Douthat's column and the powerful @AlecMacGillis piece it references both argue without much evidence that the resistance to school reopening is largely a reaction to Trump pushing schools to open.
Trump's push to open schools regardless of local conditions and in-school adaptation, and his failure to provide any meaningful support, didn't help.
But I think the more significant factor was what was happening with the country's outbreak at the same time.
To reopen in-person in August/early September, schools needed to decide which way to go in July.
And July was a catastrophe. The highest recorded peaks of the outbreak and the highest deaths since the worst days of spring.
Remember that while evidence on school transmission is pretty murky, it appears that 1) kids can and do transmit to some extent, and 2) the level of in-school risk is most dependent on transmission level in the outside community.
So what was influencing the decision that schools/teachers/parents faced in July wasn't just reflexive anti-Trumpism, it was the fact that at that moment case counts, deaths, and positivity rates were spiking across much of the country.
If trendlines from May/June had held, suspect the decisions would have been very different. And I don't think one can simply ascribe the concern about a return to in-school classes to liberal parents hating on Trump.
As pretty liberal parent of two elementary kids, I basically tune out whatever Trump says on this stuff one way or the other. And I am desperate for my kids to go back to the classroom. But when we can be confident it's safe.
The salient failure here is not parents and teachers being overly cautious - but policymakers failing to orient reopening plans toward prioritizing schools ahead of other things, and to put in place substantive measures to address parent/teacher concerns.
Right now here in Montgomery county, bars are open while schools are not.
That's insane. And that drives community transmission more than schools would, which in turn makes schools harder to safely reopen.
And mass-screening of student bodies - which some large colleges have been able to use to stay open - is not even being discussed for schools writ large (and the federal government's stated policy is that this sort of thing isn't even needed). abcnews.go.com/US/inside-univ…
So rather than blaming parents, let's put the blame where it belongs: on political leaders who squandered the spring and summer months when we could have been pursuing an aggressive strategy to get schools open safely by fall - but instead did basically fuck-all as cases spiked.
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The three academics lay out their case here. It's pretty brief and easy to read.
Interestingly, it does not cite or reference a single piece of research to support their arguments, nor does the linked website containing their sign-on "declaration." unherd.com/2020/10/covid-…
The basic argument:
- COVID poses little risk of death beyond specific vulnerable groups
- Non-vulnerables face little risk so should just go ahead and get the disease
- Vulnerables should be sheltered while non-vulnerables get naturally infected
- Ta-da, natural herd immunity
Let's be explicitly clear: "learning to live with it" means needlessly accepting hundreds of thousands more preventable deaths and letting our hospitals get nuked yet again.
"Close the country" vs "learn to live with it" is a false choice, and one that exists only because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic.
Peer countries have had shorter closures than we have precisely because they chose not to live with it but to control it.
There is an option besides indefinite closure vs let-it-rip: evidence-driven reopening + aggressive public health interventions centered around mass testing and tracing.
Trump's whole game since back in April/May is to make you forget that option exists.
It's not a choice between living recklessly vs living in fear. It's a choice to live responsibly, to balance sensible precautions with continuing to live our lives.
He is still, even now, trying to frame a false choice.
He wants you to believe we must choose between taking no risks or accepting all risks.
That's not the choice, that was never the choice.
The choice was and is incompetent outbreak response vs competent outbreak response.
The West Wing and EEOB facilities are conducive to transmission - small, enclosed spaces with limited airflow (many/most suites in EEOB have secure doors and windows that are always closed).
So there's real risk of rolling spread throughout the staff.
But must balance keeping government running with stopping spread.
White House should immediately take several steps:
- First, quarantine anyone who was in direct contact with POTUS or other confirmed. Fact that McEnany was still working y'day suggests this hasn't happened.
Ebola and COVID are VERY different diseases that transmit and behave VERY differently.
Unlike, COVID, Ebola:
- Does not spread asymptomatically
- Is not very contagious at symptom onset, becomes more contagious as symptoms worsen
- Spreads thru direct contact with bodily fluids
This means the precautions for both diseases are very different.
Under Obama we developed a careful system for screening returning travelers from West Africa, based on the science (remember science?) of how the virus spreads. I wrote about it here: cgdev.org/publication/st…