Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

By Kaniehtonkie

Schools across New York and Ontario will reopen for in-person instruction this fall. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced their respective schools will reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. New York is one of the few states in America that has a virus transmission rate low enough to bring children back into classrooms and not only in its rural communities, but also in the country’s biggest city.

Premier Doug Ford set his school goals on, “Elementary schools will reopen with conventional in-person delivery of teaching and instruction, with enhanced health and safety protocols, provincewide – meaning returning to classrooms fulltime, five days a week and with regular class sizes.”

Ontario parents and guardians in opposition to reopening have a Change.org “Ontario Demands Better: Reduce Class Sizes to Keep Schools and Communities Safe,” online petition, which had over 211,000 signatures by Tuesday evening.

It read in part, “The Ontario government’s ‘plan’ for reopening schools essentially amounts, in most elementary and middle school grades, to sending 30 students and a teacher back into a room for 6 hours/day with poor to no ventilation and probably only enough space for 30 cm of distancing between desks. This is shameful and demonstrates a reckless and disturbing lack of care for the health and safety of our children, teachers, school staff, and communities.”

Ontario elementary classrooms range from twenty to thirty students.

According to Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases consultant with the Toronto General Hospital, he told Global News, “While not perfect, our infection in Canada is under much better control from coast to coast compared to the United States.”

A report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, determined 338,982 children tested positive across 49 states since the pandemic began, making up 8.8 per cent of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Of Canada’s 119,736 cases, the most recent public health data on August 10 showed 8.1 per cent of those who tested positive were aged 19 or younger, and only one of Canada’s 8,982 known virus-related deaths was in that

age group.

Prachi Srivastava, an associate professor of global education at Western University, said ‘schools that reopened once general community transmission had either been eliminated, “drastically reduced” to the point of almost no cases or at a manageable level were more likely to stay open’.

Srivastava said, “That’s not really our situation in Ontario. That’s not our situation in Quebec,” she said.

The one topic that is rarely mentioned is “ventilation”. In order to curb airborne transmission, Srivastava said schools will also have to look at properly ventilating their buildings.

The current CDC guidance about ventilation is as follows, “Ensure ventilation systems operate properly and increase circulation of outdoor air as much as possible, for example by opening windows and doors.”

But if opening windows or doors increases the risk of asthma, or falling out the window, the guidelines go on to advise that they should be closed. That is all the CDC guidance has to offer. It does not mention air filtration, or the fact that there is pretty good data to suggest that without addressing air filtration and circulation, the 6-feet rule does not prevent transmission indoors of COVID-19.

According to CDC, Johns Hopkins University and Health Canada, the primary way COVID-19 is transmitted is through respiratory droplets that careen through the air. And yet the unreliable nature of air circulation and the lack of filtration systems in already underfunded public school systems is absent from the conversation.

Parents and guardians have been inundated with information on surface disinfection, yet, the importance of air circulation and the potential use of filtration is missing from the national and local debate regarding school reopening.

Stat, Erin Bromage, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, published a widely read article in May 2020 detailing the role of air circulation at three major indoor transmission events.

The study noted, ‘that transmission happens when you spend significant time indoors. Being 50 feet apart with “a low dose of the virus in the air, over a sustained period, was enough to cause infection and in some cases, death.” This happens because infectious particles from individuals are pushed by the ventilation system to the other side of the room.

According to Stat, Bromage’s post appeared 127 days before the first day of school in New York City.

Another study was published 108 days before the first day of school in New York City on the use of HEPA filters outside hospitals where they were installed in doctors’ offices where “aerosol generating procedures” are being performed, because, according to CDC, of ‘evidence they can help prevent the spread other infections such as SARS-CoV-1, measles, and influenza’.

On May 27, 106 days before the first day of school in New York City a group of 36 scientists from around the world in a variety of fields penned an article in the journal Environment International titled, “How can airborne transmission of COVID-19 indoors be minimized?”

They wrote, “Here, in the face of such uncertainty, we argue that the benefits of an effective ventilation system, possibly enhanced by particle filtration and air disinfection, for contributing to an overall reduction in the indoor airborne infection risk, are obvious.”

And about two months before the first day of school in New York City, McKinsey & Company ‘reviewed research regarding airborne spread of SARS-CoV-2 and on July 9 posted an article suggesting possible upgrades to existing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. A key recommended change was to increase the number of times HVAC systems exchange air per hour, which would push the infectious particles outside and prevent them from being blown across the room’.

There are less than twenty days before school starts in Akwesasne.