Back in August, when it became clear that schools were going to reopen in countries like the US and Britain that did not have Covid under control, and which never would control Covid until there is a vaccine, I wrote an article warning against going back to school while Covid was out of control.
I’d think twice before sending my kids back to school under these circumstances.
I was told this was wrong, that it’d be OK. So let’s revisit that (specific examples courtesy of the Republican Dalek):
- Thirty-nine students and three staff members at Frank Wagner Elementary school in Monroe were advised to quarantine Thursday after they were potentially exposed to COVID-19.
- East Baton Rouge Parish School System (EBRPSS) has announced it has closed Park Elementary School in Baton Rouge due to an outbreak of COVID-19.
- Eighty-eight Utah schools with Covid outbreaks.
- One-hundred and sixty-one schools and thirty-one colleges.
- Thirty-six confirmed outbreaks with one hundred and fourty-six cases in New Jersey (Nov 5)
Here’s a nice little pie-graph from Toronto, Ontario:
Children get Covid. Most don’t have symptoms, but they can pass it on. Some, even though they don’t have symptoms, will have long term damage. Because they don’t have symptoms, most children won’t be tested, so the numbers above are surely significantly lower than the actual count.
(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)
Once they get it, children, showing no symptoms, can pass it on to their parents, grandparents and any one else who comes into contact with them. They may be somewhat less infectious than adults, but that isn’t the same as not being infectious. The older the kid, the worse (high schools absolutely should be closed.)
Re-opening schools was moronic. But if you want the hoi polloi to go back to work, well the schools have to be open, because schools are primarily childcare. Note that high end workers are still isolating at home: the City of London is still effectively shuttered. Our lords and masters sure aren’t putting themselves at risk if they don’t need to.
Sending your kid back to school may be something you had to do, legally, or because you have to work, since if you don’t, you and the kid wind up homeless. So you play Covid-roulette. But as a public health measure it was stupid at best, criminally malign at worst and people who didn’t need to send their kids back shouldn’t have and often didn’t. Many schools don’t even make children wear masks, and schools, with kids locked into rooms for hours on end in close proximity, are near ideal for Covid spreading.
Our elites do the wrong thing, repeatedly, knowing it will kill or impoverish a bunch of us, and they don’t care. It’s that simple.
Hugh
It seems like younger children can go back to school while older children and high schoolers probably should continue to do at home education. A problem in all this is that in areas with more poverty many kids of all ages get their important daily meals at school.
Ten Bears
In another one of those blind hogs and acorns moments, or perhaps magnanimity, I totally agree with Trump he should get credit for the trump-flu vaccine. It’s the Trump-Virus, name it the Trump-Virus Vaccine. Pretty simple.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Betsy McKay reported that “The new coronavirus infected people in the U.S. in mid-December 2019, a few weeks before it was officially identified in China and about a month earlier than public health authorities found the first U.S. case, according to a government study published Monday. The findings significantly strengthen evidence suggesting the virus was spreading around the world well before public health authorities and researchers became aware, upending initial thinking about how early and quickly it emerged…
The results add to growing evidence suggesting Covid-19 was present outside of China earlier than previously known.”
It’s the Trump-Virus, he let in the door, gave it time to spread. Still is.
Klv
Does Ian Welsh have children? Do the other people commenting here have school-age children? If you did, you would know that the online/remote learning is a total joke.
Read this and weep
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/when-covid-19-closed-schools-black-hispanic-poor-kids-took-n1249352
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/fairfax-schools-more-failing-grades/2020/11/24/1ac2412e-2e34-11eb-96c2-aac3f162215d_story.html
Do you realize that the school closures are basically screwing over an entire generation of children?
I have a 10-year old. I am doing 2-3 hours of home schooling every day. If I didn\’t she would be way behind. This is the only way to keep keep learning, on grade level. I can do this. Lots of other parents cannot (afford) to do this. Especially kids of disadvantaged backgrounds, exactly the kids that advocates of school shutdowns \”supposedly\” really care about. Upper middle class kids are still doing fine, everybody else is totally screwed over. Way to go.
