Amazing that the author can expend so many words without an honest discussion of the drawbacks of leaving schools closed and children at home.
School closures are having a disproportionately negative impact of poor and middle class families, whose parents can’t work from home. These families relied on schools to not only teach but to supervise and feed children.
Both Cuomo and POTUS agree on this, which tells me there’s more to the story than what the author is letting on.
I know "schools aren't daycare" is one of the talking points for a number of the unions in particular. But it sort of is (among other things). The alternative is for the government to have someone else provide the childcare--which doesn't really change the problem. Or parents have to figure things out on their own however they can.
Under normal circumstances are people supposed to keep a baby sitter on call at all times just in case society is suddenly upended and schools go away? If kids are usually in school all day, parents are going to build their schedules around that. It would be pretty silly to do otherwise.
Like it or not, our society has been set up (for many years now) such that children attend school during the days. Implying that parents are the bad guys and "treating schools as daycare" is disingenuous and insulting. Parents, and society as a whole, make long term, life plans around the fact that children will be in school; not because it's a daycare, but because it's important and required. Changing that (cancelling school) impacts life in a significant, financial way; the kind of way that negatively effects both parents and children. We see the same type of thing when schools suddenly change starting times to be later; work schedules need to change and it's very stressful to everyone; people lose jobs over it. This is like that, but orders of magnitude more impactful.
The very second paragraph raisins this issue, followed by an explanation of why this article is about a specific sub problem:
> ... Indeed, many people who care deeply about vulnerable populations in ways that he has never shown are desperate to open schools. Children can be less safe at home than they are at school; families can face a crisis if a parent or guardian (often a mother) has to stay with a child rather than go to work.
> But as Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, put it last week, when she announced that all school instruction in her city will be remote at least until November, we have now moved to “a very different place in the arc of the pandemic.”...
Thats an extremely vague statement. Why are children unsafe? What is the crisis that families face? That statement doesn’t address at all the reasons given for opening schools.
It’s like saying “War is good, but sometimes war makes people unsafe”.
The point was she said “I’m going to focus on the importance of issue X, bough TBF there are other legitimate factors pushing the other way such as Y and Z. But they aren’t he topic of this essay.”
I was responding to a complaint that these other positions weren’t discussed with the concomitant implication that the author was lazy and/or biased.
To put it another way: I could write an essay on progress in cleaner burning car engines; if I did I know I would say something like, “of course the real fix is electric, hydrogen perhaps, or some other less-polluting source, but for now this is the important problem at hand”. I’d be annoyed if someone then complained, “but we shouldn’t have emissions at all”
As someone who lives in NYC and follows these movements closely, there is always a level of animus at the institutional/political level between the UFT and the DOE. This animus does not escape the political realm, relationships between on the ground and central admin and teachers are professional and serve the interests of the children.
Infighting within the union, however, is new, and sad. Both are true-
* the plans that have been made are very far to the conservative- preservation of health and safety- end of the spectrum.
* any return involves risk of infection, and with that risk of death or permanent health damage. During the awful spring peak, more than 100 teachers and low level staff and administrators died.
Teachers sign up for extremely difficult work- dealing not only with the dynamics of their children in the classroom, but because children are sensitive lenses for their families, with the dynamics of the families as well. That emotionally difficult work is fundamentally different from work that is risky from a health perspective.
In an ideal world, all workers would continue to be paid, and those who decided to subject themselves to these new hazards would receive hazard pay for doing so, as well as additional insurance and care protections, but would not be required to and could work fully remotely. That's what would be right, but that's not what is happening, and that it's not happening is not the DOE's fault, nor the union's fault. It's the fault ultimately of the US political leadership.
I am really surprised that we haven't seen some high quality remote learning platforms. I expected that problem to have been aggressively solved over the past few months.
A lot more resources should have been put into that instead of 100 COVID tracker apps.
Is it really a platform problem though. I took a workshop from MIT over the past few weeks. (They stretched a one week in-person to shorter stints over three weeks to deal with Zoom fatigue.) It worked pretty well.
But technical professionals != elementary school kids.
In the US, when it’s school districts, state and federal governments paying for it, absolutely nobody who could build good platforms wants to touch that with a ten foot pole.
You get all the headaches of contracts and support agreements with government bodies as customers, all the headaches of oversight for a product that affects children, and none of the upside of a customer willing to pay a high price.
