People overwhelmingly want kids to go to school because they want free childcare. That’s it.
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You can. Why do you think we’re yolo OFB in general and clocking 3k dead a day while a vaccine is (somewhat) actively being rolled out? The willingness of people to make sacrifices for the common good is very dependent on leadership and social trust, which are in desperately short supply.
I think it was reasonable to assume that you’d be familiar with Cohen, since you were the one who linked that On the Media podcast episode, which was a 15 minute interview with Cohen!
As far as Rebekah Jones, the connection here is that Rachel Cohen has been introduced at least twice in this stream of COVID threads. Once in the On the Media podcast, and earlier when Dan posted this:
https://twitter.com/georebekah/status/1321445110819729412?s=21
and I agree with @bobman0330 in responding to that piece:
I’m still kind of at a loss about what people find so objectionable about Oster. Cohen’s think piece and her interview both sounded to me like complaints about how other people are interpreting Oster’s articles, and that Oster’s data wasn’t as rich as they wanted it to be. Having read Oster’s articles, they all seem to include the caveats that opponents like to point out.
I think this is an excellent commentary (from an epidemiologist) on Oster’s stuff:
https://twitter.com/WhitneyEpi/status/1321460031146151950
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I’ve seen this a lot and I think it’s simply not true. Parents of kids with special needs simply aren’t equipped to teach their kids as well as schools. That’s somewhere around 12-15% of all kids. My kid’s IEP has been a disaster this year, and she’s really suffering.
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That isn’t “IT”, but that certainly contributes imo.
I think the selfish analysis for parents of schoolchildren is very likely correct (i.e., it’s better for the people they care about for their kids to be in school rather than learning virtually). It’s much less clear whether it’s selfishly rational for some 40 year old to eat dinner at a restaurant, because the costs are much higher and the benefits much less.
The moral analysis is trickier. Personally, my kids would be staying home even if they were school-aged, but I think it’s a genuinely tough call in a lot of situations. OFB is a moral horror.
On top of that, though, there’s a political element. As a negotiating posture, it’s very defensible to demand that the burden of protecting vulnerable populations be shared more by society at large than by schoolchildren, even if you can’t justify letting people die just so that your kid can be in school.
I agree that Rebaca Jones seems like a grifty clown. Not sure how that validates Oster’s ongoing clownshow.
It’s a relevant datapoint to consider in relation to the question of how nonsense gets spread about by sources that should know better.
The most vocal OFS crowd are the OFB people that think “it’s just the flu”.
Unless you’re vaccinating all teachers, support staff and students, it’s reckless to open schools. No way around it.
Sorry I haven’t read all 20 billion posts itt, what is OFS and OFB?
Open for (school/business)
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Sure, except for the American Academy of Pediatrics
https://www.aappublications.org/news/2021/01/05/covid-school-safety-010521
“Children absolutely need to return to in-school learning for their healthy development and well-being, and so safety in schools and in the community must be a priority,” AAP President Lee Savio Beers, M.D., FAAP, said in a news release. “We know that some children are really suffering without the support of in-person classroom experiences or adequate technology at home. We need governments at the state and federal levels to prioritize funding the needed safety accommodations, such as improving ventilation systems and providing personal protective equipment for teachers and staff.”
and Anthony Fauci
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article247504030.html
The decision to bring students back for in-person instruction is chief among their concerns. But even as case numbers climb, infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci is in favor of keeping schools open. In an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Fauci said to “close the bars and keep the schools open,” Business Insider reported.
“Obviously, you don’t have one size fits all,” he said. “But as I said in the past, the default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school, or to get them back to school.”
Fauci’s take is similar to the approach public health officials have taken across much of Europe.
Notably, none of these people (certainly not me) are saying that kids absolutely have to be sent back to school without qualification. I think people are generally saying that kids can be brought back to school if effective mitigation techniques are employed, particularly those aimed at keeping faculty and staff safe. And we should be dedicating all of our efforts at achieving those goals, rather than caring about whether bars and restaurants are open.
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As far as I’ve ever been able to tell you all agree that school should be the last to close and first to open. The problem is given the US response is so varied but completely opposed to that, what practical advice follows is possibly unanswerable. So you can probably argue forever!
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Are you just skipping over the entirety of people working in schools?
Keeping schools open now is idiotic. I’ll just scroll by most posts saying anything else. It was a discussion that could be had in a select few parts of the country when positivity rates were low and 4k people weren’t dying per day. Now, it’s firmly is “lol no” territory.
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In addition to what others have said, this statement is not universal either.
First, there are many kids who, for various reasons, live with old people like grandparents.
Also you’re assuming that other family members, including parents in siblings, aren’t vulnerable for some other reason.
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Exactly what CN said.
Kids better to learn in schools yes.
Can schools deal w covid safely-in theory
Does that happen in practice? Lol no
Any gathering is a multiplier. When the current background is low we can deal with that multiplier. When’s it’s high we can’t. It’s very very very high currently.
Not only is is a multiplier but it’s an exponent— the multiplier is bigger the higher the background.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55659820
The South Africa variant emerged in October, and it has more potentially important changes in the spike protein than the UK variant.
It has one of the same mutations as the UK one, plus two more that scientists think may interfere more with vaccine effectiveness. One of these may help the virus evade parts of the immune system called antibodies.
The UK has imposed a ban on direct flights from South Africa and restrictions on flights to the country. Anyone who has travelled there recently, and anyone they have been in contact with, are being told to quarantine immediately.
The Brazil variant emerged in July and was recently detected in four travellers arriving in Japan from Brazil. It has three key mutations in the spike protein that make it similar to the South Africa one.
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The concrete answer for me is that the decision to impose a strict lockdown is at the state level, where I have zero influence. But the decision to open schools is at the local school district level, where parents do have some influence over the board’s decision. So it makes sense, at least where I’m located, to consider the state-level decision fixed.
So even though I agree that we should close restaurants, bars, etc. AND THEN open schools, that’s not the actual decision I have any influence over. The decision that I can influence is, “Conditional on bars and restaurants staying open (which is bad!), should we offer in-person schools under a hybrid approach with mitigating efforts (e.g., required masks)?”
And my view is that:
- opening schools has bad consequences
- keeping schools closed has bad consequences
It makes sense to try to weigh the bad consequences of one with the bad consequences of the other, and choose the least bad of two bad options. For elementary school in particular, I think the least bad option is to bring kids back to school. For high school, I think the least bad option is to close schools. And for middle school, I don’t know.
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Jesus this ofs shit ruins this thread like once a week. The answer seems super obvious and clear so why the fuck hasnt this shit been put to bed?
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lol no. You’re not a parent, I take it?
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