To better understand why school's are closed, read @jasonzweigwsj's book Your Money and Your Brain.
Our brains aren't great at understanding relative risk, and when the media convinces everyone that they're going to die, we're willing to do dumb stuff to prevent it.
As @ZacBissonnette has pointed out, people way, way overestimate their risk if death due to COVID.
That doesn't mean it isn't a deadly or dangerous disease. It is! But most of us will probably die from heart failure or cancer. 🤷♂️
School closures are an egregious symptom of our inability to understand relative risks as we traded a tiny amount of risk for gobs and gobs of risk all because people thought that we were preventing certain death by doing so.
Once you go down that rabbit hole and people are convinced that school closures are a necessary and useful intervention, reversing course is nearly impossible.
Wise people were saying this in March and April.
One thing's for sure:
People who continue to think that schools should be closed are not showing good judgement and shouldn't be trusted with much.
One locally who has been eerily silent on this is @JeffJacksonNC.
He is running for US Senate.
As an NC State senator, he recently voted against a bill that would've required an in-person option statewide.
He is showing bad judgement and is not proving himself trustworthy.
School closures are a perfect litmus test to figure out if somebody is wise and trustworthy. It's really a pretty obvious thing, and if we can't trust you with this how can we trust you with anything?
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If you're in public health and have an anxiety disorder, you should be required to disclose such on your Twitter profile if you're active here.
It would be a helpful lens through which we can interpret your recommendations, which have outsized impact in our current environment.
I don't mean to sound harsh. I've got friends with anxiety disorders and know it is extremely difficult.
But, airline pilots have to undergo psychological screenings before they get their commercial license. They're responsible for hundreds of lives each flight.
Some epidemiologists, a good percentage of whom are afraid to get the mail (literally, according to this NY Times survey) have viewpoints that are often abnormally conservative, and aren't scientifically founded.
They're responsible for making recommendations for billions.
First, it's clear that we all agree that utilizing arbitrary community metrics is unnecessary, as @Sawyer4Schools herself alludes to here.
BTW: The answer to Sawyer's rhetorical is when the metrics were created, people didn't understand that open schools weren't the problem, and closed schools aren't the solution.
Now we know that preemptive school closures have little benefit and cause significant harm.
So (as usual) today's @CltLedger is brilliant, offering an exposition as to what's going on with @CharMeckSchools and @CMSSupt's inability to open middle schools due to what (they claim) is a lack of available bus drivers.
Let's discuss, shall we? (1/12)
There are only two explanations for why the country's 15th largest district, in a city of 1.1 million people, doesn't have enough bus drivers available: Incompetence, or something more sinister. (2/12)
My school board member assures me that nothing nefarious is at play, so we shall assume the former. (3/12)