What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point.
Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want things to actually get better?
People are scared, that's just a fact, and they need to feel confident that action is being taken in their best interest. Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.
We all know that this is an exceptional event and that there will be missteps. People will forgive mistakes and setbacks and take on more risk if they are confident that there is a plan - but so far there isn't one. We're almost six months into this and the messaging is still chaos. The lack of a national strategy is what is causing this pandemic to worsen. The rot really does start at the top.
The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!
“What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point.“
That’s what happens when political parties and now the president and his administration are spreading misinformation as long it helps their short term needs. Nobody believes anything anymore. I am already worried about the election. No matter the result, a significant part of the population will most likely not trust the results. I don’t think a country can survive such distrust without significant damage to its institutions.
It's not the case. This is clear because lots of countries are having problems with teaching unions refusing to go back to work, but only one country has Trump.
There's a lot of evidence teachers aren't actually afraid, but rather, are in hock to hyper-aggressive unions. They have been paid to not work. They can keep being paid to not work. Why would they work?
To go back to the US context, there's now a teaching union in LA that's refusing to go back post-COVID until their demands are met. Their demands include .... defunding the police. Obviously.
(The Center Square) – One of the largest teachers unions in the state of California, the United Teachers Los Angeles with 35,000 members, says public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District should not reopen if certain policies are not implemented on the state and national level, including defunding the police and implementing Medicare for All
This isn't a COVID problem. This is a political problem.
I followed this link which contained the blurb about “defunding the police...” to the next link and read the summary of the actual research paper from the teachers union.
Nowhere in that summary does it mention any demands wrt defunding the police or Medicare for all.
Your comment prompted me to read the actual "research paper", vs the press article.
The article is correct. The paper is filled with hyper-leftist demands. You read the summary, not the actual paper.
Here are some quotes:
[we demand] "Explicit plans to carry out health and safety protocols without resorting to punitive policing and punishment"
"No standardized testing infringing on instructional time"
In the section about federal funding:
"Medicare for All: Coronavirus shows definitively why we need Medicare For All."
"Wealth Tax: A new tax on unrealized capital gains to California billionaires only, 1% a year until capital gains taxes are met. This would generate an estimated $10 billion a year initially"
"Defund Police: Police violence is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue.65 We must shift the astronomical amount of money devoted to policing, to education and other essential needs such as housing and public health"
It says:
"Because of the forces of structural racism, Blacks, Latinx, and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County are dying of COVID-19 at twice the rate of white residents"
"Meanwhile, U.S. billionaire wealth has surged by more than $584 billion. Over 150 of those billionaires live in California. There is money to safely restart schools, if federal, state, and local governments are willing to
finally prioritize pupils over plutocrats."
"No matter the scenario in August, it’s clear that it will not be a “normal” school year. But when “normal” means deep race and class fissures that result in increased infection and death rates in Black, Brown, and high-poverty communities; when “normal” means increasing police budgets even as schools, libraries, and public health face catastrophic cuts; when “normal” means corporations receiving trillions in bailout funds as federal commitments to support special education and high-poverty students remain unfulfilled; when “normal” means working families lining up for miles for food banks while US billionaires increased their wealth by over $584 billion — it is clear that going back to normal is not an option. This crisis presents an opportunity to create a new normal."
Has America swung that far to the right? Those demands sound to me pretty rational... How come are they hyper-leftists? What's your definition of left?
I'm not American. Beyond all the "structural racism" junk, shifting all the police funding to education sounds like a pretty hard left suggestion to me, as does abolition of standardised testing i.e. accountability of teachers.
The naked hatred of wealthy people visible in that document is also very left. Really, just read the whole thing. If it doesn't seem hyper leftist to you, that probably just means you're far to the left ;)
I'm very pleased by the decision from the top in California today about keeping schools remote until things get better. The only complaint I have is how long it took to get there. Tons of people at hundreds/thousands of school districts and private schools throughout the state have spent incredible effort debating and planning and so much effort could have been saved if the decision from the top was made earlier.
But he's making the decision for all of California. If you look at the actual data, it appears that most of the cases are coming from southern california. Also, the real data to look at is death rate, and hospitalization rate. I don't know about the death rate, but the hospitalization rate is definitely going up. However, nearly all of the patients are in southern california again. In fact, it's LA that's really the epicenter of death and hospitalization for california.
Here's the hospitalization link I'm using, because there might be better data somewhere else.
It's easy to be consumed by the fear about this disease, and that the number of cases that are rising. But we have to be careful to make informed decisions, and not compromise student learning in the entire state due to rising cases in one part of the state.
One thing, is it looks a bit like the hospitalizations might be starting to slightly level off, but it's hard to tell since it still could be trending upwards. At the very least, it doesn't look like the cases are on any kind of exponential curve.
Why do you believe keeping schools closed is better than reopening? Have you looked into the research? Most of my findings indicate that the benefits of opening safely outweigh the the risks and the adverse effects of school closure (to the children, families and society) outweigh the benefits.
Just one quote out of many:
> Weighing the health risks of reopening K-12 schools in fall 2020 against the educational risks of providing no in-person instruction, school districts should prioritize reopening schools full time, especially for grades K-5 and students with special needs, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Edit: I realize this is a contentious topic. I'm definitely not trying to stir up political wars here. I'm submitting my question and research findings here because I trust this place for civil and intellectual discourse.
That's not research. That's opinion pieces from research organizations. There's a question of values, which is a personal question. I don't want the moral weight of risking that my child catch COVID19 and cause someone else to die.
If I were a teacher, I wouldn't want to be in a position where a mistake I make can make people die.
I can run the numbers as well as the next guy, and I know the risks. I don't want my schools to reopen. If you're from a different culture, you can run the same numbers, get the same risk profile, and say "Heck, if n people die to keep m more kids in school, that's worth it," for the exact same values of n and m.
On questions of values and culture, reasonable people can disagree. Every fiber of my being can scream to prioritize life, and every fiber of your being can scream to prioritize schooling. It's entirely a question of values and culture.
As a footnote, my concern is less about death and more about long-term disability. There, we can more-or-less speculate about the risks.
It's not really a question of values because depending on what the actual death rate actually is, you can make informed objectionable decisions based off of it that two rational people with different values should agree upon. For example, if you determined that the risk of death from Covid was less than the risk of death from driving in a year, than I would argue that you should accept that risk if you're okay with driving.
Basically, in order to be rational, you should be willing to accept the risk of dying from Covid if it is less than something else you do that is more risky on a daily basis. So the idea that it is a question of morality and differing opinions of N and M isn't really accurate. It's also why we compare death rates from Covid to Influenza and other diseases because we need to understand just how big of a risk to society it actually is to properly weigh our response.
People make different decisions there too. Some drive recklessly, and some are super-conservative, exactly because of values.
But rationally, you wouldn't make determinations like the ones you're making. False->True isn't a helpful argument. COVID19 isn't the flu, and it isn't driving. Unfortunately, COVID is very, very dangerous, both in terms of death and in terms of long-term disability.
America has already lost more than the combat deaths of WWI and Vietnam combined, and that's with the level of shutdowns we've had. Many of the people who live seem to have horrible symptoms for months; it's too early to know long-term outcomes. In New York, 7.5% of the people who we know caught it died. You can apply whatever corrections you like for underreporting, etc. (and conversely, people who haven't died yet) but the death rate doesn't approach that of the flus or of driving.
If 20 million weren't unemployed, we didn't have achievement gaps, and the nation wasn't saddled with crippling fixed costs like debt, leases, and rents, we'd all be staying home. As is, it's a question of values.
I agree that a large part of it is a personal/cultural decision. I wouldn't frame it as pro reopening school people prioritize schooling over life though. That sounds pretty bad and doesn't seem fair.
Whenever I get into a car and drive, I risk death and injury to myself, my passengers and other people on the road.
I weigh the risks and benefits and make a decision that driving is worth the risk. Does that mean I value the convenience of driving over life? I don't think so.
And for the record. I'm actually undecided on the issue of reopening schools. Like many people, I assumed not reopening was obviously the rational and sane choice. But when I looked into it, I found differing data and opinions from scientific sources so it made me reconsider.
I don't see it that way. I think my language was neutral.
Your statement: "I wouldn't frame it as pro reopening school people prioritize schooling over life though. That sounds pretty bad and doesn't seem fair" takes a very specific cultural frame as well.
Plenty of people choose to risk their lives (or the lives of others) for all sorts of causes. I have as well. This statement sounds bad only if you take the position that staying alive trumps all other considerations. That's a very modern, Western perspective. Which is not to say Americans and Western Europeans act to protect lives at all costs, but to slightly generalize, Americans and Western Europeans morally believe that protecting lives is worth all costs. When that's not done, that's a moral compromise.
People risk lives to volunteer in dangerous countries, to skydive, for ideological causes, for God and country, to be #1 in athletics competitions, or to earn enough to feed their families. All of those reflect different value systems. The exact same statement: "Would you risk you life to protect your honor by ____?" will make you sound like a horrible person if you say "yes" in some cultures and "no" in others.
I don't think saying "I am glad to risk a few lives to make sure kids get an education" sound bad or seems unfair, and I don't think any less of people who say it. It's just a different value system from mine.
Where I do have problems is where people push their value system on others. I understand see the public health perspective, where your actions affect my health and my decisions affect your health.
But when my actions don't effect you (for example, keeping my child home), I should be able to follow my values. That goes broadly too -- if you decide not to teach your kids evolution, that should be your choice too.
> Most of my findings indicate that the benefits of opening safely outweigh the the risks and the adverse effects of school closure (to the children, families and society) outweigh the benefits.
Did you read the original-original comment? This is exactly what they're talking about man
I share your pleasure in the decision, but staunchly disagree with you about the method used to reach it.
The correct decision was reached, in time (before the start of the school year) for it to make a difference.
Tons of people and thousands of schools vigorously debating is the democratic process. A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism, and as we've seen repeatedly this year, authoritarian decisions are resisted even when they're the right decision.
For something like masking, you can justify it with the urgency of the situation (even though I'm compelled to add that "the top" got this one wrong during the crucial months of February and March). For starting school in the fall, you can't.
I think you are at least a bit misconstruing direct democracy vs representative democracy and instead calling it democracy vs authoritarianism.
The people handing down the aforementioned decisions were elected specifically to do things like this. That doesn't outright make it authoritarianism. (Yes, most elected US politicians on both sides of the aisle skew fairly authoritarian, but that doesn't mean the process itself is authoritarian)
I prefer to think of these words as points in a spectrum, rather than definitional prisons with tight boundaries.
Allowing school districts to do what they are constituted to do, is more democratic than delegating it to the State governments, which is more authoritarian.
Authoritarian is also not an antonym of democratic. They correlate, but not as strongly as any advocate for democracy would prefer.
> A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism
Actually not so; it is only centralised. The democratic process is pretty clear that the people want education decisions handed down by an authority "at the top".
A decentralised approach to eduction would let parents make on-the-day decisions about where to send their children and probably have some sort of market-based approach to how education was funded (maybe even parent-pays). That approach has been mostly rejected politically.
The vigorous debating resulted in many school districts actually making plans to reopen in a variety of ways. All that effort became moot when Newsom announced his decision today.
I’m not, California should have got its shit together and instituted comprehensive tracking and tracing commensurate with the needs of public education restarting. By failing to build testing and tracing capacity we have wasted the time bought for us through mass unemployment. California is the 5th largest economy in the world, we could have done this alone and ignored the rest of the us, but we didn’t and that is a failure.
> we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus
This statement implies that there's a way to completely eradicate the virus, eg. if everyone in the world stays locked in their homes for 6 weeks, then the virus will be eradicated. That's not realistic, the level of coordination required to make that happen does not exist.
So eradicating the virus was never on the table, no matter how much we lock down.
I actually chose stomp over eradicate because I wanted to imply that there would still be some left but that it would be a manageable amount. That's interesting that you took it the opposite way; I'm sorry for the confusion.
I agree, eradication was probably impossible in the United States. What I thought we all agreed on at the start of this thing was to lock down so we could "flatten the curve". Remember that? While we were locked down there would be an enormous marshaling of resources so we could equip everyone with PPE/Masks, get testing going, and do contract tracing. But because we didn't lock down the entire nation we snuffed out the hot spots in Washington and New York but let new ones fester and they are now out of control.
> Decimation was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. ... The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth".
JFK international airport is a 20 minute ride from the heart of Manhattan and we have a "transportation security agency" that can't find physical contraband in a suitcase much less be expected to be gatekeepers of health for the nation.
Suppose we drastically lower transmission. How many times should NYC and the surrounding areas be locked down because someone flew in from a country with loose contagion protocols?
Besides waiting for a vaccine and mass infections of those unwilling or unable to stay at home, I haven't seen a concrete proposal from anyone on what we should have or should be doing next.
Logistically, it's easier to force everyone arriving into mandatory two-week quarantine, than finding a contraband whatever hidden in a sea of suitcases.
Here in Canada it was even done between provinces. My region has a bubble of four small provinces with few cases. But even so to travel across a provincial border in the bubble you will need proof of residency.
We didn't snuff out hot spots. The virus was/is still in NYC and Washington. No matter how long we locked down for it would still be there waiting to emerge after the lock down ended. That was the problem with the lockdown. It was touted as a solution when its just a delaying tactic.
Schools are the same. Keeping them closed is just a delaying tactic. And like the lockdown, unless we delay until a vaccine then it's a pointless delay.
I don't remember lockdowns being touted as a solution. I always understood it as a delaying tactic so things could be brought back under some control. Flatten the curve and all that. NYC didn't eliminate the virus but they've kept their curve flat so it's not getting out of control again.
This delaying tactic is all we have for right now, its likely saved thousands of lives, and that's not nothing. What is your plan for the next stage?
You’re right, that was all we could arrive at at the time. We don’t have the plan that says test everyone once a week, support the folks who need to quarantine as a result, and really fence this off for 3 months til it’s down to little pockets. We don’t have a plan that says follow the regions, the counties, the communities, and work hardest on suppressing it where it was and where it was heading.
We did choose a bad option, now people who’ve been locked down are exhausted and ornery while the ones who didn’t are finally getting the idea.
And for some reason “no shirt no shoes no service” is well understood, no blowing secondhand smoke is accepted all over, but the right to infect is held as culturally important.
It's not clear what the impact of the lockdowns are. You say that they've saved thousands, but in a lot of places we are back to where we were before the lockdown. Or even doing worse. I suspect that the lockdowns delayed deaths, but in most places will not have substantially reduced them.
The plan for the next stage is all of the public health measures that other countries have used to contain it. Masks, hygiene, social distancing, contact tracing, etc.
At this point we know how to stop it. Compliance is not there and every day that passes it goes down.
The delaying was so that we 'delayed' or avoided overfilling the hospitals and causing a lot of secondary death and damage. Delay people getting sick, reduce the max. Spread the infections out over time.
Well if you take eradication off the table, then you have to assume the entire susceptible population will eventually get the virus. So I guess, I don't see the benefit of "stomping" the virus down to some small level. It was at a very small level back in February, and then grew. If we get it back down to that small level, it will just grow again. There's no benefit to locking down for 3 months to have it grow in July instead of March.
A controlled burn approach makes a lot more sense, but that is not the same as "stomping" the virus.
Stomping the virus down to a manageable level so it doesn't overwhelm hospitals was the main goal of "Flatten the curve". We actually succeeded in quite a few hot spots to do this - NYC being the biggest example. Covid still exists there and people are still dying but it's not out of control. If you stay on top of it, it doesn't just grow again.
I'm not sure why you say there was no benefit to locking down. It clearly did wonders for NYC. It's likely that thousands of people were saved by this action.
What you're describing may be a controlled burn approach under a different name. After a certain point, the virus infects the entire susceptible population, and then it stops because everyone susceptible has died or obtained immunity.
Suppose 30% of the population is susceptible to covid. If lockdown policy slows the spread of the virus to 1% of the population per month, it would take 30 months before the pandemic passes. That's a very long time to do lockdown, very damaging to the economy and people's livelihoods.
I've read a lot about overwhelmed hospitals. I'm not clear on if it's happened in any widespread fashion. The media coverage tends to emphasize the bad cases and ignore the boring cases. It doesn't seem like people are unable to get medical care. I have checked the Texas online dashboard now and then, and currently about 10,000 people in a state of 29,000,000 are hospitalized with covid.
The logical policy would be let the virus pass through the population as fast as possible without overwhelming hospitals, given the specifics of any geography.
I'm sorry but you making one incorrect assumption after another.
No, it would not be logical to let the virus go. It would kill some people and causes other health effects. We don't want a few million deaths. Plus now there is clear evidence that some people don't have antibodies after they get it, a few months later, and this is not completely unknown in other diseases. Some people have some protection though. Plus there are people who get it a second time as far as we can tell.
There are not infinite number of hospital beds. In NY they were past the limits for a month, killing med staff and also ptsd for them. This was barely avoided in Seattle. It's happening now in Houston. The people sick with cv19 are blocking others from being treated, and some people stay home. The hospitals financial plans start to fail because all the other medical procedures are stopped because its dangerous to be at the hospital and they are repurposing say dermatologists to work in the cv19 wards.
I think some of what you are saying is true, but you may be lacking some balance in your sources of information. For example you say:
> It would kill some people and causes other health effects. We don't want a few million deaths.
A few million deaths would be in the 2-3 million range. This doesn’t seem realistic based on the data we have so far. About 140,000 people in the United States have died from the virus after about 5 months. It would require a 20x increase to have 3 million people to die from it. That seems like a really big reach.
> There are not infinite number of hospital beds. In NY they were past the limits for a month, killing med staff and also ptsd for them. This was barely avoided in Seattle
To be frank I've stopped caring enough to follow the news in detail anymore (which itself probably says something), so I don't know whether the rest of your comment is accurate or not. However, I can attest firsthand that this part pertaining to Seattle is completely false.
I live in Seattle and have had multiple friends/family members hospitalized with covid19. We were nowhere close to overwhelming hospital capacity. At the beginning of all of this, we had a massive field hospital in Century Link stadium set up and shut down without seeing a single patient, as well as a hospital ship which was supposed to harbor here but ended up being redirected (I believe to Los Angeles) because we didn't need it. Even now with the resurgence that's been happening, our metrics around ICU utilization are where we're performing best:
I'm assuming good faith and that you're simply worried just like everyone is, but you are spreading misinformation here. Again, I can't really attest with good knowledge to anything other than Seattle, but the fact that you are wrong about that makes me skeptical of the rest of your comment.
Effective testing and contact tracing is sufficient to dramatically reduce the spread of the virus.
If we're a year away from a vaccine or treatment, then we don't need to burn down society to stop it this month. But if we act in a way that causes millions of infections, we're inflicting unnecessary harm on thousands.
We've also learned more about how to keep people alive and how to slow the spread of the virus since February, so it's useful to postpone that exponential growth as long as possible.
If you stomp it down enough then a few relatively light measures (masks, some distancing, some contact tracing) are enough to keep it down. That's what's happening in Europe right now. Sure, eventually everyone would be infected at least once given infinite time. But that doesn't matter, what matters is how many people get infected before a vaccine is developed and widely deployed.
If you keep the infection rate low enough you can keep the hospitals from being over capacity and also delay infections until after a vaccine is developed and administered, thus preventing the infection. Both of these states would have the benefit of reducing the total number of deaths. When the lockdown talk started, I thought that was the point.
Time does wonders. We have much better knowledge of treatment options than we had in March, which makes a real difference in lives lost. And eventually, we might (might!) get vaccines. So the longer the curve is flat, the more time we have to learn and craft better interventions.
But, if you want to know what draconian policy really is, you can look at NZ. That place is no joke. It's state-managed isolation or a quarantine facility for at least 14 days and until you test negative.
There are a bunch of reports of people breaking out of these facilities after having been there for more than a month. Just zero chance this would work in America.
Nobody has been in those places for more than a month, its 2 weeks.
The 'escapees' so far have been an alcoholic (went to the nearest bottle store) and a couple of people with mental issues.
The REASON those people escaped is because the places aren't prisons, or even close. They were hotels, high quality hotels in some places...with no police presence at all...
There was a bunch of fuss made by the public because it was eventually realised that people were being allowed out without testing to attend funerals under a compassionate exemption.
Your description makes it sound like something very different to the reality.
Its toughening up a little now, because everyone in NZ wanted them to toughen up, but for a long while the reality was that all you had to do to leave was decide that you wanted to leave.
Most people didn't, of course, because most people aren't dicks.
Adding an Australian perspective here. Our politicians did not share the same approach as New Zealand (which started with a level 4 lockdown and stayed there for 6-8 weeks).
The approach here has certainly been more unified than the US, but states are encouraged to pursue their own approaches, with some states (WA, SA, Queensland) having much more success than others (NSW, Victoria). The plan here was never to pursue eradication, but to flatten the curve and keep infection rates manageable.
I wish we'd considered eradication more seriously. As a country we have the resources to support the country through that 6 week period, and the national government would have done a decent enough job in ensuring the population had sufficient support through that period.
Australia's is an interesting case because the recent spike coincides (~2 week lag) with the lifting of most of the restrictions. It's also only really spiking in one state (although NSW may be slipstreaming Victoria).
This is evidence that the lockdown rules were having a significant effect on suppression, and eradication may have been within reach had the easing been delayed another month or two.
Sorry is the implication that the US is in the state it’s in because infected people are continuously walking across the border and infecting more people?
If no, then being an island isn’t really relevant here.
No, it’s because 100 different people (according to genetic studies) started separate chains of infections in New York City due to international travel, immediately overwhelming any efforts to do contact tracing.
I invite you to spend some time with Hawaii's COVID statistics before coming to the conclusion that being an island, or not, is irrelevant to US outcomes.
Vietnam. Long border with China, two million people cross every year, population of 95 million, zero covid deaths because they got serious early and everyone more masks.
There is absolutely no chance that they had 0 covid related deaths anywhere in the country of 95 million. None. Not to say that they didn’t act well and where prepared though.
This. And maybe we shouldn't trust China's reported data, but Europe is almost doing miraculously well if you compare to the USA. Not going for eradication, but containment.
With containment, everything else is possible (healthcare system not overloaded, economy can be opened up, schools can reopen, etc.).
The US has capitulated completely, and even containment isn't really on the table nationally; on a state-by-state basis, some states may achieve a level of containment, but others are simply not even trying (or like Georgia, actively banning containment measures like local mask enforcement orders).
IMO, the US will almost certainly make up a lot of ground on the deaths per capita metric (or leapfrog entirely), given the explosion of new cases starting in June and the lagging growth in deaths that comes after cases. Scroll down to the "Deaths" section with the weekly per capita "heat spectrum" of sorts, and the US recently has reached red hot over the past few weeks, while European counterparts have been much cooler: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-m...
That helps, but at least for Spain and Italy, the hypothesis seems to be that the virus was already widely spread by the time lock-down started, so a lot of transmission still happened during lock-down until it got under control. I think it's the same for UK and France. but I'm less familiar.
Other EU countries like Germany, Austria or Poland fared much better than Spain, France, UK and Italy.
Maybe different cultures (e.g. how people relate, how compliant they are, how many people willingly ignore measures, etc.) also play a role.
The main thing Europe is doing, is border lockdowns. Some borders are open, but in general only those to countries with low Covid cases. Other travelers get quarantine, policed to various degrees.
It's not really clear they are having better results. I don't know what the numbers are out of China, but certainly in Europe they had really big outbreaks in Italy, France, the UK, Spain, and other places as well. Their outcomes are pretty similar, in terms of deaths per capita, to the United States.
I think most media outlets are over-emphasizing the impact of government interventions, and under-emphasizing the impact of other factors that affect the severity of the virus. These could be factors like the health of the population--do they have a lot of smokers? obesity?, the age of the population, or other factors like the use of public transit.
It's appealing to assume that the most important factor in deciding outcomes is government policy. This is reassuring because we (society) can control government policy. But I haven't seen any good data to suggest that government policy is the most impactful factor compared to other hypotheses.
> Their outcomes are pretty similar, in terms of deaths per capita, to the United States.
Except that they are all now on downward trajectories while being more open (as opposed to the US, which is on an upward trajectory). Travel is allowed in Europe. Schools are open. Bars are open. And they are still on a downward trajectory.
And furthermore, there are locations in the United States that have handled the virus pretty well and are powerless to stop people from coming up there and messing it all up.
“Mike, from Old Town, who did not want to share his last name, ordered a vodka Red Bull before getting back in line with friends at Old Crow Smokehouse’s curbside bar. He had just gotten back from a vacation in Dallas, Texas, with a friend, where he left a day early due to the spike in cases and the state’s rolling back on its openings.
“[It feels] like I’m the problem,” he said with a nervous laugh as he talked about being out and about amid the pandemic. Looking around at the throngs of people drinking and walking around Wrigleyville, he said it is concerning.”
What the hell are we supposed to do about that with zero national plan? All the local shutdowns in the world are useless unless we can put the interstate commerce clause on hold for a bit.
> What the hell are we supposed to do about that with zero national plan?
Looking at California, a state where borders are mostly in remote areas that aren't especially porous (compared to NYC/NJ), there's still be a huge surge, and nothing points to borders being the reason. It's mostly state and county-level policy. States around NYC seem to have stomped it down relatively well, despite there being three states involved.
The US is huge and diverse, so you're not going to get a "national plan." The best you can hope for is guidance.
> as opposed to the US, which is on an upward trajectory
You have the wrong scale in mind. The US is closer to the EU than a single country here - individual states have totally different trajectories. For example, Illinois, where I am, looks like those European countries that were hit hard early and is also opening up.
Except that big outbreaks were used as learning experience by other places who managed to contain issue before it became big and are opening now. While having enough testing capacitiy and experimenting with exact rules that allow them to open up.
Yeah, based on the self reported numbers out of Iran, which you can trust about as much as you can their state news agency on any number of topics. Let’s not forget they were simultaneously denying the virus’ prevalence while their political leaders were dropping like flies and they were digging mass graves that could be seen from space.
With the White House issuing orders for hospitals to report directly to them instead of the CDC, I'm not sure how long we'll be able to trust the US numbers.
It depends on the denominator. There is no free lunch. If there is an estimate for death prevention, what is the estimated cost in lives?
Given that death is a certainty for all, how many lost person-days do the 50k deaths represent? Since the lock down means no normal activities such as routine doctor visits, how many person-days would be lost due to undetected illness or delayed treatment?
Staying locked in is a strategy for preventing excess deaths from overwhelming a health system. It isn't a long term strategy for eliminating all virus related death.
Here's the other side - How many deaths are acceptable? If death is a certainty for all, should we just get rid of the health care systems? Should we stop research into some of the diseases? Which ones? How many person-days/productivity has been lost because of preventable deaths?
We are talking about a 4/6/8 week lockdown, that's not long term, that's immediate term.
No, no, please don’t waste time constructing persons of straw. One insinuating that my position is “get rid of healthcare” is especially odious since the counterfactual I raised was one considering impacts of preventative care missed due to lockdowns. You made a rhetorical claim: “locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?”
How do you know if it is worth it or not if you don’t know the cost of being locked in for 6 weeks? Ignoring the other track doesn’t seem a path to a well considered decision.
I'm not sure if it's worth it or not, but after you end the lockdown, you have the same situation you did at the start of the lockdown.
I think there's a huge misconception in many media sources that lockdown will somehow eliminate the virus. It can change the onset pattern of the virus, but that's it.
It's amazing to wonder whether any step, any inconvenience is worth saving even lives when the magnitude of that is in the thousands. Countries have literally been bombed over far fewer deaths.
One of the main points of the lockdowns were to get the infection rate down to a level where testing and tracing is tractable, not to outright eliminate the virus necessarily. It seems like most states in the US were not prepared for that when they decided to open back up, and now places like FL are in this impossible situation — how do you trace 10k+ infections a day?
Even if the US is in the same situation now as we were at the start of the SIP orders in March, given that many other advanced countries have the virus under control, we should have an easier time getting materials and equipment to deal with the virus now.
Plus we have more evidence to base our decisions on. We can look at specific other countries and see what works, assuming people don't turn it into politics like they did with masks. It's really sad that some people believe wearing a cloth mask decreases your blood oxygen saturation, regardless of their education or previous interactions with doctors/dentists/etc that already wore masks on a regular basis pre-pandemic.
How could that possibly have happened? Food needs to be planted, harvested(in many situations primarily by migratory workers from other countries) and delivered, power needs to be kept up, necessary medical supplies needs manufactoring, water needs to be cleaned and delivered. There's no scenario where the world gets to collectively take a break
But if everyone had of x for y weeks and that prevented z deaths, how is that not worth it?
x=stopped driving
y=52
z=34,000
or
x=not gone skiing
y=4 months
z=41
I'm not sure where the line is, but there are a number of things we could ban to lower the death rate. That doesn't mean I disagree with your assessment, but I'm just not sure I have any logical cut off point for what I would support and what I wouldn't other than just the way it feels looking at the numbers and how much it inconveniences me personally. (And I happen to like lockdown...)
Also, in case you haven’t noticed, we are not even remotely “locked down”. If you go downtown where I live (and in countless other cities in the USA) you will find people out horsing around, ignoring stay-at-home, eating at their restaurants, shopping for their khakis, and basically pretending the virus doesn’t exist. Traffic has not changed. People aren’t wearing masks (despite a statewide order). And where is enforcement? Nonexistent. I’m not convinced we can do a national lockdown because no state has even managed to implement a statewide or even citywide lockdown.
