I suppose.

The Wall Street Journal, whose headline suggests that the “latest research points to children…transmitting coronavirus,” cites just one study outside of the Georgia sleepaway camp example: a big contract tracing effort in South Korea, which found (in the WSJ’s wording) that “children between 10 and 19 years old transmitted the virus within their own households at the same rate as adults of certain ages,” but also that “children under the age of 10 didn’t spread the virus as much.”

Here’s how COVID Explained parses that same study’s data (the site also examines two smaller surveys):

It appears that outside of household contacts, transmission from kids is really low (note that in South Korea they wear masks and are socially distancing, which contributes to the low non-household contact transmissions. Wearing a mask is really important!). Among young children, transmission even within a household is low: if your little kid has COVID-19, there seems to be only about a 5% chance you’ll get it. Older kids do seem to transmit the virus to household contacts as efficiently as adults yet are still less likely to have the virus and less likely to transmit to non-household contacts.

Sorting through the available (and rapidly growing, if still woefully insufficient) underlying science is the critical precursor to having a rational discussion about school reopenings. (Which as of this writing, is already off the table in 17 of the country’s 20 largest school districts.)

But we also have two other very relevant, if not always referenced, datasets: school reopenings worldwide, and daycare reopenings at home. What do they tell us?

The University of Washington’s Department of Global Health five weeks ago surveyed 15 countries that have reopened schools, and concluded: “So far, countries that reopened schools after reducing infection levels—and imposed requirements like physical distancing and limits on class sizes—have not seen a surge in coronavirus cases….There have not yet been rigorous scientific studies on the potential for school-based spread, but a smattering of case reports, most of them not yet peer-reviewed, bolster the notion that it is not inevitably a high risk.”

The U.W. report does highlight a case that comes up frequently in these conversations: Israel. “But there have been school-based outbreaks in countries with higher community infection levels and countries that apparently eased safety guidelines too soon,” the study cautioned. “In Israel, the virus infected more than 200 students and staff after schools reopened in early May and lifted limits on class size a few weeks later.”

The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has a more recent rundown of European Union (E.U.) school reopenings, concluding, among other things, that, “If appropriate physical distancing and hygiene measures are applied, schools are unlikely to be more effective propagating environments than other occupational or leisure settings with similar densities of people.”

Those in favor of reopening schools should not skim over the conditionality in both studies’ conclusions. The “if”s are critical.

When it comes to daycares and summer camps, data is considerably harder to find, which increases journalistic reliance on negative anecdotes. “The media coverage,” Emily Oster wrote on July 30, “can give one the impression that it is impossible to operate a child care setting without outbreaks. These data contradict this.”

What data is that? Well, Oster and her team generated a voluntary, crowd-sourced self-reporting database among child care centers, then also examined media reporting on cases, and sifted through state-reported surveys. The results are admittedly uneven and incomplete, and Oster herself warns that “we should all draw our own conclusions.” Nevertheless, this is hers:

On the bad news side, the fact that we see some outbreaks here tells me that it is not realistic to expect no school outbreaks at all. In some cases, the large outbreaks cited above seem clearly linked to behaviors we’d hope schools would avoid, but it is simply not realistic to expect no clusters of cases to emerge. Some of these could be large.

But on the positive side: many child care centers and camps, even large ones and even in high prevalence areas, are operating without significant outbreaks. They are dealing with cases without having them turn into clusters. […]

It’s easy to forget the denominator, but estimates suggest in the range of 5,000 summer camps are operating this summer, including perhaps 1,500 overnight camps. The number of child care centers in the U.S. is in the hundreds of thousands. Yes, it is concerning that there are 14 child care locations in North Carolina with clusters, but this is out of a total of about 6,500 locations.

I am grateful that Oster has gone to such lengths to provide at least the beginning of some context to the individual reports of kids contracting and spreading coronavirus. But I am irritated at how rare it is to see journalists treating this important question with similar care.

For what my opinions are worth, I remain in favor of at least re-opening elementary schools—fully, not part-time, as New York City is planning—in places where the positive-test rate has been consistently below 3 percent (that’s lower than New York state’s threshold of 5 percent). And while I’m worried about the higher transmission rates of teens (my eldest daughter is 12, and I’ve seen how these people act), I’m leaning toward being in favor of at least partial reopening of middle schools and high schools in lower-threshold places as well. Perhaps having a gradualist approach there will make it easier to process new information and adapt to unwelcome shocks.

But that’s where both the discourse and the policy, I fear, are leaving us ill-prepared. Because of poor decision-making and management at all levels of government, coronavirus tests are taking more time, not less, to turn around. This is unacceptable and should have been the focus of federal policy in particular since before day one. Testing delays, more than any other factor, could grind school reopenings to a halt, just as soon as the first cluster appears.

Meanwhile, the way we talk about this stuff matters, too. It is literally impossible in this brain-damaged political moment to enter into a public conversation about possible school reopenings without people leaping into bad-faith accusations about wanting to kill children, or tip elections, or God knows what else. Journalism, particularly in places where science abuts policy, is difficult and prone to error (mine included) in the best of circumstances; a deadly pandemic during an unusually polarized presidential election is about the worst imaginable backdrop. But this is precisely where we need the best-faith attempts at acquiring and transmitting knowledge, including admitting where the available knowledge is inadequate, rather than chasing after cheap culture-war dopamine hits.

