The School reopenings depend on numbers!

The intense debates over school openings are missing something crucial: numbers. Without them, it’s essentially impossible to know what to do, or to evaluate what is being proposed.
Here’s an analogy. Suppose that the Food and Drug Administration is contemplating a new food safety regulation, or that the Department of Transportation is considering new restrictions on railroads. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is supposed to require it to identify the gains and the losses — the benefits and the costs.
Those numbers might not be decisive, but they’re needed. In their absence, the decision whether to proceed, or not to proceed, is essentially a stab in the dark.
To be sure, some numbers might be hard to specify. The agencies might not know enough to provide them. But officials have well-established techniques for dealing with that problem. For example, agencies might be asked to disclose the ranges, including the best and worst cases, and their respective likelihoods.
It’s true that politics might intervene, and you might not be able to trust the numbers. But when the system is working well, they are checked and rechecked by people who know what they are doing, and aren’t affected by political considerations.
The decision whether and how to reopen schools is being made by states and localities, not by Washington, and numbers need to inform those choices. The problem is that for school openings (and much more), we’re mostly hearing abstractions and generalities — expressions of agitation and fear. On the one hand, reasonable people are pointing to the immense strain on parents of having young kids at home and the many problems with online learning. On the other hand, reasonable people (including teachers’ unions) are pointing to the risk of an outbreak and a spike in deaths.
In the abstract, these are legitimate concerns. For many school systems, there are going to be trade-offs here. But numbers could make apparently hard questions much easier to answer and could help depoliticise the process. Imagine, for example, a school district in which the number of community infections is very low, and in which real experts (epidemiologists and others, not politicians or those influenced by them) say: “With appropriate precautions, the risk of a real outbreak is vanishingly small, and we’re highly unlikely to lose any lives as a result of opening.” In such a district, opening the schools is a no-brainer.
By contrast, imagine a district in which the number of community infections is not low, and in which the experts say: “Even with appropriate precautions, the risk of a real outbreak is significant, and over the course of the school year, we’re likely to lose at least 50 lives as a result of opening.” Opening the schools would seem to be a mistake.
In Massachusetts, officials have reportedly moved in the direction of using numbers, with guidance that relies on how much the coronavirus is spreading in relevant districts.

—Bloomberg