We have powerless leadership, proclaiming half-assed and unenforced orders, more worried about saying the right things than doing the right things.
If we were actually serious about beating the virus, downtown would be totally empty and I wouldn’t hear constant traffic and human activity from my backyard.
It’s bizarre to me that given the conclusion that this is the only solution people’s immediate instinct is to just say it’s not possible. Nothing’s possible if you don’t even attempt it.
>Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.
No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus. And the signal/noise ratio right now is absolutely tiny, especially considering how much damage the media has done by unambiguously turning this into an opportunity to bash Trump. Regardless of how you feel about the presidency, if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests (both left and right) began; and while I do believe it is shameful that we were caught with our pants down, scrambling to gather supplies nearly 3 months late, I'll remind you that so was everyone else.
Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. We also shouldn't be applying the same policies to urban and rural areas.
You know what would really answer this question to me? What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR? That's pretty much worst case exposure and seeing as I haven't heard of doctors dying in droves, I'm inclined to start believing that people do have and/or develop immunity and the fatality/complication rate really is extremely low, for whatever reason. But I need data to be sure.
Now either this strategy isn't as good as you claim it to be or NYT, CNBC, Business Insider, and the WSJ and all the analysts and experts they cite are working together to cook up a conspiracy.
Except for your NYT article, these are all pieces from more than 2 months ago. And the NYT has been exceptionally poor at reporting on covid with an even hand. What it fails to mention is that though Sweden's economy will contract by the same amount as it's Scandanavian neighbors, about -8%, it's a huge win compared to UK/Italy/France which will contract by 22-30%.
It's irresponsible to believe that journalists and editorial organizations are able to cut through their own emotions and biases during what is one of the most tense times in recent history. Everyone has an opinion. The only thing without an opinion are the data.
For Sweden that data is pretty great:
- 15 deaths in the past 7 days
- ~1200 cases
If you only want to compare Sweden to its neighbors you're cherry-picking what you want your argument to say. Sweden's strategy divorced them from their neighbors and put them in the boat with us. We are apples to apples. Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges. Since we are both of the same strategy it's entirely reasonable to point to Sweden and say "hey, it's about as bad there as it is here and they didn't go hard lockdown and kids are still in school".
It's not like we can go back in time and follow New Zealand. That ship sailed five months ago.
To get a real look at the data I strongly recommend people get on Twitter and follow any of these accounts to get a good grasp on the overall situation as told by the numbers and as a bonus you'll get:
- how deaths are reported and what that means for the narrative
- cases and their level of significance
- hospital census, dwell, and coding
@ethicalskeptic
@aginnt
@boriquagato
@natesilver538 (we don't agree on how to handle this, but he's been fair in reporting data as it should be understood)
@MLevitt_NP2013 (Nobel laureate)
@AlexBerenson
> Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges.
Your logic is simply wrong here. If you want to assess the effect of the lockdown, you compare effects between similar countries that did and didn't have a lockdown. Apple trees with fertilizer vs apple trees without fertilizer. You don't learn about the effect of fertilizer by comparing apple trees with fertilizer vs orange trees with fertilizer.
I don't think anyone is arguing that Sweden's outcome is better than Norway's. I'm certainly not.
What I'm saying is that you can go without a lockdown and avoid the doomsday scenario that was so proffered about. Everyone was pointing to Sweden as though they were a cautionary tale of a state that was about to wipe out 10% of its population.
Yet here we are and that didn't play out. So the narrative switched to "but against its neighbors!". Yeah Sweden did worse, but they also showed you didn't need to go into hiding to get the same result the rest of the quasi-lockdown camp got.
What you're implying is that if the United States went full no-lockdown strategy our outcome would be different than Sweden. Whereas logically a virus does not care whether the host is Swedish, Ugandan, or American. A human is a human.
> What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR?
Largely irrelevant, because nurses and doctors should be wearing PPE, are trained to work in infectious environments, work in buildings designed to prevent disease vectors, and places that are sanitized regularly. You should see significantly less cases in healthcare than you would elsewhere.
And just in general, the economic impact of letting the virus run rampant would be astronomical. Even outside of deaths, those with severe cases are ending up with likely permanent damage to their hearts, lungs, or kidneys, which will require increased medical costs and likely people who can no longer work.
1. All sorts of problems with that Statista chart. Just for starters it doesn't take into account number of tests being performed per 1m/pp.
2. Would it be astronomical? Total speculation. That's just a hysterical statement that doesn't point to a problem or a solution.
There is some anecdotal evidence that a small fraction of those that develop symptoms but do not become fatal can have lasting effects from the virus. There is no evidence that this is widespread. However, it's a favorite place for people to point to when they want to move the goal posts when deaths aren't going up.
1) Chile, Kuwait, and Singapore have similar rates of testing to the US [1]
2) Current studies show roughly somewhere between 10-20% of hospitalized patients ending up with heart damage, increasing their future risks of heart attacks and strokes.[2][3] Up to 36% of hospitalized patients are displaying neurological symptoms, with possible damage.[4] Up to 60% are ending up with ARDS which may be permanent.[5]
Extracting that with current numbers, assuming we had a 50% infection rate, 15% hospitalization rate [6][7], and a 1% death rate, we'd have ~1.5 million dead, ~22.5 million hospitalized, ~3.375 million with heart damage, ~8 million with neurological issues, ~13.5 million with ARDS.
Obviously many of these would overlap, but it sounds pretty devastating to me.
Tests per 1mm/pop:
US - 140k
Chile - 71k
Kuwait - 106k
Singapore - 172k (most definitely not a 2nd or 3rd world country. HDI 7th in the world and GDP/pc 8th in the world. Both higher than the U.S.)
You're stacking your numbers and assuming a worst and numerically impossible scenario. When you take into account asymptomatic cases that are extrapolated via serology samples and not just the positive PCR tests you get a fatality rate of 0.24% (and falling) with a huge age gradient down to less than 0.008% for those under 40.
Knowing that the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic dramatically lowers the scary numbers you just threw out. And you must know by now the prevalence of asymptomatic cases.
Also [5] has a sample size of 36 from May, can't tell if it's peer reviewed.
[6] is a mish-mash of CDC numbers so not sure what you're pointing to.
[2] Though worth noting, I don't think 19.7% is indicative of anything out of the range of ordinary when you consider the at-risk group for covid. You would need to control this by age and all-cause mortality. Same for [4] and [5]
The question of "with" vs "from" covid is very real. Now, I'm not saying that covid is benign. It can do damage. What I'm saying that it is significantly less dangerous than people that want to remain in lock down would lead you to believe.
The sheer number of people likely to come out of this with disabilities or serious-but-not-disabled level chronic problems is really depressing. Just the lung issues (didn't know the term ARDS, thanks for that) will be terrible.
> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.
Sweden did a voluntary lock down, which was in practice pretty comprehensive. Even then they still had a death rate per capita many times higher than its neighbours, and it was economically hit just as hard.
Perhaps it was worth a try, but it didn't pan out. Their government even formed a commission to figure out why it went so bad.
This is the critical aspect of the Sweden example: the people of Sweden are rational and everything isn't hyper politicized. Even though they tried a different approach, many still took reasonable precautions. There still were significant restrictions on operations like bars and restaurants.
Sweden was never like the "COVID denier" communities in the United States.
And still its results are relatively terrible compared to its neighbours and peers.
It also wasn't completely voluntary, they closed high schools, they banned gatherings with more than 50 people, they limited how many people could visit bars and restaurants and made them sit at a table. The government didn't sit back and do nothing like many people seem to think.
These restrictions with some give or take are what the world will have to adopt until it's either eliminated or we get a vaccine.
> it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus.
oramit said:
"The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!"
That only works when we have food to feed everyone ... which requires a surprising amount of people to stay at work. Besides the obvious people working in the fields/farms, there's a lot of support businesses that need to stay open. The people who repairs the tractors, the people who make parts for the feeders in the barns, etc, which need support for their own manufacturing equipment.
We can't just "shut it all down" worldwide and not run out of food.
You've been downvoted quite a bit but I think your post is a good example of the problem at hand.
Yes, we have to make choices about costs and we can't save everyone. Yes, the data is super noisy and its hard to tell what is happening. Yes, the media loves bashing Trump.
But none of that is important because then you go right into downplaying things and saying that "if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests". The tone-deafness of this sentence is astounding to me.
People are scared, telling them that actually we only failed as badly as other countries, is, wow.
Yes. This is largely the problem. Unfortunately, I don't think it would have mattered whether it was a left or right president. The side not in office would have done the opposite. Everything is a political proxy war right now.
I'm not so certain. There is extreme political polarization, yes, but I don't think we can honestly look at the situation at hand and not see the giant Trump shaped elephant in the room. He hasn't ever governed as a "unity" president. That has worked for him when things were generally humming along but it fails catastrophically in times of crisis. Lots of people (myself included) simply don't believe he can put aside partisanship and his own ambition to do what is in the best interest of the country. I feel like my mistrust has been proven correct.
Remember, at the start of this crisis Trump did start holding regular Covid briefings, there were big actions taken, and his approval numbers went up quite a bit. But then he backed away from all that, and started actively undermining things. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
I'm honestly baffled by it because he doesn't even have to really succeed to get good approval numbers, he just has to look like he cares, but he can't manage even that.
Contrast this with Andrew Cuomo of New York, who by any objective measure totally screwed things up. It didn't matter though - he was decisive, held daily briefings, and at least looked like he was putting in effort to fix things. Now his popularity is up a ton.
https://buffalonews.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/public-...
That's really the core of my entire thesis. The public doesn't expect perfection in the face of something like this - I don't. But I do expect the politician to give a damn, or at least put in the effort of looking like they giving a damn.
A crisis like this is exactly the sort of thing you can rally the country around. There was a brief two week period in late March where it actually happened! It was a choice by Trump, which then filtered down into Trump leaning local politicians, to turn it into a proxy war.
Believe me, I'm cynical about politics too, but I think you're engaging in the worse kind of "both-sidesism" with this. Is your contention really that if Hilary was president, Republicans would have all locked down, and Democrats would not? I just don't see it. We only truly know about the timeline we are in right now, shrugging your shoulders and saying things wouldn't be better anyway in another timeline you don't know anything about isn't helpful.
What I'm saying is that if Sec. Clinton were in office the red states would be doing exactly what they're doing now. It wouldn't have made a lick of difference.
I should have been more explicit on that.
> Contrast this with Andrew Cuomo of New York...
Exactly. I think this is part of the problem on the left. The desire to do something, anything, when sometimes doing nothing, or less, is the right thing. And then if it doesn't work out saying "yeah but we did something!".
Frankly, I think the outcome in NY was inevitable regardless of policy. So I don't blame Cuomo but I also don't think he's a hero. He just did his job and showed up. The way the data has shaped up against other jurisdictions around the country/globe I think they would have gotten about the same outcome regardless of the policy.
> It was a choice by Trump, which then filtered down into Trump leaning local politicians, to turn it into a proxy war
That's fair. He did "start it". He's a real problem for sure. Anything he touches or recommend almost can't be touched by the left for fear of keeping him in office.
But same for the right. There's no way the red states would have saddled up with Clinton.
> What I'm saying is that if Sec. Clinton were in office the red states would be doing exactly what they're doing now. It wouldn't have made a lick of difference.
Sure it would. Heck if a Republican that wasn't Trump was in office now, there wouldn't have been the White House bully pulpit being used against basic safety measures and White House emergency powers abused to block states from getting PPE and other emergency supplies. We'd probably have a state aid bill, too, though probably a less generous one than a Democratic Administration and Senate would have been on board for, but probably more than nothing. Which make it financially more viable to do lockdowns (states often can't, Constitutionally, borrow for no capital expenses, and procedurally have a difficult process to approve new debt and have a high cost of borrowing, the Feds have none of those problems). Leadership matters and there's a reason Trump's numbers are falling even among Republicans.
Thanks for the clarification. I thought you meant a complete reversal. If Hillary were president I think red states would have resisted but its hard for me to imagine they would be doing it at the same level. Maybe i'm being too Pollyanna there.
I also agree that simply doing something, anything, isn't always the right approach. I'm an independent who hangs out with the left and there is a tendency to reach for the hammer of government a bit too often. The feds shouldn't have led the charge by any means, but once individual states had started to shut down, a coordinated federal response to get this fully under control would have been the best approach. I think the end game for this will be something like that.
Here’s the thing, you can be as ideological about this as you want but if you look around the world at what has worked, empirically, national level intervention with a large testing and tracing effort at that level is what works. The best approach is what keeps people from overwhelming hospitals, not what meets some platonic ideal of overlapping spheres of influence.
There are two camps causing trouble preventing COVID-19 mitigation: the Radical Right where they are in office (Trump, Arizona, Florida,...), and the Radical Right where the Left or moderate Right are in office (Michigan).
This is what I'm talking about. I want to preface this with: I've voted blue ticket my entire life...
The numbers just do not back this claim up. NY/NJ/CT all have the absolute worst outcomes so far. NY and Gov Cuomo couldn't be more adored by the media. Meanwhile the red south and others that never locked down are sitting at about 10% the deaths of the blue northeast.
You can say wait two weeks, but we've been waiting two weeks on AZ, FL, and GA, for about 6 weeks now. Cases have gone up but deaths have not. Current trends suggest they will tick up, but they will not go vertical.
So I'm not sure what the real problem is that you point to.
>NY/NJ/CT all have the absolute worst outcomes so far.
They were also hit early in this ongoing pandemic and had to fight hard to get it under control. That red states are now ticking up is a sad commentary on their governance, which is a mix of hubris, denialism, and willful ignorance.
> Cases have gone up but deaths have not.
The average age of the infected is lowering, and they tend to survive.
> An illness that lasts two weeks and then goes away
Two big assumptions. This is true for many, but between this and death we also have people sick for months or with possibly permanent health damage. We also have completely asymptomatic cases. It's a spectrum, not few specific outcomes.
> You can say wait two weeks, but we've been waiting two weeks on AZ, FL, and GA, for about 6 weeks now.
> Cases have gone up but deaths have not.
You seem to have a severe misunderstanding of the virus. The reason why people say to wait two weeks is because there's a massive lag time. Not only is there a long incubation period but there's also a massive period of time between exhibiting symptoms and death. People who exhibit symptoms will die around two to eight weeks afterwards.
When you see cases go up, that means we can expect any deaths to follow within the next month or so. That's exactly what we're seeing in Texas right now with a huge spike in cases and many of our hospitals overwhelmed.
NY/NJ/CT have had the worst outcome so far because they got hit the hardest early on. They've already passed over the death hump assuming there isn't a second wave. For us in Texas though? Just wait and see. In fact I'm going to favorite your post and get back to you when it starts getting really bad.
And this is because protesting during a pandemic never leads to a rise in infections, so the thousands of BLM protesters surely had nothing to do with rising case numbers.
BLM protests where, on the whole, at least masked. This is a huge contrast from the literal “we will not wear masks” protests that erupted from the radical right.
There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to capturing videos of such people refusing to wear masks or socially distance. Based on the non-negligible amount of (sometimes racist) right-wing talking points they often devolve into, I’d say many would be considered on the right.
In any case, weird attempt to distract against the current sitting president and radical-right legislative bodies of several states acting in direct conflict with scientific advice on how to reduce the rate of infection.
Well just in terms of chance of infection a mass gathering is much worse than individuals refusing to follow orders. We have those her e in Germany as well, including right and left wing conspiracy theorists.
The financial damage is completely self inflicted. There is plenty of food, housing, and other necessities of all kinds except some items specific to treating the pandemic itself (which is important, but not the goal of "reopen it the economy").
Closing restaurants and football stadiums doesn't deprive anyone of the necessities of life and health. We can watch TV for entertainment. People doing essential work haven't stopped.
The only economic-related suffering are people being pushed out of their homes by landlords, or refused food (of which there is plenty) by the controllers of the food supply.
Government officals, corporation managers, billionaires and few others are simply unwilling to let go of their obsession with hoarding money, an imaginary social invention (which is of course useful in easier times), for a few months while we fight the commmonest real enemy the world has ever faced.
I have pretty much given up on everybody at this point. I have already pulled my kid from school and will not send them back. I am in a single income family and I am now working from home.
All actions and purchases at this point are to help us to become more independant from the system. Society and government at large has shown itself to be unreliable and undependable. I am also making longer term plans to move out of my current state.
I think one of the things that has been so disheartening to me about the pandemic is that it has shown how we just can't really do anything anymore in the US.
I mean, just look at PPE. I understand being a little flat footed when the pandemic first started, but it's been nearly 6 months now. I would have expected mass mobilization to pump out N95 masks, gloves, gowns, face shields, etc. by the millions. I mean, look how many heavy military vehicles the US managed to build during WWII, and then consider we can't even build masks of sufficient quantity.
And this just follows an ever growing set of problems that the US has just oddly accepted without the political will to do anything, things like our totally f'd healthcare system, mass shootings, climate change, etc.
I disagree, though, with the sibling comment that says "Don't give up! Don't withdraw!" It's not like there aren't other functioning societies in the world that are way less broken than the US. Staying behind in some mythical "fight" is just misplaced patriotism IMO. There are other countries that live the ideals that I used to associate with America (real freedom, upward mobility, democracy, rule of law, etc.) much better than the US does these days.
All of this is a consequence of ideologies that have become popular in the US both in politics and in business. Having government direct a mobilization is not acceptable. A mandate that people wear masks is not acceptable. Having manufacturing capacity to make low-value products in large numbers in the US is bad business when poorer countries can do it for less. Having spare inventory is bad, because just-in-time manufacturing is more efficient. Accepting a reasonable profit at a time of crisis is considered stupid when a business can make windfall profits by pitting states against each other or signing a sweetheart deal in exchange for a no-bid contract. We're looking a lot like Russia under Yeltsin when the place was collapsing and people were stealing everything that wasn't nailed down.
Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who is committed to division, who's willing to undermine the efforts of those who work for him, who, even at this time of crisis thinks that nothing other than personal loyalty to him and that he should never make a mistake.
While it's easy to blame Trump (and he deserves a heaping pile of blame), the corruption and destruction of a functional US government has long been the goal of those on the right. Since the 80s there has been a concerted movement to defund and destroy the effective ability of our government for ideological and personal reasons.
Then, when the water treatment plants break down or the education system is a mess they can privatize it and reap the profits. Or they can establish charter schools that teach creationism, segregate classrooms again, or reduce education to minorities.
This is just one chess move in a long game that has been playing out since the 50s. Within this context, the moves here are not surprising, especially with Betsy DeVos in charge.
I plea that you refrain down voting any comment that advises you to take a look at DeVos's Wikipedia page. I HIGHLY advise reading Betsy DeVos's Wikipedia page.
With no offense intended (truly) I've got the idea that quite a portion of HN users probably don't know just how much of an absolute shitshow the head of U.S. Education is. DeVos is certifiably insane
I will third this. Please, just look. You'll need to go through decades of multi-level marketing scams, private military contracting, torturous approach to treating autism and other behavioral therapies, and multi-generational Charismatic Christian hate groups before you can even dig into her atrocious educational policies.
Only mention is this sentence: "Betsy DeVos's brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA, a private military services contractor."
> torturous approach to treating autism and other behavorial therapies
"Betsy and her husband Dick are chief investors in and board members of Neurocore, a group of brain performance centers offering biofeedback therapy for disorders such as depression, attention deficit disorder, autism, and anxiety. The therapy consists of showing movies to patients and interrupting them when they become distracted, in an effort to retrain their brains." Reading that, and the following paragraph, it seems like the efficacy of the treatment is dubious... But torture?
> multi-generational Charismatic Christian hate groups
The wikipedia page mentions a number of christian groups associated with the DeVos family. As far as I can tell, these all seem like bog-standard conservative causes. But, judging by the hyperbole in the rest of your comment, those probably do qualify as hate groups to you.
This is a horribly disingenuous statement that shows you're not approaching in good faith.
Someone not agreeing with the original comment doesn't mean they suddenly agree with everything DeVos does, and just because someone linked to DeVos's Wikipedia article doesn't mean people shouldn't be critical of the rest of the comment (which is what the child you're replying to suggests).
The government would function more efficiently if the GOP wasn't so dead set on blocking any form of reform or efficiency. It's not a coincidence that once any Dem gets into office the GOP becomes the party of No.
Try to reform healthcare? Nope. Try to cut military spending? No. Establish oversight over federal slush funds? Nope.
Having the government burn tons of money is absolutely playing into the hands of those arguing to weaken government for personal profit. The GOP are completely fine burning cash because they can just blame the Dems and use that as an argument to privatize core government functions.
So once again, much of it comes back to GOP obstructionism.
So the thing is, since WWII we've switched pretty evenly between the 'left' party and the 'right' party at the national level. All administrations/Congresses have been quick to sell us out to foreign and corporate interests, whether it's Bush going to war for oil or Obama forcing everyone to buy health insurance.
Do you really think that sane health care, a problem the rest of the world has figured out long ago, is nothing more than a scheme to serve corporate interests? Or on the same level as intentionally going to war based on misleading, if not downright incorrect, justifications. I can't believe what I'm reading here.
I'd describe it as roughly, both parties have been Neoliberals since the 80's or so (the Political Overton Window changed), but then within that there's the part that people only see: left vs right, but they're far less different than they seem.
> A mandate that people wear masks is not acceptable.
Personally speaking I'm all good with wearing a mask if they let me out of my house. The Shelter in place thing has been such an overreaction that I'm kind of primed to rebel just because I'm so incensed by the violation of rights...
Wearing a mask is like requiring wearing a seatbelt. Shelter in place is like saying no one can drive except a few exceptionals.
I don't believe there are any states currently issuing stay at home (which is different than SIP) orders.
It also has 100% not been an overreaction. It saved countless lives by preventing spread. That whole flattening the curve thing and how well countries that have actually followed through and did not open early should show you how effective it has been.
It would be interesting to see the data of which is more effective. I'm currently biased towards believing that masks were highly effective and SIP orders mostly are not (because people still leave for groceries, for example) .
If we create the false dichotomy of Masks vs SIP I would recommend Masks
Stay at home orders work because they minimize contact someone has with others.
Sure, people might still go to the groceries or other essential tasks. Once or twice a week. But if they're otherwise obeying the order and staying at home then just by not travelling to and from the office, going on recreational walks/drives/etc, and in general being isolated with a few people is obviously going to drastically limit the spread. It's not going to cut it down to 0, but it's still far less than the other extreme of living life normally and interacting with random people and surfaces daily.
Why are you even trying to create a false dichotomy? Just stay at home and wear a mask, ffs. It's really not that hard.
Saving lives should not be this grand political issue it's become in the US. It's objectively very simple. Limit contact and limit spread, and you'll have fewer cases. You limit contact by having people stay at home, and you limit spread by having people wear masks. This isn't rocket science or anything.
> Saving lives should not be this grand political issue it's become in the US.
It is politicized whenever there is a strong disparity of benefits and costs... It's primarily the old who benefit and primarily the young who suffer by closing down the economy
They exact same disparity exists elsewhere in the world but the politicization is largely an American phenomena, so it's not the disparity by itself to blame.
Shelter in place works everywhere except in America, which is always special.
And if people go to buy food, that totally negates lack of contact everywhere else, including restaurants, concerts, offices, schools, sport clubs and so on.
It's a fallacy to think that the only outcome of COVID is binary (i.e. death or perfect recovery).
Just browse r/covidpositive. There are so many "survivors" who say they still have so much internal organ pain 4 months after being diagnosed, and now they feel hopeless, have suicidal ideation, etc.
And from the sounds of it, a lot of these people are in their 20s-40s and could run a marathon pre-COVID.
Thanks for showing us an example of exactly the kind of stupidity the parent is talking about. The government is well within its rights to require shelter in place. If you don't like it, get your case heard by the Supreme Court and win, but until then, stop pretending you have a right to not be quarantined. You don't. This is exactly the kind of thought and culture that prevents America from doing even the simplest things, like protecting people in a pandemic. A grass roots anti-intellectual culture of stupidity.
We’re not a “country.” We’re 50 different states with a federal government, which doesn’t have public health as one of its assigned roles.
This isn’t an ideological point, it’s a bare recitation of fact. Somehow, other federal republics like Germany managed to engage in an effective pandemic response while leaving most of the work to the states. For example, while Germany eventually had a mask order everywhere, the states all implemented them at different times. School reopening was all done on different schedules with different procedures. Merkel didn’t issue a national mask order, for the same reason Trump didn’t: she wasn’t legally allowed to.
This was not a surprise. Nobody thought pandemic response was mainly a federal responsibility. States, particularly New York, were just completely unprepared for a job they knew was theirs.
So I agree ideologies are the problem, but this is a problematic ideology too. Why would people use a pandemic to try and relitigate the basic structure of our government? Why can’t we just work within the system to solve problems?
While the states may be responsible for what happens on the ground, it is certainly the role of the federal government to provide coordination in the case of a nationwide public health issue. Clearly, that was not done in this case. The CDC, NIH, FEMA, and the surgeon general should have all been playing a role in this pandemic. The states shouldn't have had to ultimately go about creating their own regional coalitions of their own accord out of desperation.
The CDC issued guidelines, and Trump had regular calls with the governors to coordinate. It’s more or less the same thing Merkel’s government did. They delivered what federal stockpiles they had. What else were they supposed to do? It’s the states fault that there weren’t any test kits, tracing and isolation infrastructure, etc. Obviously it would have helped if Trump wasn’t a counterproductive buffoon that contradicted the guidelines his own administration was issuing, but I’m not really talking about Trump’s failings as a leader. My post is about the division of labor.
> It’s the states fault that there weren’t any test kits, tracing and isolation infrastructure, etc.
Why exactly is this the states' fault? This seems like something that would be far more effective at the federal level. It's the exact same argument as the parent comment, it shouldn't be up to states to create tracing and isolation infrastructure, test kits, etc.
Putting that burden on the states is exactly how we got to the place we are in. Without effective federal support and direction, no solution will be effective since inter-state travel exists and there's 50 different states that will come up with 50 different solutions, some more effective than others.
It makes zero sense to force states to individually do all this when a single entity would be far more effective.
> This seems like something that would be far more effective at the federal level.
Maybe that’s a discussion we can have for next time. But the point is that we had a very long-standing division of labor that states knew about, but they didn’t prepare. You can’t have a debate about changing the division of responsibility during a pandemic. The idea that someone else should have been in charge isn’t an excuse when the responsibility had been assigned to you. Put differently, the CDC presentation I linked to, which says the CDC is just there to provide “expert assistance” wasn’t a surprise to anyone.
> It's the exact same argument as the parent comment, it shouldn't be up to states to create tracing and isolation infrastructure, test kits, etc.
But it was. Just like it was up to France or Germany to do those things, and not some EU agency. Italy isn’t blaming the eCDC for its own lack of preparation.
> Putting that burden on the states is exactly how we got to the place we are in.
No, we got into the place we’re in because states shirked a responsibility that had plainly been assigned to them. (And in fact, was inherently theirs as a matter of the very structure of our federation).
> Without effective federal support and direction, no solution will be effective since inter-state travel exists and there's 50 different states that will come up with 50 different solutions, some more effective than others.
Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. all managed to do this just fine.
> Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. all managed to do this just fine.
You mean countries with federal-led and coordinated responses? I wonder why they did just fine. Maybe it was the leadership and support that the US so desperately lacks.
The states/provinces within may have been the primary ones managing in certain cases, like Australia, but the entire response in all three countries is federally led and centralized through committees and support from the federal governments. In fact, one of the key parts of Australia's response is specifically
> ensure the response is consistent and integrated across the country
wait, what is the CDC then? I am not trying to argue with you. I haven't heard the take that the US government doesn't have a public health role and am looking to learn.
So there is theory and practice. In theory, public health is a purely state issue. In practice, it’s a mostly state issue. But there is a real legal limit here: the federal government has no general police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_co...
> In United States constitutional law, police power is the capacity of the states to regulate behavior and enforce order within their territory for the betterment of the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of their inhabitants.
This is not an unusual principle. Germany has a similar principle, which is why Angela Merkel didn’t issue a mask order either.
See the first bullet on Slide 8: “State and local governments carry out most communicable disease surveillance and control under the police power.”
See Slide 10: “Most powers for public health surveillance, investigations, and interventions derive from state and local law.”
The federal government provides “expert public health assistance” and regulates “disease carriers who cross state lines.”
So when we talk about things like tracing protocols, where does that fit? The CDC can provide expert advice about what sorts of testing protocols are effective. But the state governments must actually develop and execute the surveillance and intervention: testing patients, quarantining them, etc. The federal government is supposed to assist insofar as patients might move between states.
This is how everyone has always understood the division of labor in public health to be set up. Countries like Germany have similar legal structures, and have managed just fine. Even countries like Japan, where the central government does have a general police power, still delegates things like testing because the local governments are more nimble.
Only in America would be ignore the clear division of labor that’s in place during a pandemic.