Joan
This was a year to home-school. I’m not saying permanently (people tend to freak out when I suggest this).
Ian Welsh
Sure, online schooling is a joke.
You or your parents dying will fuck your kid even more. Your teenager getting Covid damage will fuck them more. Probably a wise society would just shrug and lose a year.
Or, you know, have handled Covid properly and crushed it by now so people could go back to school and work safely, like in many asian countries, Australia and New Zealand.
js
A missed year could likely be made up with more intense educational focus on the kids later. Whether there is the social will to do that is another matter. I mean there isn’t the social will to give disadvantaged kids much of an education to begin with even with no covid. But it’s hardly inherently impossible.
Synoia
Our elites do the wrong thing, repeatedly, knowing it will kill or impoverish a bunch of us, and they don’t care. It’s that simple.
I complexly disagree. What I believe correct is:
Our elites do the wrong thing, repeatedly, hoping it will kill or impoverish a bunch of us, especially the elderly. It’s that simple.
Ian Welsh
lol, Synoia. Yes, that’s surely true of most of them.
Klv
> You or your parents dying will fuck your kid even more.
What I don’t see in this discussion is a rational, calm weighting of costs vs benefits of school shutdowns (or lockdowns in general). There is absolutist narrow approach – “there is (some degree of) risk, so no school. Schools will open when safety is guaranteed.”
The risks of covid are very unevenly distributed. Parents of school-age kids are most likely 30-50 years old. For healthy 30-50 year-olds the risk (of death from covid) is about the same as of daily commute to work. Do we ban daily commute because 100% safety is not guaranteed. Covid risk factors are pretty well known (e.g. obesity, age>65, etc.) If somebody in family is in a high-risk group, they should have a choice of home-schooling their kids. Why not give parents a choice – do they want to send their kids to school, or do they prefer online/remote schooling (which means home schooling)? I know quite a few parents who would send their kids to school in a heartbeat. They know covid is out there; it is their (informed) choice.
> schools are primarily childcare
This is so wrong. Beyond just the education, there are many other things. E.g. how do you think kids learn social skills? Watching netflix? By playing with other kids. If we allow them to play with other kids outside of school, why not allow them to go to school?
> Or, you know, have handled Covid properly and crushed it by now so people could go
> back to school and work safely, like in many “Asian society, Australia and New Zealand.
This is water under the bridge. Coulda, woulda. Sure. What Asian countries have done is unacceptable in the West. We (in the West) don’t have the trust and respect for authority that people in Asia have. If a government official comes and asks you “list all the people you have been in contact during the last 2 weeks”, lots of people would never trust the government with this. If forced, they would tell the gov just a bunch of bs fairly tales. Don’t trust the gov with this. None of their business.
> Or, you know, have handled Covid properly and crushed it by now
There was probably a very narrow time window in the very beginning to crush it. By now, there is no crushing it. It is here to stay just like the annual flu. Since it is a virus, it will readily mutate. Current immunity will not be 100% effective in a few years (but partial immunity may well be all that stands between life and death).
> A missed year could likely be made up with more intense educational focus on the kids later.
Nope. Theoretically sure, in practice no. Once you fall behind, it is very difficult to catch up. Kids from disadvantaged backgrounds start off 1st grade already behind. If it was so easy to catch up, how come they never catch up.
js
In areas with strong teachers unions schools often did not reopen, so there is also the educator/employee/worker perspective to consider. Where they had power not to go back they didn’t, where they want back it was maybe because they had little power to represent their interest (no unions).
They signed up for a job, to exchange labor for pay, not to be martyrs, yes I know so did so many other people at risk at work, the problem is most employees are not unionized and have no power.
And no you can’t bifurcate the workplace into low and high risk employees and only bring the low risk back, that gets real ugly real fast – it’s dystopia.
NR
Klv – The reason we have disasters like this COVID crisis is because you and people like you are willing to just shrug and accept them.
bruce wilder
It is too late now. The disease is endemic.
