Definitely not trying to make a passive-aggressive let’s open schools argument by asking what sort of metrics/thresholds can be used to indicate places that can reasonably consider in-person education.
I disagree that any place that wants to open schools doesn’t care about kids’ lives. Reducing such an important and complex situation to a binary “are you pro kid murder or anti kid murder” doesn’t do much useful to advance the topic and feeds into the politicizing of things.
There are huge swaths of the US that are not currently heavily impacted, and I’d suspect that the benefits of in-person education in those areas may well outweigh the risks, especially if implemented well. Banning all in-person education might be a prudent policy decision now, but it still merits discussion of what thresholds would make it appropriate to consider re-opening.
Case in point, my area with .7% positive rate and .3 new cases per 100k in population - pretty much all schools here are going online only. The few I know of that are opening, are doing so with 2 day a week schedules and heavy restrictions.
If that constitutes recklessly endangering the lives of children, we’re going to need to get a firm handle on what would be acceptable, or else we’re looking at the potential for years of missed classroom education for tens of millions of students.
Edit to add: We can all agree that opening schools in Miami or Houston is insanely dumb - nothing at all to debate there. No need to shoot fish in a barrel panning those dummies, imo.
You said a mouthful here. It’s easy to be cynical (and I guess I’m saying a mouthful here), but there’s no way I trust a vaccine rushed out by the Trump administration–almost certainly released just before the election–to be either safe or effective.
I think that’s effectively what it will be. The administration has bullied and corrupted every supposedly-neutral agency we have. If the head of a pharma company tells Trump, “We could have something by early October, but your mean ole’ FDA insists on safety testing that will delay us by three months,” I’m betting we get a new FDA director the next day.
ETA: I’m also taking for granted that vaccine producers will be given blanket immunity from lawsuits over side effects.
I have a very good friend who I haven’t seen since before the pandemic. He moved from NJ to VT a month ago. Him and his wife bought a large house on 5 acres of land in Windsor County. They haven’t been strictly quarantined as they’ve gone through the home buying process and everything that comes after - going to stores, traveling back and forth from NJ to VT a couple times, etc.
He is a school teacher who will be starting work at the end of the month. I’d really like to visit them before that as otherwise I won’t be able to for a while and I may be moving pretty far away in a few months. The only feasible time would be next Thursday for a few days, so not enough time for them to quarantine for 14 days beforehand.
I’m leaning towards going but don’t want to make a stupid decision after 6 months of vigilant safety. Thought on if this is a bad idea or not? Windsor County VT has had 72 total cases so far, which compared to the 8,500 cases in the county I live in seems insanely small.
Yup, my republican good friend started insinuating that the reasons deaths are so high is that they count them as positive even though tests are coming back negative…
Your personal risk is probably pretty low. You should be more concerned with the risk you’d be imposing on VT and the other communities you’d be traveling through to get there.
I’m not really caring about the open schools argument. I think it’s generally unsafe to do so right now, but if some places don’t give a s*** then everyone else can look at those places for examples of what happens when you do. It’s important to note Israel had completely crushed its curve until it opened schools. No or low cases does not guarantee there won’t be an issue.
I do take issue with calling the ‘are your kids’ lives worth the risk?’ talk politicization. I care about one thing, the health risks. I think there are too many cases in most places in the country to feel comfortable overcoming those health risks (exceptions are maybe Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine). Many of the places that fall under this issue have massively too many cases to be considering opening schools. There are obviously quite a few places that have low caseloads where schools probably can be opened somewhat safely as long as precautions are taken with the ability to shut down quickly if things start changing.
What I’m hearing is parents saying ‘my child’s development is going to be stunted and that’s unacceptable’. What I’m saying is, ‘if your child dies, what happens to the child’s development then?’. What I see from a lot of people is a selfish desire to get their lives back on track believing the monster on Pennsylvania Avenue about how children won’t be a problem. The politicization isn’t people saying health risks are the dominant factor in this decision. The politicization is coming from the people who say damn the health risks for either the economy or their child’s development.
My main point is the horses have left the barn in a number of places. They’re not going back in right now. The solution isn’t to release as many horses as possible to see what happens. The solution is to try to delay allowing more horses to escape until there’s actually some data (and to avoid the exact same situation that led to 3 million new cases in the 2 months since OFB started). That data will be piling up big time within 5 weeks and a lot of places haven’t opened up schools yet. Why make the data noisier when that 5 weeks really doesn’t mean anything to most people’s lives at this point after what we’ve already gone through?
It also would be helpful to know what county you’re in to give some specificity to your situation if you’re willing to share it.
Nope, they did a strict 14 day quarantine when they went up to settle and then again when they moved up there, but have since been going to stores (home depot mostly). They also were coming from hunterdon county NJ which I believe is the one NJ area that is ok for VT travel. I’d be driving directly to their property, staying there, and driving back.
I’m torn because what you say is all true. I’d be putting VT at risk probably more so than they would me, even though I haven’t left my house since late February other than for dr appointments.
Appreciate your perspective and agree with essentially all of that. Wholly agree that parents are being forced into bad choices and some are certainly making selfish ones. I also think that giving parents the option for in-person vs. remote is awful and absolutely shouldn’t be a thing. Smart people should be making those decisions for Joe Public, who certainly lacks the qualifications to make such essential life and death decisions. Unfortunately, the smart people are nowhere to be seen, and it’s elected stooges spinning the wheel and making random decisions.
That’s why I really wish there was some kind of data driven or at least data adjacent way to frame some of these things, so it isn’t just all random. You are correct that we lack much of the data and will definitely be gathering more as time goes on, but we could still be looking at some kind of framework.
I’m in the Finger Lakes region of NY - those were the numbers I was citing from the NY dashboard. I’m familiar a bit with the school situation in Livingston county (a rural county with very few cases) and Monroe county (the biggest one in that region - Rochester NY).
Again, definitely agree and wouldn’t advocate for in-person schooling even in my area. I work at a college in the region and we’re almost fully distance for the fall semester. I endorse that approach fully, but recognize that if this is the new normal eventually we’ll need to determine what constitutes “safe enough” for schools to resume. Not now for sure, but we need something better than “we’ll know it when we see it” imo.
You can think that all you want. It’s not informed and it’s not correct. Preemptively striking at the vaccines credibility because of politics is exactly the kind of political bs that has fueled the idiotic response of the republicans. Don’t do that
I agree with pretty much everything you said there.
I graphed out Monroe and Livingston County, and it looks to me like it’s much less safe to open any schools in Monroe County than it is in Livingston, where it looks like it would probably be about as safe as it can be anywhere in the country to open them there. It has a tiny amount of new cases each week and the SDI requirement appears to be extraordinarily low (20 guess, which is close to the equivalent of doing nothing). Based on 1point3acres, it looks like Livingston County has 10 active cases, which means it could easily set up contact tracing for anyone who gets sick. What have you heard about schools and how they’re opening there?