Governments are tragically slow to invest in infrastructure, and when they finally do it’s usually garbage built by a patchwork saga of contractors way over budget and behind schedule.
Most of the product that schools offer, is in teaching 'propriety'. This is their function as an obedience academy. This requires bodies in seats, and it requires a dissemination of what ignorances students are socially required to bear.
A younger ages I don’t see it as a platform problem — humans rely on a plethora of non verbal social and environmental cues which are not replicable when every interaction is disintermediated by a screen.
Speaking as an ed-tech advocate and practitioner, having written games and platforms for kids, worked in schools, have kids who program- I can't align with this perspective enough.
We are biological/physical/chemical/etc embodied entities, with a spectrum of interactions, especially sub-teen- the range of which far exceeds present understanding.
Children need literal human contact, on real-life modalities, to survive and thrive. A child raised by screens would die.
For the later high school set, potential improvements within the limited screen modalities have some value, but still- this all reminds of early AI framings, where a machine playing chess was thought to be the sum total of human engagement capability. Those making the argument didn't even know how not-even-wrong they are.
Until the last few weeks, most places in the U.S. were insisting that they were going back to in-person learning, at least partially. On top of that, whatever market opportunity exists now will likely (hopefully!) not exist for more than a year. I thought about trying to do something helpful here, but was concluding that if I did, it would have to be a charity project. I also don't think it's that easy of a problem to solve ...
The odds of a vaccine being very effective are very low. A good vaccine is not likely for a long time no matter how many billion dollars we throw at it.
It feels like to me there’s no good answer to this problem. If we don’t open schools there is two options that I can think of. One that a parent quits their job and stays home to care for the kids which is probably what most of the HN crowd can do, but more and more families require two incomes. The other option is the kids get sent to a day care or study pod that we don’t have the resources to inspect on the same basis as schools and the spread is worse. A part of me thinks we should open school for the younger ones, halve class size, require masks, introduce daily disinfecting, and have the older kids do distance learning but it seems too many schools have put off prep because they were sure that the virus would be gone.
For our daughter we are still up in the air on what to do and school begins in a week or two and they are doing distance learning for the first quarter of the year.
Note I am assuming kids can spread it as well as adults there may not conclusive evidence of this but it’s the safest assumption route to go down.
This might not be very popular among the "think of the children" crowd, but what if we plainly stop classifying 12-year old kids staying at home alone as child neglect for the duration of this crisis? Asking kids to run a gauntlet of bureaucratic strictures with all of the stress that school entails but not half the socialization and fun is not going to do them any better in terms of mental health. And parents are spending as much time with their children as never before (see https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-.... ); it's not like we're in danger of getting wolf children if we turn the crank down a bit.
There have probably been man bites dog type of stories (that may also not include the whole story), but it's hard to imagine leaving a normal high school student home alone being "neglect" absent other circumstances.
It is possible to do child care safely, as some programs in NYC remarkably demonstrated over the spring and summer, but it is all too easy to fail. And even "success" still involves some level of infection, spread, and risk of death or long term health impacts in the participants.
The overall aggregate risk may be low, but the predictability in any particular case is also low, so engaging is something like playing a game of Russian Roulette.
That said, in NYC, we are open to having our 3 kids return to in-person school, at least in the 1st quarter, while we expect 2nd and 3rd quarters over winter to be full lockdown. Even if there is a return for the start of 1st quarter, we do not expect it to last, as the temporary quarantine bar is low, and the overall fragility of the dependencies and relationships required is high.
> A part of me thinks we should open school for the younger ones, halve class size, require masks, introduce daily disinfecting,
Younger children are not very likely to maintain distance from one another nor will they keep their masks on. They're also likely to talk loudly or scream which would increase the likelihood of viral transmission. Unfortunately, distance learning is not a realistic option for younger children.
> Note I am assuming kids can spread it as well as adults
I have not kept up with research about how likely covid-19 is transmitted between people when comparing adults versus children. But looking at historical data in terms of viral transmission between children in school and daycare settings and the fact that children tend to be less fastidious compared to adults, it stands to reason that their will be viral outbreaks regardless of what measures the school takes.
I am a fan of the author, but the headline is far stronger than the piece itself, which is weak and weakly argued.
Behavior at the federal level on COVID overall-
* refusal to engage
* denial of reality
* hiding of data
* propagation of false information and fraudulent non-solutions
* obstruction of useful state and city-level plans
plus indications of misappropriation for financial gain are plainly criminal. That criminal acts are carried out by elected officials at the time of pandemic is a level of sociopathic abuse that cannot be tolerated in democratic society.