Masks and social-distancing are not very effective and lockdowns, also not effective against endemic disease, are very costly.
The professional and managerial classes, who, of course, protect and take care of themselves, will enjoy preaching and shaming the lower orders, while stifling any attempt to hold any one higher up responsible for the bumbling and stumbling.
bruce wilder
@ NR
Was there ever any other option for common folk, other than shrug and accept?
nihil obstet
A comprehensive threat to the society like this pandemic reveals the ways that we section off our organization of the society to limit its effectiveness for everyone. It’s rather like the hardening of the spiritual arteries in the followers of the great prophets in the previous post.
Children learn as they grow, and we can help or hurt that learning. The promise of help led the non-elite to demand public schools. There are knowledge and skills that broaden their children’s thoughts and give them the potential for better lives. However, virtually immediately, the powers that be bent it up to their benefit. They made it a warehouse for the children of people whose time and labor power they wanted. And then came the curricula, which has become the means by which any destructive public policy is justified — don’t regulate banks; require high school courses in “financial literacy”!
Meanwhile we ignore what children actually learn in schools. If you look at the thinkers about public schools in the 19th c. as they were being set up, you see that character and social contributions were more important than school work which consisted of learning Latin and the like. As Wellington said, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”. We set up schools to focus on the skill sets that most will forget long before they use them.
Universities are valuable at teaching skills that need more than apprenticeship and at giving citizens a grounding in the humanities. The first part is why the U.S. funded the land grant colleges. The second part is why the states usually have a state university, to open up the state’s future leaders. Other careers are not best built through universities.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that the pandemic should be giving us incentive to think about why the schools are falling apart and start trying to redesign the schools to do what they should be doing rather than being the bucket in which to drop all our social problems.
Klv
NR,
> Klv – The reason we have disasters like this COVID crisis is because you and people
> like you are willing to just shrug and accept them.
What exactly do you mean by “COVID crisis is because you and people like you are willing to just shrug and accept them.”
Do earthquakes happen because we just “shrug and accept them.”
Ok, you may say that covid turned into a mess it is because we could have handled it better, but didn’t. Fine. It easy to say – shut down everything, crush it. Be done with it. Everything goes back to normal. Hurrah.
Exactly how do you do that? With the constraints/limitations you operate under. Appoint me a dictator of mankind and I will fix everything for you. Covid? no problem. Trains will run on time too. You don’t get on with the program, I will put you to the wall.
On a personal level, I worry about things that I can influence/control. I try not to stress too much about things I cannot influence/control.
GM
NR
Klv –
“Exactly how do you do that?”
This is a really stupid question given that there are many countries out there that handled COVID just fine. It’s not like this was some unsolvable problem.
Klv
>> The risks of covid are very unevenly distributed. Parents of school-age kids are
>> most likely 30-50 years old. For healthy 30-50 year-olds the risk (of death from
>> covid) is about the same as of daily commute to work
>
> This is blatantly false on its own as any look at the statistics will show immediately.
Can you show us the statistics?
> But those were not the only two alternatives, they are presented as such
> only because billionaires don’t want to pay taxes
This is way bigger question/issue that just covid. (may comment on this later)
> they very thought of even a temporary downwards transfer of wealth is a
> blasphemy that should never be allowed to even enter people’s mind.
Have you not noticed how the current covid response has enriched the billionaires and screwed everybody else? Checked the net worth of Bezoes et. al. lately? Compared against the well-being avg folks?
Seems to me, the suggestion that people on the left of the political spectrum, unhappy with current response, is more extreme version what what we are already doing? E.g. how would what Biden & gang is proposing make things fundamentally better?
> The proper response to which would have been to hang billionaires from lampposts.
Appoint me a dictator of mankind and it will be done. No tears.
Klv
NR,
> This is a really stupid question given that there are many countries out there that
> handled COVID just fine. It’s not like this was some unsolvable problem.
Nice to see that we are having a respectful intelligent discussion without resorting to namecalling.