> In theory, public health is a purely state issue
No, it's not. The federal government is, in theory, fully empowered to use any of it's enumerated powers for any purpose not expressly prohibited, which public health is not, and has quite emphatically adopted policy around exercising its power for that purpose, starting at least as far back as the establishment of the marine hospitals in 1798, later, in many steps, reorganized into the modern US Public Health Service.
The Marine Hospital Service wasn’t a “public health” service. It was for taking care of disabled and ill federal beneficiaries. Until 1878, it was concerned with treating members of the military. The first exercise of general public health powers seems to be in the Quarantine Act of 1878, but that was directed specifically at preventing vessels with infected people from entering US ports or informing relevant state and local officials if they did: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/45th-congress.... This was focused on infectious disease screening of Ellis Island immigrants. Maybe by this point you can say that public health is within the federal government’s jurisdiction insofar as it’s an adjunct to the government’s power over the border, which is fair. But because the government’s power over the border is plenary, you can shoehorn many things that would otherwise be purely state issues into that.
The reorganization into the US Public Health Service was in 1912, and that’s when it picked up general authority to study infectious diseases. But that era isn’t really relevant to what’s constitutional.
You haven't heard it before because it's patently not true. The CDC, the FDA, the NIH, FEMA, not to mention the droves of smaller groups you and I have never heard of that are embedded in other agencies - the federal government has a massive public health role. It's so clear that I have to seriously question the motives of anyone saying that it doesn't.
> We’re 50 different states with a federal government, which doesn’t have public health as one of its assigned roles.
COVID is clearly a national security issue, which is squarely a matter for the federal government. The prior administration made pandemic response part of the national security apparatus (i.e. the NSC). According to public testimony, this continues in the current administration despite a reorganization.
You claim a bare recitation of fact, but in my view that is completely inaccurate. There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. One of the first iterations of our government under the Articles of Confederation didn't have a strong enough government to respond to national security threats and we could have lost the war for it. Having a strong federal government that can accomplish things the states cannot is literally the reason for our government as it exists today.
As I mentioned, by our own government's admission pandemic response is a national security issue. There are two additional reasons why this is clear. First, what if the pandemic was started by a biological weapon? Would we still leave it to the states then? Certainly not, yet it would be the same exact pandemic whether started by terrorists or by accident. Second, COVID is going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. On and don't forget it literally took a nuclear powered aircraft carrier off the battlefield. It is then by definition a national security issue because of how weak it makes our country.
I generally enjoy your writing on these issues but I think you have the basic structure of our government completely reversed. We threw out the Articles of Confederation and created a stronger federal government because disjoint states did not have the ability to respond to massive threats at the scale of COVID.
One you throw out your designation of COVID as a public health matter and recognize it is an issue of national security (again by our government's own admission) I think a lot of your other arguments do not hold up. Some things that you mention as a matter of law are clearly correct with respect to masks. But the idea that "nobody thought pandemic response was mainly a federal responsibility" is completely false and counter to the ideals of our government after the Confederation Period.
>a federal government, which doesn’t have public health as one of its assigned roles
Yes, it does. It may not be explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, but the federal government is absolutely tasked with responding to national disasters, of which pandemics are one example. What is the CDC? What is FEMA? What is the NIH?
>Merkel didn’t issue a national mask order, for the same reason Trump didn’t: she wasn’t legally allowed to.
Even if it were true, that would make this the very first time in his life that legal limitations ever stopped Trump from doing something.
Even to the extent that we’ve long ignored the constitution on these issues, we still haven’t put the federal government in a primary role for public health. The federal government is not supposed to be the front-line response to a pandemic. CDC’s own documents make clear, for example, that it is supposed to provide expert advice and deal with patients that cross state lines, while states are supposed to handle actual testing and intervention: https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/phl101/PHL101-Unit-5-16Jan09-S....
Same thing with FEMA. It’s not supposed to be front-line disaster response. It’s supposed to be a backstop for when a particular state is overwhelmed. That’s why FEMA is legally not allowed to act until a governor declares a state of emergency and asks for assistance. But every state is supposed to be prepared to handle their own disasters. FEMA is a backstop—it’s not supposed to have the resources to help every state at the same time.
The NIH is a research agency. It doesn’t have an operational role in public health.
Even if we overlook what’s “explicitly enumerated” and we look at the structure that exists today by historical accident, the federal government is still relegated to an advisory role, and dealing with travel. But those aren’t the things that went wrong with the pandemic response. Lockdowns are an operational role, and entrusted to the states. PPE, testing kits, having people in place to do tracing and isolation? All of that is operational, and was assigned to the state governments. Mask orders are an exercise of the general police power, and entrusted to the states.
Again, this is not an ideological point about how things should be. (Although, they are this way because that’s how the constitution sets things up.) It’s a point about whose job it was to be prepared. The states were supposed to be prepared for this, and they weren’t. By the time the pandemic hit, there wasn’t much the federal government could do. It could advise states about tracing and isolation protocols, but it has no boots on the ground to actually do any of those things. The states were supposed to be prepared to do all that.
If you're trying to tell me that you think we wouldn't be better off with a leader that said this was a present and real threat and put out a mandatory mask order back in Feb/March, shut down travel and enforced travel quarantines, used the Defense Production Act to create and deliver PPE where needed, didn't confiscate PPE from states and re-sell it to the highest bidder, didn't publicly contradict the pandemic response team and CDC, implemented an effective national testing and contact tracing strategy, etc, then I'd say you're not here for an honest dialogue.
Different political leader - we don't know. A different political leader who was not divisive and dismissive of science - yes, it would have been better.
That's true. A counterpoint is Japan or Sweden where citizens changed their behaviour prior to any government action. Social distancing, avoiding bars, public transport, staying away from elderly relatives, face masks, etc etc. I think it's a sad state of affairs if people only take action under the instruction from a government.
I do think more or less any other leader likely would have done at least a little better. But if the same events in late 2019/early 2020 had happened under President Obama in 2015/2016 instead, I think it likely that many people in the opposing party would have ended up taking the same anti-science positions we see now. Federal action would have made the pandemic less bad but individuals and other levels of government could still have caused problems.
Only Nixon could go to China. Imagine how much different things would have been if Trump had embraced the CDC and science like the other nations did. His followers would have gone along with it.
I think there would probably still be systemic problems, but I don't see how anyone could think that it wouldn't be better under another leader. Trump is overtly incompetent.
Interdimensional cable. You can't prove that I don't have it.
Ask yourself this, could the current administration's response have been better given what was known at the time? If the answer is emphatically yes, then perhaps another person is better suited for the job.
Why is this even a discussion we're having? Yes, literally anybody would have had a better response than what we got. Just looking at the current state of the US vs practically any other country in the world shows how cripplingly bad the response has been from the current administration.
Sometimes, I really hate the people in this country.
I can take a guess. People consume different information sources, and have different ideologies. So, they may arrive at different conclusions than you. I suspect this is more heavily on the ideology side because it's hard to deny the body count.
It was more of a rhetorical question. I know why it's happening, it's just ridiculous and infuriating that it is happening.
Anyone who comes in with good faith and actually objectively looks at the statistics and response can't possibly come to a different conclusion. The problem comes down to the "good faith" and "objective" parts of that sentence.
Don't discount the power of our filter bubbles. Someone can have good faith but their objectivity goes out the window because of the information they consume.
I can't help but wonder if the nature of the US being a 'melting pot' doesn't result in more difficulty in achieving agreement on national policy decisions. I'm not saying that diversity is bad. In most cases, we benefit enormously from being a melting pot. However, on some national policy topics it makes me wonder.
> Interdimensional cable. You can't prove that I don't have it.
@not2b pointed out a number of very valid issues in the United States. No disagreement from me, these are obvious and very important problems.
But then followed it up with:
>> Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who is committed to division...
"Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership" on its own could be interpreted as an abstract philosophical statement, but not when it is accompanied by "...but we chose someone..." implies a specific context (the last election), does it not?
In the last election, there were two choices: Trump and Clinton.
Trump was elected, leaving Clinton as the only other choice of a person who could have "turned this situation around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause".
Is: "are you asserting that Clinton both could have and would have done so? If so, how do you know this?", requesting clarification and evidence of the claim, inappropriate in this context?
Is: "Were all of these issues nonexistent under prior administrations?" not appropriate, considering the claim was that a different choice could "turn this situation around quickly"? Is past performance of Presidents not relevant to the epistemic soundness of a claim that something is not just possible, but quick?
I'm thinking: perhaps turning things around in a country of 300 million people of vastly different cultures and ideologies is a bit more complicated than is appreciated by some forum commentators. Just an idea.
> Ask yourself this, could the current administration's response have been better given what was known at the time? If the answer is emphatically yes, then perhaps another person is better suited for the job.
Of course, just look around at other countries. There are surely thousands of people in the Unites States that could have handled this situation better, but we are only allowed to vote for the candidates that are undemocratically offered. And let's not forget, an election isn't about on issue, like "who would handle a pandemic best?". The reality is, each voter is (or should be) considering many thousands of variables, many of which have unknown values and all sorts of messy stuff.
The notion that ~"because President<A> is handling individual issue <x> poorly, therefore it logically follows that Candidate<Y> was the better choice for President" is not strongly logical. The answers to questions like this (or, what the hell is even going on, at any level of significant complexity) are actually not known - it just doesn't seem like it. I happen to believe that this phenomenon may actually play a major role in the underlying cause of the problems themselves.
You are getting downvoted for your political statement. I really wish the parent comment kept out the last bit because the conversation then devolves to red/blue, left/right, white/black.
We, as a country, screwed the handling of this. It isn't just one person. It is the way our entire system works. How do we fix it?
Yes, the country screwed up, but ultimately, the country is represented by a single leader, and said single leader is responsible for the response of the country as a whole.
With great power (like presidency), comes great responsibility (like properly leading the country through a global pandemic) and with great responsibility comes great criticism where said responsibility isn't followed through.
They're not getting downvoted for a political statement. They're getting downvoted by implying that someone else wouldn't do a better job than probably the worst possible response to Covid.
Objectively, the response we've had from the leadership of the country has been terrible, and the effects are evident when you look at # of cases. Also objectively, any other response would have been better. Obviously, I can't tell with absolute certainty what other leaders would have done, but I can assure you it'd have been better than what we have now.
To say otherwise is ignoring the current state of the country and the response that has resulted in said state.
> You are getting downvoted for your political statement.
Technically, I'm being downvoted for asking two questions that challenge someone else's political statement (that aligns quite nicely with the general politics of HN).
> I really wish the parent comment kept out the last bit because the conversation then devolves to red/blue, left/right, white/black.
Me too, I completely agreed with the first part. I have this thing about about people dropping dimensions of reality and pretending they are irrelevant, or predicting the outcome of events on parallel dimensions of our universe, and stating those predictions as if they are facts. I consider this sort of rhetoric as part of the problem, but most people seem to overwhelmingly prefer it nowadays, provided the proper claims are made of course.
> How do we fix it?
This seems like the important question to me as well. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be a very popular topic of discussion.
Clinton isn’t incompetent with a long list of failures behind her name. I despise her but to think that she wouldn’t have been better at handling the pandemic response than Trump is delusional.
> Clinton isn’t incompetent with a long list of failures behind her name.
This is subjective and necessarily highly speculative.
> I despise her but to think that she wouldn’t have been better at handling the pandemic response than Trump is delusional.
Predicting or thinking (about) that is perfectly fine and reasonable. Mistaking subsequent predictions for conclusive facts is what is actually delusional. There are many examples of such delusional behavior on HN every day: mind reading, future predicting (and stating the results as facts), you name it. I think it is fairly true to say that conspiracy theorists (for example) and "smart" people differ more in degree than in kind, although we do not have the means (or ambition, or epistemic skills) to determine the degree to which this is true.
Most of the time, what we consider to be true, is actually unknown.
Right but you didn’t write anything about this particular situation. Instead you created doubt in the conversation because we don’t have 100% of the facts.
In leadership not making a decision until you have 100% of the facts, and truly know something to be a fact, will kill your ability to be effective.
Trump didn’t make a decision, instead he called the virus a hoax and prevented experts from providing insight to a situation where we didn’t have all the facts.
On the next sentence I’m going to write, no I don’t have 100% of the facts but I can certainly make an informed statement.
Trump fucked this country up and Clinton would’ve had a better response to this pandemic - regardless of who you identify as how could you not accept this.
> Having government direct a mobilization is not acceptable.
Then you would expect divergent performance in the D-controlled states (eg. California) vs the R-controlled states (eg. Texas), no? So far, I see all types of states having similar outcomes.
> ... good leadership ... but we chose someone who is committed to division, ...
I'm no fan of our current leader, but let's be honest Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative[1]. The problem is much deeper.
Performance is in fact divergent by party; see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hso3sf/oc_.... Blue counties are doing worse than red in both state cohorts due to population density, but counties of either party are doing worse in R states. Blue states were worse early on, mostly due to New York City being quickly overwhelmed, but now that's not the case, because D governors (e.g., Newsom) are generally leading responsibly, and R governors (e.g. Kemp) are... not.
>Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative
Healthcare.gov was a shitshow, but referring to it here is a very silly false equivalency. It was not time-sensitive in the same way that COVID-19 response is. It involved getting the federal government to exercise new competencies that it hadn't done at scale before; responding to national crises is kind of the number one job of the federal government, and PPE acquisition, distribution, and even manufacturing are not new. It failed for reasons having to do with mismanagement of timelines, not outright fraud; COVID PPE shipments have been hijacked and sold off to the president's cronies.
But sure, both sides technically did something wrong, so there's no difference between them.
> Blue states were worse early on, mostly due to New York City being quickly overwhelmed, but now that's not the case, because D governors (e.g., Newsom) are generally leading responsibly, and R governors (e.g. Kemp) are... not.
The relevant metric is not "amount of time doing relatively better or worse." You can get all over with quickly like NY did, but they ended up with 8x the deaths of FL. NJ has 3x FL's. AFAICT, "leading responsibly" here means simply having (D) after their names, as these governors' policies were catastrophically bad.
> responding to national crises is kind of the number one job of the federal government
I responded to your sibling comment about other examples about how D-dominated governments have failed spectacularly in areas which are supposed to be the core jobs of governments - public infrastructure. (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875739).
> both sides technically did something wrong, so there's no difference between them.
I actually don't see much difference in the incompetence of the two sides. Presidents (or Governors) are simply impotent to get anything done in the US systems. At best (in terms of their powers), they can only stop something from happening.
> Then you would expect divergent performance in the D-controlled states (eg. California) vs the R-controlled states (eg. Texas), no? So far, I see all types of states having similar outcomes.
Maybe if it were also possible to lock down borders between states, making them truly separate sovereign nations.
A lot of states had a declining infection rate and looked to be getting things under control, then people traveled to other states and brought back the virus with them.
There are still things only the federal government can do or coordinate.
> Then you would expect divergent performance in the D-controlled states (eg. California) vs the R-controlled states (eg. Texas), no?
It’s not so simple in that many states are miniature versions of our polarized country. For example, you have a Democratic governor facing Republican opposition in rural counties in Washington, and a Republican governor suing a Democratic mayor in Georgia.
>Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative
It's very frustrating seeing people continually arguing that because some people screw up, learn from experience, and fix things, that it justifies others going in the opposite direction, ignoring experience, and breaking things.
Even before your metrics show that the destruction has reached a crossover point, the latter is fundamentally different because it's unnecessary. The former is fundamentally sound because there will always be mistakes.
It doesn't matter how bad you think government is, it's not an argument for making it worse.
This is not true; a) more rural states have a much easier time with covid and b) blue states started off being hit the hardest, but red states are now catching up because their governors are incompetent
I think this is a misrepresentation. Texas has 85% of the infections as California and 74% of the population. California has had steady growth while Texas has been very quick with several days over 10k.
I think the reason the outcome is largely the same is this is a situation where we rely on our federal government to lead the response, and so far they haven’t.
> I'm no fan of our current leader, but let's be honest Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative[1]. The problem is much deeper.
This strikes me as a pretty passive-aggressive argument style.
Who, in your opinion, is the better leader? Which of Obama or Trump do you think would handle this pandemic better?
You are picking out one mistake, and kind-of-sort-of implying that makes them both the same, except you don't have the courage to directly state that. If you have a point to make, make it.
My point - a solo good leader is insufficient in the US because the systemic rot is deeper and bipartisan. (FWIW, Obama was an okay leader, though vastly better than Trump).
> You are picking out one mistake
Here are a few more: California High-Speed railway, which was being implemented when CA had D-dominated government under a very competent governor (Brown). Did that leadership or unified government control help? Absolutely not.
Another: 2-mile stretch of Second Avenue subway in NYC, which took almost a 100 years and $4-5B. Why? Were all the NYC leaders incompetent for a century? I don't think so.
The problem is that people think the D's and R's are dramatically different. They both have similar statist agendas just marketing themselves towards different demographics. Neither party has many any substantial effort to rebuild our infrastructure, develop genuine disaster preparedness, reduce tax burdens on the middle class, and so on.
All of those things lead to what we're seeing now where the average person can't even afford to live on savings for a few months. If the average person can't keep themselves above water, how can they realistically contribute to their community efforts like we did in WW2? And if they're all going broke and risking losing their houses and livelihoods you end up with a massive backlash to anything keeping people away from work.
We need leadership that pushes serious reform initiatives to reduce government bloat and reach goals that actually benefit the people.
I see that you are being downvoted, but I do agree with some of your points.
> people think the D's and R's are dramatically different
This is so true. Let's ignore fringe topics like Green New Deal or White Supremacy and look at what the mainstream portions of the parties are debating about - abortion, transgender rights etc.
But what are the key differences between tax policy or curtailing corporate powers or entanglements in various wars? You will have to squint hard. And please don't cite Warren or Sanders when it comes to corporations and D's - those two lost the primary handily and when D's controlled all the levers of the powers in D.C., they happily bailed out the Wall Street without punishing a single banker for the crash of 2008.
Yeah it's pretty obvious by reading by what is NOT being discussed and talked about that there is some serious disconnect from both the Ds and the Rs and the people that make up the US that is behind a lot of the current problems.
The upvotes/downvotes I get are weird to watch because there's so much apparent disagreement and very little dialogue. This is the case on anything I post that takes a more 'conservative' stance.
> the mainstream portions of the parties are debating about - abortion, transgender rights etc.
I sometimes call these the clickbait issues. They get the most public attention but affect people's daily lives the least. Of course, that statement is going to upset some people because they will not immediately consider the net effect of trans rights legislation in comparison to taxes / corporate lawmaking / warfare / international trade.
Worse, some people take statements like the above and think that I don't want all humans to have truly equal rights, which I do.
> they happily bailed out the Wall Street without punishing a single banker for the crash of 2008
Very true. I've seen many people (including on this forum, which is better educated than average) make statements to the effect of 'democrats are better for the economy' without considering the fact that both parties have been complicit in creating and maintaining the systems that have led to massive government debt and economic collapses.
The United States government is completely and utterly dysfunctional when it comes to serving the needs of its citizens. The government rarely goes out of its way to help its citizens, and the rare times it does something to help, it does so incredibly begrudgingly, intentionally making the process as painful as possible.
The pandemic payouts are a wonderful example of the government going out of its way to make helping its citizens as painful as possible. Millions of people still haven’t received their one-time payment of $1,200. Meanwhile in Canada, it took their government only two weeks to develop the infrastructure to send monthly payments of $2,000 to every Canadian.
The incompetence displayed by the American government isn’t because they can’t do better - it’s because they don’t want to do better. The same government was able to send massive financial assistance to huge corporations with very little delay.
It’s become totally evident that the United States government exists solely to serve its corporations, not its citizens. Anything it does to actively help it’s citizens is, at best, incidental.
This is entirely at the feet of the Republican party. They're the ones who have declared states are on their own and have suggested (and this is not a joke) that the next round of "relief" must include a capital gains holiday. There have been missteps from the left, but the Democrats overall approach has been to serve the needs of citizens in general while the Republicans have been eager to continue their program of concentrating wealth.
This isn't quite true, yes the Republican party has some pretty clear pro-business idealogy that hurts the citizens. No doubt. But it was a Democratic party that pushed for the hollowing out of american businesses to overseas locations and bailed out a morally bankrupt wall street with no public consequences other than a federal reserve patch job
It is true that the pandemic has brought to the fore some things that could be improved. I'm not based in the US but I think it has a lot going for it. We may argue about some of the drawbacks associated with the status quo but this is the country that landed people on the moon. It has brought us Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Starbucks, Hollywood, Disney, etc. In spite of the retoric from some quarters it still welcomes people from all over the world. And what is more they almost immediately identify themselves as American and embrace the values and start making working towards the American dream. I think you'd struggle to find a better place in terms of upward mobility. Certainly not in Europe. I think we have to see it in terms of trade offs. The things that some admire in other nations come at a cost. And in some cases can't really happen in the US because the policies don't scale as well. There may be other nations catching up in some areas. But I think America is still a great nation.
> I think you'd struggle to find a better place in terms of upward mobility.
Just going to respond to this. The US used to be a paragon of upward mobility. That is no longer the case: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s... . That is just one article, but you can search "US upward mobility ranking" and find lots of articles and evidence how many other countries now do much, much better than the US in this regard.
If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks. Given the (very popular) laws against price gauging, it seems like the only viable option is to force some companies to manufacture more masks. Production capacity is available, but at a higher cost than is currently economical.
All that being said, your second point seems correct to me, and I doubt anything will be done (as a result of the political quagmire).
> If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks.
Those aren't the only options. Some mask manufacturers could scale up manufacturing as long as they had a medium/long term contract to make the investment worth it. The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishing it (dubious claim), so there was exactly zero reason for this[1] to happen.
Curious. Is there anything stopping individual states from doing this? Surely a federal system should enable individual states to act independently to some extent. They must have their own budgets and are to determine how resources are allocated. No?
There were three major disincentives for states to do this.
First, without a coordinated response there were dozens of high demand buyers and low supply. The market did its thing and State Governments were being forced to pay very high prices for PPE. States were bidding against each other and bidding against the Federal Government, this drove the price even higher.
Second, even when States could secure PPE, the Federal Government was seizing PPE and testing supplies to send it to Coronavirus Taskforce approved vendors who would then sell the seized goods back to the States at inflated prices. This got so bad that Maryland's Governor, after using his South Korean wife's connections to secure testing supplies from South Korea, placed them under the protection of the National Guard to prevent the Federal Government from absconding with them. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/maryla...
Third, the State budgets are shot to hell. When the public health crisis started it was easy to say, let's do what it takes to keep people safe. Now a sizable chunk of the citizenry is refusing to wear masks or social distance, and the State coffers are running empty. State leaders are faced with deciding if they want to use the limited funds left at their disposal to try purchasing PPE in the face of a constituency that is going to spread and worsen the public health crisis regardless. It's lose-lose for the decision makers, so they are disincentivized to follow this path. They can spend the last of the treasury on PPE just to watch it evaporate as cases soar.
In many cases states have tried to obtain supplies directly from manufacturers and suppliers only to have the Federal Government step in and prevent them from actually taking possession of the needed materials.
IIRC, states are mandated against running deficits, and their budgets are set 1-2 years in advance (eg, Texas, whose legislature sets the budget every 2 years), which limits their maneuverability in this regard. Also, states don't have the equivalent resources and bargaining power of the federal government.
States are resource constrained in ways that the federal government is not. Most, if not all, local governments are required to balance their budgets on an annual basis. Conservative politicians insist on tax cuts during economic boom times that prevent these governments from being able to withstand downturns without dramatic cuts in services (which is the real end goal of the conservatives).
That’s the removing price gouging solution, just at the wholesale level. Unless the plan is for the government to tell the manufacturers what kind of pay they should find acceptable.
> The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishing it (dubious claim), so there was exactly zero reason for this[1] to happen.
The claim is "dubious", so (therefore) there was exactly no reason for this to happen?
> One thing the stockpile clearly doesn’t have enough of is face masks. News reports found that the N95 face masks were not substantially replenished after H1N1 in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. (continues)
> “The national stockpile used to be somewhat more robust. In 2006, Congress provided supplemental funds to add 104 million N95 masks and 52 million surgical masks in an effort to prepare for a flu pandemic,” Bloomberg News continued. “But after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
> KELLY: I mean, I have read that since that experience, you have been sounding the alarm. I know you wrote to President Trump. I know you wrote President Obama before him, warning that it wasn't going to be if but when that there would be another...
> BOWEN: I'm not. No. No, no, no. You know, I have been off and on. Of course, I've been selling this message for 14 years, but I'm really not angry. I'm puzzled. And I think what I've been fighting is not the government, not President Obama, not President Trump. I think it's human nature. I think since everybody ignored it - I mean, reporters ignored it. Pandemic experts ignored it. Our government ignored it. Hospitals ignored it. Everybody ignored it. So to me, it's a human nature problem. So I'm over my anger.
> “Prestige Ameritech is presently the lone voice warning of the insecure U.S. mask supply,” Bowen wrote to President Barack Obama in June 2010. “Apathy and inertia are our biggest hurdles.”
(Note that this is from The Washington Post)
I don't disagree that there's no GOOD reason for this to happen, other than the unfortunate reality that human beings are not very good at thinking, at least compared to how well we perceive ourselves to think. As far as I can tell, almost all humans are living in some sort of a severe state of delusion at all times, our minds and societies haven't had nearly enough time to evolve to accommodate the massive increase in complexity in the last few hundred years, let alone the last 20.
The "dubious" claim (I was imprecise and meant to credit it to the president's quote, not the "without replenishing it") was basically affirmed by your Politifact link.
More importantly, the current president didn't spend the first 3 years in office replenishing the stockpile and didn't take an offer from a former mask manufacturer very early in the outbreak to increase the production rate.
> More importantly, the current president didn't spend the first 3 years in office replenishing the stockpile and didn't take an offer from a former mask manufacturer very early in the outbreak to increase the production rate.
There's no point in further engaging with you if that's your take on the presidential responses to 2009 H1N1 versus 2020 SARS-CoV-2.
The presidents could not differ more in:
- lead time between inauguration and first epidemic reaching the USA (6 weeks versus 3 years)
- seriousness with which the presidential transition team took pandemic response
- the authority given to pandemic response (Obama made NSC responsible while Trump made HHS responsible)
- speed and intensity of initial response once the outbreak was identified
- empowerment medical professionals
- use of Defense Production Act
- treatment of WHO, CDC, and FDA as institutions
> There's no point in further engaging with you if that's your take on the presidential responses to 2009 H1N1 versus 2020 SARS-CoV-2.
"the presidential responses to 2009 H1N1 versus 2020 SARS-CoV-2" was not the topic of conversation. The topic of conversation was:
>>> If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks.
>> Those aren't the only options. Some mask manufacturers could scale up manufacturing as long as they had a medium/long term contract to make the investment worth it. The current administration keeps blaming the previous one for drawing down on the federal PPP supply without replenishing it (dubious claim), so there was exactly zero reason for this[1] to happen.
You are now expanding the scope of your original argument. Before we do that, can we finish with your first point?
Did the Obama administration refill the inventory of masks after they were drawn down, or not? My reading of the evidence is that they did not, does your reading leave you with a different conclusion, are you maybe referring to different evidence than what I posted above?
That's why we have mechanisms like the Defense Production Act. Under normal circumstances the free market works well, but sometimes in a crisis it isn't enough. We are in a crisis.
Price gouging is based on a reasonable price and is subjective. If the present situation results in inflated prices due to lack of materials or needing to run at a higher capacity, that's still reasonable. California, for example, has this written into their penal code, limiting it to a 10% increase in price of the total cost of manufacturing, which includes the increased cost of production, transportation or storage.
If those companies decided that they were going to stop selling their current stock of masks completely until they sold for a higher price, that would be price gouging.
But you wouldn't be taking on that cost and risk. That's the whole point of subsidizing manufacturing. To alleviate said cost and risk in desperate times.
You know, like a global pandemic. That's a pretty desperate time, IMO.
You’re missing a whole world of how governments can get market actors to do things, unless you’re putting “incentives and guarantees” under “force people”. In fact that approach of using market actors to the benefit of the country used to fall under the umbrella of conservatism, in the distant past of 3ish decades ago.
HN really needs to be more aggressively critical of comments like these, that try to construct arguments on ideological foundations without any deeper investigation of the relevant facts.
First, production capacity is not available, as the VP of Prestige Ameritech tried to explain to everyone months ago [1]. The equipment required to manufacture suitable PPE is big and expensive and there isn't enough demand to offset the capital or the maintenance costs for the equipment, except when there's suddenly a pandemic and everyone wants PPE yesterday.
Despite this, Prestige Ameritech -- having foreseen this scenario a long time ago and spent over a decade begging different administrations to prepare for it -- offered to ramp up production early this year. The Trump administration said no [2]. The issue has now been made even worse with everything reopening nationally, which has not only caused a huge spike in hospital demand for PPE, but has also caused a huge spike in demand for masks specifically [same article].
And these are just the immediate, short-term, direct issues that should be easy for outsiders to grasp. There are many other related, harder-to-solve problems:
> The blame, experts agreed, goes beyond any single person or agency but is the culmination of decades of change in the nation’s manufacturing capabilities, a worldwide shift in how goods are delivered and the country’s long battle with medical costs. Warnings about how these factors set the stage for shortages during a worst-case scenario went unheeded, leaving the country unprepared for a pandemic.
