Commentary: Adults Throwing Knox County Kids Under A School Bus

By Nathan Kelly, for Tennessee Lookout

September 2, 2021

Three weeks of school are in the books, and it is now clear that the kids in our schools are bearing the brunt of the latest surge in COVID-19 cases. How bad is it? Simply, this is the worst point in the pandemic for Knox County’s kids, by far. And while case counts among children are skyrocketing, the adults at the helm of Knox County Schools (KCS) collectively shrug.

As the dad of a KCS third grader, the health crisis in our schools has been keeping me up at night. And since my day job involves analyzing social and economic data, I decided to run some numbers. What I found is disturbing.

By accessing publicly available data from the Tennessee Department of Health and the U.S. Census American Community Survey, I found that the number of COVID-19 cases among school-age kids, those ages 5 to 18. is higher than it has been at any point in the pandemic. Cases are increasing faster than ever before. Notably, these numbers don’t include many of our students with disabilities, some of the most vulnerable and often marginalized students, who make up portions of the student population in age ranges of 3-5 (Pre-K) and 19-22 years of age.

The figure above plots the history of the pandemic for Knox County kids (age 5 to 18). Until recently, the most acute moment in the pandemic for this group was in mid-December of last year, when each day saw an average of about 100 new cases per 100,000 kids in the county. Now, that number has more than doubled. The current upward trajectory is steep.

Throughout the pandemic, we have regularly seen reports of the daily number of new COVID cases per 100,000 people calculated at the state level. If there were a state comprised only of kids in our county, it would have the highest level of COVID-19 spread in the country. According to the Washington Post COVID tracker, Mississippi would currently be in second place with 106 new cases per 100,000. That’s right, COVID-19 is spreading at almost double the rate among Knox County kids than it is in the hardest hit state in the country right now. Over the entire course of the pandemic, no state has ever experienced higher case growth rates (covidactnow.org). This comparison cannot tell us whether our kids are worse off than kids in other places, but it does show that COVID-19 is now targeting kids at unprecedented rates.

A skeptic might respond that high pediatric case counts don’t necessarily lead to massive amounts of serious illness. The best estimates suggest that COVID-19 “only” produces 1 to 3 deaths per 10,000 pediatric cases. As a parent of one child, such low probabilities are reassuring.

But KCS leaders don’t have the luxury of focusing on a single child when thinking about COVID-19 risks. They should be thinking about ALL 60,000 students. The fatality rate cited above would lead to as many as 18 deaths if the disease is allowed to spread unmitigated through the entire student population. That is an alarming possibility, but one that elected officials and school administrators should be focused on avoiding.

Click here to read the full article.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit network of state government news sites supported by grants and a coalition of donors.