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@wildgrass saidAmerica was unprepared because The Donald had just previously defunded the federal agency whose job it would have been to coordinate a national response to a pandemic which experts had warned would come someday. Stupid move; cost many lives unnecessarily.what happened was an uncooperative state-by-state patchwork of half-baked measures.
Yes. The numbers say that it probably would have been a better decision to reopen in person schools in the Fall semester 2019, after the initial wave leading into the summer of 2019.
This analysis, however, downplays the reality faced by many school administrators, community health directors, local politicians, and our feckless leaders at the federal level. Publicly, Tru ...[text shortened]... ning. Let's learn and move forward with better preparation and planning for when this happens again.
@earl-of-trumps saidGood point, EOT. Thank you.
Just a suggestion, @sh76, placing some pertinent text from a link that you post is a big help to some of us.
https://www.adb.org/publications/cost-benefit-analysis-closure-schools-covid-19-philippines
People’s education strongly influences their health behavior throughout their lives. The analysis shows that long-term mortality increases due to less effective education from face-to-face closure are many times higher than the number of lives saved from COVID-19 in the short run.
https://www.economicsreview.org/post/how-keeping-schools-closed-does-more-harm-than-good-a-cost-benefit-analysis
Keeping our nation's youth at home and out of school has drastic economic implications. Studies show that closing schools and using virtual learning are no substitute for traditional education in terms of students’ intellectual advancement, social skills, and overall well-being. Nevertheless, different parties have been quick to place sometimes irrational fears about the pandemic above this irreplaceable facet of youth development. Past pandemics can provide insightful guidance into how to successfully reopen schools and mitigate infection levels—a risk that has already proven to be largely insignificant. Certain groups, already considered to be disadvantaged, have fallen behind even further due to COVID, which could lead to serious losses in the nation’s productivity while further establishing epistemic inequality. Although many schools were mistaken in refusing to offer traditional learning throughout this past year, it is not too late for most, if not all, schools to make whole-hearted commitments to reopen in the fall to avoid the vast negative consequences that emerge from keeping students at home.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8909310/
We argue that a wise application of the aforementioned precautionary principle should not focus on a single threat. As education plays a fundamental societal role, the principle also advocates that schools should remain open as much as possible to guarantee students’ access to education and prevent devastating effects on children and society at large. This is challenging during a major crisis as people tend to internalize the experience and assess the risk of epidemics as more likely and impactful. Thus, scientists should help policy-makers in providing a holistic understanding of the effects of public health interventions.
As argued in this commentary, school closure as a response to COVID-19 has been often evaluated in terms of its positive effects on the spreading of the pandemic. Instead, we posit that these non-pharmaceutical interventions should be deemed as drugs in clinical medicine with an explicit consideration of both the benefits and side effects.
...
There are ongoing discussions in many disciplines about the potential benefits of integrating multiple sources of data (e.g., interviews, surveys, biological measures, register-based data) and methodological approaches (e.g., longitudinal and quasi-experimental study) to increase the reliability of scientific findings and address public concerns. These evaluations should not only consider monetizing tangible losses (when possible), but also exposing the intangible costs that cannot be fully expressed in monetary terms, such as increasing domestic violence or gender inequality. Third, decision support systems should explicitly include the short- and long-term effects of school closure in order to better inform the policy-makers and improve the planning of emergency responses.
...
Finally, school closure is often considered as an option by societies that are facing social-environmental extreme events. The implemented efforts and lessons that are learned during the current pandemic, such as moving to distance learning, should be considered when defining preparedness plans. More specifically, improvements in internet access and technological support in rural areas, mentoring programs for children from low socio-economic families, and the evaluation of implemented context-specific interventions to mitigate the effect of school closure should be included in governmental agendas. Analyzing the benefits and costs of school closure, along with their context-specific unintended consequences and side effects, is key to best inform policy-makers and help them account for the complexity of health, as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being” (World Health Organization), when responding to public health crises.
@moonbus saidWith the amount of damage done by the CDC, I shudder to think of what another heavy-handed federal bureaucracy whose only mandate is to throw around its weight during a pandemic, would have done.
America was unprepared because The Donald had just previously defunded the federal agency whose job it would have been to coordinate a national response to a pandemic which experts had warned would come someday. Stupid move; cost many lives unnecessarily.what happened was an uncooperative state-by-state patchwork of half-baked measures.
@sh76 saidYou're starting to sound Metal Brain-ish.
With the amount of damage done by the CDC, I shudder to think of what another heavy-handed federal bureaucracy whose only mandate is to throw around its weight during a pandemic, would have done.
Unfortunately, the CDC wasn't "heavy handed" enough to avoid more than a million COVID deaths, many caused by intransigent policies of State governments run by COVID minimizers like yourself.
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@sh76 saidIf any politician who came around on this issue by, at the latest, middle of 2021 comes clean and says "okay, I made a mistake. I was afraid, etc." I'm willing to give him/her a mulligan.
The only people I'm blaming are the people who argued for school closures. I don't care what their political orientation was. As I demonstrated in the OP, most "libs" have come around on this issue by now.
If any politician who came around on this issue by, at the latest, middle of 2021 comes clean and says "okay, I made a mistake. I was afraid, etc." I'm willing to give him/ ...[text shortened]... into 2021? Nope. Never getting my vote again (unless running against someone even worse, I suppose).
