“The opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality … to get every child back into school where they’re safely being educated…”
I know he’s a giant quack and bullshit merchant, but does he really not know what the word safely means?
God, these people are evil. It’s only children…and teachers…and staff…and custodians…and administrators…who cares if 2-3% of them die? (Well, maybe administrators; don’t get me started about them).
I must retract that snarky comment about administrators; my husband is the offspring of a school administrator, and has been deeply offended. So ignore that part, okay?
The 2-3% increased deaths refers to a relative increase in number of deaths (so 1,200-1,800 more deaths if we were going to have 60,000 deaths) and this is across the whole population, not among schoolchildren. Children of school age are virtually immune from serious consequences from COVID-19 (last I saw of the 34,000 deaths in the US only 6 were people under 20).
Theoretically we can say we’re not going to accept even one death, but that’s not how we operate. We accept 40,000 car-accident deaths a year as the price of letting people drive, etc., etc.
So I while I think it might sound callous to make a change that’s going to bump deaths up by maybe 1,800, and I’m not saying we should, this isn’t outside the realm of decisions we routinely if less explicitly make as a society.
Skeletor, a school isn’t just children. Many of the people who work at schools are in high risk categories – older, asthmatic, immune suppressed, whatever. Opening up the schools doesn’t just mean letting the kids go back; everyone else has to go back, too.
Also, as far as car accidents, I can make a calculated choice to drive or not drive; that choice is somewhat reduced by the fact that I live in an area where there is no place to live within walking distance of work – unless I want to live in a corn field, at the power plant, or on the race track. I suppose there is also the golf course. But I do get to make that decision, and we did move to a place where there is no mass transit. I could have turned the job down, but jobs are hard to come by.
Smoking is another permitted activity that creates risk; I choose not to smoke. And in today’s society, it is easier to avoid smoke, since my campus went tobacco free about five years ago. I rarely encounter smoke any more. We did that because smoking puts other people in danger; as an asthmatic, I have had near fatal asthma attacks from second hand smoke. We did that for a reason, and the people protesting the restrictions don’t like those rules, either. They want the right to smoke in my face if they wish, to wave their guns around in crowded places where people gather for entertainment, to live without paying taxes, and now, to infect everyone else with COVID-19 if they so choose.
But in this case, it is not my choice, or yours. It is a virus, and nothing stands between it and us but social distancing. We can make the choice to avoid the virus ONLY if we are allowed to do so – that means shut downs, because I could not stay home from work until my boss said sure, work from home.
Schools are traditionally high risk areas, and diseases pass from child to child, and teachers contract those diseases. It is Eden for a microbe, because there are bodies crowded together, and not bodies that worry as much about hygiene as older people. The LAST place you should open is the schools.
Oh, and refusing to ignore my comment? You are doing me ACTUAL VIOLENCE!!! And you know it’s true, because I used CAPS LOCK and exclamation points.
If the only goal is reopening schools and accepting higher deaths then that is one thing… That’s fine, it works.
But since the real idea is “it’ll be just like it was but more people who aren’t me will die”… Well, that’s nonsense. It’s wishful thinking, a fantasy. That world isn’t coming back.
Why do people keep confusing “unlikely to suffer serious symptoms” with “totally immune”? Fine, maybe not a single child will die from covid (time to learn that word, autocorrect!), but how many of them will kill a parent or grandparent with the disease they caught in school?
…or bus driver, or shop worker, or any of the other people they may come in contact with as they merrily skip to and from school, footloose and fancy free, believing themselves to be unaffected because who would open the schools up if it wasn’t safe?
There’s also an asymmetry between what we’d have to do to reduce driving-related deaths and what we’d have to do to minimise the increase in death of opening schools a bit earlier.
In the first, lots of change. New laws, new manufacturing standards, shifts in working patterns, probably unpredictable results…
In the second, just not opening schools for a bit longer.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t welcome the former or that there are no costs associated with the latter, but they’re fundamentally different. I understand what you’re saying, Skeletor. There are risks associated with everything and we tacitly accept them every day. There’s a risk in children going to school in the first place, especially if they go to school in America and while we don’t like it, we don’t ever seem to do much about it and the problem gets ever worse.
