Thread by @Loretta_Torrago

We may have "opened the schools" but we still haven't made them accessible.
Yesterday my medically vulnerable son told me:
"Either I ruin my life avoiding Covid or Covid ruins my life. Either way I am suffering."
It is not fine. 🧵
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

If there is “no widespread crisis” in the classrooms, it’s because there is no shared crisis. Covid has been framed as a problem for those with “pre-existing conditions.”

The result is that, across the US, but in isolation from each other, & out of view of the able-bodied, momentous conversations are taking place inside homes, over dinner & at the kitchen table.

Left to fend for themselves, families of vulnerable students are deciding whether they die by Covid or by isolation.

The fantasy that public health is a matter of individual choices keeps these agonizing kitchen table conversations out of public view, liberating the rest of society from the eye-sore & agony that is the reality of these life-or-death conversations.

If there isn’t “widespread doom”, it’s because in youth vulnerabilities are the exception, not the rule and because the public has not been asked to engage on this issue while popular media and press holds the brooms that sweep this reality under the rug.

The effort to keep the impact of our choices from public view is helped along by hyperbole that suggests dodging doom is a triumph making the reality of preventable tragedies seem less of a failure.

As the article acknowledges, kids have gotten sick, they have been hospitalized and they have died. To suggest this is “rare when precautions are taken” is to miss the point.

Precautions aren’t mostly taken & what happens rarely happens more frequently to the vulnerable whose most common precaution might well be to leave public school entirely. No wonder the worst outcomes are “rare”.

But we can bury the individual burdens vulnerable families bear under the weight of the differences schools make at the population level to incidence rates. Obfuscating language that is virtually unfalsifiable helps solve even that problem.

So for example, we are told “schools are not to blame”, that they “didn’t cause the surges” or “cause the massive numbers of hospitalizations and deaths”.

All this is a far cry from saying schools bear no responsibility. Study after study has shown, when schools open, cases go up. This was clear even pre-Delta.

https://twitter.com/Loretta_Torrago/status/1381264249142534146

Carefully chosen exculpatory language can hide these facts, but at the cost of undermining the push for mitigation that doesn’t merely open schools but, more importantly, puts schools within reach, in other words, makes them accessible to, vulnerable kids and vulnerable families.

In fact, for exculpatory language one can’t do better than the vacuous, “For the most part, [outbreaks] haven’t occurred”. This language invites us to overlook when they have occurred, even outdoors, as after Sturgis.
forbes.com/sites/jemimamc…

It also inserts a pretend "discovery" into facts already known: that Covid transmits by way of overdispersion which is neither vindication for the large gatherings where superspreading mostly doesn’t happen nor an invitation to complacency about them.
theatlantic.com/health/archive…

It’s enough, isn’t it, that superspreading is dangerous when it happens, especially since we know how to avoid it?

The world now is complicated which makes statements like “preventing new cases completely is nearly impossible” perplexing because it addresses no one; which makes me think the remark is more of an action, or inaction, imperative.

In fact, any doubt that the article advocates for a certain kind of inaction is made clear, not just because this is a concluding remark, but because inaction is what happens after things are “safe enough”. Surely I’m not the only one asking: safe enough for whom?

But we already know the answer: Schools are “safe enough” for the “public” which can only mean the “general public” because the families of special needs kids and those kids themselves do not think schools are "safe enough".

So much seems to be reflected in this article which finds that, though 70% of students have an improved school experience when masks are optional, 8% feel their experience is worsened.
Any guesses who that 8% might be?

https://twitter.com/Loretta_Torrago/status/1467600863992631301

Yet what we are told is: the “public can stop fixating on schools”. From the beginning, there’s been open advocacy for this despite its ableistic undertones.

That’s why it was alone in our kitchen, late on a Saturday night when school was hours behind him and hours in front of him, that my son told me his choices were to risk his life at school or to not live a child’s life at all.

My son began his life as a vulnerable person. But we all end our lives as one. It would be nice if the vulnerabilities of the young weren’t furtively relegated to the darkness and fraught isolation of individual families.

What if we dealt with the vulnerabilities of special needs kids the way we deal with the vulnerabilities of old age which, as a society, we anticipate and accommodate, however imperfectly?

It is often said, quite rightly, that when a younger person dies, what dies with them are the many years of life unlived.

Yet, for the young disabled person, there is no similar recognition of the possibilities that are lost to disability; not because of the disability itself, but because of sociality’s inflexible refusal to create an accessible world.

End.