1/ Let me expand on school issue. The downside of closing schools is not lost on me. They're huge. I address that here. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lets-ta…
2/ My concern is that the Mayor/Admin seems to be considering the whole issue of school closures as a fixed point. Cannot happen and you reason back from there. You can't do that. You have to think abt it as a real possibility. You have to start thinking about how to ...
3/ handle and mitigate the externalities - impact on low income families, meals, many students who can't do distance learning, etc. It doesn't have to be a binary choice. We need to think more creatively. Even more important, the big issue is that there is LOTS of ...
4/ evidence that school closures at the front of an outbreak are a big determinant of eventual death toll. Big. see this talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/acting-… In his discussions, the Mayor is not even addressing this issue. At least no publicly. And to be clear, it's not about ...
5/ kids dying. Kids seem to have very, very limited bad outcomes from this disease. It's not mainly about protecting the children directly. It's slowly the overall spread of the disease.
6/ At the moment we simply don't have enough testing to really know even where we are, how quickly it's accelerating. We're flying blind. That puts us in a very bad position. Waiting to see how far it spreads, given the history, is a very dangerous approach.
7/ As the pressure to close the schools have increased the Mayor/Chancellor have shifted the argument to this new one which is that if you shut the schools for two weeks that will necessarily mean they won't open again for the rest of the school year or maybe even for the ...
8/ rest of the calendar year. That doesn't make sense. Hard? No doubt. I can only imagine the difficulties. But weird in the mix of a very dangerous epidemic. Hard can't be a deal breaker.
9/ Finally, I'm a journalist. I'm not a public health person or a school administrator. No one should take my word for this. But I'm talking to a lot of those people who can't make sense of what the Mayor is thinking. From my own point of view, what worries me is not ...
10/ so much the decision not to close the schools as the refusal to even seriously consider it. It's like they're dug in on this idea that it can't happen. That's too inflexible. This is a life and death situation. There are lots of downsides and they're not spread ...
11/ evenly over the citizenry. There are huge problems. But again, earlier epidemics, early school closures, at the front of the epidemic was a BIG determinant of how many people died. That's a big deal too.