But some problems are bigger than others and it’s easier to act (or not act) to reduce deaths in one area than in another. These two scenarios are not the same kind of risk calculation
‘Schools are a very appetizing opportunity’. I almost admire that ‘appetizing’ – it is so appalling. I could imagine it being said in some horror film by a ghoul, or perhaps by a murderous paedophile with cannibalistic leanings, in a film called something like ‘The Silencing of the Lambs’ or ‘The Skeletor Returns’. But no, it’s a real doctor with the wonderful name of Oz, smacking his lips and chuckling as he presents himself as being so daring, so splendidly capable of thinking the unthinkable.
Catwhisperer, yes, that’s true, but everyone seems to be ignoring what I mentioned repeatedly, which is the first actual problem with the school:
The people who work in the school. They are not children. Many of them are vulnerable and high risk. All but the administrators tend to be underpaid.
Parents can choose to keep their kids at home and homeschool; teachers, administrative assistants, and custodians have no choice but to come to work if they are ordered back to work, because they are not wealthy real estate people who can hole up in a bubble, nor are they famous (infamous) TV show jabberers who can take a break and live off their millions while it blows over.
‘All but the administrators tend to be underpaid.’ (iknklast)
This is so also of course where the salaries of doctors and in particular nurses are concerned. It is a curious situation, isn’t it? I suspect it derives from the kind of attitudes so well described in ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ whereby people who have power (political, social, financial, mere inherited status, etc), regard themselves as patrons, and teaching and nursing as ‘services’ provided by people who, weak in terms of what Bourdieu called ‘social capital’, may therefore, at a fundamental level, be treated really as servants, and so ‘patronised’ (i.e. treated with a certain contempt). One thinks of Hobbes trying to teach the young Prince Henry mathematics while the latter, according to John Aubrey, masturbated beneath the table, or of all those intelligent young women forced to become governesses in the past, or of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg’s treatment of Mozart and Maria-Theresa’s description of Leopold & Wolfgang Mozart as ‘beggars’. Surely, one may see this kind of relationship playing out in the obvious tensions between Trump & Fauci and in the disdain for ‘experts’ expressed by members of the British Cabinet and their political advisers (i.e. Dominic Cummings).
Ah the governess question; one of my minor obsessions. It dawned on me very late the extent to which Austen’s Emma is all about governesses, and the larger set of vulnerable “genteel” women who can go from prosperity to poverty in an instant if one male relative dies. Also the fact that Emma is not an alter-ego of Austen’s but a sort of class enemy. The way Jane Fairfax is patronized and pushed around by the horrible (and stupid) Mrs Elton is a classic example of what you say.
Iknklast, yes, obviously there’s all the adults who work in schools being put at risk. I didn’t mention them because you already had it covered. I’m sorry you’re being treated like cannon fodder. I was thinking of how “just” opening schools would not limit the risk of infection to the people in the school. It wouldn’t even be people who go into schools, plus their families. It would include people who are outside during school run time, especially if they live near a school, people who use otherwise mostly deserted public transport, people in small shops trying to crowd control dozens of school kids trying to get in to buy some sweets on the way home… the more I think about the school kids in my area, the less it seems like a sensible idea. Just the thought that they would walk to and from school 2 metres apart from each other? Don’t make me laugh. And quite a few of the little shits would just add “deliberate lack of social distancing” to their usual repertoire of anti-social behaviour.
Tim @ 14 – It’s a funny thing about Emma. I realized on my umpteenth reading of it some years ago that it’s like Hamlet in the way one can never quite get to the bottom of it, that is, there is always more to find in it. It surprised me a lot to realize it because Austen doesn’t seem like that kind of writer, but with Emma she was. It’s a very sly novel, very stealthy. The Prince Regent of course won’t have noticed any of that.
‘Emma’ is my favourite of Jane Austen’s novels; it is, as you say, a wonderfully sly novel, and I have huge admiration for the way (it is not easy to put your finger on how she does it) in which she very subtly lets the reader know more about Emma than Emma does herself. The reader is always one step – not more! – ahead of Emma.
“The opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality … to get every child back into school where they’re safely being educated…”
I know he’s a giant quack and bullshit merchant, but does he really not know what the word safely means?
