Certainly one can have reservations about dishonest but effective advocacy, but If the alternative is being a useful idiot for the other side…
I tried to get into this controversy and have an opinion, but I got derailed at “Dothraki”. Hot take: GoT was pretty boring and wildly overrated.
eta: I guess with the title of this thread and all it is a good place to go for clever references. Hat tip I reckon.
eta: “winter is coming” is a GoT thing, right?
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I really agonized over that line tbh. It did feel a bit forced. Hello fellow pop culture afficianados!
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This might be a reasonable take! But you’re leaving out the part where some have suggested that opening the schools won’t lead to a major increase in COVID spread. And when you ask for the evidence behind this counter-intuitive claim, you get called a science institution-worshiping Dothraki.
The rhetoric is pretty thick, even by bobo’s normal standards.
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He is one of the few people for who it makes sense to risk Covid. He could literally be making a billion dollars if his career goes well.
I’m convinced the schools issue is just a way for some (not necessarily here) to “what about the children” and “we must think about the children” to justify all the terrible bullshit they are doing to spread the disease in the other aspects of their life. If you are eating out every week, traveling to Florida to party on the beach, attending Trump rallies, attending huge indoor events maskless like church you don’t care about anyone but yourself. These people don’t give a fuck about public education and have largely been voting to either directly or indirectly cut funding to it for decades. The whole children need school thing is just cover for their overall monstrosity and to try and put that in the column and safe and necessary along with restaurants and bars to “win” their dumbass covidiot political conversations.
That being said schools should be a top priority. I think we all agree here on that. But the covid denial crowd isn’t using kids in schools in good faith whatsoever. So I am going to be extremely skeptical of any non-peer reviewed study on this issue.
This issue isn’t that complicated and the fact we are going round and round on it for literally 6 months now here is really grinding my gears. Treat school as a top priority. Take steps to reduce communal spread and open schools taking what precautions you can. The real problem is Karen needs her Chili’s and salon time so it is impossible to control the spread outside of school.
The bottom line is that school isn’t going to be safe from a community perspective with widespread Covid cases. It doesn’t really matter if kids spread it at 25%, 50% or more. It’s just one more vector for rampant spread and death. School can be fairly safe but not in most places currently in the US that are filled with selfish dipshits.
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The Dakotas are absolutely exploding right now:
To put that in perspective, adjusted for population, it would be like California having 70,000 cases/day.
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JFC, I posted about North Dakota last week and it’s gotten worse. Population adjusted their 7 day average is equivalent to the US having 375k cases and 4300 deaths per day. Yesterday alone is the equivalent of 582k cases and 5600 deaths.
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I’m sure deciding to hold a bike rally was worth it. As I think about it it’s a bad spot to be in out there, deciding whether to let it happen or not. If you say no your constituents who are very red are going to all but lynch you for ruining the local economy… and if you let it happen this happens.
In other words what’s happening out there is 100% Trump’s fault. And to think that six short years ago I was convinced that it was very hard for a president to have actual impact domestically. I should have remembered my own framework for historical figures… that usually big moments are triggered by incompetence rather than brilliance. Don’t get me wrong brilliance wins usually, but that usually looks like a ton of small opportunistic gains made in the total absence of major fuck ups.
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I don’t know how they don’t end up completely wrecked as a state by this. They don’t have the healthcare facilities to handle this absurd of a wave. It’s a major health emergency worse than anything we saw in NYC early on and there’s zero leadership to do any about it.
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I suppose you’re just editing the timeline for persuasive effect, but I prefer to imagine that you’re like a Westworld host, and just can’t perceive information that isn’t peer-reviewed.
Mr Science: demands data
Girl Economist: assembles a bunch of data
Mr Science: It doesn’t look like anything to me…
Ohio is exploding on worldometer right now.
The US saw a record high of 91,000 new Covid-19 cases reported on Thursday, with spikes in dozens of states just days before the presidential election.
The same day, over 1,000 Americans died with the virus, as the national death toll and number of patients in hospital continue to trend upward.
Will we see 6 figs today?
If we don’t have any weird reporting issues with any of the states I think we will.
I feel like there are multiple arguments happening, and I’m not even sure I know what those arguments are.
I am taking for granted that we are in this baffling world where we have prioritized bars and restaurants being open. Yes, that sucks, but I can’t do anything about it. So in that world, should schools be open?
I am in a location with a very high rate of spread right now (just outside of Columbus, Ohio). We’re at something like 200 cases per 100,000 individuals over the last two weeks, which is the metric that our school district is focused on. Everything over 100 per 100,000 is deemed high spread.
Does that high spread mean that we should open schools or not? I’m actually not sure. This is how I view the various factors.
Arguments in favor of opening:
- Kids’ education will be better if they are in school. My belief is that this is almost certainly true.
- Households’ well-being will be better if they are in school. A couple of factors are that kids being in school makes it easier for parents to earn their incomes, and families are going batshit crazy being around each other 24 hours at a time and becoming de facto teachers.
Arguments against opening:
- It’s potentially unsafe for the kids.
- It’s potentially unsafe for the community.
I want to focus on these last two points, because I think people have different assumptions about how true they are with regard to schools opening vs. being closed.
I’ll start by saying that I have no doubts kids can spread it. Some quick data from my school district:
We have 11,500 students currently attending in-person schools on a hybrid basis, with 2,000 staff members. The state of Ohio reports a cumulative 63 positive tests among students and 18 positive tests among staff. That’s a 0.56% rate for students and a 0.90% rate for staff. Since 8/31, the state of Ohio has recorded roughly 82,000 new cases out of a population of 11.69 million, for a rate of about 0.70%.
In short, I think it’s reasonable to say that the virus is spreading at about the same rate among students and staff as it is among the general public.
But I think the important question is whether this transmission is happening within schools or not - does school opening actually cause an increase in transmission? Much of the communication that we’ve gotten has been clear that many of these student cases are being transmitted through outside events. I believe that more than a quarter of the student cases were traced to a single private party that was hosted on what would have been Homecoming Weekend. (The actual Homecoming event was cancelled.)
If that can be generalized, then I’d say we should just open up schools because opening up schools doesn’t meaningfully increase transmission above the rate it would otherwise be.
So even though I’m very concerned about the virus and believe that many businesses should be shut down, I’m not sure I understand the argument for shutting down schools completely. Is it based on the assumption that school transmission is going to be greater than the transmission that would otherwise have happened? If so, have we seen any evidence that actually attempts to capture that counterfactual?
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If it makes you feel any better, our new Minister of Health doesn’t know how reproductive numbers work:
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Maybe eating a hot dog dangling off a string look ma no hands style while drunk, shirtless, and sitting on a motorcycle isn’t actually a good idea during a pandemic?
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Putting this in a different context, Ohio State University is testing (largley at random) roughly 3,000 students and staff each day, and has had a positivity rate of <1% for at least the past month.
I think it’s fair to say that this forum largely believed that opening a large university would be a disaster. (I myself thought that OSU would reverse their decision by mid-October.) My question is this: If you knew that OSU would be able to maintain a positivity rate of <1% through aggressive testing, tracing, and quarantining, would you have been more in favor of opening? I know that I definitely would have been.
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Agree with this, and it also applies to their sudden concern about mental health, suicides, etc.
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