Hugh
Klv is a troll. Klv just dismisses 273,000 Americans dead of covid as coulda, woulda. Trump, his crony Administration, and their murderous fractured joke response are responsible for every one of those deaths, and those who try to whitewash this with their business as usual BS are complicit in those deaths. So wrap up tight in your lies, Klv, and sleep tight in your denial.
NR
Klv – What namecalling? I didn’t call you any names. I said you asked a stupid question, which you did. That’s not namecalling.
Willy
So Trump, the Honorable Madame Noem and Anders Tegnell have failed in their various attempts at herd immunity. I say it’s about time for all people everywhere to rap along with our man Reverend Ken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2s0nB2VPvs
Geoffrey Dewan
Not only is there not enough social will to give disabled kids an education, there’s not enough social will to give disadvantaged
kids enough food to eat.
Turns out when Margaret Thatcher said there’s no such thing as society she was only slightly ahead of her time.
Ten Bears
~ It is too late now. The disease is endemic. ~
Bingo. I’d call all the rest of this academic, but that’d be a stretch.
Bottom line this is a dry run for the future, and we failed. Collectively. All of us. Tis moot in the generally accepted vernacular where it came from, what matters is how we’ve handled it. Be it not new, not novel, perhaps thawed out of the thawing tundra that hasn’t seen a human since before we were human; a weird yet not implausible food-chain or a rogue bioweapons lab in need of .007 all moot, all pointless, all a waste of time: we failed. At the risk of prematurity, this shouldn’t be the plague that kills us all. It might be, but it shouldn’t. As viri go it’s a relatively mild one. The next one, the next “new” one, may not be. This was an opportunity to step up to the plate and prove ourselves ready for the twenty-first (21st) century, only to find we’re still stuck in the nineteenth (19th). If not the thirteenth.
Yes, a few bad apple do spoil the whole barrel. There is ample evidence this could have been handled better, but for a few selfish assholes. There are/were a few simple steps that many around the world took to successfully contain it, but for a few selfish assholes. Thought could have been given to placing the good of the many ahead of the few, or the one, but that’s just a movie platitude. Hollywood. Not the real world. Not real “America”. A few selfish assholes. We could have nipped it in the bud, been just another bug by now, but for a few selfish assholes.
Having some experience with … aftermaths, I can almost feel next spring’s silence.
I’m not at all sure it’s not a genocide.
capelin
NR,
> Klv – The reason we have disasters like this COVID crisis is because you and people
> like you are willing to just shrug and accept them.
What exactly do you mean by “COVID crisis is because you and people like you are willing to just shrug and accept them.”
NR means, shut up and parrot what everyone is being told.
“What I don’t see in this discussion is a rational, calm weighting of costs vs benefits of school shutdowns (or lockdowns in general). ”
A calm weighing of cost vs benefits? Good god, what kind of a monster would advocate for that?
bruce wilder
Well, I spent an hour I should not have spared writing a fairly brilliant rant and then lost it to the ether.
Too bad really. Seven people would have read it, two understood it because they already shared my view and Hugh would have dismissed me as a Putin-worshipper.
My point was that the COVID-19 response was brought to you by the same people who brought you the invasion of Iraq and the GFC of 2007-8. What do you expect?
Continuing the economic damage while failing to slow the epidemic appreciably is a feature not a bug. Might as well maximize the downside! It is the upside for billionaires after all.
Plague Species
There is no viable vaccination program and there won’t be one. It is going to be a complete clusterf*ck. Without full government control with private industry doing as it’s told, this hybrid of private/public with private calling the shots or having too much influence on the process will result in a highly dysfunctional and ineffective vaccine campaign.
The CDC has preliminarily announced the outline of the working plan and nowhere in it does it mention essential workers, other than healthcare workers, being a priority on the list of the first to receive the vaccine, whatever vaccine it may be. There simply is zero respect for essential workers. Zero. Zero respect for the ones who are holding up this House of Cards. Without the essential workers, it all falls down and it falls down hard.