> By the time the coronavirus arrived, it was too late. The nation was left with massive shortages and a ruptured supply chain that won’t be an easy fix. [3]
Furthermore, prices did rise dramatically, and -- gasp! -- this did not magically fix the supply chain [4].
Allowing unregulated price gouging would not (and did not) change the supply shortage. It would have just been a pinata party in the shape of the US, and would have left front line medical workers without necessary PPE while wealthy people hoarded supplies.
An effective, less corrupt federal government could have dramatically increased PPE supply just by taking the pandemic seriously at the start and putting competent people with relevant expertise in charge of oversight and response. There still would have been shortages, but they would have been far less severe and they would largely have been resolved by now.
I would argue that the high salaries in the software industry have siphoned technologists from other industries that make physical products. Some of that is intrinsic, since making stuff has smaller margins than pushing bytes. But a lot of it is hidebound business practices. For example, should a manager always make more money than their reports? In many industries the answer is yes, which is a rejection of supply and demand in favor of a social hierarchy. There is also incredible bloat in supervisory roles, again because of the artificial money and prestige. Some companies would seemingly prefer to slowly die than pay needed employees a market rate, market being a national market spanning industries (some skillsets are fungible like that).
Personally I think it's more likely that the low salaries in other areas of technology (particularly physical products) has pushed people to software, rather than high salaries in software pulling them. Same effect in the end but I think the race-to-the-bottom in manufacturing, machining, and physical product development began the cycle. Soaring software salaries followed.
I have no idea about N95 masks, but surgical style masks (which are what most people need) seem to be readily available.
I bought 50 for $30 at Newegg in mid May. I just ordered another 200 from there at $15 per 50. There are similar offerings immediately available on Amazon.
Honestly I think the government is too big and centralized. At this point is isn't much different that Soviet Russia back in the 80s and 90s. I think the reason the government can't do a good job is because it wasn't designed to operate the way it is now. We were supposed to be 50 states all doing what is best for them and not dictated by the federal government. The right decision for New York will probably not be the right decision for Wyoming and so forth.
To your comment about WWII. We had a common enemy and a common effort. This "wartime" economy pretty much envolved the entire economy and I would argue wasn't much different than what communism would be. Meaning that the central government pretty much controlled the means of production.
I mean the opposite. The degree of government centralization and intrusiveness in US today is nowhere even close to what it was in USSR circa 1980s. And it's still one of the most decentralized countries in the world in general.
I think you are bringing your own biases to this problem. The US is not as decentralized as it once was, it's true. And that has pros and cons. But many countries that are more centralized than the US have handled this crisis better, and the same is true for countries that are less centralized. It's not clear at all that the reason for the US failure had been the level of centralization.
Good. The current state of the world is incredibly unnatural when you compare it to even 50 years ago. Everything is too connected. We are so much more efficient, but so much more fragile. The best thing you can do to save the world is save yourself and your family. Less fragility, more robustness at the personal / local level.
I am mid twenties, and was homeschooled my entire childhood. My father owned a technology company, and brought me to work with him most days. People talk about homeschooling being damaging due to the lack of exposure to the "real world", but I have had more exposure to reality than most, due to the constant exposure to actual working life.
Don't be afraid of "sheltering" your children by not having them be part of the system. There is so much more out there than the system. Your kids will turn out weird vs other kids raised in the standard environment, but its a good kind of weird.
My family was very involved with the homeschooling movement in our state, so I am more exposed than most to the sub-culture. Feel free to ask me any more specific questions.
A counterexample is Tara Westover[1] who grew up in an extremist version of what you are describing. She ultimately became successful but it was mostly despite her parents isolation from "the system", not because of them.
The story you linked to is pretty interesting, but she clearly states she was allowed to learn (just not forced to), she obviously understood what a university was, and had the desire and ability to apply and be accepted to university at an age when her parents would have had the legal right to stop her if they so wished - they obviously supported her application. Her outcome was clearly a lot better than many students who go to public school.
This story is fascinating (you really should read the whole book). But using her as example is completely misleading. She is a genius (I think). Very similar to the movie "Good Will Hunting". She got accepted into Cambridge with little to no education whatsoever. Even if you are a genius, this is not easy, since you just have to understand the system to some extend, no matter how smart you are, to be accepted into it.
Suffices to say, millions would fail under similar conditions, where she succeeded. Odds in normal education are much better than that.
I interpreted "the system" of your GP as wider society, not just the normal public education system, because of the first paragraph.
Also, yes Tara was given lots of autonomy early in her education, but she was completely unprepared for the world even at BYU (her undergraduate university), she struggled through many years of therapy, and she claims she was admitted to Cambridge because of luck (on top of lots of talent and hard work) because she still needed lots of remedial coursework to catch up. One interesting quote from a (TED?) talk she gave is that her early childhood was spent reading early Mormon scripture, so she spoke and wrote with the character of a mid-19th century LDS prophet when she arrived at university.
Let's say your kid is "weird" - on the autism spectrum, or ADD, or has severe allergies, or whatever. That can often cause problems in school, because children are often cruel. Parents of such children may be more likely to homeschool them than parents of kids that better fit the "normal" pattern.
Let's say the kid turns out a little weird. Would they have turned out better going through the public school system?
It's not necessarily fair to blame the homeschooling if the kids come out different. What were they at the start?
At this point I am even sure that being more efficient is better. From the context of economic opportunity the only ones that benefit are the rich and well connected. Now, I'm not one to bash "rich people" but think about it. If I was looking for a good deal for some land I could probably find one if I looked hard enough. Today it is pretty difficult to find land that isn't insanly expensive or too far away. Everything has already been bought up. The people that are well off and connected already learned 20 or 30 years ago where the land development were going to happen and they already bought the land.
As far as homeschooling is concerned. I spent 20 years in the military and the only thing that I observed that was a little awkward about the people that were home schooled was how they were around "authority". Meaning that they weren't as submissive to authority like everyone that went to a normal public school.
> At this point I am even sure that being more efficient is better. From the context of economic opportunity the only ones that benefit are the rich and well connected.
I think you are really underselling how awful life has been in the past.
Just look at things like child mortality rates.... historically, nearly HALF of all people died during childhood. That is insane. The global rate is now about 1/10 of that.
Similar changes have been made to starvation and malnourishment, with today's rates so much lower than historically.
This would not be possible without the improvements in efficiency over the years. Because we need so few people to grow enough food to feed everyone, we can spend the resources on medical research and advancements that have allowed our health outcomes to improve so much.
Are the gains of an efficient society unequally distributed? Of course. But let's solve the inequality problem by sharing the gains, not destroying the gains.
Yes, if we got rid of our efficiency gains, we would be more equal... because everyone would be much poorer.
We would still have people exploiting others, though. That happened way before we were efficient.
Don't get me wrong about the efficiency gains. To a point I think it is great. But when everything is maximally efficient there is nothing to gain. Sure we could disrupt yet another industry but for every winner there is a loser.
Starvation and malnourishment are drastically lower due to industrial farming. But that was to the detrement of destroyed ecosystems, pollution, and greater government regulations. Heck, I believe that I was Michigan that was trying to prevent people from purchasing seeds to plant their own gardens.
Don't worry. I'm not actually all doom and gloom. I just don't think we are on the right track and we are heading of course. And this has been going on for a lot longer than 2016.
I don't think homeschooling is usually like you're describing. Most of the people I have met who were homeschooled were not social adjusted or developed and didn't seem 'normal' by most standards. Most of them had parents who were either extremely religious or some other ideological tendency (survivalist, etc).
My nephews kids are homeschooled. They have a rigorous curriculum, specific goals, etc. They also have regular socialization activity with other homeschoolers. They just choose to not settle for the mediocrity, nor accept the indoctrination pushed by the education system.
No offense, but this is where it starts getting weird and into the whole "society is bad!" that seems pretty extreme:
>They just choose to not settle for the mediocrity, nor accept the indoctrination pushed by the education system.
Most people I know who went to public schools came out fairly well. I refuse to share this elitist/ideological attitude towards them. What indoctrination? Don't you think that's a rather general and blanket statement considering how varied each school district is? Maybe that's more of a criticism of how schools are run in your area.
> Most people I know who went to public schools came out fairly well. I refuse to share this elitist/ideological attitude towards them. What indoctrination? Don't you think that's a rather general and blanket statement considering how varied each school district is? Maybe that's more of a criticism of how schools are run in your area.
That's exactly what someone who has been indoctrinated at a public school would say!
If you as a parent are grappling with the idea of homeschooling, know that you don’t have to do it the way those parents did. What you saw is not an indictment of homeschooling, but of those parents that decided to do it that way.
I took the GRE in 9th grade and started taking classes at a community college. There are alternative paths out there where you can still socialize. There are more MOOCs and online schools, but I still think learning to deal with others is a real skill that you have to develop and is immensely important in life.
How many people have you met that were homeschooled but you just didn't know it? Hard to really quantify something unless you ask the question of every person you've met.
See my other reply [0] for more. I think the word homeschooling groups together to many different things. Something like "distributed schooling" feels better for my experience, and the people in my community.
How do parents help their kids learn once they reach middle school or high school level and the materials get more challenging?
I understand that many good online courses exist but they are not full substitutes of in-person discussions and personalized feedback for essays, for example. It can take quite a bit of time to understand or even review materials. Some families might not have the necessary background as well.
Personally, my mother was good at writing, so she taught that subject until I was 12. After that, there was a local writing teacher who taught an equivalent of comp 1, and comp 2.
My father taught math and programming. We did a mix of typical tutoring, and self study. Lots of self study since I had a natural aptitude for it.
From my experience, the horror stories you hear about kids being stuck in the middle of nowhere with only a bible to read are not the norm, and not what most "homeschoolers" advocate for. Even the word homeschool is a misnomer, a large amount of my time was spent at a local co-op with other "homeschoolers". My wifes youngest brother spends 4 out of 5 days split across two local co-ops. Her eldest brother is in a PhD program after the same experience. Most of the homeschoolers I know are more than able to function in modern society. Homeschooling simply allows for a much more tailored and less systematized schooling experience, making each family educational experience more akin to a startup in its ability to be nimble and respond to individual needs.
You learn with them, basically. Or you find other people in your community that can help. I’m not sure about others but most people don’t homeschool in isolation.
Not sure where you're from, but in many places, "society and government" has not failed people the same way it has in the US. Even within the US there are some places where local and state government have performed much better than places like Florida or NYC.
That is to say, the problem is not, conceptually, "society and government", but instead, the American society and American government we have today. Don't give up! Don't withdraw! Organize and fight to improve the systems that are exacerbating this crisis.
It's my conclusion that the system has failed as well, and it comes from things that are intrinsic to the system itself. Our civilization and systems are set up for failure. When "success" and "wealth" is determined by how much resources you can extract from the land and people, and how much control over access to those resources, it incentivized centralization and control over basic necessities. This would be food, water, shelter, warmth and clothing. Every one of those require money and participation in the economy. There is no fixing it, as every single possibility moves us towards eventual collapse.
The alternative is having the basic needs (food, water, shelter, warmth, clothing) be met by being a participant in the ecology. Where these things can be provided through decentralized means as part of regenerative processes. When these things are provided by regenerative cycles, families can live off of that across many generations provided that they are wise stewards of the land. This is better than Universal Basic Income. You can't eat money, and UBI still relies on the fragile global supply chain to meet basic needs.
Furthermore, because these systems are decentralized, it does not require collective action. It does not require organizing, or fighting against the system. It does not require waiting for leaders to Do Something About It. It is more like letting the weeds grow. Pioneering into depleted soil with tenacity and resilience. It requires a mindset shift, and connecting with the local ecology and local community.
This argument really doesn't work for me because you have nothing to compare the system to.
> Our civilization and systems are set up for failure.
I mean, it's succeeded so far. There have been and will be growing pains, but so far the standard of living has increased over time. To declare failure is just speculation.
> fragile global supply chain
Fragile compared to what?
> Every one of those require money and participation in the economy.
Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.
> There is no fixing it, as every single possibility moves us towards eventual collapse.
Citation needed.
You can point out problems with economies, government, etc. all day long, but if the system you're comparing it to is pure fiction, then what's the point?
> I mean, it's succeeded so far. There have been and will be growing pains, but so far the standard of living has increased over time. To declare failure is just speculation.
Industrialized society has been reducing the long-term carrying capacity of the earth for over a century. These effects, until recently, have been masked by intensification i.e. continually increasing consumption of resources for use as inputs of various processes (e.g. agriculture) that improve the standard of living. In the absence of infinite resources this method eventually reaches hard limits. Also, in a closed system negative externalities can eventually reach levels where they negatively affect carrying capacity.
> Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.
Hunter-gatherer societies have routinely been found to be happier and involve significantly less work than industrialized societies. The accelerating Holocene extinction, ongoing for millennia now, has obviously made this harder. Climate change is making this considerably harder as biomes, generally, shift poleward at rates that negatively impact biodiversity and hence carrying capacity.
> Citation needed.
Not sure what the other poster had in mind here, but the CMIP6 models taking into account cloud dynamics (which also happen to most closely fit historic data) show climate sensitivity of 5-7C, i.e. doubling preindustrial CO2 levels will entail to global average warming of 5-7C. Do you think warning in this range unlikely to occur because you see the necessary immediate societal change as likely? Or do you think that given that degree of climate shift occurs it is unlikely to entail a societal and/or biosphere collapse?
You're welcomed to jump in there with the citation. I had no intention of citing anything because it was my personal opinion. And mainly because, I think the system is complex enough that no single model can definitively prove that it will always tend towards collapse.
I am going to add, what I have in mind isn't a move backwards towards hunter-gatherer, but a move forward, into a post-industrial sociey. And I think post-industrial means becoming decentralized, and in alignment with natural processes, and one where people largely follow ethical principles to live within the ecology.
Food forests are a good example. They can be created with perennials or self-seeding annuals that regenerates itself, even when harvested by the residents.
Family sizes will probably have to increase, or at least, we may be talking about pooling the resources at a neighborhood level. A nuclear family alone doesn't have the time or resources to really pull this off well, but a nuclear family is also the product of the industrial idea of "success" and "wealth".
Careful use of technologies can make this a much different experience than hunter-gatherer, or even horticulture. Among the biggest difference is the presence of the Internet -- specifically, allowing people exchange practical information and barter for things from beyond the local area. (So I am not talking about the current Internet dominated by Big Tech and aggregators, but more of what Tim Berner-Lee had in mind with permissionless architecture, and Richard Stallman's views of Free Software).
The biggest thing we'd have to give up is this notion that wealth comes from extracting resources from the ground and controlling access to them. As long as we continue to use that as a means to rank ourselves against other people, we will continue to perpetuate a mindset that takes resources beyond our fair share, without regard for the earth or for the people. That one mindset is harder to give up than the extra cars, eating out, cheap fossil fuels, indoor plumbing, because we feel that we are entitled to all of it, and we get jealous when we see others have when we don't. Wealth inequality is intrinsic to this model of wealth. It will always be there, no matter how much resources we keep extracting.
> So is it a coincidence that 99.9% of hunter-gatherer societies have chosen to industrialize?
I don't think there is much evidence of this. Would you say that hunter-gatherers in Australia, Africa, or the Americas chose to industrialize? It seems more that agrarian society was forced upon them. Likewise, industrialization isn't much of a choice once you are already in an agrarian society as failing to adapt to it will see you outcompeted and displaced or extirpated.
Your question is like asking "why do 99.9% of people choose to have sex with me if I hold a knife to their throat?" It takes some serious mental gymnastics to construe that as them wanting to have sex with you.
99% haven't chosen to. It's more that those few that did, quickly wiped out or assimilated their neighbors. The ones that are left today are those who lived in regions too remote for that to happen (but it's still an ongoing process, e.g. in Brazil and Papua).
I have describe systems. There are demonstrator sites all around the world with people living with less dependency upon the system. It does not require 100% self-sufficiency to make a difference, and even 50% self-sufficiency with reslient and regenerative processes makes that family much more survivable.
After the fall of the USSR, Cuba had trade sanctions, cutting them off from the global supply chain. Locals had to come up with something to survive, and they started building a number of local, decentralized food systems. This was all grassroots, though they were eventually supported at the policy level. These were the same people who developed a sneakernet, passing contraband information from the Internet via disks and thumbdrives along the gossip channels.
So no, this system is not pure fiction. There are working examples. There are practices in place that people have been developing for 50 years now. There are people who are living that way.
More to the point, I am already implementing these things at my house and working my way towards that. I don't need to convince you. I'm not here pointing out problems with economies and governments. I have come across solutions, and they don't require large scale changes in policy for me to start taking action.
> Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.
No, it is not the reality of being a living creature. We can do better than that and we have the technologies and practices developed. There are some conveniences we have to let go, but there are a lot of the "work" is not as hard of a work as you think. It does not require a sudden change in going completely off the grid either. Small changes, over time is the way to go, one that works with the social customs and culture of the people involved.
Thanks for your comment. To expand on your point, a healthy society has a good mix of subsistence, volunteer/gift, exchange, and planned transactions. And when those are strong, theft is reduced.
You mean how the tax authority distributes the work to Intuit and HR Block?
How housing is distributed to private owners, financiers, and realtors?
The problems we’re experiencing are due to the opposite of centralization. Arguments against it are ideological conservatism.
Post office was a model of efficiency and distribution for an org that size until the GOP saddled it with debt.
In fact MOST human need centric social services in the US historically did great work on a dime budget.
And consider how much duplication of effort we get instead. Instead of NOAA sharing accurate weather data, we get Accuweather who takes NOAA data and wraps it in story mode for the innumerate masses who still believe in literal human hierarchy dictated from top down.
Utilitarian centralization of needs can and has in recent history, worked fine.
It’s limbic systems riddled with memes of the past, that can’t express motor agency outside a restricted norm that are the problem.
The concepts themselves are just that.
Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from!
Centralization can work. What we have is a terrorist political organization fighting against the end of their ideology in the form of Republicans and Democrats who prefer fealty to the past story they know and read about all day. Not the emerging one thanks to shifts in technology and social agency.
Imagine just getting a slip of paper in the mail with taxes owed?
Or not pricing 5 different package carriers?
This uncentralized waste playing ideology whack a mole is infuriating. It’s to prevent the centralized work habits, to enable authoritarian desire to grift on our work and game our agency.
“If the public were allowed to collectively build agencies that were successful, I might not be a rich important person!”
Let's start with housing. We have this idea of property laws and property rights. Before the rise of civilization, we didn't have such laws. People squatted and lived off of the land as needed. There are also blended model. The Homestead Acts allowed people to claim territory, which, after certain requirements are met, would pass into their hands as legal ownership.
Property, then, is an example where the registration of ownership is centralized to the legal mechanism of the government.
Or, let's take a tomato. Like the kind I can get from Wendy's. That tomato probably came from California or Mexico. (Or during the winter, from the hothouses in Canada). It is grown there and then shipped unripen across country. There are multiple actors involved. You can argue that, because the government is not involved, this is not centralized.
The kind of decentralization I am talking about is a tomato that I grow in my backyard. That can be watered from rainwater harvesting. That can be fed by compost from other parts of my garden. Whose seeds I can save, and I can replant. Every generation, those tomatoes become more adapted to my biome (low desert). After the initial setup, there is no money involved to intermediate between me and the tomato. It is between myself and the land, and the local ecology.
> Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from!
I have no idea what you mean by this. I don't consider shared effort at the household or neighborhood level to be that centralized. That speaks more about coordinating efforts, and cooperating together.
Let's see - US government instituted reasonably prompt lockdowns. They mailed one-time stimulus checks to everyone, gave 600$ unemployment insurance boosts, ramped up hospital capacities, opened up other support measures for businesses and allowed 50 parallel experiments (at state level) to see what works and what doesn't.
Was the response perfect? Certainly not. Did some other countries do better? I'm sure we could find a handful. Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!
And in case you think that the US is indeed one, it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore, or you have consumed too much of biased media which wants to maximize your anxiety and partisanship for their profits, or you are just trolling here to intentionally sow divisions. Assuming you are not in the last category, please go and learn about how things are in Brazil or India or sub-Saharan Africa. You will realize that the US is in a much better shape and things are handled far better than the media narratives.
No, it was not perfect. According to [1] the US has 27% of all cases of COVID-19, 24% of all COVID-19 deaths and 29% of new cases yesterday. For comparison US has 4.3% of world's population [2].
> Did some other countries do better? [...] it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore
Did some countries do worse? Italy is often cited as a badly hit country (and is not Singapore nor in Scandinavia), but if you look at their total cases curve [3] you'll see it has become nearly flat and new cases have been suppressed to near ~200/day from the peak of ~6k/day. For comparison, the corresponding plots for the US show a bungled attempt to flatten the curve followed by renewed exponential growth [4]. Daily new cases were only suppressed to ~1k/day from the peak of ~2.7/day.
> Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!
Well, what are the inclusion criteria? I'm asking, because when it comes to COVID-19 the US is doing so badly that now only 26 other countries have had more cases of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic than the US added yesterday (73,388) [1].
has 27% of all the known cases - FTFY! Do you honestly believe the reported number of cases from the populous developing countries known for their corruption and a lack of functioning systems (I come from one, so I know first hand how they work)?
> I'm asking, because when it comes to COVID-19 the US is doing so badly...
so badly in terms of what? Reported number of cases, which is miserably under-reported due to a lack of testing / credible systems in the majority parts of the world (at least by population)? I know that people are losing jobs in the US, businesses are bankrupting but where I come from, people are starving and a 12 yo was begging for food when my sister went for grocery shopping, since his family hadn't had enough food in 2 days.
If you are in the US and haven't experienced a poor society first-hand (beyond a 2-3 week vacation in the tourist spots in such places), please count yourself lucky and appreciate what you've got!
The US has handled the pandemic worse than any country in the world, except maybe Brazil. Otherwise, I can't think of a country that has handled it worse.
Which countries are doing a worse job than the US in handling Coronavirus, in your opinion?
Apart from Brazil (which you mentioned), the US is doing a far better job than India and Bangladesh in terms of supporting the economy and social safety nets like one time stimulus payments, boosting unemployment benefits, aid to businesses etc. [Source: close families / friends living in those two countries].
Spain and UK all had a fair amount of drama and government incompetence, still have worse death/1M stats than the USA by a fair margin, and are forecasted to be hit harder economically (-11% vs -7% USA in 2020 GDP). It's still way too early to tell if they are actually going to end up worse, since this is still going at full swing in the USA, and there are a lot of uncertain factors, but I think there's a fair chance they end up being as bad or worse than USA.
Russia did very badly. First, lots of denial. Then, lockdowns so harsh in some places, Chinese could be jealous. And the burden was placed squarely on the businesses - the government effectively declared universal non-essential paid leave, but didn't subsidize it.
Oh, and the government successfully managed to use the epidemic as a cover-up for heretofore unseen levels of electoral fraud in the not-really-referendum on constitutional amendments.
Not really true. US had a terrible response at the start, made worse by the CDC test not working, putting us weeks behind ever other country. Then Trump decided wearing masks wasn't important and tons of people followed his lead, ensuring our case load stayed consistently high.
The context of what I mean by saying that I am giving up is that institutions, government, and corporations are unreliable. I can't make decisions based on conditions as they are today because as soon as I do the rug will be pulled out from under me and leave me on my butt. This means that if I had a great idea for a business I will decide not to start that business. That vacation that I was planning won't happen anymore. Certain cities I may have been inclined to visit I won't enter anymore. Heck I even have to self-censor myself now for any thoughts I have because who knows who is going to get offended and try to prevent me from having a job, credit card, or even an opinion.
Giving up on one approach vetsus another, because the incentive balance has shifted. From a consequentalist point of view, the impetus is secondary- if you think people would be better off being less reliant on the state, then any time they take actions towards that, it's good.
What we need is a plan and a leader that will pull us out of this gridlock and death spiral that we're in. We need a diagnosis of what exactly is going wrong, a concrete plan of action, and mass participation.
My diagnosis:
- Hyper-partisanship is causing politicians and the electorate to harden into uncompromising tribes. This hyper-partisanship also serves to increase the size and scale of the fringe wings of both parties, leading to events like the infamous white-supremacist Charlottesville rally.
The cause(s):
- 1. News as a business, particularly if that business is publicly traded, is not in the 'truth-telling' business. It is in the 'maximizing profits' business, as all (publicly traded) companies are.
- 1.1. Therefore, truth is ancillary to any for-profit news business. This will manifest itself in different ways depending on the monetization scheme of the business.
- 1.2. In the case of 24-hour news networks, like Fox and CNN, they are advertisement driven and therefore seek to maximize 'eyeballs'. Therefore, a constant stream of engaging content must be produced: for both Fox and CNN, the result is hyper-sensationalism. The creation of outrage, controversy, and even facts that don't exist. Further, because Fox is so partisan, it has effectively forced CNN to become partisan too.
- 1.3. The above is also true, and *especially* true, for ad-driven online news sources. Clickbait is a well-known phenomenon for, again, maximizing outrage and controversy for ad impressions. Visit an average article on CNN, Fox, or Breitbart and count how many ads you see. Now ask yourself: is it *really* in their best interest to be partial and nuanced?
- 2. Twitter and Facebook allow us to create echo chambers of politicians, pundits, news organizations, and peers.
- 2.1. The 'like' and 'share/retweet' mechanisms incentivize divisive, emotional, and simplistic posts/tweets.
- 2.2. And given that a small subset of users actually tweet or comment or post, those that do tend to be more radical, which lead people to believe that the majority opinion for ${POLITICAL_PARTY} is reflected in the comment section. This leads to a true 'Overton shift' for those in ${POLITICAL_PARTY} and opposite polarization for ${OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY}.
There are another dozen reasons, I'm sure, including: money in politics, constant campaigning, a genuine uptick in racism/anti-semitism, and many more. I think exploring the idea of a crowd-sourced website listing these reasons and proposed solutions would be quite valuable.
> I think exploring the idea of a crowd-sourced website listing these reasons and proposed solutions would be quite valuable.
100% agree...a crowd-sourced website that does this and a whole bunch of other things is desperately needed.
I believe with strong certainty that the current state of affairs (in Western countries at least) is that our political, corporate, and media structures, combined with the "collective consciousness" of our population, have basically brought us to a point from which these same organizations haven't a hope in hell of undoing the mess they've put us in. I think something outside the current system, a completely new grassroots approach to decision and sense making is required to get us back onto a sustainable path.
> has not failed people the same way it has in the US
Not yet. It ain't over yet though, even though it might seem like it elsewhere. Basic facts are: herd immunity is prohibitively expensive from the fatalities perspective (although it may be our only long term option), a vaccine is not guaranteed to ever exist, and C19 is now endemic, so it will come back. Oh and also, for the society to function people must be able to work.
To poster below who said that no vaccine == no herd immunity. That's actually not true. For a vaccine to be approved it needs to be safe. Herd immunity will just happen eventually, no approval needed as the virus itself doesn't care if it's "safe" or not. Paradoxically, the society will likely prefer to tolerate higher body count due to not having a vaccine at all, rather than smaller body count for a vaccine that is unsafe in a small, but not completely negligible percentage of cases.
Most of the vectors of COVID spread in the US have little to do with failing to close itself off from the rest of the world. If you have the political will, you can implement quarantine for international travelers, which will catch the overwhelming majority of externally-sourced cases.
The US did not do so, because it was too disruptive to business, and because good, sober governance has been an explicit non-goal for the past few decades, on both state and federal level - but especially in the last few years.
Extensive use of the subway is what sets NYC apart from all other cities in the US, and it was the main vector. NYC should have been much more diligent about cleaning the subway and limiting concurrent access. I understand due to the sheer volume and necessity of subway use the chosen policies may have been the best. But the subway has been overcrowded and near the breaking point for years and little was done to maintain the system before COVID.
I've been in a lot of subway cars where you're so packed in, you can't move an inch. Even if the NYC subway was twice its capacity, I don't think you would have had the level of social distancing necessary to do much about COVID. Maybe it would have been less bad, but I think it's hard to say.
And remember, if the subway capacity was increased, subway ridership would likely increase as well, as it becomes a more appealing mode of transport.
What NYC really should have done is shut down businesses on March 1 instead of March 15. But... I don't know, I think that's a lot to ask of politicians. The public would not have responded well to schools being closed and restaurants being shuttered. We needed a wake-up call.
By contrast, I feel like Florida, Georgia, etc have really had that wake-up call, and have chosen to flout it anyway. I don't have much sympathy.
"If transit itself were a global super-spreader, then a large outbreak would have been expected in dense Hong Kong, a city of 7.5 million people dependent on a public transportation system that, before the pandemic, was carrying 12.9 million people a day. Ridership there, according to the Post, fell considerably less than in other transit systems around the world. Yet Hong Kong has recorded only about 1,100 COVID-19 cases, one-tenth the number in Kansas, which has fewer than half as many people. Replicating Hong Kong’s success may involve safety measures, such as mask wearing, that are not yet ingrained in the U.S., but the evidence only underscores that the coronavirus can spread outside of transit and dense urban environments—which are not inherently harmful."
This seems to be a widespread problem. Nobody wants to spend money on maintenance. You can always find a grant to build new stuff, but maintenance you have to pay for yourself.