God, these people are evil. It’s only children…and teachers…and staff…and custodians…and administrators…who cares if 2-3% of them die? (Well, maybe administrators; don’t get me started about them).
I must retract that snarky comment about administrators; my husband is the offspring of a school administrator, and has been deeply offended. So ignore that part, okay?
No. Don’t tell us what to do. What are you, some sort of administrator?
Here’s the study:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30105-X/fulltext
The 2-3% increased deaths refers to a relative increase in number of deaths (so 1,200-1,800 more deaths if we were going to have 60,000 deaths) and this is across the whole population, not among schoolchildren. Children of school age are virtually immune from serious consequences from COVID-19 (last I saw of the 34,000 deaths in the US only 6 were people under 20).
Theoretically we can say we’re not going to accept even one death, but that’s not how we operate. We accept 40,000 car-accident deaths a year as the price of letting people drive, etc., etc.
So I while I think it might sound callous to make a change that’s going to bump deaths up by maybe 1,800, and I’m not saying we should, this isn’t outside the realm of decisions we routinely if less explicitly make as a society.
Skeletor, a school isn’t just children. Many of the people who work at schools are in high risk categories – older, asthmatic, immune suppressed, whatever. Opening up the schools doesn’t just mean letting the kids go back; everyone else has to go back, too.
Also, as far as car accidents, I can make a calculated choice to drive or not drive; that choice is somewhat reduced by the fact that I live in an area where there is no place to live within walking distance of work – unless I want to live in a corn field, at the power plant, or on the race track. I suppose there is also the golf course. But I do get to make that decision, and we did move to a place where there is no mass transit. I could have turned the job down, but jobs are hard to come by.
Smoking is another permitted activity that creates risk; I choose not to smoke. And in today’s society, it is easier to avoid smoke, since my campus went tobacco free about five years ago. I rarely encounter smoke any more. We did that because smoking puts other people in danger; as an asthmatic, I have had near fatal asthma attacks from second hand smoke. We did that for a reason, and the people protesting the restrictions don’t like those rules, either. They want the right to smoke in my face if they wish, to wave their guns around in crowded places where people gather for entertainment, to live without paying taxes, and now, to infect everyone else with COVID-19 if they so choose.
But in this case, it is not my choice, or yours. It is a virus, and nothing stands between it and us but social distancing. We can make the choice to avoid the virus ONLY if we are allowed to do so – that means shut downs, because I could not stay home from work until my boss said sure, work from home.
Schools are traditionally high risk areas, and diseases pass from child to child, and teachers contract those diseases. It is Eden for a microbe, because there are bodies crowded together, and not bodies that worry as much about hygiene as older people. The LAST place you should open is the schools.
Oh, and refusing to ignore my comment? You are doing me ACTUAL VIOLENCE!!! And you know it’s true, because I used CAPS LOCK and exclamation points.
If the only goal is reopening schools and accepting higher deaths then that is one thing… That’s fine, it works.
But since the real idea is “it’ll be just like it was but more people who aren’t me will die”… Well, that’s nonsense. It’s wishful thinking, a fantasy. That world isn’t coming back.
Why do people keep confusing “unlikely to suffer serious symptoms” with “totally immune”? Fine, maybe not a single child will die from covid (time to learn that word, autocorrect!), but how many of them will kill a parent or grandparent with the disease they caught in school?
…or bus driver, or shop worker, or any of the other people they may come in contact with as they merrily skip to and from school, footloose and fancy free, believing themselves to be unaffected because who would open the schools up if it wasn’t safe?
There’s also an asymmetry between what we’d have to do to reduce driving-related deaths and what we’d have to do to minimise the increase in death of opening schools a bit earlier.
In the first, lots of change. New laws, new manufacturing standards, shifts in working patterns, probably unpredictable results…
In the second, just not opening schools for a bit longer.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t welcome the former or that there are no costs associated with the latter, but they’re fundamentally different. I understand what you’re saying, Skeletor. There are risks associated with everything and we tacitly accept them every day. There’s a risk in children going to school in the first place, especially if they go to school in America and while we don’t like it, we don’t ever seem to do much about it and the problem gets ever worse.
