Will school opening cause more confirmations and therefore more deaths? – this is the big question in the fall. In order to answer that question you need to look at the issue at the very least on a county basis. Using Burbio school opening tracker we can establish start date and monitor the county confirmation and deaths from covid. The big trick will be to compare the appropriate counties – no point in comparing non-comparable dense counties. In order to set up the county compares – we had to find comparable within states. The below are our stab of selection by state. The other thing we are missing to actually formulize whether this is the right approach is excessive deaths, teen suicide, mental issues, etc… which is unfortunately not available by county – if someone knows let me know.

Hypothesis – School opening COULD be better given they can centralized and control the HVAC and other features vs. individual homes. IF home schooling actually isolated kids particularly teenager it could be better but the odds of isolating teenagers seems very low vs. a control school setting. Given the various issues not likely to see a significant difference from in person school vs. online school.

For TX we have the following – with the key county of isolation policy are Travis (Austin TX) and El Paso – others are more open from Bexar (San Antonio) and Fort Bend (Sugar Land – Suburb Houston TX) – Dallas and Harris noted – but Harris data management makes the graphs look bad so I left them off the charts. Also interesting to see the two counties that have no/limited in person are also the counties with lowest confirmations outside Ft. Bend.

So far Bexar is seeing an uptick in confirmation after 26 days of opening up school – whereas Travis and El Paso have flat lined.

For Florida we have identified Broward as the closed location vs. Pinellas and Palm Beach which are at 100% in person school offering. Broward does have a high confirmation rate relative to the other counties.

So far no different in covid cases

California had less choices as many do not have any in-school. San Diego has 20% compared to Santa Clara at 0 – interesting to see Santa Clara has more community activity (CAI) than San Diego but has no in-person schooling.

So far Santa Clara is the one looking like they have in-person schooling.

For Ohio we identified Lorain as no in-person schooling – vs. Stark and Mahoning. Once again interesting to see Lorain has a higher consumer activity index than Stark and Mahoning. Also Lorain has a lower confirmation level than both of the other counties.

Stark county did observe a spike in day 22 after school opening – but please NOTE the chart scale – it is very slight jump form 0.4 to 1.5 average 7 day moving average change.

In Colorado we will go with Jefferson vs. Adams – Adams has 0 in person Jefferson is at 50%. Adams is seeing almost double the confirmations than Jefferson.

So far nothing to noteworthy – Jefferson seems to be more flat lined than Adams.

Too good to be true – US back to over 1000 and now tops the death chart

Fl leads death at 202

Miami Dade leads the US counties at 42. Revision in Bexar confirmation occurred – 2845

Big 4 Harris County data is horrendous accounting it is no way the confirmations happened all on that day – probably not even enough testing to accomplish that – they need to go back and revise the time series.

Notice how quite it has been in terms of ICU beds issue in Houston/Harris county…..

France, Spain, Belgium, and UK still trending the wrong direction.