A uniquely American view of independence and rights has become a uniquely american problem with helping our neighbor, unfortunately. Nations with more collective oriented values appear to have done much better.
Just sucks to not have a solution for people who spend their lives teaching (and babysitting, managing, mentoring, and more) our youth.
While I do worry to myself if that's making monoliths, I think you're right.
One way or another, this situation tests a country/culture's ability to implement collective behavior/protections where the benefits don't accrue to the person taking the actions.
Social distancing has its obvious social costs, and my feeling (I couldn't definitively call it understanding) with masks is that it's more about protecting people from you, and not the other way around.
I think no matter how you break it down, the USA has proven so far it's poorly suited to do carry that out for each other.
We're currently looking for a new home and this disaster has completely changed what we're looking for. Before it was clean suburbs with great schools close to the city. Now we're looking for more property much farther out and even considering states that didn't lock down so tightly. Good schools are no longer a consideration as we will home school as well.
The social contract theory has failed, and we're preparing now for a future without it.
Albeit, I'm not a single family (we have two parents) but...I'm an advocate for homeschooling. I have been for about a decade now. I've noticed a lot of different parenting styles growing up and education matters tremendously but not just book smarts, but emotional intelligence, dealing with various people, skills, and even high valued skills.
As I've lived my life and looked into multiple system, I feel the American education has failed it's students for well over 30 years. The student that succeed? The ones that knows that school is more than 9am to 2pm (or whatever depending on the age). I feel it's best taught in the home.
As the child ages and more skilled studies are required, yes they'll learn from teachers but parents can get very far with a child, if you encourage them to learn and foster their curiosity.
Finally, I'll conclude with this. I feel very grateful for this covid19 because this will now help more resources to improve the quality/efficiency of homeschooling. I look forward to using these new resources that will rise up.
Economist Bryan Caplan (who wrote the book The Case Against Education) has been homeschooling his kids for 5 years and shares his thoughts on the topic:
I am lucky enough that the local school district and university my kids go to are either outright online, or offering online options. But if that were not the case, I would be where you are, and I would also support teachers striking over the lack of fundamental workplace safety of in person teaching right now. From the rough impressions of my reading of research, indoor transmission in groups is the easiest way to pass an infection.
This is completely intentional and the natural growth of right wing political ideologies that has been building since the 80s.
There has been a concerted effort by some to make the government unreliable. There are vested interests in getting the government out of many things it does, and lots of profit to be made taking over what the government provides. The right has, for awhile, been ideologically opposed the government funded education, for example.
If the government is unreliable, it's because the US has elected people that make it so. Government works fine in many countries around the world. Canada, Europe, Australia... all seem in far better shape. We're just intentionally crippling it for ideological and profit reasons.
US voters who voted Trump into office are also largely to blame. No one to blame but ourselves. Projecting anger onto "the system" is missing the picture. To put it another way, if you want your government to work for the people, stop voting people into office who are very obviously breaking the government because they are zealots or greedy.
The real illness is on a different level - it's the way the main culture in the US sees and understands the world. It makes some spectacularly wrong assumptions there. But those assumptions were never seriously challenged (no enemies nearby, dominance after WW2), so then why change, right?
Now those assumptions are being challenged. And of course a lot of people, rather than change and give up their cherished "identity", would plow ahead blindly, consequences be damned. Everyone who is protesting masks, I am looking at you and your beliefs.
This has happened many times in history. Societies get their beliefs challenged by reality. Some adapt, fix their stuff, and go on. Some don't.
My wife is a teacher and starting school (in person) in a week and a half. There’s no answers to questions like:
- Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away?
- When a teacher gets sick, what substitute teacher is going to want to teach an exposed class (also, they’ll be making sub plans with covid?)?
- When they’re sick are will they be getting additional sick leave?
- Do they get worker’s compensation if they get sick, since they were knowingly sent into a dangerous environment?
> Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away?
It pains me to admit that this didn't even occur to me as part of the topic of teachers being sent back. The human aspects of students-teacher relationships. I feel I've been desensitized to this after exposing myself to a constant stream of news, and now I'm thinking further about what other aspects lie behind other headlines. Thank you for sharing this
I agree - this never really occurred to me either. My girlfriend's mother is a preschool teacher who just had to go back to in-person sessions and she believes some of these kids will have trauma's from being young and terrified. One little girl is afraid to touch anything and constantly asks if objects have been cleaned/safe to touch? it's heartbreaking to her.
Sounds like a bunch of children just got trained to have obsessive compulsive disorder. My wife has it and my life was filled with contamination fears before COVID-19.
As someone who used to struggle with OCD in my youth: Procedural awareness of sterile field and infection control is a very different thing from OCD. OCD can't really be taught like that.
I really struggled with this with my toddler. In the end I decided to chill out and take whatever comes as a consequence rather than traumatise my child for life.
Typically kids are more resilient then that. The kid that ends up as scared had those tendencies before. If your toddler don't tend to be paranoid, you taking precautions and talking about them as normal thing to do won't harm him at all.
It's a human aspect, but to be blunt, it's not a significant consideration as long as you aren't opening schools in an area with high community transfer (e.g. Houston today). IF you additionally filter out high risk-group teaches (known pre-existing health conditions, older than 65, etc.) excess death risk is quite low. (e.g. in the Bay Area, dying in a car crash remains far more likely (~10x) if you meet the criteria earlier noted)
At least 30 teachers have died of COVID in NYC alone. That seems significant for a viral outbreak that is nowhere near containment or exhaustion, and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually.
But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismissive of the risk or forced to take risk to feed themselves. I think the real change will have to be less preciousness/protectiveness of the value of human life, sadly.
> and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually.
I'm not proposing schools open in an NYC/Houston/Miami type situation. But in lower infection area (e.g. the Bay Area), where about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly, you are not "almost certainly" going to get the virus.
Obviously, school opening should be gated by community transfer level. California seems to be using a 2 week target of < 100 confirmed per 100k people (with low test positivity), which seems reasonable to me.
> (e.g. the Bay Area), about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly
I don't know if your 0.1% number is accurate, but let's assume that it is. If somehow cases remain completely level for the rest of the school year (which is far from a given, but for the sake of argument ...) over the course of 40 weeks, a randomly-chosen person has roughly a 40 * 0.1% = 4% chance of getting infected. But that is a randomly-chosen person, whereas it's not hard to imagine that a teacher exposed for hours daily to multiple young kids who aren't good at keeping their germs to themselves is (ballpark) maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person [1]. So then we arrive at an estimate of perhaps 24% odds of a teacher getting infected during the 2020-2021 school year using my assumptions (which you are free to disagree with).
Is 24% "almost certain"? No, but by highlighting the tiny 0.1% number, I think you are potentially seriously misrepresenting the true risk to an individual teacher. Hopefully, all of the measures that school districts might put into place will make my 6x-elevated risk estimate incorrect, but it's really hard to know. It's also possible that kids just don't transmit the virus very often. There's some evidence that that's the case, but I don't think we have really solid data on the question.
> maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person
That is almost certainly not the case. California has had 350 daycare staff get covid infections out of 100k+ workers. That's actually about a third the rate on average.
Again, kids are less likely than average to have covid. Infectious kids may be less likely to transmit. This is different from flu where kids are large carriers. There are few documented cases of young kids (under 10) spreading to other kids or to teachers.
Or there is the other option that we as a country acknowledge that being compassionate and finding solutions to feed these people is an all around better way to take care of our citizens.
Why is the solution: Generate corporate profits or die. Or expose yourself to needless risk or die? Seems...sociopathic?
This strikes me as highly naive. We have states here in the US banning cities from implementing mandatory mask rules. Do you really think places like that are going to tell people older than 65 not to come in? Do you think if someone who's high risk refuses that they'll still have a job in a place like that? If you're over 65 and will potentially lose your pension for not going in to work, you're probably going to have to think twice about that before just saying no.
How does one isolate "high risk group" teachers, though? What's the plan for that? Is it a volunteer thing? Are you going to lay people off? How do you fill the void in the resulting empty positions? What about the family members of those not-high-risk teachers?
I'm not a zealot on this. Areas with low infection rates should definitely be looking at schools as an early candidate for reopening.
But I genuinely can't understand the outrageous partisanship on this subject that says we have to pick a fight with everyone, right now, on this subject. Why schools? Seriously? Why schools? Why now? What focus group told who this was the hill to die on?
> You shouldn't be having high risk-group teachers
Uh, why? What specifically about diabetes, high blood pressure, or the still largely random distribution of many types of cancer, prevents one from being a teacher?
It's amazing to see how differently we treat the low probability, high impact events like active shooters and terrorism, but we completely fail to do the far easier task of dealing with the high probability, unknown impact events.
Well, that’s true, except that it’s not easy. Easy to talk about, sure, but not easy to implement without backlash from the moneyed interests that exist.
Most of the world has reacted better than the US. I agree it's not easy, it has not been easy for anyone. But the unwillingness/incapability of the US to suffer backlash from their own moneyed interests is not the norm. It's a symptom of a dysfunctional system. It shouldn't be normalized.
Agreed it's a disturbing realization of the unspoken acknowledgment people in the US have been forced to live with: "capitalism doesn't care if you live or die"
And I wasn't advocating for any one of those as a fundamentally better system, assuming you mean raw unfettered nature, hunter-gatherer style. And even then it's likely there is a tribe that cares..but I digress.
I don't see how the moneyed interests really have much to do with the COVID-19 response in the US (or lack of it). Few of the people refusing to wear masks belong to the idle rich.
There is nothing special about America in that respect. Plenty of people around the world are not wearing masks when they are supposed to.
What sets America apart is the hyper-shorttermism: go into a lockdown, then come out of it in the middle when it becomes clear that the lockdown has economic consequences (which should have been obvious). Then, go back into lockdowns when it becomes clear that coming out of lockdown at the wrong time lead to a second wave.
There seems to be a particular class of stupid businesspeople, who cannot think beyond next week. This too is not unique to america. What is unique is that in America their desire to bankrupt their own businesses takes precedence over everything else.
Other countries have had second lockdowns or are thinking about it as well, including China. Also, no one in America wants to bankrupt their own businesses (except the lower side of the lower class). Our downfall is our reliance on "repeatable" profits which we then waste by giving them to the rich who then hoard them and don't spend enough.
No. I think my intention when using the low-probability, high impact examples is that we over-invest by dedicating far too much time and too many resources on events that will likely never happen but we can't even prepare for / respond to the high probability events well. Far better to practice and iterate on improving our response to the latter which will give us the expertise to better handle the former.
Even on the outside, it seems like pushing kids back into the classroom is poorly thought out. I can't imagine the shitshow it must seem like on the inside.
The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster.
I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work.
In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't care, or are unable to provide internet access.
One solution is to get students back into classrooms. Another is to design a remote learning system that actually works, with enforcement of attendance and where grades actually matter, but that is probably not something our substandard education system is able to achieve.
>The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster.
Speaking from a USA perspective, no, it was a complete shit show. And you know what? That is fine.
Our school district went from completely normal one day to remote learning the next. Huge swing in what to do and how to do it. There were no plans for a global pandemic. School districts learned quickly there were external factors affecting everyone's life at the same time. Parents losing jobs, food insecurity, child anxiety. All at once.
School districts eased up. Remote learning went quickly from trying to dive into things to one on one check ins to group hellos. The semester started winding down. Everyone passed and moved on.
Now, we're in the fall. School districts had months to prepare for an effective remote learning strategy. Let's see what happens.
(Between you, me and the tree, it's not going to go well, either.)
My wife is a teacher, guess how much direction she has had over the summer? Districts are just now thinking about whether they'll be online or not, 2-3 weeks before they open.
School districts really aren't doing any more training or working on remote learning. Teachers are not required to work in the Summer and therefore most will won't do anything to prepare. My wife works with multiple school districts here in SoCal. We even had one district who had negotiated with the teachers union and they did not legally have to do any online instruction at all. (Huntington Beach). So, many teachers simply did nothing, or very little. The school board there has been taking heat over it for the last couple of months.
Even for parents like myself that are really, really trying to make it work, it's a nonstarter. I have a 7 year old, and his computer is right next to mine where I am working remote, and I can supervise, except I'm in meetings often and it's hard to keep him on track. There's no peer pressure from other students to behave, the teacher has poor equipment and is barely intelligible sometimes, and there's every incentive to just goof off if I am not on top of him in a ridiculous way that would never have been the case in conventional schooling or even in traditional homeschooling.
I'm distracted and my productivity suffers also.
> Another is to design a remote learning system that actually works
I don't know what that would look like, because at the end of the day it'll just be a TV yelling at you, and kids will tune out. There's lots of interactive educational material, but unfortunately it's either way too much "fun and games" and not deep enough, or it's just boring worksheets slapped on a screen.
The teachers are honestly trying their best with the materials they have, but it doesn't work, and it seems like really we're stuck between wasting formative years, or risking that we get sick with a disease which honestly has a pretty low mortality rate in otherwise healthy people. I hate the decision, I hate the dichotomy, I wish there was another option, but I don't see it.
And this is with a private school outside of America; so I can only imagine how it would be in a more impoverished American inner-city setup, or how it is for people who can't work remote.
I think they have to go back and we just have to accept the health risk. I hate that this is where I've landed.
The alternative option is hybrid remote/on-site schooling, where the kids are on campus half-day, rotating groups a few days a week, on an alternating week schedule. That gets critical face-to-face time, albeit with social distancing, that is necessary (particularly for elementary) to support a workable remote learning plan on the other days.
This is what my school district, for example, was planning on doing until the teachers union organized a walk-out.
This is what my nephew is doing, and it's 100% incompatible with working parents. How can they work around shifting 4 hour days with alternating weekly schedules?
No, what I mean is that providing daycare is NOT a requirement that has factored into school district or education department decisions at all. It is not something that is being optimized for.
I have mixed feelings about how effective this approach could be, especially in younger populations that don't have the best grasp on what is happening and where the boundaries are in terms of playing together or interacting. I hate to say it but I think it's all or nothing, either no one goes in or everyone goes in. Even if a smaller portion of people get sick, they still have the option of spreading it..especially if they don't work remotely which many people can't.
This seems to reflect that many of these folks seem to think what they are asked to learn is largely detached from their dat-to-day lives. I would agree with that assessment for high school students who are not college-bound.
Specifically, high school for these folks is a rehash of middle school, a simplified version of college prep (which is not relevant for folks not going to college), or both.
One thing that I have taken away from the quarantine is that the function of school as childcare is as much or more important than the function of school as a place to learn for many people.
The people who told me this are elementary and junior-high teachers. The students are fairly young. They are all on social media though, which is why they all learned that the state won't hold students back this year.
Fairly young students are not motivated without personal contact and relationship. Which is more likely reason then fear of non existent threat of being hold back.
They also can't organize to be at online lessons unless parents do that work.
You're right, and it's because remote education is exposing the core truths of education, which are that it's mostly daycare (at least until dropout age) and signalling.[1] If that's not bad enough, our education systems (not just the USA) constantly make most students feel stupid, so the kids hate it.
I really don't know how you'd fix all the issues, but I am sure that any meaningful reform will be incredibly unpopular (especially with teachers).
When I was in middle school, a couple teachers threatened a couple kids that if they did not do X and Y and Z, they would be held back a year. The kids did not do X or Y or Z, i.e. nothing, and they were promoted anyway.
I didn't know anyone who was held back a year, other than one kid in 2nd grade. It's a completely empty threat, and the kids knew it.
I got one and dug trenches for a sprinkler system in a pretty small city yard. It was fun for about 30 minutes, which represented a disturbingly small fraction of the total job.
What's with the black&white? How about nurtured guidance, positive reinforcement learning or inspirational leadership? The stick isn't the only compelling force, and when it comes to education, it's probably one of the worst.
Kids are naturally curious, they're hard-wired to learn from the world around them. But you need a school system that fosters that, not hampers it.
To be empathetic, there's a 4th group of parents, those who can't really help. A single mom of 2 that used to rely on school and day care to work is between a rock and a hard place now. Either they work and are able to put food on the table but the kids suffer, or they help the kids and underperform at work and risk unemployment. I think most people chose putting bread on the table.
Being hold back a year was not serious threat for the years already. Literally no one worried about that, except maybe few kids with actual learning issues.
So 2 directions? The cheaper, easier, and far more deadly in person option or invest $$$ with a need for short term results. It's never that simple, but if the issue is spending the money then I don't see why it isn't a straight forward option given how much we've spent to buy bad debt and bail out administration cronies.
The consensus on both ends of the political spectrum over the past 30 years is that public education is a failure and must be abolished through either defunding or diverting funding to charter schools. Providing more funding to public schools would undermine that goal.
I don't see it as a consensus when there has been a systematic defunding and destruction of many many education systems, especially in rural america and the inner cities. It's like saying, why did you fall in the hole I dug in front of you?
I think the GP is arguing from results, not policy. If the past 30 years have consistently resulted in the same policies of defunding and deconstruction, there's apparently a tacit agreement among all parties that that's the way to go.
The actual solution is to control the propagation of the virus throughout society, which for the most part still has yet to be done. We're going to continue to have the same poor options we had in March until this is actually done.
This is both disheartening on one hand and encouraging on another it means that remote education of school age isn't inherently broken because the current system is.
Then you cut the school day in half, get rid of homework, and find the best-of-breed educators to deliver unidirectional video content with mandatory pass/fail multiple-choice quizzes. Do less than x% of quizzes and you get held back a grade.
Teachers are on the clock for what, 8 hours a day? I don't think it's too much to ask for two or three blocks of "office hours" for miscellaneous Q&A or face-time or "random topic of the day".
I mean c'mon, we all know half of what's taught in schools these days from K-12 is useless filler material. Teachers must adapt.
Online quizzes and video lectures might be fine for college students, but your idea is laughable for younger kids. You really haven't thought this through...
The third solution is to suck it up and wait it out until there's a vaccine, which still may be as soon as December.
I hate having my kids out of school. Virtual learning is mostly useless. They are ( I think ) quietly becoming more and more withdrawn and I don't know how well they'll recover once things open up. We have two parents working from home and barely managing to stay productive.
Still I think sending kids back to the classroom is a terrible idea. I wouldn't be a school nurse for any amount of money. It's just not safe, and we can all still wait.
What if there is never a vaccine, or what if there is one but it takes years to become available, or what if a large portion of Americans refuse to be vaccinated?
My girlfriend is a middle school guidance counselor. She was spending most of her week during the end of the school year dealing with referrals from teachers for students who weren't doing any work at home. Not just slacking off some, but entirely refusing to do anything. She'd try contacting the parents but many would never return her calls. The few she did contact weren't very concerned or admitted they lacked a way of making their child do their school work.
Her main concern is that this is going to widen the achievement gap between students with high parental involvement and those with low parental involvement. They've spend a lot of time trying to come up with strategies to deal with the situation but outside of sending government officials to the home for an on-site evaluation (problematic for many reasons), there's little they can do. She's worried that as time goes on, the number of students discovering they can get away with doing no work will increase.
> this is going to widen the achievement gap between students with high parental involvement and those with low parental involvement
How could it not? Volunteering in my kids' school since they were in kindergarten, it was sadly clear to me that some of the kids got dealt a pretty bad hand in terms of parental involvement (often out of conflicting demands on the parents, I'm sure). COVID-related home-schooling hasn't helped anything I'm sure.
They were less likely to refuse the work. For one, kids are herd animals and when other kids are doing work, it motivates the slacker. For the other, teachers actually make them - most kids just kinda don't want to do it and will if pushed by teacher or motivated by system of rewards.
Second, doing work at home alone all the time is much demotivating for even good kids. And parents are less fun to explain things then teacher, because most parents sux at it all. Some end in power struggle others just don't know what to do.
I can't say for sure but it was my impression that many of these students don't have parents at home during the day. The school system my gf works for is in an area with several meat processing plants, which I assume are considered essential. There are also many undocumented workers in that area. For those who were doing jobs that weren't considered essential, they probably can't rely on being able to collect unemployment and had to go find other work. It's a lot to ask of middle school age children to be self motivated especially if their friends around the neighborhood were outside playing or coming over to hangout, regardless of lockdown orders or not.
Teachers are so under appreciated. It takes a lot of knowledge, training, and some have years and years of experience on how to make kids pay attention to the class and study. I am trying really hard at home but there's no way I can even match any of the teachers my son has at his school on almost everything they do.
All good questions. If it were me I would join forces with other teachers and parents to bring the questions to the principal and school board (or district). I suspect that in many cases, teachers and parents will need to put significant pressure on the PTB to force them to confront these important questions.
edit - If your wife belongs to a teachers union, this would be a great thing for the teachers union to push for.
You can push for answers from those people, but there's probably no real answers to give. The federal response to the pandemic has been so ineffective, to put it kindly, that it leaves people at all levels with no meaningful responses. Principals, superintendents, and school boards can want to offer the support described in this thread, but have no real way to actually deliver it.
For sure, there aren't any easy answers. I believe that smaller school districts can come up with creative answers if there's sufficient support for the schools in the community. If the school policies are dictated at the state level, then the ability to do this is made much more difficult (if not impossible).
Not always. My kids were educated in public schools K-12 and we always lived in areas where the schools were the best. The 2 things in common for different places we lived were: (1) higher property taxes (used to fund the schools), and (2) very active parental involvement in the schools.
The public schools are only one part of our civilization. The ineffectual and incompetent national response has left no good options on the table for public schools. No matter what happens now, we're sacrificing some children because the assholes in power couldn't be bothered to care about things other than themselves.
Right. Even if one community comes up with a really good plan, we still have interstate travel in a nation with numerous states whose governors are actively against any mitigating actions on a local level. So no, we can't just "look to our governors".
All good questions. Based on some of what I've read, actions are being taken to ensure (for the most part) the contrary...that businesses / schools are protected with little regard for the individual. A more recent example is below.
> Included in the list are temporary protection from the trial bar for schools, colleges, charities and business that follow public health guidelines and for frontline medical workers.
One could argue they (in this case Senate majority) are just crossing the t's and dotting the i's but considering there has been little regard (in many states and definitely on the federal level) for public health (in favor of other concerns) thus far...that is IMHO wishful thinking.
Same here. The narrative admin has been giving parents was that they were working hand in hand with teachers on the return plan.
That was a total lie. It came out this week and parents (thankfully) called our counties admin on their narrative.
So no they have principals calling each teacher and asking them on their comfort level about returning . Unsurprisingly, most aren’t comfortable.
When they called my wife they asked for her comfort level on a 1-10 scale.
She refused to give them a number. Instead just saying this plan means she is 100% confident she will contract it and spread it to the family in the month of august. But that is not what concerns her. What concerns her is that if every other school, teacher and parent is doing the same, on the heels of the current numbers, it means we may not be able to get the medical attention we need due to overloading the medical community.
The Los Angelos teachers added a few other requests [1]. The introduction starts with:
[...] LAUSD educators clearly want to get back into schools with their students, but the underlying question at every step must be: Given broader societal conditions, how do we open physical schools in a way that ensures that the benefit outweigh the risks [...]
And then proceeds to the following recommendations, among many others:
- Defund Police
- Shelter the homeless
- Paid sick leave for all
- Medicare for all
- "Charter Moratorium"
- "Financial Support for Undocumented Students and Families"
I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters. Parents choose to send their kids there - if the existing public school was so good, why would they send them somewhere else? It's simply about choice, and sending your own kids to the best possible option. No one would ever deny their own children the best possible education available. It's so clearly about administrators and professionals over the needs of children, it's simply immoral and bordering on evil.
> I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters
The left doesn't hate charters, it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable. That's a subset of charters plus all vouchers.
Actual public charters, by which public schools are granted some variance of generally applicable rules to trial new methods are not a problem to the left; the hijacking of that process to create super-voucher schools when the voucher model failed to gain sufficient political support is what the left hates.
> Parents choose to send their kids there
Often, after the local regular public school has been replaced by a privately-operated charter in the same facility, and often the parents who most choose to send their children their are the ones whose most-local school was replaced, because it's the most convenient public school and going to a more distant one has added cost.
Charters are explicitly reductions in institutional legal accountability, and unlike public (charter or not) schools, the chief decision makers so released from accountability with private schools are not accountable by election, either.
Yes, and it's difficult to get information from charter schools because they are not subject to the same reporting that public schools are. This makes it easy for people take advantage of their opaqueness.
Harper’s recently ran a pretty good piece on the matter, if anyone is interested in a longer-form skeptical perspective on charter schools and their lack of accountability:
Charter schools are accountable to the parents. If the parents do not like the performance of a charter school, they can pull their kids out of it, and put them in their neighborhood public school.
I have had 3 kids in charter schools in San Diego for a total of 5 charter schools. The charter schools were all really good. Bad ones should close but the passion and excitement shown by charter school teachers are above and beyond the State run school teachers that my kids have also attended.
Charter schools compete for the same low funding pool, while only accepting well performing non-SPED students, leaving public schools with less money and a harder (& more expensive) student body.
This artificially increases Charter School's performance, and artificially lowers Public School's performance.
But this isn't an accident, Charter Schools are designed to de-fund public education for political reasons, and while discriminating against SPED kids is illegal, the % of SPED kids at charters is disproportionately low[0].
> Charter schools are significantly less likely to reply to students to the IEP message than to the baseline message, while traditional public schools are not. There is also some evidence that schools are less likely to respond to families with Hispanic-sounding names.
Blind lotteries exist because it has been true, and most states still don't mandate blind lotteries. That's like using anti-discrimination laws as an argument for discrimination not existing.
Blind lotteries were started to combat this prevalent issue (and still fail to address poorly performing/SPED kids dropping out of charters and back into public education at a disproportionate rate, which undermines their goal).
At best, charter schools are there to defund public education. At worst, they are outright embezzling of school funding. They are being pushed by Betsy Devos, whose record speaks against her. Her handling of the charter school system in Detroit led to it having the nationwide poorest reading and mathematics scores. In a lawsuit, charter school defenders argued that literacy is not a right.
Far too sweeping of a statement. "At their best" charter schools provide a laboratory for experimentation and alternative models of education which are impossible to implement within a rigid bureaucracy. In NYC we have many excellent progressive charter schools with massive waiting lists to get in. In many cases test scores are lower because these schools have chosen to emphasize real education over test preparation which unfortunately dominates bandwidth in many classrooms.
> At best, charter schools are there to defund public education.
At best, charter schools are public schools granted flexibility to trial new educational approaches on a limited basis to provide concrete evidence to drive decisions on changes in general practices.
But most charter schools, especially private-operated and especially private-for-profit ones, are not “at best”.
For me, it's because private, religiously focused schools can receive federal aid to indoctrinate children into said religion, dictate what is taught to increase indoctrination rates, and skate oversight. They are welcome to do this on their own dime, but as soon as taxpayer funding is involved all religious specific focus and values must be dropped. The school must no longer refuse employment or punish students based on protected classes, benefits and other school affiliated programs must not have any religious based rules or policies, and the school must be transparent to audit and review to confirm students meet standards for their education including basic science and and history like the big bang and fact based origins of dinosaurs.
In this instance, it's a separation of church and state. You should not get a public dime if they do things like fire an LGBT teacher who had otherwise glowing reviews and successful students or refuse to teach basic science and history.
But the arguments against charter schools as a suck for public dollars as well as the way voucher programs can be abused (with support by the present Secretary of education, someone who has investments and connections to charter programs) is another huge issue.
It's not that the left opposes education, it's that they want actual education in schools. It's not that we shouldn't spend the money to improve education, it's that we need to invest in programs and schools that meet federal guidelines and respect federal law and constitutional rights.
And for me it's because the first amendment should guarantee freedom of and FROM religion. If the best school in town is the religious charter school my property taxes are supporting, we have conflicts.
> If the best school in town is the religious charter school my property taxes are supporting, we have conflicts.
What is stopping other schools from improving their standards? After all, they also have access to the same public dollars and I am not aware of any funding imbalance between charter vs public schools (though please correct me if I am wrong here).
I went to a high school in Cali that was converted to a charter school. As far as I could tell, the main change was that they kicked out all the kids with poor grades or other problems. That is the polar opposite of "choice", it was about increasing inequality and it was completely disgusting.
Wow, so charter schools allow for stack-ranking their pupils all the out of the school if desired? Is there a list of reasons that a school cannot use to suspend or expel a student up somewhere? In addition, a list of active conditions with associated constraints for when they can?
Schools can do many things either directly or implicitly, with some variations based on local laws. Here are some that I’m aware of:
1. Have an exam to pass up to the next grade. This isn’t necessarily intended to be malicious but it means that kids who are struggling, have less than fully supported disabilities, unstable home environments, etc. aren’t in their stats for the higher grades but will be in the comparison schools.
2. Have a graduation requirement that, say, you pass a ton of AP exams. Struggling students are probably going to bail when the odds aren’t looking good.
3. Not offering support services: charters have a financial incentive not to hire specialists for special needs, psychologists, librarians, cafeteria workers, etc. Parents will often pull kids over to the public schools where they’ll get more support, which also makes the cost differential and difficulties accurately comparing performance more pronounced.
4. Favor high levels of family support: academic performance tracks closely with family wealth so anything which favors affluence will have the effect of removing more lower-performing kids. That can be homework requiring laptops which aren’t provided, having a schedule or location which doesn’t work well for transit users, after school / weekend clubs or courses with supply fees, etc.