Actions in the context of schools derive from the sociopathy. Only one district- the largest, NYC, operating in the context of NYC's largely self-governing citystate bubble- has been able to even get into a position to have a rational, non-politicized conversation about reopening.
As a parent in NYC following the conversation very closely I am engaging with the school system to continue the discussion about return and can see best case circumstances that permit me to feel comfortable with my kids attending in person- which IMO is much, much better from social/emotional and intellectual perspectives than remote. But given the chaos and worse orchestrated at the federal level, I expect the in-person program to not last even to the end of the first quarter, and as winter sets in, expect a grim, difficult lockdown.
I find behavior and reports eg. from Georgia so saddening, and so utterly astonishing. Even theories like Stockholm Syndrome fail to explain to me the degree to which families are willingly marching to their own needless, often permanent harm.
The bottom line is that the most important interests a community and society serve are those of its children. A democratic society expects elected officials not only to act in accordance with those interests but to possess the attributes that allow them to hear and listen and respond in a balanced way across the range of views of their constituents. That's not what we are seeing.
Many officials presently in power at the federal level- and many of a particular party at the state and municipal levels- are not fit for that level of public service, should resign or be expelled, and should face the consequences of their criminal actions, including forfeiture of their private assets, which many have grown through graft, misappropriation, and corruption.
Whether or not one thinks these consequences can actually be brought to bear is a different question. One has to identify the right answer first, then fight to achieve it.
It's possible to safely reopen schools provided there is a consistent and regular testing scheme. This isn't doable with PCR tests due to the expense and lab requirements. But in the "This Week in Virology" podcast, virology researchers suggest deploying cheap and rapid testing methods regularly to school children. It's possible to design cheap $1 per test paperstrips that diagnose saliva samples that can be administered by teachers (or even parents). The technology is there, but it's not approved by the FDA because it's not reliable at very low dosages (where the individual isn't probably infectious anyways). But the goal of those tests is to fight the pandemic on a population scale, not to help with diagnosis on the individual scale, so the criteria for the test should be different. Non-N95 masks aren't 100% effective either, but they have an effect that does save lives. With a regular testing scheme in place, reopening schools should be safe enough.
> It's possible to design cheap $1 per test paperstrips that diagnose saliva samples that can be administered by teachers (or even parents). The technology is there, but it's not approved by the FDA because it's not reliable at very low dosages (where the individual isn't probably infectious anyways).
Is this “possible” in that it exists and the FDA hasn’t acted on it or this is test only theoretical?
The tests exist in drawers of various companies but they aren't certified, at least back when those videos were released (maybe it's different now). The price depends on the scale the tests are deployed at, that's why I said "possible to design".
> IMPORTANT NOTE: The STOPCovid kit and protocol should not be used for clinical purposes. Although we have validated the kit on patient samples, this test is not FDA authorized. We welcome researchers working with COVID-19 samples to request a starter kit for further experimental testing.
I think it’s crazy to see comments like this because there is this presumption that we know what all the edge cases are regarding coronavirus complications. Just see the recent stories of the CDC itself having to shut down offices because the lockdown period allowed an emergence of Legionella.
Personally I think it’s way too soon to reopen schools really anywhere, even in cities or countries with mask mandates and positive test rates around 1% or lower.
We just absolutely don’t know what the effects will be. We’ve never shut down school buildings for months and reopened them. We’ve never needed to understand the effects on busing, learning rates, transmission via children to adults, effects of children being back in these buildings, etc. etc.
It feels so shortsighted to act like the only issues we need to certify are first order, direct properties of the virus itself, like testing, masks, transmission rates, and not being more humble to say, wait a minute, we just totally do not know all the effects or edge cases we need to be worried about.
I agree with the sentiment, and have made similar arguments in the past, that we need to be focusing on contagiousness and rapidity of assessment; that all of the specifics of reopening policies and practices are the result of the failure to develop and deploy this sort of testing regime; that this sort of goal would have been a much, much better target for the $10B (or more) deployed in Operation Warp Speed.
But I reject the framing that this is a question of FDA being a bottleneck. That's not it, at all.
There is a criminal chaos actor, and larger political group, operating at the federal level in the US. Entire workflows aimed at actual public health and safety have been disrupted and compromised.
It will not be possible to move forward until the chaos is removed from the system.