But some problems are bigger than others and it’s easier to act (or not act) to reduce deaths in one area than in another. These two scenarios are not the same kind of risk calculation
‘Schools are a very appetizing opportunity’. I almost admire that ‘appetizing’ – it is so appalling. I could imagine it being said in some horror film by a ghoul, or perhaps by a murderous paedophile with cannibalistic leanings, in a film called something like ‘The Silencing of the Lambs’ or ‘The Skeletor Returns’. But no, it’s a real doctor with the wonderful name of Oz, smacking his lips and chuckling as he presents himself as being so daring, so splendidly capable of thinking the unthinkable.
Catwhisperer, yes, that’s true, but everyone seems to be ignoring what I mentioned repeatedly, which is the first actual problem with the school:
The people who work in the school. They are not children. Many of them are vulnerable and high risk. All but the administrators tend to be underpaid.
Parents can choose to keep their kids at home and homeschool; teachers, administrative assistants, and custodians have no choice but to come to work if they are ordered back to work, because they are not wealthy real estate people who can hole up in a bubble, nor are they famous (infamous) TV show jabberers who can take a break and live off their millions while it blows over.
‘All but the administrators tend to be underpaid.’ (iknklast)
This is so also of course where the salaries of doctors and in particular nurses are concerned. It is a curious situation, isn’t it? I suspect it derives from the kind of attitudes so well described in ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ whereby people who have power (political, social, financial, mere inherited status, etc), regard themselves as patrons, and teaching and nursing as ‘services’ provided by people who, weak in terms of what Bourdieu called ‘social capital’, may therefore, at a fundamental level, be treated really as servants, and so ‘patronised’ (i.e. treated with a certain contempt). One thinks of Hobbes trying to teach the young Prince Henry mathematics while the latter, according to John Aubrey, masturbated beneath the table, or of all those intelligent young women forced to become governesses in the past, or of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg’s treatment of Mozart and Maria-Theresa’s description of Leopold & Wolfgang Mozart as ‘beggars’. Surely, one may see this kind of relationship playing out in the obvious tensions between Trump & Fauci and in the disdain for ‘experts’ expressed by members of the British Cabinet and their political advisers (i.e. Dominic Cummings).
Ah the governess question; one of my minor obsessions. It dawned on me very late the extent to which Austen’s Emma is all about governesses, and the larger set of vulnerable “genteel” women who can go from prosperity to poverty in an instant if one male relative dies. Also the fact that Emma is not an alter-ego of Austen’s but a sort of class enemy. The way Jane Fairfax is patronized and pushed around by the horrible (and stupid) Mrs Elton is a classic example of what you say.
Ah, I must read ‘Emma’ again in the light of what you say! That’s a very interesting point.
Iknklast, yes, obviously there’s all the adults who work in schools being put at risk. I didn’t mention them because you already had it covered. I’m sorry you’re being treated like cannon fodder. I was thinking of how “just” opening schools would not limit the risk of infection to the people in the school. It wouldn’t even be people who go into schools, plus their families. It would include people who are outside during school run time, especially if they live near a school, people who use otherwise mostly deserted public transport, people in small shops trying to crowd control dozens of school kids trying to get in to buy some sweets on the way home… the more I think about the school kids in my area, the less it seems like a sensible idea. Just the thought that they would walk to and from school 2 metres apart from each other? Don’t make me laugh. And quite a few of the little shits would just add “deliberate lack of social distancing” to their usual repertoire of anti-social behaviour.
Tim @ 14 – It’s a funny thing about Emma. I realized on my umpteenth reading of it some years ago that it’s like Hamlet in the way one can never quite get to the bottom of it, that is, there is always more to find in it. It surprised me a lot to realize it because Austen doesn’t seem like that kind of writer, but with Emma she was. It’s a very sly novel, very stealthy. The Prince Regent of course won’t have noticed any of that.
‘Emma’ is my favourite of Jane Austen’s novels; it is, as you say, a wonderfully sly novel, and I have huge admiration for the way (it is not easy to put your finger on how she does it) in which she very subtly lets the reader know more about Emma than Emma does herself. The reader is always one step – not more! – ahead of Emma.