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Madeline Heim and Sarah Volpenhein
USA Today
August 27, 2021

For a brief, glorious few weeks, it seemed to many that the worst of the pandemic was behind us.

. Beloved  and , forced into hiatus last year, are making a triumphant return, with .

In late June and early July, many counties recorded averages of very few — sometimes zero — new coronavirus cases per day. Hospitalizations from the virus were down and deaths plummeted.

But signs of what could come our way were already emerging in the southern U.S., where states with large unvaccinated populations suddenly had overflowing hospitals and some of the highest case counts .

The surge is thanks to the more contagious delta variant, which appeared first in India and now accounts for more than 86% of all COVID-19 cases in the nation, .

Numbers haven’t skyrocketed the same way in Wisconsin, but : On July 15, the state was averaging 150 new cases per day; a little more than a month later, it’s averaging nearly 1,400. Hospitalized COVID-19 patients . Deaths have remained relatively low, but at eight per day over the past week, they’re higher than they have been since February.

Even with the help of vaccines, health care workers, school teachers, business owners and others are struggling with the familiar feeling that this fall may be bad.

But how bad?

At the pandemic’s worst, outbreaks struck Wisconsin ,  and  with full force, moving quickly through populations at high risk of illness due to age, comorbidities or poor ventilation and close proximity to others.

Today, those settings are at least somewhat protected by vaccination and natural immunity built up from previous infection, though we don’t know how long that lasts.

This time around, though, schools with relaxed mask policies and a commitment to in-person instruction could prove a breeding ground for outbreaks, as could the mass gatherings that were largely canceled last year.

Prisons: 70% of incarcerated people are vaccinated, but less than half of staff are

Prisons have been the sites of some of the pandemic’s largest outbreaks. Prison overcrowding, cramped living quarters and limited space for isolation or quarantining made the facilities hotbeds of COVID-19.

About 11,000 Wisconsin prisoners have tested positive for the virus since the beginning of the pandemic and at least 32 have died from COVID-19, according to . That’s out of a prison population that, on any given day, is .

Nearly 2,700 members of DOC staff have also caught the virus, .

About 80% of infected prisoners caught the virus in the last three months of last year, when the pandemic was at its height in Wisconsin. In some state prisons, three quarters or more of the prison population ended up infected.

By June, most prisoners had been fully vaccinated, and cases of COVID-19 among prisoners were few, according to DOC data. No large outbreaks have been reported at state prisons since the delta variant became dominant.

That’s likely due, in part, to the relatively high vaccination rates among prisoners. Nearly 70% of all current prisoners have been fully vaccinated, though at some prisons, the rate is nearer to 50%, according to DOC figures.

It’s less clear exactly how many correctional staff members have been vaccinated, said John Beard, DOC spokesperson. At least 47% of prison workers have gotten the vaccine, Beard said, though state prison officials believe the true number is higher.

Amanda Simanek, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said it’s important to keep an eye on vaccination rates among staff members, who could bring the more contagious delta variant into the prison.

The prisoners “don’t have a choice of who comes in and out of their facility. They have the least autonomy over the mitigation measures they can take,” she said.

This School Year Is Going to Be a Mess—Again. We have the tools to keep Delta in check, but schools have to actually use them.

By Sarah Zhang
The Atlantic
August 23, 2021

Since early summer, three pandemic clocks have been ticking. The first pertains to the coronavirus’s Delta variant, which has  more than tenfold since June. The second clock is more predictable: The school year starts, as it always does, in late August or early September. The third clock counts down to the authorization of , which was optimistically supposed to come this fall. After the FDA pushed for a larger trial to collect more safety data in kids, it will likely take longer.

These three timelines have now managed to converge in the worst way possible: Just as Delta is climbing to a new peak, millions of children  are going to spend hours a day indoors at school. And many of them will do so without masks, thanks in part to mask-mandate bans in some of  that are currently experiencing the worst outbreaks. “Are you allowed to use swear words?” is how Sean O’Leary, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado, replied when I asked him how he felt going into the school year.

This fall was supposed to herald the return of in-person classes everywhere. After the virus brought the 2020 spring semester to an abrupt halt, schools fumbled through another year with a mix of in-person and virtual learning. Now Delta threatens to wreak havoc on a third school year.

The risk the coronavirus poses to an individual child is still very low— need ICU treatment—and with millions of the most vulnerable adults now vaccinated, the danger of kids bringing the virus home from schools is also much reduced from last year. But Delta will make for a bumpy school year even without very sick kids. Students who get infected or even just exposed at school will have to miss classes to  at a time. And if cases truly get out of control, schools will have to shut down and return to remote learning. Parents will again have to scramble for last-minute child care.

The fewer mitigations a school has in place—masks, testing, ventilation, vaccination for students over 12—the more likely this is to happen. “​​Not using those measures is a surefire way to mean more kids have to be out of school and have interruptions due to quarantine and individual school closures,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. At just one school district in Florida, a state that has banned mask mandates,  were in quarantine or isolation after one week of school. In Alabama, some districts are already being  .

Parents had hoped that this school year would go smoothly—even somewhat normally. Last year’s experiences suggested that schools could indeed stay open with the right mitigations and low community spread. “The big takeaway was: With moderate efforts, we could pretty much control transmission pretty well,” says Alyssa Bilinski, a public-health researcher at Brown University who has modeled . Cases dropped to an all-time national low in June, and things looked good—until Delta. Now schools have to deal with a more transmissible variant and more community transmission of the virus. This is “not how we were planning to go back to school,” Bilinski says. School districts, especially those bound by state laws banning mask mandates, have been slow to adapt to a steep rise in community transmission.

Delta does not require a complete overhaul of school mitigation strategies compared with last year. The same tools still work. “Delta may be more transmissible, but it can’t defy the laws of physics,” says Amanda Simanek, a public-health researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. â€śWe have a good sense of how successful mitigations were with other variants that weren’t as transmissible. We’re going in not totally blind.” But with Delta, schools may have to add measures to reduce spread to the same level as before. “There’s no single intervention that’s the magic bullet, but a set of layered interventions can work together to stop COVID. I would say it’s still true for Delta. It’s just that you need more,” says Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. For example, schools might layer on surveillance testing of students without symptoms—Baltimore , but it’s still rare in schools across the country. And vaccines for teachers and students over 12 are new tools that were unavailable last year. O’Leary told me he is “very optimistic, even with the Delta variant,” about schools that have mitigation measures in place.

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