This is mentioned despite, and above and beyond, the potential effectiveness of any vaccine assuming the logistics of it and the cost of it is effectively worked out. As it stands now, my wife, an essential worker, does not want the vaccine and I don’t want her to have it either. We don’t trust the corporations to be ethical and moral. They are immune from liability and would not be held to account if they murdered and maimed hundreds of thousands if not millions from this vaccine program. Apply the Wells Fargo fee scam to the pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma is just as unethical and their products can and do kill. Not to mention, even if we trusted the corporations and decided for my wife to receive the vaccine, I have no doubt the cost of it would not be covered. There is no indication insurance companies are willing to fund this campaign and as it stands now, that appears to be the assumption. It will break the insurance companies and yet Biden nominates Neera Tanden, an emphatic opponent of single-payer or M4A, as his OMB director. So, bankrupt the insurance companies by making them pay the exorbitant profit for the vaccine to the pharma companies, and then make sure no healthcare option is there to replace the bankrupted insurance companies.
The Trump fascists are going to win big in 2022 and 2024. Trump’s first fascist putsch is likened to Hitler’s first fascist putsch where Hitler’s little rebellion was squashed and Hitler was imprisoned so he could pen Mein Kampf during his time in the bullpen. Once released, the fate of hundreds of millions was cemented. Just as Joe Biden will cement the fate of hundreds of millions by not pursuing true justice against Trump and his henchmen and collaborators. Biden and the DNC have ensured it. It’s in the bag. My only hope then is the fascists take THEM, those who enabled their rise, out first with extreme prejudice. It’s the least the enablers deserve. In the meantime, the rest of us better find a way out of this place. Maybe start applying for asylum in advance before it’s too late. Even if you have no side, you will get caught in the crossfire. There is no place for us here.
Plague Species
GM, that was superb. Awesome, in fact. I couldn’t have typed it better myself. Spot on. I couldn’t agree more and I’m not an agreeable person. That’s saying something.
Plague Species
Wouldn’t it be something if a few Republican leaders in Georgia get murdered as a result of Trump’s fundraising campaign under the aegis of protesting election fraud? These guys don’t have sophisticated security details like el presidente has. They are effectively playing Russian Roulette. Any other person would be put behind bars for the rest of their life for stoking the murders and therefore complicit in them, but Geriatric Joe can only look forward and therefore Trump has a Biden pardon against anything Trump may do up to and including nuking a country I suppose, even if that country is America.
Hey Joe, I have news for you. The crazies are coming for you too. Is the SS up to the task? We’ll see. All it would take is a couple of SS Trump supporters on your detail to step aside when the bullets fly.
Joan
@Klv,
I don’t have kids and do not plan to have them. Your child is the future. I think having a smaller generation is a good idea for the crises headed our way in this century. It means more resources can be allocated to your child, rather than adding another parent competing for those limited resources. Even though I am childless, I still gladly pay taxes to support my local schools and other programs that help children. I also work as a tutor.
That said, if you are devoting 2-3 hours per day in educating your child, that is less than half of what a homeschooling parent devotes. If you’re worried your child is falling behind, then I’d encourage you to actually home-school your child. The stigma against homeschooling is that it’s done by religious fundamentalists who don’t want their children studying science. A tiny percentage of wackos are used in order to smear a method of education that can be quite productive, especially in times like these.
For the impoverished children whose parents work in Amazon warehouses, there really is no homeschooling or online schooling option. They don’t have internet, and there are no adults at home with them. If small-scale tutoring were arranged for such students, and only them, then you have the potential for wide-spacing and precautions that could prevent infection. But insisting schools open for everyone just puts these kids at risk of losing family members. It is impoverished adults who are at the highest exposure at work and risk getting a heavy virus load.
Also, I know many people who were held back a year, or who started school one year later, and also who went to public schools in the countryside with fewer resources and ended up having to take remedials while working in apprenticeships. If your homeschooling efforts fail and your child ends up one year behind, that is not the end of the world for her. She can still thrive, but I’m sure you know that.
Astrid
Joan’s comment is very generous and thoughtful.
