Open Letter to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

[NOTE: THIS OPEN LETTER IS POSTED AT MY WEBSITE AND IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE WIDELY TO THE MEDIA – IT MAY BE REPRODUCED FREELY WITH ATTRIBUTION]

Dear Commissioner Riley and Members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education:

I am a professor in the public health program at the Tufts University School of Medicine and an epidemiologist who was trained in infectious disease outbreak response at CDC. I am writing to urge you to immediately allow schools to hold virtual classes for the next 2-3 weeks, or at least until the astronomical rate of increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations in Massachusetts subsides.

Opening schools in-person at this time is going to be disastrous, both for our local communities and for the devastating situation that our hospitals are already facing. I hope you will consider allowing schools to implement a 2-3 week delay before forcing students to return to school in-person. The issue is not the safety of our students, or even of our staff. It is simply the fact that the infection rate right now is extremely high and students will invariably infect family members, furthering the spread of Omicron throughout the state. Our hospitals are already overwhelmed, but further spread will completely incapacitate the health care system and lead to a humanitarian disaster. We will end up closing in 2 weeks anyway because of student and staff shortages.

For the life of me, I can't understand how schools are re-opening today with the trend in Omicron cases being a straight line upward. We are nearing a humanitarian disaster and the time to act is today.

My concern is that our health care system is literally non-functional right now. We are not doing our kids any favors by allowing Omicron to run rampant and destroying any semblance of a functional health care system that is necessary to be able to make sure that our kids and their families can get medical treatment when they need it. Yes, I would love nothing more than for our children to be able to attend school in-person; however, if that comes at the expense of destroying the capacity of our hospitals to handle the demand for medical care, then we have a humanitarian disaster on our hands and the fact that kids learn best in schools is no consolation.

As of today, our hospitals do not have the capacity to handle the demand for emergency care. At the rate of increase in COVID-19 that we are currently experiencing, within two weeks we will literally have to ration medical care and decide which patients get to be put on ventilators and which have to be let to die.

This is an unprecedented time in the pandemic. We are experiencing more cases and more hospitalizations than at any time. The trend is rising straight upwards, and with the resumption of in-person classes and other in-person activities, there is little hope of reversing this trend.

As a physician and public health practitioner, I will do everything I can to prevent this impending humanitarian disaster. I am already working with teams of physicians and health care workers unions to press the governor to re-impose strict limits on public gatherings. However, we need our public schools to have the option of not bringing students back in person at a time when we haven’t even reached the peak of Omicron.

Those of us who trained as physicians and health care specialists are the ones who have the expertise to be making the decisions regarding the protection of the public’s health on a population basis. I wish that our decision makers would start listening to those who are at the heart of this pandemic and are witnessing the disaster it is already causing. Another two weeks of continued spread will absolutely push us over the brink.

I want to alert you to today’s leading story in the Boston Herald, entitled:

‘Humanitarian disaster’: Infectious disease experts sound the alarm as Massachusetts schools open amid omicron surge

As the story explains, Massachusetts hospitals are currently in an “unsustainable” zone, meaning that at current rates of Omicron spread, our health system will be incapacitated within about 2 weeks. Hospitals are already talking about the need to ration care, cancel elective procedures, and deter people from coming to the hospital except for extreme emergencies, and my colleagues are concerned that the wait times for such patients will be unacceptable and lead to the loss of lives.

In summary, as a physician and public health expert, I believe it is unconscionable for schools to return to in-person classes at a time when we are seeing a straight line increase in hospitalizations. As you can easily see from the data provided by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, hospitalizations are rising linearly. The only reasonable response is to keep classes virtual until we see this line start to come down. I don’t think more than a 2-week period would likely be necessary. If you fail to act, then during the next few weeks you can expect to  see heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story of people who cannot get medical treatment for urgent conditions because our emergency rooms are filled with COVID-19 patients.

Thanks for the opportunity to express these concerns.

All the best,

Michael Siegel, MD, MPH

Visiting Professor

Department of Public Health and Community Medicine

Tufts University School of Medicine

136 Harrison Avenue

Boston, MA 02111

617-636-2419

Mike.Siegel@tufts.edu

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