My plea, as a parent, to journalists more scientifically literate than I: Please do better.

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A podcast in the Deep Background Freedom of Speech series (put out by Malcolm Gladwell’s & Jacob Weisberg’s Pushkin Industries); I think many of you will enjoy it.

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I blogged this morning about what I think is an unconstitutional injunction that bars defendants—who had accused a police officer of making a white supremacist gesture—from mentioning the name of the officer, who is suing them for libel. I think the underlying allegations against the officer are quite weak (the gesture, the familiar “OK,” has long been used with no racial dimension, and I expect continues to be largely used this way). His libel case may also be weak, because the allegations may well be understood as the expression of opinion (a complicated question). But my point was simply that it’s unconstitutional to broadly ban defendants from mentioning the plaintiff’s name, especially when that’s done before trial and without adversary argument.

Some commenters, though, suggested that perhaps the injunction might be justifiable not on a libel theory, but on the theory that the accusations against the officer might foment threats of violence against him, or outright violent attack. That argument doesn’t work, I think, but let me explain why.

[1.] Something similar, though with more risk of violence, arose in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982). In that case, the NAACP had organized (in the late 1960s) a black boycott of white-owned businesses in Claiborne County, Mississippi. Not all black residents were inclined to join, so to enforce the boycott, the organizers stationed “store-watchers” who wrote down the names of blacks who weren’t complying; “names of boycott violators were read aloud at meetings at the First Baptist Church and published in a local black newspaper.” Those people “were branded as traitors to the black cause, called demeaning names, and socially ostracized for merely trading with whites.” And there were some violent attacks against those who declined to participate in the boycott:  “In two cases, shots were fired at a house; in a third, a brick was thrown through a windshield; in the fourth, a flower garden was damaged…. The evidence concerning four other incidents is less clear, but again it indicates that an unlawful form of discipline was applied to certain boycott violators.”

Store owners sued, essentially claiming that the interference with their customers through threat of violence (as well as of social ostracism) unlawfully interfered with the businesses themselves; and they got damages against the organizers, as well as an injunction. Unconstitutional, the Court held: Though violence and true threats of violence could be punished, but organizing the boycott and naming those who weren’t complying was constitutionally protected. (There’s more to Claiborne Hardware, but this is the core point that’s important in this case.)

The same applies here: Merely criticizing a police officer by name, asking the city to investigate and perhaps discipline him, or even urging “social ostracism” (as in Claiborne Hardware) of the officer is constitutionally protected. That a tiny fraction of people who hear the criticism might follow up with illegal activity (such as “violent acts or threats”) can’t justify restricting speech to the vast majority who won’t act illegally based on it. If the post itself contained threats, then it might lead to liability, and perhaps an injunction against the threats. (Note, though, that there was some potentially threatening language in Claiborne itself, which the Court found wasn’t enough for liability). But that can’t justify a categorical prohibitions on using a person’s name as such, simply on the theory that such use could lead to bad behavior.

[2.] This isn’t, though, just a matter of precedent; it’s a necessary principle if we are to be able to freely discuss specific incidents, rather than just conceptual abstractions.

Unfortunately, virtually all speech that accuses someone of misconduct—however correctly—could yield some illegal behavior against him. Any newspaper story reporting that someone was arrested for a crime, or convicted of the crime, could lead some people to send the criminal threats, or vandalize his home, or physically attack him. (That is of course especially true if the crime is especially heinous, such as child molestation or rape.) Any story accurately reporting misconduct by a government official, police officer or otherwise, might have the same effect. Any story reporting a person’s politically repugnant views (left, right, or otherwise) or unpopular religious views could yield attacks, as well as illegal (and sometimes criminal) employment discrimination.

If the mere risk that some readers will act illegally based on the story can justify orders to take down the story, that will mean that newspapers, bloggers, and others will routinely have to remove or anonymize such stories. (If such a risk can justify civil liability in case someone does act illegally based on the story, that will deter all such stories in the first place.) And even if there has to be a showing of outright threats of violence, such threats are (a) regrettably not uncommon, given how cheap they are to make, and (b) pretty easy to safely fake. I’ve found over 85 outright forgeries of court orders aimed at trying to get criticism deindexed from the Internet. How much easier and safer would it be for someone to fake an anonymous death threat (or several), when that becomes the reliable way of getting criticisms removed?

For this reason, I think Claiborne Hardware and other similar cases are correct. People need to be free to discuss alleged misbehavior by others—especially but not only by police officers and other public officials—and the risk that some small fraction of the audience will misbehave can’t justify restricting this freedom.

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President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, which is depicting Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, as “far left” and “radical,” was quick to note that the senator has criticized her running mate’s draconian record on criminal justice issues. Yet so have the Trump campaign and the president himself, which makes it hard to tell whether this point is meant to reflect badly on Harris or on Biden.