My reaction was – if you think that 8 months of online classes is bad, the 2020s and 2030s are going to be extremely rough. Kids are more resilient than people give them credit for, but losing caretaking family members or their health are much bigger blows than forgetting some math or grammar and getting held back for a year or two.
Eric Anderson
All this kvetching about falling behind … what a joke.
Kids are resilient. It’s what they ARE.
Any human “on track” before they’re 30 is a d-bag I don’t want to associate with.
Ché Pasa
Precisely. This is yet another opportunity not taken during the virus pandemic. So many things could be done to re-think the purpose and process of public education, but it’s not being done because of thinking that schools are either open or not, and not being open is not acceptable regardless of health and other risks.
Instead, everything is supposed to be as it used to be or the children will suffer irreparably and the parental units will go bonkers.
No thought at all.
Well, not among those most affected, no.
The downward spiral accelerates.
Eric Anderson
Not to mention the fact that smart educators strive to identify “teachable moments.”
Is there any more teachable moment for children about the way the world really works than the shit show on parade before us right now?
No. The kids are learning just fine. They’re just not learning the rote pedantic pablum bullshit that ultimately stunts their ability to think for themselves once their prefrontal cortex has developed. That’s a problem for the ruling class.
js
It is true keeping schools open could have been more of a priority. They hardly closed in much of Europe.
But much of Europe is a covid mess? That is true, but no more so and actually less so than the U.S. But the U.S. closed more schools. They just prioritized education the way the U.S. prioritized business,it is really as simple as that. The U.S. *really* doesn’t care about kids or the future. Oh the countries that actually did well with coronavirus prioritized public health and knew that the economics and the ability to open schools would follow. They were of course correct.
So there is a legitimate argument schools should have been more of a priority to keep open. It’s just that if teachers fight through their unions to keep them closed they have every right to. They didn’t bring your kids into the world, they don’t have to die for them, they agreed to exchange labor for pay, that is all, they aren’t your servants.
But I don’t think arguing to try to keep schools open is completely crazy either. It’s just when people start ranting about dictatorship in reference to pandemic response they just tend to get dumped straight into right wing lunatic territory in my mind. Because it’s a tell to use those terms. You call this freedom where we can’t even hug loved one’s, celebrate holidays, go to a movie etc., without fear of coronavirus? The right wing has always had a completely nutty conception of freedom though.
Eric Anderson
“The right wing has always had a completely nutty conception of freedom though.”
It’s just people who excitedly drank the Ayn Rand Virtue of Selfishness kool-aid because, like christianity, it’s a readily available prop for excusing narcissism/sociopathy. Which makes sense, given our readiness to adopt the consumer identity du jour.
We’re just witnesses to the myriad ways the Virtue of Selfishness fails miserably applied to the real world.
The large bulk of usians are a mess of cognitive dissonance, wrapped in narcissism, and tied up all pretty with a bow of masochistic neuroses.
Freedom is selfishness.
Joan
@Astrid, thank you, that was kind of you to say.
Astrid
Joan, you definitely deserve kudos for your level headedness and generousness of spirit. I think most of the commenters here have their hearts in the right place and I’m glad Ian provide a safe space for us, but we also snipe at each other like crabs in a bucket. It’s really refreshing to hear from someone who consistent speaks from a place of kindness and empathy.
Dan
It’s really “the polloi” not “the hoi polloi” since “hoi” (οἱ) means “the.”
Lex
Kids losing the social learning and benefits of teacher interaction face-to-face is terrible. But like all else COVID related, the problem is our response. The department of education could have spent the summer producing television shows that covered the basic lessons of elementary school, which would have then freed the teachers up for helping students individually and relieved the pressure of individual teachers doing fully online lesson prep and the issues with internet access.
But like all else related to this pandemic, it’s revealed that the US (and most of the developed “west”) is a hollow and sclerotic state. Trump made it all much worse than it had to be but he’s a symptom of systemic problems. And it’s not like our educational system was doing a great job before. To wit, look at all the low level idiocy that has led to us being 9 months into a pandemic and getting hammered to the point where our entire heathcare system is on the verge of collapse. Where people are dying from a virus they don’t believe in.