Thread by @ezraklein

Lots of good stuff in this @mattyglesias post on schools and COVID and worker power, but I want to highlight this section, as it gets to a broader problem in COVID response: slowboring.com/p/school-closu…

There's been a weird literalism in public health communication wherein policymakers ignore substitutions. If you close indoor gathering spaces, people go outdoors. But then some places closed outdoors spaces (beaches, parks) too, so people just gathered in homes!

You really see this with kids. We've gone through long periods with playgrounds and schools closed. But parents still need to work and toddlers will still light the house on fire if they don't get taken outside.

So I knew a lot of parents making excess trips to the grocery store and Target and Home Depot because those places were open. I knew others podding up so groups of kids played in one parents' house while other parents worked. But that's clearly more dangerous than the playground.

One issue here is policymakers only know what they know. If you close outdoor dining, outdoor dining is closed. Policymakers know that. But what do people do instead? That's not as clear. Is it worse? Maybe, but that's hard to prove, so policymakers don't get blamed.

But spaces that are legible to the state are also spaces where you can do more on ventilation regulations, masking, etc. You can reopen schools and send every school N95 masks and air purifiers. You can't do that for whatever people are substituting schools with.

There was a lot of panicking at the beginning of all this and the tools we had were crude. But we didn't get that much better at it as time went on, and I think there are lessons to be learned there.

A much more coordinated approach to what we thought was essential, what we need to produce/pay to make those operations safe, and how to titrate the level of restrictions so people weren't doing more dangerous activities en masse could've done a lot of good.