5. Tailor the curriculum to attract certain types of student: require things like taking Latin/Greek or a STEM load, don’t offer much in the way of arts/music/sports, or simply requiring more classes total, etc.
Again, this doesn’t need to be malicious - it just means that you’re encouraging kids who aren’t hyper-focused on academics and well supported to go elsewhere. That makes the numbers harder to accurately compare with public schools who have to serve everyone and also confounds the question of how many of those kids would have been high performers at any school. People like to say this pushes them to be better, and that’s true in some cases but not as many as lore would have it and tends to ignore the kids who burn out but would have done well with a bit less pressure.
In many states, almost anyone can establish a charter school and there is very little oversight. Money is diverted from already small budgets to these charter schools.
Additionally, the US system punishes underperforming schools by deallocating funds. In what world does that make sense? Any rational society would send in an educational SWAT team to lift the school up, not handicap it further.
I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters.
You'll probably understand better when you quit thinking that you can automatically identify the players involved. Perhaps simply ask why some folks oppose charter schools.
Others have responded with good answers, such as increased inequality and siphoning funds from public schools. If you take those to be left/right issues, well, there's your problem: does "the right" support increasing inequality and the draining money from public schools? That's kind of a rhetorical question (the assumed answer on my end is, "of course they don't"), but then again, maybe it's not.
These seem to be the "real" reasons: 1) re-segregation 2) skimming[B] 3) de-unionization 4) benchmarking[A] 5) statism preference.
The other declared reasons seemed unconvincing to me.
[A] Benchmarking - competing schools provide parents with a direct comparison point, so it's much harder for a struggling public school to disclaim responsibility for some of their own problems.
[B] Skimming - picking out the best-performing and the least-demanding students.
Charter schools in many jurisdictions can also expel underperforming or struggling kids, while public schools are obligated to enroll everyone regardless. I would be very skeptical of any charter school benchmarks.
I believe the case about giving money to religious schools was regarding publicly accessible facilities (playgrounds), so it doesn't change anything about funding for classrooms, teachers, etc.
That's how they like to pitch in sales, anyway. There are two problems which it hopes you won't know to ask about:
1. Most of the big claims about charter school performance is due to small sample size or short measurement time. There's a notorious cycle in the field where someone announces that they have a brilliant way to make kids succeed and publishes results which get a lot of attention, but regression to the mean sets in once they try to scale it up or have more than a few years worth of data. Once you get enough data they perform very similarly to the public schools serving the same community — worse as often as better.
2. Schools which show consistently better performance are the ones who can select students who were higher performing when they enrolled. If you can consistently attract richer, educated parents to your school — say with a pitch telling everyone how it's the best possible education for their children — you will post great numbers but those kids would have done well almost anywhere. This can be overt in the states which allow test-in or in the structure of the school (i.e. hit students with enough outside homework and you're going to lose a lot of kids who don't have family resources to support that extra time) or hidden in other areas: for example, a school in a state which doesn't require schools to offer free/reduced lunch will exclude poor kids without explicitly doing so, as will not offering bus service in a suburban area, having limited support for anyone with special needs, etc.
When evaluating schools, you have to do a value-added analysis comparing like cohorts of students. Public schools serve both a greater number of students and a much higher degree of diversity and very few are truly “bad” as — what you're usually seeing is that poor kids have more obstacles to success, and the United States runs a lot of special needs support through schools, and averages hide that information. I live in Washington DC which has tons of charters and there are a couple which have some great things for certain kids but not everyone (e.g. a language immersion) and a whole bunch which look pretty similar to the data from the local public schools when you match for equivalent parental SES.
Irrelevant. Plan a building for 2000 students. Figure out the best location, heating/cooling, building maintenance schedules, etc. Merge districts so that you can offer niche courses for advanced students. Then have the funding cut by 50%, because 1000 of the students go to charter schools. The fixed costs were planned out for the next 20 years, until the rug was pulled out from under schools. Instead, you get fewer teachers, larger class sizes, lower supply budgets, since those are the costs that can be reduced over a short time scale.
I'm fine with properly managed charter schools. However, opting out of public education does not entitle you to defund public education.
No, they aren't, because they expel problem students, into the public system. Even if admissions are lottery-based, expulsions are not.
Imagine two groceries. One that has to, by law, serve every kind of customer, and one that is allowed to throw out shoplifters, drunks, people high-out-of-their-minds-on-meth, etc.
Which one of these will provide better groceries for lower prices?
Experimentally: No. Betsy Devos's implementation was tested in Detroit, and failed miserably at teaching children. Expanding it without major, major changes is irresponsible and immoral. Step 1 is a system that doesn't defund public schools in the process.
Certainly. [1] gives a good overview, on how Devos pushed for more and more charter schools, without any requirement for credentials. [2] is some focus on the history of charter schools in Michigan, Devos's home state. [3] is a local news story (tracked down from some articles that reference it), going into a lawsuit about the poor performance of schools in the Detroit area, following the siphoning of funds to charter schools. The state didn't even attempt to argue that the schools were well-run, and instead argued that "there is no fundamental right to literacy".
Maybe I could see charter schools as a reasonable option in some cases. With Betsy Devos at the helm, they should be fought at every turn.
I wanted to circle back and say thanks for providing the links.
The wapo article was garbage (really, 3 sentences?) , but I found the michigan advance ariccle informative. I still don't agree with your conclusions, but now know there is a questionable track record in Detroit. I think the connection between Devos and charters and her influences is overstated, as they existed in numerous states long before she held any federal positions.
Thank you for the feedback. For the Washington Post article, it looks like they are silently paywalling the majority of the article. Opening it in incognito mode gave me the full article (several pages, not just a few sentences).
First, it is wrong. There's no requirement that charter schools get paid the same per student as public schools. Even when they do, charter schools also often lean heavily on public school resources (e.g. charter schools where I grew up used our public gymnasium, theater, and library regularly).
But second, even if the funding is exactly the same, the result is that all the "cheap" i.e. wealthy students (books and technology readily available at home, familial support for their studies, financially able to engage in more expensive educational opportunities outside the classroom) end up in one school while those without these privileges, or with disabilities, end up in the other. Even if you give both the same resources the second school is going to perform worse. And under current US policy, the school that performs worse then gets even less money while the school of rich kids gets more! It's wealth consolidation, pure and simple.
> the result is that all the "cheap" i.e. wealthy students (books and technology readily available at home, familial support for their studies, financially able to engage in more expensive educational opportunities outside the classroom) end up in one school while those without these privileges, or with disabilities, end up in the other
I don't understand - are charter schools allowed to refuse to admit disabled students?
Anti-charter sentiment is a union (teacher union) protecting itself. The left is along for the ride, because it's the same "tribe", but this is 100% driven by an organization protecting itself against competition.
Even if that is a cause, so? But the real issues revolve around a lack of oversight, small budgets, corruption, and exclusionary practices that hurt already marginalized groups.
Edit: "your mask is slipping" isn't a productive characterization. What I meant was, your statement comes off as bias - "tribes", "the left", "protecting itself against competition" all scream pro-capitalist propaganda on a topic that, frankly, should stay as far away from capitalism as possible.
That's my interpretation of your remarks and I am well aware that my own biases may distort your message.
But typically, when someone introduces "competition" to a discussion on education and laments teach unions, they have an agenda. Again, I could easily be wrong.
There's fundamentally no connection between the health of a union and the quality of the product. That's not the point of the union -- the point is protecting workers! Nobody argued that meatpackers should unionize so they could pack more meat!
So it's entirely reasonable to separate the reasons for the NEA to (1) exist, and (2) dislike charter schools -- that is, because their job is to protect teachers -- from the educational merits of charter schools. We shouldn't expect a teacher union to balance the merits of charter schools, because it's _not their job_.
We can talk about those points separately, but we need to expect that those talking points are completely independent of whether a teacher protection union (and I don't mean that negatively) objects to the schools which cut them out of the picture.
The current situation in US education strongly suggests that whatever other failings you want to ascribe to teachers unions, the interests of teachers and students are much more closely aligned than the interests of administrators who are planning to murder both other groups.
> I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters
Charter schools are a threat to the public school system, so the public school system will naturally oppose charter schools.
If you are a public school without charter schools, a parent only has two choices: (1) public school, or (2) pay $20k+/yr/child to do private school. For the vast, vast majority of parents, public school is the only option.
Once you add charter schools to the mix, there is a new option that is viable for a much larger population. When parents choose charter schools, they lose public funding. Hence, this is a threat to public schools, and public school systems will strongly oppose it.
I think the reason you're having trouble understanding this is that you assume the public school union has the interests of children as it's top priority. With that assumption, opposition to charter schools doesn't make sense. But if you assume rational self interest, then you can easily explain the opposition.
I laughed when I first heard about this. Maybe they took the approach of asking for so many un-reasonable things to make sure the school does not open.
My mother is an elementary school teacher, and I don't want her to go back to school this year. The federal government is worse than useless, and the state government is feckless and unwilling to make the tough calls to protect people's lives.
She's been a teacher for ~15 years and still makes less than $30k a year teaching. She loves helping the kids, but her life isn't worth it.
She's in Colorado. The teachers' union agreed to a pay cut & freeze during the Bush financial crisis; pay had had only started to rise again a few years ago.
This is somewhat of a digression, but the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. The people taking these jobs typically must have some other way of supporting their family; either their spouse has a higher-paying professional job or they are the beneficiary of some other form of generational wealth.
But we tend to lose the teachers who must make ends meet their own selves on a teacher's pay. There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
> There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
AMEN. I would NEVER recommend ANYONE become a teacher based on my wife's experiences. You used to be able to write off expenses as "non-reimbursed employee expenses" but they cut that out so teachers get the token $200 writeoff. We spend almost 10x that annually supporting her in the classroom.
It really is glorified day care in most peoples minds which is a real shame.
My high school band friend became a high school music teacher. He was making hardly enough money for his family to live without stress or worry, he asked about wages they said they couldn't give raises, the only way they could justify a raise is if he had more education - so he took some student loans and got his masters. He was then told nothing could get him a raise, wages are frozen. Around that time he emailed me asking for help getting a corporate training gig where I was working. Of course I put in a word but I also pressed back because I'd always known him to be incredibly passionate about teaching and music. I always imagined him as a bit poorer than me, but a hell of a lot happier (I was going through a bit of a depressed time thinking about the "meaningfulness" of my corporate life). He said it wasn't about meaningfulness, or enjoying the work, or passion, it was that at one point they had to consider whether or not they had the budget for fucking light bulbs one week. He moved on to a nice corporate training job, and does well now. I haven't talked to him recently about if he still misses teaching, but I am acutely aware there's kids out there missing out on an amazing band teacher because we don't pay our teachers a salary that shows the profession any respect. I guess my friend's richer and happy he can take vacations and buy necessities without worry and for that I am glad, but I see the world as little bit poorer.
My wife hung up her hat after busting her butt for 5 years. Pay was garbage. Expectations too high — mostly from the students and parents. I often jokingly ask if she’d go back if they offered twice her pay. She doesn’t even hesitate - no.
My mother briefly taught middle schoolers as a side job to her cleaning business she was running. One year in, she decided the money and the admin politics and low-key racism was not worth the stress. She is black and was working in a very rural white area. She made a lot more money pushing a mop than teaching.
You can't say "you should clean for the future of these kids, not money" or similar with as much support from society for cleaning as easily as one can for teaching.
Unless there's some regulation in Colorado that doesn't exist in New York, teaching does not require a master's degree. It does require specific training and certification, but there are undergraduate programs that offer this.
There are also master's programs, they just aren't required.
To be fair, it varies in CO depending on the district. More Urban places pay a lot more than the state average. Rural areas will try to make up the pay difference with free housing. Private schools will pay ~80k, but the bar is high to get hired (think PhD requirements) and the hours are longer.
But the point stands, the pay is not good at all for the workload. And that was before covid. Aurora public schools have requisitioned two covid-19 tests per month for it's 4k teachers [0]. That's it. They already had high teacher turnover before this mess. Now, I'm afraid that though the schools may be open, they will not be attended.
My SIL makes, I'm pretty sure okay/decent pay... (for a teacher) HOWEVER, she loves her job, and her kids (Teaches poor kids from the Indian Res.)... so she spends almost HALF! her paycheck on supplies for her kindergartners. It's almost like it's part job part hobby.
I think that's pathetic that we don't give ALL school's enough money so everyone has everything they need.
Edit: my point being, even if a teacher makes good $$, they can spend quite a bit of it on student's so take home really becomes a LOT less.
> the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly.
Teacher pay is not extremely low. The median teacher salary is usually pretty close to the median salary for the state. Plus they get good benefits, a pension, and much more time off than other jobs. It's a solid middle class life.
ok thank you for explaining my family's lived experience to me, the person whose family's lived experience it is. Maybe later you could swing by and tell me if I'm finding the sun hot or not.
Ehh... those statistics are often skewed. First hit on search for elementary school teacher median salary comparison[1]:
> ...median annual income of $58,230.
> This number would be above the average salary in the U.S., but it's the median of an awfully wide range of salaries. Elementary school teachers in the bottom 10% of income only made around $37,780, while those in the highest 10% could make as much as $95,270.
You then scroll down to the section on per-state numbers and see the wide gaps between states. You also see that this article, like others, suddenly jump to using mean instead of median.
I usually don't play this card, but show the data. You are likely only looking at a specific statistical lens that does not paint a real picture.
The median educational attainment is "some college". In my state we require teachers to hold a degree and do some postgraduate work, so by definition it isn't a "median" position. That's before we get into it recently becoming a dangerous job
While there certainty are places that pay starting teachers more, unless you work for the upper crust of K-12 the pay is quite bad compared to basically any other other job that requires a four-year degree plus certification and/or (usually and) a license.
The sad part is that it isn't like there isn't a budget to pay teachers more. We spend more per kid than we ever have, but now any budget increases get absorbed by growth in the administration. Administration in education and healthcare is a cancer.
No relation, saw one of their engineering jobs on HN and your comment made me think of a solution for your mother's situation (it's teaching over Zoom).
My mom works as an administrator in a public school. She is one year away from being eligible for medicaid, which is when she planned on retiring. She said as of right now, she plans to go back, because getting private insurance with her pre-existing conditions for the next year isn't feasible. I'm seriously considering seeing if my siblings and I can fund it for her for a year so she can just retire now and not have to worry about her as much.
A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.
The ACA (aka Obamacare) made it so insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions. Check the exchange in her state for options.
The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope.
The presidential talk about it is just that - talk.
>The federal government has no jurisdiction over education.
It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".
It's the same deal tho - the federal government has no jurisdiction over the healthcare system either. The Obamacare, if you recall, in large part hinged on a "tax" created just for this purpose because taxation is the purview of the fed, which was a hack.
And even if Trump issued a "mask mandate" on the first day, for example, who is to enforce it? The FBI?
Yes, it's not written into law that the federal government has the specific power to drag kids back into classrooms and arrest people not wearing masks.
Do you think they have no levers to pull to affect policy from a federal level other than physically forcing people to do things? I'm not really sure what your point is.
Are you kidding? There are hundreds of nurses and doctors who have gotten sick and that's when wearing full PPE. Do you think teachers and kids are going to be wearing PPE in class?? This is a troll comment.
Proper, full PPE? Low. Proper PPE requires diligence and training, but for medical professionals it’s pretty reasonable to expect them to wear it correctly.
The issue is that “proper PPE” is a bad assumption in America. Normally PPE is one time use stuff; you’re supposed to destroy the N95 after use. But we don’t have nearly enough of the stuff, so doctors have been reusing them for a while. This increases the risk of it failing, which is a huge issue if you’re going to interact with known COVID positive patients.
It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term.
Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, teaching, and food-working staff MANY of which skew older.
If a school system in a rural town doesn't have enough workers to bus kids, clean up the school, serve lunch, or teach (there's already a teaching shortage because it's a shit job that doesn't pay what it's worth), then schools will be defunkt before long anyways.
What do we do then? It'll be decades before we can replace all those teachers, so we'll have to speedily move to online teaching... what then do we do about parents who need school as daycare so they can provide?
We're beginning to see how intertwined everything in society is, and it's all seemingly crashing down and most people don't even see it happening... it's just a a flu... it'll be over soon.... someone said on FB yesterday that it'll go away as soon as the election is over the only reason it's so big is because of the election....
No. December the election will be behind us, flu season will be upon us, and the 3rd wave will decimate us worse than this one is. Because it'll be cold, we'll be inside, Christmas will come and families will get tired of quarantine again and it's the perfect storm for another explosion of cases.
>There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
And most of them are wearing full PPE when possible for many hours a day, if anything your numbers point to the effectiveness of masks.
>Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open.
I really don't understand your point of view at all. The US had more cases yesterday than the entire EU combined. We had roughly 1/3 of Germany's total cases over the past 4 months in a single day. How can you actually point to them and think we can do the same things they're doing here in the US?
The US has bungled it's response so badly it boggles the mind. We have by far the most cases and deaths and even on a per capita basis we have by far the most cases and deaths in the developed world and more than most of the developing world. The idea that we should just open up and let potentially thousands of kids, tens of thousands of their parents countless others die so they can sit in a classroom and have a blue haired liberal arts major blather at them for 8 hours a day is simply ridiculous.
>Death rates are not surging in proportion to cases.
Deaths have a 4-6 week lag and are steadily increasing, at the same time a larger fraction of cases are young people(who are less likely to die) flouting the rules and getting infected in large numbers at bars and social events.
You can't honestly be saying that we're overreacting to COVID?
I would hope someone in full PPE everyday has a much lower rate of COVID deaths.
The US alone has more than 25% of global cases - comparing Europe to the US doesn't really make sense. They largely beat covid, the US obviously hasn't (see 70k new cases yesterday)
More people die in car crashes than the flu - doesn't mean we don't spend trillions on road safety, seat belts, etc.
Death rates are surging in proportion to cases, with the expected 2 week delay from infection to death. Yesterday Florida had 116 deaths.
CFR isn't the metric that informs policy... its deaths and potential deaths? IE 141,000 Americans dying this year, which were largely avoidable.
There is no science behind the lockdowns. There is no logic in keeping Walmart open but closing Sears for safety. Yes I believe it is absurd the level to which we have locked down the country.
Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
The purpose was never to stop the virus but to slow it.
Growing cases does not concern me. Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
> Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
NYC metro ordered lockdowns after it was hard hit, because it was hit early on before there was a real understanding of what was going on.
A lot of other places still haven’t peaked, the reopening push in response to overall national case decline was driven entirely by NY being past it's peak while the rest of the country combined was still on the upswing.
> Growing cases does not concern me.
The growing list of places at or near ICU capacity should, though.
> Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
Since the peak death rate was when almost all the cases were in NYC when the NYC health system was overwhelmed, that's unsurprising, we shouldn't see similar death rates in proprtion to cases unless almost all the cases are in similarly overwhelmed locations, which because it hit different places at different times will, even with uncontrolled spread, take a little while.
But with enough cases, you can get a pretty apocalyptic total death toll without going back to the peak death:cases ratio.
> Reporting that they are at capacity intimates that they are packed full of Covid patients and overflowing.
No, it suggests that if the COVID numbers go up, someone who should get ICU treatment, whether COVID or not, won't get it because there won't be capacity. Which is kind of an important fact in places where COVID numbers are trending upward.
If your ICU is at 80% capacity, with 20% COVID and 60% everything else, that means you can DOUBLE the number of COVID patients there before running out of space, whereas if all of the patients were COVID patients you could only accommodate an increase of 25%.
Yes, hitting 100% is bad no matter what percent of patients are there because of COVID. But what percent of patients are there for COVID informs how large an increase of cases can be managed.
I’ve never understood this argument. Places in Europe are opening because they think they’ve got the virus under control. It’s an outcome, not a cause.
Before accusing me of denying science, you should actually read the underlying material and try to think about it critically. The AAP guidelines the article is referencing were written more than three weeks ago, when most states were in the middle of a lull between the first wave that we had in March and April and the second one that is starting. It also contradicts CDC's own, current guidelines, which state that remote learning is the safest option for people of all ages.
Furthermore, the AAP guidelines don't say anything about teachers or school staff. It is written purely with kids in mind. When asked about this in an NYT interview, Dr. Sean O’Leary, who helped write the guidelines, said:
"We’re pediatricians. We’re not educators. We don’t want to tread in space where we don’t belong."
In other words, they don't give a shit about teachers or school staff. Well, maybe we should? At least a quarter of American teachers are over 50, and more than third of them have pre-existing conditions. Reopening schools for in-person instruction will decimate them.
Lastly, even if kids themselves are not strong vectors for transmission, there is literally tens of millions of them in the USA that are of K-12 age. What do you think is going to happen when they go on to infect their parents and grandparents?
> There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
The person you are replying to is talking about frontline healthcare workers. But you ignored that and ran your math to include everyone who works in a hospital, and then you go on to ridicule the OP based on your incorrect math.
> They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population.
This is based on your incorrect math and I'm quite sure is the incorrect conclusion.
> Schools across Europe have opened.
This isn't Europe, though, it's America. The situation is different here.
> Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID.
I'm not sure how to interpret this, but COVID did not start to spread until November/December last year and obviously the numbers were small to start. What do you mean to imply with this stat?
> The CFR of this disease does not meet the threshold for a pandemic
The definition of a pandemic has nothing to do with CFR.
> nor does it merit the level of fear engendered by the press.
I haven't seen any fear-mongering from respected press. Most of the fear mongering I see about COVID is from Fox or similar telling us that the masks are something to be afraid of, due to government overreach or something.
But the normal press mostly just reports the facts. If those facts create fear in you, then I'm sorry, but it's not the press causing that fear.
Move to Canada, our teachers are paid 86K (CAD) or around 63K USD.
"Teachers in the province earn an average salary of around $86,000, according to data provided by Ontario's Ministry of Education. Only in Alberta are average teacher salaries higher, around $89,000"
It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?
No, the federal government we have is the result of our outdated, quirky and flawed electoral system, where the votes of certain states are much more valuable than others.
> The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people).
That's because States are political units, not just arbitrary boundaries. So they also have a voice in the federal government as States. To me, Wyoming being able to not be run roughshod over by California just because California has a lot more people is a feature, not a bug.
If that's true, why does it not also apply to the weighting of the Presidency between those two poles?
What they were describing applies to every federally elected position, in different amounts. Whether it's a bug or a feature (as a whole or for each position) is very much up for discussion, but it's orthogonal.
In that case, I don't think anything really remains of your original comment in this thread? Your follow-ups have blurred the line between factual questions and normative, but in both cases the comment you initially replied to applies at least as much to things other than the presidency.
(I'll note that this doesn't mean there weren't interesting points worth discussing that you've been trying to get at, just that you've at least wound up unclear in how you've been expressing them.)
The Senate is designed to act as a counter balance to the house. The senate with equal representation per state, and the house with population based representation.
No, the votes of people in certain states being more valuable than those in others is also true of the House and Senate.
In fact, the inequity in voting power produced by the Electoral College is a direct consequence of that in the structure of the House and Senate, since the latter is apportioned simply (except for DC) by adding the apportionment of House and Senate seats.
I responded to a similar point by not2b downthread. The following are some additional points I didn't make there.
To some extent the inequity you describe can be corrected by forcing particular methods for apportionment that can better prevent gerrymandering, and by increasing the size of the House to reduce the difference between the populations of the least and most populous districts. A certain amount of inequity of this type is, however, unavoidable in any representative democracy.
Also, this particular inequity is important to people only to the extent that what the Federal government does directly affects their lives. So an obvious way to reduce the impact of this inequity is to reduce the ways in which the Federal government can affect individual people's lives. The idea that Federal laws and regulations should be able to micromanage so many aspects of everyone's lives would have been horrifying to any of the Founders. Not only that, but it also disempowers people by making them much less aware of everyone's ability to find local solutions to local problems.
Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions; they can continue to make them with impunity since they know they are not risking reelection by doing so. (For example, in all the furor over the CDC and FDA bungling COVID-19 testing, nobody to my knowledge has observed that the only reason the FDA had the power to prohibit State and local health authorities from developing their own tests is that Congress gave it that power, and legislation to rethink bad policy decisions like that is not even on the table.) That is not something that can be fixed by adopting a different system for apportionments.
> Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions.
Wrong.
Individual members of Congress tend to have high (often overwhelming) approval in their districts (or states for Senators); members generally do a good job of representing the people they are elected by.
Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do. If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.
This is not only analytically obvious, but borne out by actual results of surveys of public approval of representative democratic governments in general and legislative bodies specifically when compared to measures of effective proportionality of representation.
> Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do
In other words, people like their individual representatives because those representatives favor their preferred policies; but they strongly disapprove of Congress as a whole because they don't see any of those preferred policies actually being enacted.
> If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.
This assumes that, by changing apportionment and the electoral system, more people would see Congress enacting their preferred policies. I don't think this is true. I think the reason Congress as a whole doesn't enact anyone's preferred policies is that there is no broad bipartisan consensus behind any of them; if a majority exists at all in favor of any particular policies, it is a thin majority, and there is no majority with enough consensus on a range of policies to be able to make the required legislative deals to get those policies enacted.
In other words, Congress is reflecting the fact that the country as a whole does not have a broad consensus in favor of most policies that are on the table. And in that situation, those policies shouldn't be enacted. So I would argue that in this respect our current system is doing exactly the job the Founders intended it to do: it is preventing thin majorities from imposing their preferred policies on everyone.
However, the disconnect between individual approval ratings and the overall approval rating of Congress does allow something else to happen: since there is effectively no competition for individual seats, there is no accountability for bad policy decisions that do have broad bipartisan consensus behind them. So those decisions can be, and are, made with impunity. The grant of power to the FDA that I mentioned previously is an example: there is no serious opposition from either party in Congress to granting unelected bureaucrats in Federal agencies extremely broad powers that affect everyone and cannot be effectively challenged. So that disastrous policy decision continues on while people squabble over policies that have only thin majorities, if any, in favor of them.
Yes, some states have House seats that represent somewhat fewer people than some other states. I suppose, technically, that means the votes in that state are "more valuable". It's far different from the Senate, though.
It's absolutely true of the House, though because of granularity rather than fixed representation, so it's not simply smaller-states-are-overrepresented. (But instead smaller states have the most variable representation.)
> Yes, some states have House seats that represent somewhat fewer people than some other states
“Somewhat fewer” in the sense that 527,000 (Rhode Island) is “somewhat fewer” than 994,000 (Montana), but, while it's a narrower range than the Senate (65.7:1) or EC (3.59:1), 1.88:1 isn't a close ratio.
Trump did not lose the popular vote. There is no contest for the popular vote. Perhaps one party should try moving a bit to campaign according to the actual contest at hand, rather than try to rewrite the rules.
You assume the Democrats would win a popular vote easily. First, Republicans would actually campaign in California for a change. They might even move left a tad on some issues. Democrats might decide it's the time to go batshit insane and go further left, leaving an even wider, disenfranchised center than we have now.
Dear god, do facts not matter at all? He absolutely lost the popular vote. He won the election through the electoral college. It's the system we have and it's what determines the election but to say he didn't lost the popular vote is false and revisionist.
I believe that you are missing LanceH's point. I'll try to put it in different terms.
Here's a football game. Team A scores 17 points on 284 yards of offense. Team B scores 10 points but has 317 yards of offense. Team B's fans say "We won on total offense!" That's great, Team B fans. Here, have a lollipop.
Why am I being so condescending? Because no football game is decided based on total offense. They're decide on points. Team B "won" something that is a statistical category, not a game.
In the same way, Hillary won a statistic, not an election. So all this "Trump lost the popular vote" is... yeah, so what? Winning the popular vote plus six bucks will get you a latte at Starbucks. And Democrats knew what the rules were going into the election, and have known ever since. Who cares about the popular vote? It's totally irrelevant. They. Lost. The. Election.
I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.
If instead the president was chosen by popular vote, both parties likely would have campaigned differently.
>I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.
This is a non-sequitur. Whether or not that metric (popular vote) has a bearing on the results of presidential election is irrelevant to the statement of whether he won in that metric.
Furthermore, it's counter-productive to the discussion to preface a comment with a politically charged comment (trump and some of his supporters legitimately believes he got more popular vote than clinton, despite evidence to the contrary), then backpedal on that statement by adding a bunch of qualifiers.
Maybe with a definition that you can only "win" a competition that was agreed upon ahead of time. However, a quick search on hn shows that "win" colloquially also can mean beating everyone else at some metric (or in some cases, on a subjective basis). eg.
And that since the rules weren’t “whoever wins the national popular vote is president” we can’t know how campaigns and voters would have behaved under that rule set, making appeals to the “popular vote” meaningless. A position which I actually agree with, despite very much not liking the last couple R presidents who won despite “losing” the (meaningless, and not a useful measure of much given the above) popular vote.
It’s fun to complain about when your (our, perhaps) person loses but is about as meaningful as “our team should have won because we had more men-on-base”. Well, OK, but baseball is played to optimize for runs because that’s how you win, so no, you shouldn’t have won, and also if the other team had been optimizing for men-on-base you may still have lost—we simply can’t know.
My wife is a teacher. She's quitting in two weeks so that she can give her mandatory 30-day notice in time for the beginning of the semester.