I live in Ontario, Canada. To be honest, I'm going to be pretty pissed if schools are a major reason why a second wave happens in the fall largely because the government basically did nothing to help schools reduce the likelihood of transmission via decreasing classroom sizes. Where I live, they even had the gall to say that schools should use cafeterias as spaces for teaching in spite of the fact that most schools here don't have cafeterias.
I also dislike the fact that they haven't even bothered to experiment with different ideas, but are instead just going full steam ahead with normal school schedules in spite of the fact that literally every sector in the province is doing things very differently to suppress the spread of the virus.
not sure what you are expecting. We wont be able to deal with this unless we get a vaccine and if we dont exactly what are you expecting us to do? The consequences of keeping things in lockdown are plentiful and we already know children arent being affected. So protect old and frail and lets get back to a semi normal reality taking all the precausions we can.
Lots of teachers are old and/or vulnerable. Lots of people who work or volunteer at the schools are old and/or vulnerable. Lots of parents are old and/or vulnerable. Lots of grandparents - same.
And then all of the people those people interact with.
Children do not exist in a vacuum. This is the point.
lots of teachers are young. Lots of people who work at schools are young. Let the old stay home, there is no reason to keep the young and healthy home. Again what are you going to do if we dont get vaccines?
"one in four teachers (24%, or about 1.47 million people), have a condition that puts them at higher risk of serious illness from coronavirus. This percentage is the same as the one we found for workers overall"
Let the old stay home
How will the 1.47 million teachers mentioned above pay their bills and put food on the table?
Again what are you going to do if we dont get vaccines?
That's what everyone is trying to figure out. Telling the old and frail to quarantine themselves just isn't the answer, because old and and frail people work for a living, and live with relatives who have children, and live alone but have family members that come to care for them, etc. etc.
the old and frail teachers can teach from home for some of the classes.
its still 75% who are not in danger and even among the 25% there are still many who would teach anyway. Of course its the answer to tell the old and frail to quarantine just like we are now. putting the eorld to a stop is what is not an answer
everyone is susceptible to infections thats not what we are talking about. Most people cant afford babysitters for their kids, 80% of the workforce dont work behind a computer. What you guys seem to suggest will bankrupt most families.
You have to have the virus under control to even consider a plan. Denmark reopened schools months ago, after painful negotiations with the government, parents, and faculty. There were new rules and lots of remodeling (I think they even added bathrooms).
We don't have any of this, and it's aggravated by a large population of aggressively ignorant and anti-science parents.
Israel was one of the models for controlling COVID-19, and school reopening completely wrecked their progress.
If people think school is so important that it needs to open even though the virus is spreading, then we need to help them find the best way possible to do that. Throwing our hands up and saying there's no way to even consider a plan won't stop schools from opening - it just means they'll open with bad plans or no plans.
Schools are not an island in this plan. Any strategy, without proper federal plan, resources, money, tests, and tracing is going to fail. A municipality or a city is not going to single-handedly solve this while a pandemic is raging all around, with the President golfing for the 9th weekend in a row.
With our level of infections, and essentially none or useless testing, there is no need to plan. We are all agreeing we are creating a massive spike.
The point of a school reopening plan isn't to "solve this" - as you say, there's no way to escape the fundamental problem that the coronavirus will spread at school. The point of a plan is to make targeted reductions in the spread while accounting for the likely secondary effects. Paulding County has chosen to allow the virus to spread, and whether or not we agree with that choice, it would still be better if they didn't have students jammed shoulder to shoulder in interior hallways.
This is what came to mind for me. I've lived in Georgia my whole life. In fact my hometown is right on the county line of Paulding County. There have been plenty of quips about the unenforceability of a mask mandate, but they can enforce rules against spaghetti strap tops or above-the-knee shorts. The first thing that came to mind when I read it was Road Rage Randy bursting into the principal's office demanding to know why his son was told he'd have to wear a dangerous, oxygen-restricting, anti-freedom muzzle to come to school this morning. It might be unenforceable just because of unhinged dads.
Judging by the stream of Facebook posts and arguments in comment threads among my own family, people I went to church with as a child, and other connections from "outside the city," the anti-scientific beliefs are deeply entrenched here. The zeitgeist is some kind of rapidly evolving mixture of: it's just a flu, the numbers are faked, masks rob you of oxygen, there's nothing you can do about a virus we just have to live with it like we do colds every year, vaccines weaken your immune system. To compound the madness, this crap is all mixed with reactions to Black Lives Matter protests. I'm losing it.