“Harris has repeatedly slammed Biden, going so far as to say that he supported racist policies that hurt the Black community,” says a press release from the Trump campaign. “Harris said Biden’s 1994 crime bill ‘contribute[d] to mass incarceration’ in the U.S.”

That’s a quote from comments that Harris made last May in response to Biden’s defense of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—or “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill,” as he prefers to call it. “I have a great deal of respect for Vice President Joe Biden, but I disagree,” Harris told reporters in New Hampshire. “That crime bill, that 1994 crime bill, it did contribute to mass incarceration in this country.” She noted that it “was the first time that we had a federal three-strikes law,” requiring a life sentence for anyone convicted of a violent crime after committing two other offenses (violent or not). She suggested that provision “encouraged” similar laws at the state level. Harris also noted that the bill “funded the building of more prisons,” which was contingent on state passage of “truth in sentencing” laws that limited or abolished parole.

The Trump campaign points out that Harris also has criticized Biden for bragging about his collaboration with former segregationists. While the context of that criticism was a spat about busing during a Democratic presidential debate in June, Biden has specifically cited his work with Sen. Strom Thurmond (R–S.C.) on the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which began a pattern of harsh mandatory minimum sentences that continued into the 1990s, as an inspiring example of bipartisanship. During that period, Biden was eager to show that Democrats could be at least as tough on crime and drugs as Republicans. In a 1993 Senate floor speech, he boasted that “every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.”

Biden’s criminal justice record is so appalling that the Trump campaign has attacked him from the left on the issue. “In addition to wrecking countless lives with the 1994 crime bill, during his time in the Senate, Biden’s ‘priority’ was legislation that policy experts agree made the opioid epidemic far more deadly,” it said in a March 4 press release. “Biden pioneered legislation that decreases the likelihood of people to call 911 if they witness a drug overdose and has even led to prosecutors filing homicide charges against drug overdose victims’ loved ones.”

The latter claim was based on a provision of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that prescribed a sentence of 20 years to life for drug distribution when it results in death. Like many Biden-backed anti-drug policies enacted in the 1980s and ’90s, that provision ostensibly was aimed at “kingpins” who make a fortune by selling drugs that kill people. But prosecutions for “drug-induced homicide” (mostly at the state level) usually involve low-level dealers and acquaintances close to overdose victims, since those are the cases in which the causal link is easiest to prove. And the Trump campaign is right that such cases can involve “homicide charges against drug overdose victims’ loved ones.” These prosecutions are not only cruel and unjust; they are potentially deadly, since fear of homicide charges is a powerful deterrent to calling 911 when someone overdoses.

Last year Trump himself slammed Biden for supporting criminal justice policies that had a disproportionate impact on African Americans. “Anyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected,” he tweeted. “In particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you. I, on the other hand, was responsible for Criminal Justice Reform, which had tremendous support, & helped fix the bad 1994 Bill!”

Biden has repudiated the myriad mandatory minimums and death penalties he once championed, saying they should be abolished. He also wants to eliminate the irrational sentencing disparity between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine, which was created by the 1986 law and reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. He says that distinction, which led to strikingly unequal treatment of black drug offenders, was “a big mistake” based on misinformation. And while continuing to resist the repeal of federal marijuana prohibition, Biden now calls for decriminalizing cannabis consumption and automatically expunging “all prior cannabis use convictions” (neither of which would have much of an impact at the federal level, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes low-level marijuana cases).

Trump, by contrast, barely talks about criminal justice reform, beyond occasionally touting his support for the FIRST STEP Act and his commutation of a few drug sentences. The “Law and Justice” page on his campaign website says nothing about those actions or any further steps toward a less arbitrarily punitive criminal justice system. Yet despite his Nixonian “law and order” rhetoric, Trump has intermittently shown seemingly genuine concern about the “very unfair” drug penalties that Biden pushed for decades.

Whether or not Biden’s conversion is sincere, it seems unlikely that he could get away with reverting to his old drug-warrior ways given the current climate of opinion among Democrats and Americans generally. Harris, whose own record in this area as a local prosecutor and California’s attorney general is nothing to brag about, likewise has “evolved” in response to shifting Democratic opinion and in some respects goes further than Biden. In 2018, after resisting marijuana legalization for years, Harris said she wanted to “decriminalize marijuana nationwide.” Last year she was the lead Senate sponsor of the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement Act, which would repeal federal pot prohibition by removing cannabis from the federal lists of “controlled substances.”

Trump wants to have it both ways with Biden’s criminal justice record, criticizing it as senselessly harsh when that’s convenient and citing Harris’ similar criticism as evidence of her “radical” proclivities when that seems like a more effective rhetorical tack. It would be interesting to see a debate between Trump and Biden about these issues, since it would give Trump a chance to clarify his position and give Biden a chance to forthrightly address his egregious misjudgments. But it seems unlikely that will happen, given Biden’s reluctance to admit that his proudest accomplishments as a senator were disastrous and Trump’s reluctance to antagonize conservatives who see nothing wrong with that record.

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