The planning being done for the next school year where we live is complete bullshit. The politicians and administrators running the planning have no idea about the realities.
They are driving these hybrid models with kids doing remote and in-person learning in alternative days/weeks with the in-person class sizes being about one third of the normal class size. To do that they would need at least twice the amount of teachers (one to teach in-person, and one to teach remotely to kids staying at home), possibly even more. Are they planning on hiring more teachers? No.
It's going to be a complete shitshow even without teachers quitting en masse.
There's this completely unrealistic sense among the people in charge that teachers will just magically make it work with no additional training, no proper support, no additional resources, nothing.
And I'm not even addressing the difficulties families, especially those that have multiple kids and/or can't work from home, will have with these proposed schedules.
> There's this completely unrealistic sense among the people in charge that teachers will just magically make it work with no additional training, no proper support, no additional resources, nothing.
I honestly doubt they think it will magically work, I think there are no good options that will give all the kids good educational outcomes, keep kids and teachers safe, and allow the economy to function without the use of schools as childcare, and that they are trying to pick the option that will have the least number of people calling for their heads.
Even if they rotate kids in and out to keep crowds down, they still need separate facilities or FEMA level decontamination daily with same day testing for employees like those working the cafeteria and would interact with all sets of students...
We need to double resources for schools and teachers anyway but even if we had the time and funding it would be less than ideal to combat the pandemic too.
I feel like there is too much emphasis on these and not enough on the ones that earnestly want to go back to work. There should be a balance here, as we really do need a lot of students to have access to schools in the fall.
Remote learning doesn't work for everyone and leaves a lot of people behind. The overall consequences of another lost semester may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.
Here's a question to consider: behind on the way to what, exactly?
If we keep on getting pandemics (something that's been expected for a long time) the whole baseline of how society operates will be forcibly disrupted. (a baseline people can be 'left behind' on the way to: I hear talk of students missing vital academic AND SOCIAL connections, which sounds like pre-pandemic talk)
If we have even moderate economic collapse, which is inevitable with the pandemic we do have (and the other, related upheavals going on) then the destination simply will not exist. We will be flung into a Star Trek future where the existing mechanisms of human survival no longer apply. It's possible the consequences of dropping 'behind' will mean the difference between becoming wealthy through business and social connections, and literally starvation and homelessness (rather than just doing poorly and getting by). However, in those conditions, all of society collapses and the wealthy have no place to be anymore. Wealth depends upon the existence of a society that can support it.
In my opinion there is no possible benefit to pretending it's possible to go 'back to normal' in any sense, and it's on us to envision what comes next. 'Normal' is never coming back. It's already gone forever, so it's time to decide whether we want human beings to survive or not.
We've always 'kept on getting pandemics'. Pandemics and rampant disease and death is the normal historical state of the world. We have become accustomed to it being not the case due to the prevalence of vaccines and better medicines, but COVID is nowhere near the worst pandemic ever, nor is it even the last in living memory. Recall that the worst pandemic in terms of per-capita death is still within living memory. Pandemics are normal. There is nothing that has accelerated their emergence. This is a fantastic lie.
> 'Normal' is never coming back.
That's ridiculous. If anything, this pandemic has restored 'normal' to the world. The normal state of the world is pandemics, natural disaster, human death, etc. Only by active human society have we been able to avoid that. Modern society is so good and efficient that too many people have forgotten what's normal.
>may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.
Let's be perfectly clear, this isn't something abstract. The consequences are dead kids and dead teachers. Get that through your head. You of course imagine it won't be your kids that die but there's absolutely no reason to think that.
> Let's be perfectly clear, this isn't something abstract. The consequences are dead kids
Yes, the serious risk of increases in childhood “morbidity and mortality” if schools remain closed are exactly what the American Academy of Pediatrics cited as a key consideration when strongly urging that planning center on a return to in-person schooling with the start of the coming school year.
Yes, and then the American Academy of Pediatrics announced a revised statement that included:
"Returning to school is important for the healthy development and well-being of children, but we must pursue re-opening in a way that is safe for all students, teachers and staff. Science should drive decision-making on safely reopening schools. Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics. We should leave it to health experts to tell us when the time is best to open up school buildings, and listen to educators and administrators to shape how we do it."
Bottom line IMO is that these decisions need to be made locally. There is no one-size-fits-all for schools across the country. And sadly there will also be other significant negative consequences for some kids who can't go back to school yet. We should be attacking these issues on multiple fronts with multiple strategies, using strong leadership, increased funding, and careful planning instead of rushing into a situation we are unprepared for.
Not to mention dead family members these teachers and kids will bring the disease back to. Maybe it won't get through people's thick skulls until we start making school yearbooks have obituary sections.
I'd say that's a false dichotomy. Lots of kids won't have access to a safe environment during the day without school. There will be no visibility for those suffering abuse. Physical abuse will be worse with a kid at home with an abusive parent all day, under stress. There will be less access to food for many children. The virus holds the potential of devastating effects on school children and their families if kids go back. We don't have any good way of quantifying the trade-offs. With everything else, we've been running large-scale social experiments to see what works to keep rates at a level the hospitals can manage. I don't see why we shouldn't do the same with schools: let them re-open on a restricted basis, attempt to cater to those most in need, and see what happens.
I 100% support your view IF they get smarter about protecting teachers and staff (masks, at a minimum). I would love to buy my wife a fogger so she could be sure her room was disinfected properly at the end of every day. Of course they are sold out and it's likely someone would complain about that, too.
Our state (NM) has proposed mask wearing, social distancing, isolation by classroom, and alternating schedules to achieve 50% capacity. Yet still they may not open. At the same time, teachers don’t generally get much support financial or otherwise, school is such a messy endeavor already I can understand the hesitation to move forward with any plan.
The hospitalization numbers show the majority of them were under 1 year of age, who would not be attending school. This according to your link [2]
>> Among 95 children aged <1 year with known hospitalization status, 59 (62%) were hospitalized, including five who were admitted to an ICU. The percentage of patients hospitalized among those aged 1–17 years was lower (estimated range = 4.1%–14%)
And of course the number of children infected would be much lower than "all 74 million".
Your math is wrong. First, there are 56M students in the US (5-18 year olds, pretty much). Second, while you quoted the % of cases that belong to children, that is the wrong stat. You want the number of kids that would ever get COVID, which is probably all of them, although there is evidence that 20-50% of people have some sort of resistance. So, for worse case estimates, if all students get covid, then 56M * 0.018 = about 1M kids hospitalized. However, CDC also has evidence that there are 5-10x the number of cases in general out there. So if it is 10x, then it is 100,000 kids hospitalized because the hospitalization rate is commensurately lower. Still not a good number.
If we look at mortality, it is better. The current estimate for IFR in kids is about 1 in 300,000. That gives about 220 estimated deaths if every school age kid gets Covid. Cars kill more kids per year driving to school.
This is all horrendously tough to decide on, but we need to use the best data we can and understand the dangers and comparisons to other dangers.
Finally, kids are going to spread it anyway, so I think kids getting it is really a non-issue, except for the very vulnerable.
Staff/teachers are another concern. An even worse concern is people at kids' homes. That's the really tough part.
You need the Infection Fatality rate for mortality.
The numbers in the CDC article are up until just April 2, 2020. Two weeks prior (incubation period) puts the latest case data in mid March, prior to when the lockdown started to be rolled out.
Granted, the situation has become a lot worse since then. It's still a good glance at how the virus spread before any measures were put in place. Especially for relative figures of how COVID behaves differently across age.
There are plenty of examples of distance learning working well. Assuming it is a failure seems willfully blind to me.
This spring we rushed into something unexpected. We've had time to improve. But it seems that instead of focusing on improvements people are focused on their agenda.
The mortality rate in children would leave us with something like 10k dead kids country-wide if the virus is permitted to spread to everyone.
Mortality isn't the only issue, either. We're seeing plenty of signs some folks survive, but with long-term health impacts.
(An overwhelmed medical system will kill vulnerable kids in non-COVID ways, too. Mortality of things like car accidents and asthma attacks and suicide go up if the ICUs are full.)
I partly believe this is because thus far kids have been mostly shielded - in my experience anyway. Schools and businesses (daycare, etc) closed as the virus gained traction. Now we are opening back up and throwing the kids headfirst into an uncertain future. It is worrisome to say the least.
My niece was born with a defective kidney. Her chances of dialysis grows with every infection... and COVID19 has been shown to cause long-term damage to kidneys and livers.
I'd expect my niece to survive COVID19 if she got it. But I'd also expect her to get significant kidney damage and possibly dialysis as a result. Every UTI she gets results in an emergency room visit under normal circumstances. We've been lucky enough that she hasn't had anything this year, but... she's definitely not someone we'd want to see COVID19 infect.
Not everyone's kids are 100% healthy out there. Keep that in mind. There are mutations out there that are completely silent and hidden, and we try to keep these little facts inside the family.
You're grossly underestimating the prevalence of birth defects that lead to health issues in children.
And adults for that matter. (Any teacher who has a similar immuno-comrpomised situation, or knows of someone similarly immuno-compromised is at risk).
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In any case, I "don't worry" about the potential death of my niece at all. What I care about are the long term health effects on her and her life. And for the long-term health effects of other children too.
This disease has been shown to ravage and disable athletes: destroying their lung function even when they survive. Deaths are hardly endgame: long-term chronic illnesses are still a problem to try to minimize.
In spite of the common idea that schools and young children are germ factories that make adults sick, there's a recent article from the American Academy of Pediatrics that shows children are very rarely the index case for COVID. It's much more likely that she would give it to them, than that they would give it to her.
It's like we're the kid in school who refused to do their work, then has a tempter-tantrum because they have to forgo recess. And much of the EU (and Taiwan, Singapore, HK, etc) are the nerdy kid who finished early and now get to spend the afternoon doing something fun.
The consequences of losing a semester for students are highly debatable considering the primary and in many cases only function of schools outside of feeding students is babysitting.
> Remote learning doesn't work for everyone and leaves a lot of people behind. The overall consequences of another lost semester may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.
I'm curious - how few would have to die so that the "overall consequences of another lost semester" is not worse?
The ones who want to go back are either working with special needs kids or have no family of their own. There's a difference between "I'd love to be in a classroom teaching again" and "I want to be in a room full of 20+ potentially infectious children." The government has a responsibility to its constituents that goes beyond "a return to normalcy."
We're hitting 75K positive tests a day in this country and that number is increasing daily. That's WITH social distancing by kids. What do you think is going to happen when a school has 800 kids running around? That's 800 daily potential avenues for disease transmission.
Seriously, who cares if some people "fall behind?" They can catch up at their own pace. I'm pretty sure that most parents would rather their kids graduate at 19 or 20 than be buried at 8 or 9.
I would prefer every student to be held back 1 semester from graduating high school than 1 more dead (if that were a possibility, but you get the point).
I don't even understand how its possible to prefer sending kids back over one semester. Of course I think the bigger issue is its just parents that want kids out of the house for a multitude of reasons including getting back to their own work.
I presume kids die in accidents at school at the moment. if 1 kid dies a year falling down steps at school should all schools be forced to be only 1 level? there needs to be a sensible look at the cost and benefits and zero deaths should not be a a hard requirement.
It is easy to go about and proclaim, "life is priceless", "I would prefer to have every student held back than one dead", and so on.
What of students that have debt and now will have to wait more to get their "education"? Do you realize this is all going to cause more pain and suffering and possible deaths?
Do you realize given more budget it is possible to save more people if you spend it wisely?
How does delaying your school career 1 semester cause death?
What debt? School debt? Are you talking about college? If you aren't attending school at all then you aren't adding to the debt (in most cases with Federal loans). If its online then you are still on track so I don't see your point.
We are talking about large number of people. On average this would take away half a year of their productive life.
Nowadays, many people have a plan which is mostly: finish school, get a job based on the education.
It is not difficult to see that if you set back financially large number of people, suddenly, this might increase suicide rate, for example. Or may make them worse off in many different ways causing some to tip into loosing life.
These are not easy decisions, and saying "I would prefer people to pause their lives for 6 months than loose one life" is a completely braindead, extremist way of looking at things.
To show how stupid this is, you can use just a portion of your home budget to save a life. Today. There are many people that don't need much in the way of help. You are free to find one and help him/her, without involving large percentage of population that doesn't want to get involved in it.
I guess it is easier to go about and proclaim extremist slogans.
Nowadays no one's plans work out exactly the way they planned.
You can ignorantly (and hypocritically) call avoiding super-spreading schools in the midst of a pandemic an extremist position all you want, but you are overvaluing 6 months of "productivity" and completely avoiding continued remote learning.
> These are not easy decisions, and saying "I would prefer people to pause their lives for 6 months than loose one life" is a completely braindead, extremist way of looking at things.
Based on the data from March it's pretty easy to estimate the effects of reopening things, including school. It's a very easy decision, don't reopen yet.
You're comparing an estimated thousands to tens of thousands dying from schools reopening to at most a few hundred thousand having to pause for 6 months and saying it's not an easy decision...?
Not to mention that most schools would have online programs as an alternative, not hold everyone back so your entire premise is false anyway.
I'm also against schools reopening in the fall (though I haven't done much research and don't hold this opinion strongly).
But it seems like holding people back semesters eventually adds up to something that's as bad as a death. These kids are never going to get that semester back. And if you think they enjoy the at home alternatives half as much, or learn half as much or value that time in their lives half as much it seems like on some level the equivalent of 1000s of person lifetimes of value have been lost. I wouldn't hold back everyone one semester in high school in exchange for even on the order of 100s of deaths.
This is exactly why all the people that said "choosing to protect life is also choosing to protect the economy" were right. It sucks, but people with savings can choose to quit over having to risk their lives. So if there is an appreciable risk (and associated hazard, which, for many of our older educators there is) then that is what is going to happen and you still get the disruptions to the economy.
Medical staff get to wear PPE. As for grocery workers:
My wife's a teacher. She was back in school for a day last week, with a much smaller class of children. The first thing one of her children tried to do on seeing her was give her a hug. I doubt this happens to many grocery workers.
In September she'll spend about six hours a day in a poorly ventilated and inadequately sized classroom with 30 children. Neither she nor the children are allowed to wear masks or gloves. From the single days she has been in each week, she's watched children unable to maintain social distancing in the classroom or the playground. They cough, sneeze and wipe their noses on their hands and then touch everything. That's what kids are like.
Because if they didn’t, they’d get pushback from teachers unions demanding schools provide masks (and soap, sanitizer, etc.). What most of America does not realize is how little money American schools on average spend on school supplies. Most teachers pay out of pocket for the majority of school supplies (on top of their already low pay). So as with most things that make no sense, it’s enforceable because there are people with significant sway up top that realize how much more money will be needed if they didn’t enforce it.
I get it too. I used to teach, albeit in a different country. Several of my aunts, uncles, and cousins are teachers too. My answer was more geared towards everyone else who had the same question you had but can't see how upper management would logically justify such a response.
The crux of your question, though, is an ethical one and I think everyone knows the answer - it's not OK.
Sadly, money often trumps ethics in America and my response was an explanation as to why that happens. You will also see the very same people trot out ethics as justification for their actions when it benefits them (case in point, one reason for re-opening schools).
Your comment and question is a great one that everyone should be wondering. The next step is to get people to understand why the illogical is happening and who are making those decisions. That will point people towards confronting the right people in power with the right arguments to push for change.
My god thinks mouths and noses are ugly, hideous things that must not be seen. As such our religious cannon/traditions require the wearing of masks over the mouth and nose at all times.
Join us @ Maskbeterian.org (I only bought the domain today, give me a minute to stand up a shitty wordpress site)
This isn’t going to solve the problem entirely, but what about moving most instruction to the outdoors? Is this being considered anywhere?
I went to a private school for 1st+2nd grade (this is Michigan, in the 90s), and we were allowed to roam around unsupervised in the woods during recess. That includes the dead of winter. We built forts out of tree branches, constructed igloos and snow tunnel, etc. Occasionally we did outdoor lessons, like making a to-scale model of the solar system.
I’m not suggesting those activities necessarily, but it seems to me that there is the possibility of moving outdoors for a significant portion of the day. Even in the absence of a lesson plan, kids still get the benefit of social interaction, experiential learning, etc.
Having three young kids myself and a parent who is a teacher, I know how "gross" kids are first hand.
>Neither she nor the children are allowed to wear masks or gloves.
I understand why the children won't be wearing any PPE - my 3yo would never keep a mask on for more than 15 minutes. Why is your Wife not allowed to at minimum wear a mask?
Has there been any districts/states/counties that have strictly forbid teachers from choosing to wear a mask?? I'm unaware of this but would find it terribly cruel.
At the start of the pandemic, there were hospitals that explicitly forbid doctors from wearing masks, going so far as to fire them. There was one just up I-5 from me which did just that.
When an idiot with authority decides to flex their bureaucratic muscles, the cruelty is the point.
Nurses largely have the PPE needed to deal with covid and have been trained to do so. Store workers have far less exposure than a teacher trying to wrangle 30 kids for 8 hours a day.
Thus far, surface transmission seems to be low. If you're not licking the payment terminal, you're likely OK in that regard.
Length of exposure to an infected person matters a lot. Spending a day in a room with an infected person is riskier than a 60 second interaction with one as you ring them up.
> What bothers me the most is that just like retail / grocery store workers we put people with the lowest earning potential and generally worst benefits directly in the path of this. I don’t want to get COVID but unless I convince my wife to quit her job my odds of getting it greatly increase due to situations out of my control.
Transmission is largely by aerosol over long periods of time, not fomites.
Store workers are relatively distant and contact with any one person is brief. With teachers, every surface is constantly touched and they spend all day with the children.
Store workers are also dealing with adults rather than children. Most adults know how to conduct themselves in a pandemic, most of them...
Grocery store workers don't spend 8 hours a day in a crowded room with kids who won't keep their PPE on, won't adequately wash their hands, want to give their teachers hugs / high fives, etc. Cashiers get to stand several feet away from those checking out, can put up plexiglass barriers, can slow down the checkout process a bit to sanitize between customers.
Hospitals are designed to prevent infectious disease spread. They plan for mass sanitation, employees wearing PPE, minimizing disease vectors. My wife's hospital has changed their policy to no outside visitors even on non-COVID floors. You can't do that in a school.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to downplay the sacrifice essential employees are making right now; they absolutely deserve hazard pay among so much else for putting themselves at risk for the benefit of everyone else. I asked my wife at the beginning of this if she wanted to quit, and we'd find a way to make it work, and she said "I'm a nurse, I signed up for this." That's just her mindset; she's been trained to work in a contagious environment and her hospital has many ways to help keep her safe. Asking teachers to take on that responsibility in addition to what we already ask of them, while being inside a petri dish of disease spreading is 100% irresponsible to everyone involved.
Well I would say even a grocery worker is safer because
* They are generally working in a much larger space like a big store, so not confined into a small classroom
* The small space teachers are in are filled with kids that are obviously the most unhygienic. Try as they will, it's way more risky than being filled with adults(ok lots of adults that are less responsible than a 5 year old, I know) who are wearing masks and attempting to keep distancing
I don't know if they're at more or less risk and I don't know the stats on how many of them have chosen not to work, but if I had to guess I'd say that nurses feel a sense of duty as part of their chosen line of work and that grocery workers are easier to replace for those that chose not to work.
I live in the Netherlands. Schools were closed here for nearly two months and then re-opened for 6 weeks now, the re-opening did not affect R. Tests are available for all school personnel and there were no hospitalizations. Some more data points:
- we do take care that parents stay 1.5 meters apart. There’s special drop-off routes and such, parents don’t enter the buildings
- I don’t have data on this but I assume ventilation is good in our schools and they opened windows
- kids had to wash their hands a lot
- younger kids can come close to teachers and intermingle, older kids have to keep their distance
- we don’t wear masks, they are only required in public transportation <— I disagree, just stating what’s up here
- this is on a population of 17 mio
Perhaps this is in some ways too small or different a dataset for it to be meaninful, but politics aside and living this reality it is apparent to me that schools for young kids can be reopened with minimal risk.
What were your numbers for new cases looking like when the schools reopened, though? Keep in mind, many parts of US never even got past the first hump in the curve.
We don't do much nationally in the US to help our public schools. They vary widely in terms of having resources available to do things like deep clean the classrooms every day, provide PPE for teachers, etc. And there is zero federal support for providing a testing program of the sort you mention for teachers.
It is a bit surprising to me that there is such a strong focus in the US on school closures and mask wearing (here on HN but also in the major newspapers). It is my impression that in quite a few European countries there have been, and to some extent still are, significant debates about the effectiveness of both these measures. On the other hand, there appears to have been a much more universal implementation of other measures, namely 'stay home' (if you feel sick) and social distancing (be it 1m, 1.5m, 2m or 6 feet...) throughout affected Western European countries, all of which have the epidemic under control for now. Am I alone in thinking that these measures deserve more attention in the US?
Several countries rolled back mask wearing and are making it mandatory again now that cases are increasing - most recently Austria. France is tightening its mask rules ahead of schedule. etc.
I think by now there's little doubt that masks work, but Europe's incredibly and stupidly averse to them.
Social distancing isn't really contentious in US (other than the subset of the population that believes that COVID is hoax).
"Stay home" is one of those things that are on every list of recommendations, but it's completely non-viable in practice because of the way US handles healthcare in work context. Keep in mind that there is no federal requirement for paid sick leave, and only 13 states mandate it. Consequently, 30% of workers don't get any paid sick leave at all - mostly the lowest-paying jobs, that are paid the least (and so taking an unpaid day off can easily mean an unpaid bill etc), and who interact with random people the most.
And don't forget that employment in US is "at-will", meaning that businesses can fire workers without giving a reason. FMLA limits that somewhat wrt unpaid sick leave, but 1) it only applies to businesses with at least 50 employees, and 2) it only applies to illnesses that are incapacitating to the person claiming sick leave.
The focus is on mask wearing right now, because the return to stay-at-home is clearly not happening, and so people go and mingle. If they mingle with masks, they definitely reduce the transmission rate enough to notice - there's ample evidence of that. What's unclear is just how large the effect is.
Also, why focus on Europe alone? We could also look at Japan, which seems to have made a bet largely on mask wearing - and has some impressive results to show for that.
Those are some very good points, thank you. The lack of paid sick leave makes me both sad and worried. My guess is that changing that situation, even temporarily, could make a big difference in containing the pandemic.
In Japan, it's not that the government forced everybody to wear masks - it's that people just did that, with nearly 100% conformance.
We aren't certain that it's masks. But they did little else (e.g. no lockdowns or travel restrictions); so it's either masks, or something unknown. Occam's Razor says masks are more likely.
There are other anecdotal cases about mask efficiency. E.g. there is a hair salon in US where two hairdressers got COVID, and they served 139 clients in 8 days, before testing positive; one was symptomatic for the entire period, the other one for 5 days. Per company policy, they wore mask consistently while working with clients.
During that time period, they infected 4 people - but all of these were their family or roommates. None of the clients they serviced developed symptoms then or within a month, and of the half who consented to testing, none tested positive.
Besides, we do have good reasons to believe that masks are efficient just based on physics and biology alone. We do know that masks are definitely effective at stopping saliva droplets, and we do know that droplets definitely spread COVID. So even if it has other vectors (e.g. aerosols), masks would still reduce the overall viral load, and thus chances of infection.
It's election year in the US. Republicans demand that school should be reopened so Democrats must demand that they should remain closed. The evidence shows that school closures are not effective. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/apa.15371
One should note that the safety risks are not one sided, as the American Academy of Pediatrics has pointed out in strongly urging planning centered around means to reopen in-person schooling, there are risks to health and lives at issue with not returning to school:
> the AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school. [...] Lengthy time away from school and associated interruption of supportive services often results in social isolation, making it difficult for schools to identify and address important learning deficits as well as child and adolescent physical or sexual abuse, substance use, depression, and suicidal ideation. This, in turn, places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality
I'm not endorsing the simplistic and punitive Trump Administration spin that is at issue in your story, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Both the “reopen without significant investment in safety” and “stay closed” sides are both grave health risks and education failures, as the original statement itself implies and the further elaboration makes clear.
It's probably the case that, reduced to those options, “stay closed” (to in-person schooling, continuing distance learning) is best for teachers, so it's understandable that with governments refusing to offer more when it comes to reopening that’s their stance. But even when it is reduced to those two bad options, it's far less clear that that's the best for kids (especially since a lot of the private internet access subsidies from ISPs, that were given with no obligation by providers, that mitigated the inequities with distance learning have expired.)
IMO the AAP's guidance on that page is extremely valuable and covers a comprehensive list of well thought out considerations. My biggest concern is that much of it will require significant increases in funding, strong leadership at all levels, and time for careful planning to implement according to those guidelines. Those challenges are not insurmountable, but are we doing enough to meet those goals, or are we rushing into decisions prematurely based on other factors which are clearly against the AAP's guidance?
Well it is definitely true that having schools fully open does not contribute to much greater risk if the community already has the virus under control as this has been widely demonstrated by many European countries where infection rates continued to decrease, hospitalizations and deaths decreased, even as schools fully opened. But in those countries, they actually did the responsible thing and had a full uncompromised lockdown for months to get the virus under control.
> Today [some subset of] people saying we messed up the lock down cheered a mob which just [destroyed some property].
There's no need to be hyperbolic; it's possible to have a nuanced view on both of these issues. When you presume the latter are the former, the only group of people you denigrate are the strawmen you created.
For the teachers whose calling is teaching, I can see them moving to this part-time: https://outschool.com
My wife and I were concerned about our daughter getting isolated. We don't want her on social media, but we do think it is important for her to connect with her affinity group, and explore her passions. I found out about outschool recently, and it looked like exactly what we needed to address this.
The classes and activities on outschool don't conform to any national standard. Instead, teachers, both accredited and non-accredited, can teach subjects they are interested in teaching. In turn, technology is used to connect interested students together with the teacher.
There are some really unusual things that connects different disciplines together in a more wholistic way. Such as a class on world architecture using Mindcraft.
Teacher set their own pricing at a minimum of $10 for a course, and the platform takes 30%. Some are prerecorded and some are live. The intended audience if k-12.
So, keeping my child engaged for 5 days a week would cost about 150$ and 45$ go to the platform (judging from glancing over class duration/classes per week and cost).
Can somebody tell me what value outschool adds aside from being an agency?
I don't care, I don't have children. I think it's interesting that 30% is evil when it comes to app stores or food delivery but with outschool.com suddenly it is well deserved.
As someone from Germany I also think that 600€ for "entertaining" one child (with 180€ going to a platform provider) is crazy.
I don't have kids though so in the end if that's what the market rate ends up at apparently it is either what parents are willing to pay or at least it is what market providers presume to be a realistic rate (and we will see how soon the marketplace will run out of money).
Curation of content creators. A presumption that efforts to create a brand will lead to long term quality and consistency in content and creators who are controversial will be removed.
You can do the equivalent of this using Youtube videos - the onus is on the parent to figure out how to block Youtube from auto-suggesting/auto-playing click bait viral videos after the tutorial you want the child to watch is over.
Israel was forced to close their schools again after infections skyrocketed with schools opened. One school had 114 students and 14 teachers get infected.
This is exactly what's going to happen in the US as well, especially in the states that are seeing explosive infection rates at the moment.
Well, that's what happens if you keep high schools open (where the kids are much more susceptible) and don't attempt reasonable social distancing.
20 elementary school aged kids that must stay with their group? Teachers required to only interact with one group of kids? I'm less worried at least in areas that aren't at TX/AZ/FL levels.
These "it's a hoax until it happens to me" stories are super common in the US.
>Former game show host Chuck Woolery announced Wednesday his son has tested positive for COVID-19, just days after Woolery accused medical professionals and Democrats of lying about the virus in an effort to hurt the economy and President Trump's reelection chances.
>Woolery, who hosted several popular game shows including "Love Connection" and "Wheel of Fortune" and who is a staunch supporter of the president's, has since deleted his Twitter account following the announcement about his son.
>"To further clarify and add perspective, Covid-19 is real and it is here. My son tested positive for the virus, and I feel for of those suffering and especially for those who have lost loved ones," Woolery tweeted before his account disappeared.
If no one listens to you, who is a formal education valuable to, exactly? I assign no personal value to the pieces of paper I got from the various institutions I've graduated from - society and the job market values them.
No, you didn't. You said you don't assign any value to the piece of paper. Find, but did you actually learn anything in the process? That has value, to you.
Now, perhaps your point is that the formal education didn't matter, that is, you could just as easily have learned the same thing by informal means. That is true, if you had the self-discipline or curiosity to do so. While you may have had that, and I did, many who attend public school do not. The things they learn are still of value to them.
I can understand the sentiment well enough. The person holding the sign has the impression that experts in epidemiology aren't being listened to by some people. But their education is still very much in play and is clearly valuable, so I don't think the sign is really making a useful point. It's just complaining.
Pennsylvania is considering putting the funding with the kids, rather than through the system/administration. The average spending per student in the US is about $15k/yr. If that money went with the student, instead of to administration, etc. a teacher could take on 10 students and make $150k/yr revenue. A mainstream online curriculum for those students costs less than $30/mo. I'm not saying that's exactly the solution, I don't want to get caught up in the details on the HN forum, but I hope we can head in that vague direction.