In the Netherlands, even runnynose toddlers are allowed to attend. No issues yet. I'd say that is a pretty major indication, a test by an entire country.
> If there is to be any hope for in-person schooling not only in the fall but in the spring—when a safe vaccine, even if one exists, might not be fully available—a rapid change in course is necessary.
Consider how much is riding on a vaccine now. The CDC is a non-player at this point and hasn't been since March. The three pillars of rolling back a pandemic (testing, contact tracing, and isolation) lie in shambles. Other countries' success in rolling back infections point to a massive failing within the US.
And that leaves the vaccine. The consensus is that early next year one will be available.
What if that doesn't happen?
It wasn't too long ago that Americans were being asked for "15 days to stop the spread." What if the actual time turns out to be measured in years? Decades?
What effect will a protracted period of wave after wave of infection transmitted through well-meaning but ignorant school administrators have on public education? On the fabric of society?
Here's a modest proposal, an idea I got from reading Supernova Era by Cixin Liu: we could send the kids to boarding schools in China. They have covid under control and we already outsource a lot of industrial production to China so why not outsource education too. Shipping kids over there and back could help stimulate the airlines and maybe Trump could negotiate a deal to pay for it via subsidized soybeans and other excess agricultural products. The parents would still have an externalized child rearing service and the kids would get a nice cross-cultural experience. There's probably excess real estate in Chinese boomtowns that could house the American students. Then when covid is under control here and Trump and his immigration restrictions are in the past the Chinese can resume sending their kids back here to the US to study.
Also, let's face it, people who are stakeholders have a bias.
Parents who can work at home who have children may want the schools closed. Parents who can't work at home may want them open. And full-time teachers and administrators would want them closed because they'll still get paid.
As a 57 year old who never had children, I wonder why can't they have some sort of compromise. A-L goes to school from 8-11, M-Z goes to school from 12-5. Classrooms are half-empty and separated, and they don't have lunch service in school (except for needy famillies) to minimize risk of spreading COVID. I've never seen things like this proposed. Certainly the teachers won't want it--because they'll have to work.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadSchool closures are having a disproportionately negative impact of poor and middle class families, whose parents can’t work from home. These families relied on schools to not only teach but to supervise and feed children.
Both Cuomo and POTUS agree on this, which tells me there’s more to the story than what the author is letting on.
Using schools for daycare facilities isn't an honest discussion of the drawbacks of leaving schools closed either.
Another alternative is to pay workers a fair living wage sufficient for everyone to afford private care.
> ... Indeed, many people who care deeply about vulnerable populations in ways that he has never shown are desperate to open schools. Children can be less safe at home than they are at school; families can face a crisis if a parent or guardian (often a mother) has to stay with a child rather than go to work.
> But as Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, put it last week, when she announced that all school instruction in her city will be remote at least until November, we have now moved to “a very different place in the arc of the pandemic.”...
It’s like saying “War is good, but sometimes war makes people unsafe”.
I was responding to a complaint that these other positions weren’t discussed with the concomitant implication that the author was lazy and/or biased.
To put it another way: I could write an essay on progress in cleaner burning car engines; if I did I know I would say something like, “of course the real fix is electric, hydrogen perhaps, or some other less-polluting source, but for now this is the important problem at hand”. I’d be annoyed if someone then complained, “but we shouldn’t have emissions at all”
Infighting within the union, however, is new, and sad. Both are true-
* the plans that have been made are very far to the conservative- preservation of health and safety- end of the spectrum.
* any return involves risk of infection, and with that risk of death or permanent health damage. During the awful spring peak, more than 100 teachers and low level staff and administrators died.
Teachers sign up for extremely difficult work- dealing not only with the dynamics of their children in the classroom, but because children are sensitive lenses for their families, with the dynamics of the families as well. That emotionally difficult work is fundamentally different from work that is risky from a health perspective.
In an ideal world, all workers would continue to be paid, and those who decided to subject themselves to these new hazards would receive hazard pay for doing so, as well as additional insurance and care protections, but would not be required to and could work fully remotely. That's what would be right, but that's not what is happening, and that it's not happening is not the DOE's fault, nor the union's fault. It's the fault ultimately of the US political leadership.
A lot more resources should have been put into that instead of 100 COVID tracker apps.
But technical professionals != elementary school kids.
