I haven't been a hard liner on keeping schools closed and am trying to listen to science. If we were still at the original COVID I'd say let's go with the low rates for kids and teacher vax but variants are still a wild card and children seem to be susceptible. But consider the article and comments below including long-term lung scarring from even people with mild cases. Every single person I know who had it even a year ago complains of some shortness of breath or being more tired. I may never leave my house again.
As usual the UFT and AFT are waffling. Do we think the CDC is suddenly not politicized under Biden who has promised to get schools open and viola, distances shrink from 6 to 3 feet.
Naked Capitalism -
Yves here. Biden repeatedly promised to “follow the science” in developing Covid policies. But as has become the norm in American medicine, the science has instead been distorted in the interest of profits and political expedience. This post provides a devastating takedown of the Biden plan to reopen schools with little in the way of additional protections for teachers and students, particularly more ventilation (how about the simple expedient of opening windows?). It explains why Covid cases among children have been severely undercounted and where population-wide surveys were made, children were vastly more likely to introduce Covid into a household than adults. It also shreds the CDC’s astonishing assertion that distancing as little as three feet would be OK.
On the one hand, parents and children are suffering due to the lack of in-person instruction. Keeping schools closed is politically risky for Team Dem, particularly since it is seen as a staunch ally of the (formerly) powerful teachers unions. But simply pretending that schools can implement hand-wave level measures and everything will be hunky-dory is the sort of wishful thinking that is guaranteed to produce problems down the road, just like our insufficient test capacity and unwillingness to enforce quarantines and mask mandates. As a result, how much luck do you think schools and teachers will have in getting children to wear masks properly (particularly not take them off if they start to cough and keep them over their noses), and how much support will they have from parents if they try to discipline the non-compliant?
Lambert almost immediately challenged the CDC’s recommendations on schools for ignoring evidence on aerosol-based transmission. He also found evidence that they relied on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report that punted on the question of “indoor air quality of schools” because addressing it might mean spending money! In other words, they refused to consider the issue at all, even low cost mitigations. This article confirms his concerns and adds quite a few others.
Your humble blogger also expressed doubts about Dr. Rochelle Walensky as the new head of the CDC, that she had signed up for Biden Administration priorities (as in she appeared not to have attempted to negotiate the agenda), some of which looked like an impossibly big leap for a weak agency, and others looked unconstitutional. Two particular weaknesses look relevant to this fiasco:
Fighting yesterday’s war
Treating better PR as the solution to way too many problems
There’s much more information in this carefully argued and well documented piece, which I hope you’ll circulate widely. As we’ve been saying from early on, it’s the disease dynamics that are in control. Wanting that not to be true won’t begin to make it so.
By Deepti Gurdasani, Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning, The William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary, University of London; Phillip Alvelda, CEO & Chairman, Brainworks Foundry, Inc.; and Thomas Ferguson, Director of Research, Institute for New Economic Thinking and Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
