Did "public health" shut down rural Minnesota to save urban NYC? No.
Early on when virtually nothing was known about a disease that was massively flooding ERs (& morgues) around the world, US states implemented stay-at-home guidance for a few months to protect their hospitals.
Governors made those decisions, and they did weigh econ & other factors alongside.
Turns out it's not good economics for a hospital system to collapse!
And there was no reason to assume that what was hitting big cities wouldn't ultimately hit rural areas too.
BTW rural communities in 2020 had similar COVID death rates to urban metros.
Lower than huge cities, higher than other metro areas, and higher than the overall national average.
By early May 2020, the CDC (public health!) had prepared detailed guidance for risk-based, phased re-opening of schools, business, day cares, etc. Not a simple open/closed binary.
There was plenty of debate at the time about trade-offs. CDC actually did issue guidance on safely re-opening schools - which Trump then trashed publicly.
Rather than attempt to support and resource safe re-opening, he just pushed a return to normal ops. cnn.com/2020/07/08/pol…
The choice didn't have to be open vs closed: it could have been to invest in safely reopening schools (more testing, enhanced support to schools, etc etc). I wrote about this at the time:
Not going to further relitigate the schools debate here but the essential point is: these were not binary options.
Public health guidance sought to manage risk in order to reopen in a safe & incremental way.
Trump rejected that, and pushed a false binary choice.
So Collins gets the history wrong and the public health wrong. It was not "public health" pushing the choice between open vs closed, it was Trump.
"Public health" was trying to reconcile COVID precautions with restarting schools, biz, etc - and that guidance was shot down.
It's easy to second-guess hard decisions made in the fog-of-crisis period when stakes are high and good info is scarce. And plenty we should learn.
But don't rewrite history in the process...
There is a concerted disinfo effort on the right to undermine "public health" by blaming it for all COVID-related grievances and airbrushing what Trump and other pols actually did.
Collins' answer naively plays into that. Unfortunate.
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There are no words to adequately convey the rage heartbreak of the Israeli govt murdering 7 aid workers.
First and foremost, my deepest condolences and full solidarity with @WCKitchen, @chefjoseandres, and the families of the 7 heroes who gave their lives feeding Gazans.
This is not just a grave IHL violation, it is a clear war crime. Part of a clear pattern of IDF striking humanitarians routinely since early in the war, while refusing refused repeated calls to set up a functional deconfliction system that would actually protect humanitarians.
Starvation is astonishingly pervasive - touching the entire population. Typically (e.g. Somalia 2011) famine affects a subset, not the whole.
Rate of deterioration - never seen a population go from stable to famine so quickly.
Also unique - complete absence of natural factors. Typically famine emerges from mix of natural and man-made factors. Somalia 2011 was mix of war + sanctions + worst drought in 50+yrs.
This famine is purely man-made. Which means the only solutions will be man-made as well.
We @RefugeesIntl have been conducting research in Tunisia since late summer. I traveled there last month to hear from migrants firsthand.
Our findings corroborate reports from over the summer of extensive and systematic migrant abuse by the Tunisian National Guard.
The abusive detentions of Black African migrants over the summer - being rounded up off the streets and left stranded in desert border regions - are continuing.
Tunisia had halted this after global uproar, but we heard multiple firsthand accounts of recent new expulsions.