You get all the headaches of contracts and support agreements with government bodies as customers, all the headaches of oversight for a product that affects children, and none of the upside of a customer willing to pay a high price.
Governments are tragically slow to invest in infrastructure, and when they finally do it’s usually garbage built by a patchwork saga of contractors way over budget and behind schedule.
We are biological/physical/chemical/etc embodied entities, with a spectrum of interactions, especially sub-teen- the range of which far exceeds present understanding.
Children need literal human contact, on real-life modalities, to survive and thrive. A child raised by screens would die.
For the later high school set, potential improvements within the limited screen modalities have some value, but still- this all reminds of early AI framings, where a machine playing chess was thought to be the sum total of human engagement capability. Those making the argument didn't even know how not-even-wrong they are.
For our daughter we are still up in the air on what to do and school begins in a week or two and they are doing distance learning for the first quarter of the year.
Note I am assuming kids can spread it as well as adults there may not conclusive evidence of this but it’s the safest assumption route to go down.
As in, I actually took babysitting classes at that age, it was common and socially accepted.
It is possible to do child care safely, as some programs in NYC remarkably demonstrated over the spring and summer, but it is all too easy to fail. And even "success" still involves some level of infection, spread, and risk of death or long term health impacts in the participants.
The overall aggregate risk may be low, but the predictability in any particular case is also low, so engaging is something like playing a game of Russian Roulette.
That said, in NYC, we are open to having our 3 kids return to in-person school, at least in the 1st quarter, while we expect 2nd and 3rd quarters over winter to be full lockdown. Even if there is a return for the start of 1st quarter, we do not expect it to last, as the temporary quarantine bar is low, and the overall fragility of the dependencies and relationships required is high.
Younger children are not very likely to maintain distance from one another nor will they keep their masks on. They're also likely to talk loudly or scream which would increase the likelihood of viral transmission. Unfortunately, distance learning is not a realistic option for younger children.
> Note I am assuming kids can spread it as well as adults
I have not kept up with research about how likely covid-19 is transmitted between people when comparing adults versus children. But looking at historical data in terms of viral transmission between children in school and daycare settings and the fact that children tend to be less fastidious compared to adults, it stands to reason that their will be viral outbreaks regardless of what measures the school takes.
Behavior at the federal level on COVID overall-
plus indications of misappropriation for financial gain are plainly criminal. That criminal acts are carried out by elected officials at the time of pandemic is a level of sociopathic abuse that cannot be tolerated in democratic society.Actions in the context of schools derive from the sociopathy. Only one district- the largest, NYC, operating in the context of NYC's largely self-governing citystate bubble- has been able to even get into a position to have a rational, non-politicized conversation about reopening.
As a parent in NYC following the conversation very closely I am engaging with the school system to continue the discussion about return and can see best case circumstances that permit me to feel comfortable with my kids attending in person- which IMO is much, much better from social/emotional and intellectual perspectives than remote. But given the chaos and worse orchestrated at the federal level, I expect the in-person program to not last even to the end of the first quarter, and as winter sets in, expect a grim, difficult lockdown.
I find behavior and reports eg. from Georgia so saddening, and so utterly astonishing. Even theories like Stockholm Syndrome fail to explain to me the degree to which families are willingly marching to their own needless, often permanent harm.
The bottom line is that the most important interests a community and society serve are those of its children. A democratic society expects elected officials not only to act in accordance with those interests but to possess the attributes that allow them to hear and listen and respond in a balanced way across the range of views of their constituents. That's not what we are seeing.
Many officials presently in power at the federal level- and many of a particular party at the state and municipal levels- are not fit for that level of public service, should resign or be expelled, and should face the consequences of their criminal actions, including forfeiture of their private assets, which many have grown through graft, misappropriation, and corruption.
Whether or not one thinks these consequences can actually be brought to bear is a different question. One has to identify the right answer first, then fight to achieve it.
Best wishes.
See also these resources:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZWuyvBAWWQ
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDj4Zyq3yOA
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/opinion/coronavirus-tests...
Is this “possible” in that it exists and the FDA hasn’t acted on it or this is test only theoretical?
https://www.stopcovid.science/
> IMPORTANT NOTE: The STOPCovid kit and protocol should not be used for clinical purposes. Although we have validated the kit on patient samples, this test is not FDA authorized. We welcome researchers working with COVID-19 samples to request a starter kit for further experimental testing.
