Haven't weighed in on COVID much lately but I'm seeing this video in my feed quite a bit today and I'm rankled. So for old time's sake:
This is a careless and misinformed reply by Collins that buys into the lazy "closed vs open" binary framing preferred by the Barrington crowd.
Did "public health" shut down rural Minnesota to save urban NYC? No.
Early on when virtually nothing was known about a disease that was massively flooding ERs (& morgues) around the world, US states implemented stay-at-home guidance for a few months to protect their hospitals.
Governors made those decisions, and they did weigh econ & other factors alongside.
Turns out it's not good economics for a hospital system to collapse!
And there was no reason to assume that what was hitting big cities wouldn't ultimately hit rural areas too.
BTW rural communities in 2020 had similar COVID death rates to urban metros.
Lower than huge cities, higher than other metro areas, and higher than the overall national average.
So applying precautions to rural areas was wise. cdc.gov/nchs/products/…
By early May 2020, the CDC (public health!) had prepared detailed guidance for risk-based, phased re-opening of schools, business, day cares, etc. Not a simple open/closed binary.
The White House spiked it. Trump wanted a full re-opening.
apnews.com/article/virus-…
This led to total incoherence between state and federal levels amidst a 2x+ summer surge in infections.
So as schools had to make decisions about opening for fall, cases were exploding. In December, they were 3x+ higher. Hard choice for parents/teachers.
There was plenty of debate at the time about trade-offs. CDC actually did issue guidance on safely re-opening schools - which Trump then trashed publicly.
Rather than attempt to support and resource safe re-opening, he just pushed a return to normal ops.
cnn.com/2020/07/08/pol…
The choice didn't have to be open vs closed: it could have been to invest in safely reopening schools (more testing, enhanced support to schools, etc etc). I wrote about this at the time:
Not going to further relitigate the schools debate here but the essential point is: these were not binary options.
Public health guidance sought to manage risk in order to reopen in a safe & incremental way.
Trump rejected that, and pushed a false binary choice.
So Collins gets the history wrong and the public health wrong. It was not "public health" pushing the choice between open vs closed, it was Trump.
"Public health" was trying to reconcile COVID precautions with restarting schools, biz, etc - and that guidance was shot down.
It's easy to second-guess hard decisions made in the fog-of-crisis period when stakes are high and good info is scarce. And plenty we should learn.
But don't rewrite history in the process...
There is a concerted disinfo effort on the right to undermine "public health" by blaming it for all COVID-related grievances and airbrushing what Trump and other pols actually did.
Collins' answer naively plays into that. Unfortunate.
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