This is a great idea! Cut the amount a bit to pay for state oversight and certification. Maybe light standardized testing to make sure everyone is generally on track.
Underpaid, unappreciated by many, overcrowed in classrooms, forced to pay for their own supplies. Not really surprising -- I would not last long in that situation when you add in life-threatening.
This is another example of how modern economies are driven by individual choices about participation--in this case teachers refusing to provide service because they don't feel safe. The same choices are devastating a wide range of industries like aviation, hospitality, tourism, etc.
It's a little mindboggling that so many political leaders do not understand this basic concept. Economics is far from perfect but the effect of the pandemic on economic behavior was about as close to a slam dunk prediction as you can get.
Serious question. At this point, why can't teachers wear n95 masks? Data has shown they adequately protect even healthcare workers that are constantly exposed to heavy viral loads.
> “They said we’d have masks and face shields and everyone is going to be covered, but it’s a school district — sometimes we don’t have soap,” he said.
We've had trouble getting enough N95s for healthcare staff, let alone teachers.
Meanwhile multiple N95 production lines are sitting dormant in Texas and elsewhere. You're confusing not being willing to make masks with having trouble getting enough. No, we have no trouble getting enough. We have no willingness to make any. Those two couldn't be further from each other.
Even if N95 masks worked, do you think school districts will give every teacher an N95 mask every day? AFAIK there are way more teachers than "healthcare professionals" and we failed to get all the healthcare professionals N95 masks. I highly doubt we'd be able to get teachers the same amount.
That gets you only a small handful of reuses; it renders the mask safe pathogen-wise, but it doesn't clean the accumulated gunk out. A juicy sneeze will still render the mask useless.
Schools generally do not provide many supplies to teachers. Given that many teachers do not receive basic supplies like paper from the schools, why do you think schools would purchase sanitation machines and tens of thousands of N95 masks?
>why do you think schools would purchase sanitation machines and tens of thousands of N95 masks?
Because the alternative of telling parents that their kids are either not going to school or will have to attend from home is a worse option to some school districts.
Schools are on some level accountable to the communities they serve. If the community wants to blow a five figure sum so that parents can have their kids in "daycare with learning" and be freed to go back to work then I see no reason the school or municipal government couldn't make that happen.
There's tens of thousands of schools in the US. They're not all operating under the same constraints and likewise the decisions they make with regard of if/when/how to reopen are gonna have a lot of variation.
Healthcare workers are constantly replacing those masks with new masks and have vastly better protection than the average teacher, who usually has to buy their own supplies with their meager salaries.
There is no excuse for this behavior from politicians and the public at large. This is selfish ignorance of the utmost degree.
It is, at face value, ridiculous to even think of re-opening schools. The real story is the total and complete abdication of their duties by elected politicians. Faced with a tough choice, they'd rather let people die and systems collapse then take responsibility. Despite watching this unfold in the news and social media for months, these people chose to ignore it and shrug or, as we've seen with kemp, purposefully stop other governments from enacting policies, and now thousands will die.
Why these politicians haven't been dragged out into the street is beyond me. We are going to soar clean over 200,000 people dead in no time-- many of which were preventable.
Just imagine-- if a contractor's shoddy work resulted in 3 people being killed, they'd be hauled into court on gross negligence charges. Yet...politicians are being given a pass. That's not ok.
What about the gas station workers? Grocery store workers? Millions are working during COVID as they're deemed "essential". Teachers are just as essential.
We pay teachers poorly enough that plenty of people who otherwise would be teachers were already choosing to not take those jobs.
Now keep the poor pay and crank up the risk of death knob.
Obvious result is obvious, it's actually surprising to me that they're actually able to reopen schools-- that the number of teachers uninterested in continuing in this environment isn't much greater.
How many teachers does it take to quit before you can't reopen? 10%? 20%? Many are economically desperate enough that they'll take the added risk of death, but surely a portion is not.
I can only imagine that there are also a lot of parents who don't want their kids back in schools, perhaps there is a much greater market now for private tutoring.
School districts should give at-risk teachers the first pick for virtual work. When they run out of virtual teaching jobs, they should offer voluntary furlough. Allowing teachers the flexibility to temporarily leave would allow younger and healthier risk-takers to step up and do the job during the pandemic. In our current economy, there are tons of young healthy workers willing to take these teaching jobs.
Any worker is free to quit if they don't agree with the risks. The real problem, that I don't see mentioned anywhere, is that teachers want to continue being paid the same salary and benefits to teach virtually, despite virtual learning being a disaster. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
What happens in between the time of rebuilding it? Why were other countries able to repair and mend their education system without putting the lives of teachers, children, and parents at risk?
Media has done a great job at fear mongering. People aren't realizing that kids not being able to go to school means the child abuse numbers are through the roof and they aren't even getting caught or reported. There are safe ways of achieving schooling without putting older teachers at risk.
I have to ask you Americans. Are you giving up on society yet?
I'm Canadian, and it is surreal watching the country below us completely waste the lockdown so they can go to beaches and bars and then urgently move to shoving kids back into the classroom.
Do you still feel that you can count on your government? On your neighbours?
Same. Progress isn't always smooth or comfortable. Like being at the gym and feeling your muscles burn. But the work and struggle will be worth it, and I'm confident the American spirit will pull us through to a better future.
As an American, I'm absolutely OK with each state's governors making safety determination for their own state.
The current death rate in each state can very easily be explained by actions the governors in those states took. They'll answer to their voters, and we'll see if their PR campaign blitz is enough to save them.
The answer to this for me depends on what the election in November holds.
Making a mistake once and having to live with it for 4 years is manageable. Institutions can recover. But another 4 years of this is would be an unmitigated disaster for the republic.
I'm black, and I'd prefer that to any one of a number of things Trump actually does, like family separation. Blackface-for-kicks is, at best, insensitive and offensive, but on a scale with massive human rights abuses, it, standing on its own, doesn't even merit discussion.
My 65 year old parent, an educator in a sunbelt state, told their superintendent that if the distict came back for in person classes too early, they would walk on the spot.
I find it odd that countries/cities with much higher population density (and some, worst healthcare ie. in east Asia) are not going through this paranoia (finding hard to pick a mildler term) that many in the west have been going through. It's like: "I'm not leaving my house EVER until my (insert authority) guarantees I or someone won't die".
I guess people suddenly have much higher expectation of what is realistically authorized can guarantee. Good luck with that.
I have a friend who got hired for his first teaching job this summer. It's all he's wanted to do and he's incredibly passionate. He's afraid that if he backs out now the school board won't hire him back after this is all over.
Sweden's strategy is looking more sensible every day (with the exception of failing to isolate nursing homes, which was a blunder). Their excess mortality rate is back to zero, and they never closed schools for a day.
Once President-Elect Biden pronounces this strategy on November 4th (with universal acclaim from the media and all corners of the ruling class), you can point to your comment from today and get some more downvotes!
Completely agreed! Excess deaths are reaching all time lows in many European countries. Most of the excess deaths - as in Italy - were probably due to antibiotic resistance.
But this is something you can't say, not at least in HN. You have to agree and obey the official truth.
It is mind boggling how otherwise sensible people panicked and refuse the see the truth. I really hope vaccine would come soon, just to calm people down.
There isn't a way to force schools to reopen in person right now. As soon as there is an outbreak (and there will be), teachers will stop going, and parents won't allow their kids to go.
HN is feeling more and more like reddit every day. Why is this comment downvoted/flagged? It's the first well sourced scientific information I find in this thread.
32 different countries? Iceland doesn't necessarily generalize to denser populations. Even the capital, Reykjavik, has a low population density, 472/km2, whereas New York has over 10,000/km2.
It's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Whether we like it or not we're going with the Sweden Model. I've got school age kids myself, and I understand the risk. This is going to be a situation that could become hard to manage but our society's economy is constructed in such a way that relies on daytime programming for children and teens outside of their home. The teachers are going to have to help bear the load, just as we all are.
Are you willing to die for the economy? Ask your kids, are they OK with you dying so that money can be made, maybe collect on some life insurance money? Are you OK with your kids potentially dying (rare but not zero) just to keep them busy during the day? I bet not.
Yes. And there are many millions of unafraid people. Doesn't mean they aren't cautious, but they understand risk.
Children have a higher chance of dying in a car accident, are you going to stop driving tomorrow, because you know a non-zero chance of dying is all you will accept.
To your point: there is a non-zero chance of dying when riding public transportation.
Hyperbole aside, I think it's important to understand the risks and find appropriate compromises. Clearly "business as usual" is not the best course of action. But "shut everything down and wait until 2021" isn't very practical either. We missed our chance to contain the virus - but the world's not going to end.
You sound resigned to your fate. When did Americans become accustomed to accepting utter incompetence that costs hundreds of thousands of lives from their leadership? Is the political process down there completely broken?
Maybe. I think the major problem is there is not a compelling childcare alternative that's ready to take over if the schools don't open.
I also think it's a "tale of two cities". There's a lot of political will to reopen the schools in rural areas that haven't been as deeply impacted by the virus itself. And rightly so - the risk in rural upstate New York is much lower than in Flushing, Queens. It's probably wisest to address this at a local level.
I'm already having friends with kids call to see if we can do co-ops where 3-4 kids go to a single home and do online school. By limiting the families, you limit exposure, and solve the child care and socialization problem at the same time.
A friend is doing something similar, except in person: a teacher from the private school his daughter attends/attended has entered into an agreement with some parents. His daughter will go to school with a few classmates and her teacher, doing the curriculum she was supposed to be doing, just offsite.
Everyone involved has to be COVID-19 tested and they are taking as many sensible precautions as they can. I realize this isn't an option for many, but if you can get on board with a good teacher it's win-win. Note that my friend is very vigilant about not spreading the bug — he's not an antimask type at all. It seems like a great option if it's possible.
I think the challenge systemwide is this further divides the privileged from the lowest income earners. It adds additional cost that even when pooled with others is outside the realm of affordable for many.
The only option for them will be to send kids back to school because they need to be able to work in order to feed their kids. Their choice is food/shelter vs low risk of death for children with COVID. Sucks, but we should at least understand why there is such a push to reopen schools.
The divide this creates though.....who knows what the long term consequences will be
A lot of people are now unemployed. Some of them will open small childcare centers, often operating in private homes on an informal cash basis. (I'm not claiming this is a good thing, just that it will inevitably happen.)
Maybe 30k isn't worth it, but when your entire family's access to (non-financially-ruinous) health care is held hostage by your employer, it's a harder decision to make.
You say you understand the risk. Do your kids have a say in this? It's their lives on the line. Would you respect their decision if they insist they are unwilling to go to school in person?
They haven't insisted on that. Quite the opposite, they have insisted they want to return to school. I have talked to them about the pandemic and they understand people are getting sick.
I'm puzzled why my comment got downvoted. Perhaps someone could explain?
I was pointing out that the language the commenter used made it seem like his children's opinions were not taken into consideration.
For simple analogy, imagine if he said "I have a wife myself, and I understand the risks" when insisting that his wife needs to go to a place many consider dangerous.
Teachers' unions are among the most powerful unions left in the country. If there ever was a time for them to flex that power, it's now: In the middle of a raging worldwide pandemic, they are actually being asked to risk dying for their jobs and risk having their classrooms turn into petri dishes sending infected children back to infect their families. If that's not enough to motivate collective action, what is?
The power of teacher’s unions varies a ton. Supposedly in some places they have so much power it’s impossible to fire teachers for pretty much any reason. I’ve never seen anything close to that, but I believe accounts that such districts exist. Meanwhile in others the best they can do, with great effort, is get districts to pinkie-promise not to abuse teachers (but then do it anyway, of course). That’s the only kind I’ve seen but I dunno how it works in New York or Chicago or wherever.
Good, that will save us from laying them all off when Online school teachers are able to teach nearly unlimited students via repeatable content like videos.
And those who are better tutors than lecturers can become tutors for those who need more help
This whole generation is going to be lost. It's not a cataclysm, but a whole generation of American kids are going to be a year or two behind on their studies. They will have grown up during unprecedented social unrest. If the economy doesn't recover and society doesn't support their families, millions of them will grow up in poverty. It's not a certainty, but the outlook could be much better. It's sad, I feel for these kids.
> They will have grown up during unprecedented social unrest.
No, they won't. The almost continuous post-war race riots and civil rights protests of the 1940s-1960s (overlapping with the anti-war protests of the 1960s), the intense period of labor and race riots in the interwar period, and...well, it goes on and on as you go back to and before the Revolutionary period.
Thinking about having a kid. There's no way I would ever have a kid in my current US state. Not saying anyone has done it well vs rest of the world, but there are clearly states (and counties/cities) that have done a much better job at protecting human life than others.
As someone who has lived in the US South for most of my childhood and adult life, I truly don't think it's responsible to have children here if you have another choice. I know a lot of people don't, but I do and I'm out of here.
I think people have felt the same about having children throughout most of history.
Do you want a child born into slavery?
Do you want a child subject to a totalitarian government?
Do you want a child born into extreme poverty or famine?
I feel like if you want to have a kid you have one and you deal with whatever adversity comes along.
Take the opportunity to prepare your child to deal with the world that exists regardless of the circumstances. The more children that grow up with thoughtful parents that prepare them to face problems in the more possibility the world will be a better place in the future.
I'm sure my argument isn't well thought at being that it's 4:30pm on a Friday, but I really feel like regardless of the issues we face in society today we are living in the best time to be alive ever and if you have the means to care for a child, and you want children, there's nothing that should stop you from having one.
> I feel like if you want to have a kid you have one and you deal with whatever adversity comes along.
The thing is, it's not only you who will be dealing with "whatever adversity comes along". Your child will also have to deal with it, and just because you're okay with dealing with it doesn't mean they will be too.
Forcing a child into existence when you think it's likely they will have a negative life, just because "you want to have a kid", is an incredibly selfish decision to make. We shouldn't encourage people to take a gamble on their potential children's lives just because they want a kid.
This argument is unconvincing and really annoying. I don’t care about the calculus other people had to go through to have children in other times because I’m not them. Every human makes decisions based on the pressures they experience in their own life, pointing out that times were worse elsewhere is just annoying pedantry.
And of course, part of my point was I’m dubious about having a kid in America. As in, I’d be open to going expat and raising a child somewhere I think is safer and more stable.
This. Think of the marshmallow study where long-term planning kids turned out richer than the short-term minded ones. We need to push back against the Idiocracy mindset.
It is our prerogative as the less reckless to breed and propagate our genes, and teach our culture to our young. As you mentioned, the force of nature is against that, so we need campaigns, perhaps by the State, for the “careful thinkers” to breed and hold control over culture.
Not only that, it selects for children that have learned to trust other people's promises. If you have learned that a promised reward will never materialize, the rational choice is to take the treat now.
If you believe that your child will have a net-negative life, but you have one anyway (and force them to live under the horrible conditions you recognized!), just to balance out the more-reckless children, I question your ethical framework.
It doesn't seem ethical at all to bring new beings into an existence you acknowledge to be negative, and thrust the responsibility of fixing the world onto them.
You probably also don’t want to propagate the gene for “I don’t really want to have kids, but I’m still going to because I think I’m better than the people who are already having kids.”
Not sure I agree. More like, arguing that cultural and inherited values and behaviors can result in changes to the gene pool. Not that people are generically inferior, but that their values can be propagated when tied to a higher birthrate, with potentially net negative outcomes for society at large.
The exhortations of early Christian leaders against birth control are thought to be in part an effort to ensure the faithful flock grew at a faster rate than rival religions. A similar concept to the one I am trying to frame in the above paragraph, but not one that I would call eugenics which is an utterly flawed and morally abhorrent concept.
Mass killing of people based on criteria? Let’s not do that.
Reducing opportunities and quality of life for people we don’t want to breed? Let’s not do that.
Forced sterilization of populations? No.
Rewards for voluntary sterilization? (This selects based on socioeconomic status and moral values.) I don’t like this. You might be surprised to hear this is happening in India right now.
Fines for having too many children? (Again, this selects on socioeconomic status and moral values.) I don’t like this. You’re probably already aware this is happening in China.
Removing existing monetary or tax-break incentives that encourage having more children? We have a lot of child support/relief programs in Australia. They cause a sort of inverse selection by socioeconomic and moral values. I’m not sure how I feel about them. They really do improve the quality of life for the parents and the children, but they make having a child a less scary decision, which undoubtedly removes some of the hesitation that may have otherwise made a more reckless person think twice.
Researching genetics, culture and education and building programs that help people understand how nature and nurture will affect their unborn or young children. YES! These programs should be available to everyone. It should be mandatory to get a “child report” before having a child. But the exact contents of the child report should not be available to anyone but the prospective parents. (Aggregate anonymized should be available to all, though, to help with society-level planning.)
Wide-spread education on life planning? Openly marketing “Don’t have children before you’re ready!” ? Researching happiness and success metrics and publicizing the results in an accessible way, to help people realize the consequences of having children? Yes, yes, yes!
mrmuagi’s comment captures it well. If you look at a child in isolation, there are definitely preferable genes, cultural aspects, and educational aspects. For example, you want them to have a college-level degreee. You want them to not have asthma or eczema.
There will be children. How can we sway the forces of nature — in a way that most of us are okay with — toward preferable genes, culture, and education?
If we don’t steer the boat, we may not like where it goes.
I believe the old FDR phrase, "There's nothing to fear but fear itself," is becoming more and more accurate with our situation.
The risk from this virus goes down dramatically the younger you are. Kids are young. That's obvious. Their parents also tend to be young, at least young enough to not be in the high risk groups.
These groups are also accustomed to being sick or dealing with sick people.
If there were no vaccine in the pipeline, our only option would be herd immunity. If we were shooting for herd immunity, the groups exposed by going back to school would be exactly who we'd want to put at risk from a statistical standpoint.
So it's really a question of do we want to continue hiding out in hopes that they truly are able to fast track a vaccine, or do we want to just deal with a couple hard months and get our lives back?
Most of the alarmism at the beginning of all this was centered around it being a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic. It's not.
Or you know, you could deal with the virus like 99% of the other first world countries and be half way through it instead of still not having hit the peak of the epidemic. It's crystal clear that the US is doing something wrong. "it's not that bad", "europe is reopening schools so we should do it too", &c.
> It's crystal clear that the US is doing something wrong.
And if that's the reality, then we need to figure out how to move forward from there. We can't go back to March and convince everyone to do a better job of shelter in place.
We followed all the rules in my family. It was, in my opinion, a waste of time. I'm not going to hide in a hole for fear of the damn boogey man for the next three years.
> We can't go back to March and convince everyone to do a better job of shelter in place.
Apparently it's impossible to convince Americans to do a better job of anything. So "moving forward from here" is going to be just as incompetent and half-assed as shelter in place was. Apparently no one in power has learned a thing, hence this article.
It's not just those in power. Too few people in the populace learned that they really needed to follow heath guidelines like this was serious. Without that, the people in power can't do too much.
And why do many people not take the guidelines seriously? Partly it's because of the fumbling and incompetent response to Covid, but it's not just that. Government/political leadership has been setting their credibility on fire for a decade or several. (To be clear: It's not just this president, it's not just this administration, and it's not just one party.) They've been too busy trying to win at political trench warfare to actually govern, and the people have noticed. Too often, neither reason nor competence have been on display. So when it actually matters, nobody is willing to listen to the politically-driven clown show, because it's probably just more of the same. (And, to some degree, it was.)
So "moving forward" will require rebuilding trust in government. People need to trust that policy will be competent and (at least in something like this) not set by politics. That's going to take a decade or several to rebuild.
You will see that no single state except LA looks like that, they all look like the Germany graph.
The graph is simply the result of adding several time-shifted graphs together. Basally some US states had a delay before getting hit hard by the virus.
Everyone is like Europe good US bad hurr hurr hurr. But actually the US is simply lagging behind Europe. States they were hit early and done, states that were not are starting their ramp up now.
If you look closely you can actually see the virus spreading from East to West (and South) - notice the Eastern states had their cases and done, and now the Western and Southern states are starting.
Did we look at the same graphs ? There are like 5 states which are post peak, 15+ in very high increase, and the rest is beginning to rise.
> Everyone is like Europe good US bad hurr hurr hurr. But actually the US is simply lagging behind Europe. States they were hit early and done, states that were not are starting their ramp up now.
The first cases were reported more or less at the same time in every state or close enough that it doesn't explain the lags.
I read the article and I don't see how it contradicts my point. Kids are getting sick, as we expected. Soon they will be immune. Then it won't be an issue.
(Also fwiw, teacher salaries in the US do vary greatly by state. You won't make off like a bandit anywhere, but it's a perfectly respectable amount in some places.)
Maybe we should take better measures to protect both incredibly valuable professions instead of making snarky comments that imply they should just go get sick and die because someone else decided making bad calls is good.
Many or most of whom are social distancing or at home rather then in a room full of kids from different households. Plus very disproportionate effect on older people, a group that includes many teachers. Plus the extended effects in some cases even if you survive. Then consider how little they get paid and that there’s potentially alternatives (delay or virtual)
Nurses get about double the salary and literally signed up for this type of work. School teachers often buy their own supplies and aren't remotely prepared for this.
This doesn't make any sense - it's possible to teach children remotely. It is not possible to be a nurse remotely. The two situations are not remotely (pun intended) similar.
idk if it's a tongue in cheek comment or what but when you sign up to work in the medical system it's kind of implied (and probably explicitly written in your work contract) that you'll encounter dangerous and unpleasant situations, much less for teachers, especially when the whole thing is unnecessary and preventable in the first place.
This is 100% false, nurses and doctors did not opt-in for working under pandemic like conditions. Also they never agreed to do so while understaffed or without appropriate levels of PPE
It's also kidn of implied that teachers signed up to work with snivelling children who spread germs. That being said, there's evidence this particular virus doesn't even spread easily among children.
The study acknowledges children having been infected, but that they generally aren't a major vector for transmission. In particular, the study concludes that rise in cases among the young seem to occur from adults infecting the children.
Except the danger is overblown, there is risk ? yes of course, like everything else in life there is risk. Thats being said If they feel uncomfortable to work then they should quit, give opportunity for other teacher to take their job.
Look at other countries, the US wants to reopen during the peak of the virus... There are always risks, but there are more risks if you knowingly reopen everything during the worse time possible.
New teachers just don’t appear out of the woodworks, it takes time to be trained. Plus, since in the US it’s such a poorly paid and poorly respected profession (at least not respected by society; Id imagine parents appreciate teachers), where will these new teachers come from?
Ok not for you but at least for me and whole lot other people consider the risk be overblown.
>New teachers just don’t appear out of the woodworks, it takes time to be trained
This assume there are more teacher who are afraid than not. If there is truly lack of teacher then there are plenty of ways to urge them to work, such as giving more benefit.
I agree the US government response is really disappointing, they should have just reopen everything now.
I'm not saying that there nothing should be done regarding this virus. The vaccine research still have to continue, treatment research still have to continue, increase medical capacity(if needed) still have to be done.
What I'm against is this lockdown/restriction and this fear mongering because the damage it cause is more than the virus.
>Six months in and "it's just the flu bro" is still going strong, humans are weird
I'm not saying its just flu, I'm saying the risk of this virus is very low. The data clearly shown that for majority of cases it either asymptotic or only mild symptom.
Would there be risk of death due or long term damage to his virus ? of course, any diseases could cause that but the risk is low.
> I'm saying the risk is very low. The data clearly shown that for majority of cases it either asymptotic or only mild symptom.
The data also shows that 140k Americans died (probably many more if you take into account the excess deaths that have been recorded but haven't been linked to covid yet) and many more will suffer long term side effects.
The data also shows that Europeans countries almost completely curbed the epidemic and can _safely_ and _slowly_ reopen because they went through a real lock down.
If anything the data clearly shows that reopening anything in the US right now is suicide for thousands of people.
This situation will be a literal text book example of how to completely fail at handling an epidemic for the centuries to come, it would be comical if it wasn't for all the preventable deaths and suffering.
Amazing for someone to write off 140k deaths. Only 58,000 died in Vietnam. Thats literally in and out of "theaters of war". 1900 died in the Gulf war and those are ppl who "signed up for it".
I’m sorry, but of all the things I’ve read on HN regarding this pandemic, your lack of empathy truly stands out. Of the “millions other people” you mentioned, there are two types: those who feel a sense of duty to bear their share of burden to stop this virus from taking (complete strangers’) lives, and those who reject that notion, eagerly treating those lives, and the lives of people who would grieve their losses, as statistics to be put on scale with profit and growth for a quick decision. I’m not saying that people in the latter invented that scale; that scale is indeed a fact of life. But when I think of my own experience of loss, I cannot imagine that those who tout the balance of this scale as the sole reason for policy decisions understand the weight of a lost life.
Of course i understand it can be tragic for some people to loss life due to this virus but I also understand to achieve near 0 death will also incur high cost.
>your lack of empathy truly stands out.
I disagree, I sympathize those millions who suffer due to the lockdown. Their suffering is real as well.
I hope your grandmother doesn't live in your ideal society. Forgive the strong language but my point is it's precisely the most vulnerable / neglected / oppressed of our fellow citizens and members of our society who are / have been the most at risk to coronavirus.
And that's an important consideration when we think about why a lockdown is important as well.
My grandmother will always have high risk of death given of her age, any small diseases could kill her, not just covid.
To lock her down, to not let her out the house, to deprive her with activity that she want to do will cause more damage to her physical health and mental health.
It's also kind of implied that teachers signed up to work with sniveling children who spread germs. That being said, there's evidence this particular virus doesn't even spread easily among children.
No salary would be worth my life. Not everyone cares about money as much as people on HackerNews. And nurses definitely have more exposure to covid-19 than teachers.
Yes! Just wanted the other numbers to compare -- NC is paying less than the national starting salary on average for teachers and less than the national average for nurses. In both cases starting pay and average NC pay are less than the US average salary.
My wife could match her salary working at the local Sheetz gas station which does not require a masters degree AFAIK.
I've heard medical professionals opine that they're safer at work than they are at the grocery store now that they have adequate PPE along with well designed and properly followed procedures.
Wonderful. If they stay employed, we have to pay their salaries, despite not receiving any kind of education for America's children. We can't fire them, due to the union. But if they quit, we achieve everything -- tax payers save money for something they are not getting, and the funds can be used to educate children (Perhaps by direct payments to parents for use in hiring private tutors, or whatever).
This comment shows an astounding lack of anything resembling human empathy. Teachers do not want to return to work because the outbreak is getting worse in many places, and the already underpaid job of being a teacher would become even more dangerous. Ask any teacher (especially grade school) during normal times: they get sick constantly, and kids constantly pass around colds/the flu. In AZ, the emergency room ICUs are so full that patients are having to be flown to New Mexico. Huh, I wonder why teachers are concerned. Probably just union BS.
America’s children not receiving education isn’t the fault of teachers. It is the fault of a failed state that is unable to protect public health. Instead, you (and probably a large portion of older, affluent Americans) will celebrate as our already underpaid teachers are forced to seek other work rather than kill their students/families. Before the pandemic, many teachers in my district were forced to work second jobs (e.g. at restaurants). This is a breaking point.
America has truly lost any sense of community solidarity or just the barest altruism. Everything has become individualized and treated like a business cost that needs to be cut off like some sort of tumor in order to boost some shitty education startups that is “innovative” or “focused on shareholder value” or some shit. Teachers have an interest in not seeing their students/students’ families die, so it seems pretty obvious why they would be reluctant to pack a bunch of children in a classroom setting. But hey, maybe we can all create tutoring startups and unbundle public education into 40 SaaS apps.
> Instead, you (and probably a large portion of older, affluent Americans) will celebrate as our already underpaid teachers are forced to seek other work rather than kill their students/families. Before the pandemic, many teachers in my district were forced to work second jobs (e.g. at restaurants). This is a breaking point.
Yes. Teachers at private schools are paid much less but produce better outcomes, despite having similar demographics. For example, Catholic school teachers earn much less (and catholic schools spend much less per pupil than similar pupils at public schools). Yet the outcomes are better. This is not a problem with pay. The public school system and teachers who are complicit in it have failed our students.
And to be clear.. I am not older. I have soon-to-be school age children. My mother was a teacher. We have seen the rot in the system, and our children will not be attending. Especially as a minority, we cannot let our children be subject to the silent and self-denying racism inherent in the public school system. Sorry you don't get to ruin my kid's life as people like you forced my mother to ruin other children's lives be following the edicts of the public school system.
Human ingenuity has accomplished some marvelous things in the last century. I can't help but wonder how easily we could have tooled up for mass production of affordable PAPRs to distribute for times when remote work isn't very effective, like teaching children.
LA’s teachers union issued calls to defund the police and limit charter schools (AKA competition and accountability for teachers) as part of their reopening plans so I’m not sure that health is the only thing in play. It seems like large numbers of teachers are just openly exploiting this crisis for political and personal gain.
Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want things to actually get better? People are scared, that's just a fact, and they need to feel confident that action is being taken in their best interest. Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.
We all know that this is an exceptional event and that there will be missteps. People will forgive mistakes and setbacks and take on more risk if they are confident that there is a plan - but so far there isn't one. We're almost six months into this and the messaging is still chaos. The lack of a national strategy is what is causing this pandemic to worsen. The rot really does start at the top.
The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!