Personally I think it’s way too soon to reopen schools really anywhere, even in cities or countries with mask mandates and positive test rates around 1% or lower.
We just absolutely don’t know what the effects will be. We’ve never shut down school buildings for months and reopened them. We’ve never needed to understand the effects on busing, learning rates, transmission via children to adults, effects of children being back in these buildings, etc. etc.
It feels so shortsighted to act like the only issues we need to certify are first order, direct properties of the virus itself, like testing, masks, transmission rates, and not being more humble to say, wait a minute, we just totally do not know all the effects or edge cases we need to be worried about.
But I reject the framing that this is a question of FDA being a bottleneck. That's not it, at all.
There is a criminal chaos actor, and larger political group, operating at the federal level in the US. Entire workflows aimed at actual public health and safety have been disrupted and compromised.
It will not be possible to move forward until the chaos is removed from the system.
I also dislike the fact that they haven't even bothered to experiment with different ideas, but are instead just going full steam ahead with normal school schedules in spite of the fact that literally every sector in the province is doing things very differently to suppress the spread of the virus.
And then all of the people those people interact with.
Children do not exist in a vacuum. This is the point.
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-man...
"one in four teachers (24%, or about 1.47 million people), have a condition that puts them at higher risk of serious illness from coronavirus. This percentage is the same as the one we found for workers overall"
Let the old stay home
How will the 1.47 million teachers mentioned above pay their bills and put food on the table?
Again what are you going to do if we dont get vaccines?
That's what everyone is trying to figure out. Telling the old and frail to quarantine themselves just isn't the answer, because old and and frail people work for a living, and live with relatives who have children, and live alone but have family members that come to care for them, etc. etc.
its still 75% who are not in danger and even among the 25% there are still many who would teach anyway. Of course its the answer to tell the old and frail to quarantine just like we are now. putting the eorld to a stop is what is not an answer
What did you mean when you said that "we already know children aren't being affected"?
We don't have any of this, and it's aggravated by a large population of aggressively ignorant and anti-science parents.
Israel was one of the models for controlling COVID-19, and school reopening completely wrecked their progress.
With our level of infections, and essentially none or useless testing, there is no need to plan. We are all agreeing we are creating a massive spike.
This is what came to mind for me. I've lived in Georgia my whole life. In fact my hometown is right on the county line of Paulding County. There have been plenty of quips about the unenforceability of a mask mandate, but they can enforce rules against spaghetti strap tops or above-the-knee shorts. The first thing that came to mind when I read it was Road Rage Randy bursting into the principal's office demanding to know why his son was told he'd have to wear a dangerous, oxygen-restricting, anti-freedom muzzle to come to school this morning. It might be unenforceable just because of unhinged dads.
Judging by the stream of Facebook posts and arguments in comment threads among my own family, people I went to church with as a child, and other connections from "outside the city," the anti-scientific beliefs are deeply entrenched here. The zeitgeist is some kind of rapidly evolving mixture of: it's just a flu, the numbers are faked, masks rob you of oxygen, there's nothing you can do about a virus we just have to live with it like we do colds every year, vaccines weaken your immune system. To compound the madness, this crap is all mixed with reactions to Black Lives Matter protests. I'm losing it.
Send little kids to school. Don't send older kids. The nuance starts there.
https://www.rivm.nl/en/novel-coronavirus-covid-19/children-a....
Consider how much is riding on a vaccine now. The CDC is a non-player at this point and hasn't been since March. The three pillars of rolling back a pandemic (testing, contact tracing, and isolation) lie in shambles. Other countries' success in rolling back infections point to a massive failing within the US.
And that leaves the vaccine. The consensus is that early next year one will be available.
What if that doesn't happen?
It wasn't too long ago that Americans were being asked for "15 days to stop the spread." What if the actual time turns out to be measured in years? Decades?
What effect will a protracted period of wave after wave of infection transmitted through well-meaning but ignorant school administrators have on public education? On the fabric of society?
For citizens of the US, it sucks.
Parents who can work at home who have children may want the schools closed. Parents who can't work at home may want them open. And full-time teachers and administrators would want them closed because they'll still get paid.
As a 57 year old who never had children, I wonder why can't they have some sort of compromise. A-L goes to school from 8-11, M-Z goes to school from 12-5. Classrooms are half-empty and separated, and they don't have lunch service in school (except for needy famillies) to minimize risk of spreading COVID. I've never seen things like this proposed. Certainly the teachers won't want it--because they'll have to work.