That's because you have moral fiber. 99.9% of politicians have that trait removed before entering their chosen profession. 😏
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@mchill saidFrom July 1, 2021 to the end of that year about 225,000 people in the US died of COVID. That's only slightly less than the number who died in the first 6 months of that year (approximately a quarter million). https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
If any politician who came around on this issue by, at the latest, middle of 2021 comes clean and says "okay, I made a mistake. I was afraid, etc." I'm willing to give him/her a mulligan.
That's because you have moral fiber. 99.9% of politicians have that trait removed before entering their chosen profession. 😏
Depending on local conditions, it may well have been wise to continue to rely on virtual learning in certain areas rather than sentence people to death, hospitalization and sickness. This is even more true since COVID minimizers like Sh76 bitterly fought preventative measures like masking in schools or requiring vaccinations for school employees.
@sh76 said
===When you kept writing "liberals" in the OP, I assumed you had some blame placed on specific political orientations.===
I meant that EVEN liberals are saying this. If I just quote Fox News about how school closures were bad, nobody from the left side of the political spectrum will care. I'm taking liberal sources because I'm not just preaching to the choir.
I don't thin ...[text shortened]... ng the people who (largely) didn't make the decisions for not convincing those who did is a stretch.
While I don't deny that the Trump administration was awful in many respects on covid, blaming the people who (largely) didn't make the decisions for not convincing those who did is a stretch.
They didn't make decisions because they didn't want to be blamed for the fallout. The CDC is a branch of the DHHS which is an executive branch department. The buck stopped there. However, when the CDC used their authority to make recommendations and directives to governors, school officials, public health officials etc., POTUS (at the top of the totem pole at the CDC) would tweet something contradictory or confusing and no one really knew what to do. The CEO of a company blames the intern for the stock price. That's about the worst kind of leadership I can think of.
@sh76 saidI would agree for 70% with your last comment if 90% of the population was vaccinated.
The the quite liberal The Economist:
https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-learning-loss-has-been-a-global-disaster
From the even more liberal The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/covid-learning-loss-remote-school/661360/
Snarky thread from liberal Nate Silver ripping the Dem-come-lately "freedom" lovers.
https://twitt ...[text shortened]... ools closed after the teachers had vaccine access (Jan/Feb, 2021), made a policy error for the ages.
But it wasn’t. And the Delta variant was too risky to let rip completely. There was a large chance of collapsing the health services (which you can never allow to happen).
Omikron is far less of a risk. And the schools are open.
Anti-vaxxers are the people you should be blaming.
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@shavixmir saidAnti-vaxxers have been vindicated the vax is either useless or, like the improperly used masks, doing more harm than good.
I would agree for 70% with your last comment if 90% of the population was vaccinated.
But it wasn’t. And the Delta variant was too risky to let rip completely. There was a large chance of collapsing the health services (which you can never allow to happen).
Omikron is far less of a risk. And the schools are open.
Anti-vaxxers are the people you should be blaming.
And an important difference between the anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers might advise against the vax but in the end you own your body so go ahead and shoot up the clot shot as much as you like. The pro-vaxxers are advocates for state force and coercion, in NZ there are still thousands of workers mandated out of work in industries suffering shortages of skilled personnel.
NZ Fire Service in crisis mode with short staffing, recently dropped the mandates, about 2 years too late. Many ex staff have already moved on with their lives, others would never go back to a union or an employer that has treated them so appallingly.
@wajoma saidWrong.
Anti-vaxxers have been vindicated the vax is either useless or, like the improperly used masks, doing more harm than good.
And an important difference between the anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers might advise against the vax but in the end you own your body so go ahead and shoot up the clot shot as much as you like. The pro-vaxxers are advocates for state force ...[text shortened]... ir lives, others would never go back to a union or an employer that has treated them so appallingly.
Every report, all experience and everybody with a dote of intelligence knows you're talking crap. Like usual.
@beowulf saidThat's why you're a moron and a blathering kunt.
@shavixmir
Blame anti vaxxers?
No. I blame China.
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I'm finding more and more that the anti-vaxxers and the long covidian alarmists are the same people in the looking glass.
Both groups:
1. Rely very heavily on anecdotes ("my cousin got the vaccine last year and now he had a stroke" vs. "my niece got covid in 2020 and she still can't run a marathon" )
2. Define adverse outcomes so broadly that they can apply to almost anyone ("20% of people get long covid, which includes extreme fatigue, heart trouble and slightly altered sense of smell" vs "800 zillion vaccinated people have either died, gotten myocarditis or had a headache for 6 hours"
3. Throw wild numbers out there without any scientific evidence, hoping nobody will call them ("800,000 vaccine deaths" vs. "90% chance of long covid after 4 covid infections" )
4. Fail to stratify risk and benefit ("my 78 year old uncle got long covid, so your 14 year old daughter is also at risk" vs "It's stupid to vaccinate my 15 year old who got covid last month, so it's also stupid to vaccinate your 82 year old mother in the nursing home" )
5. Wildly assign blame ("the vaccines are causing soccer players to fall down on the pitch" vs. "long covid will disable 25% of workers" and "covid would be over if not for the vaccine forcing selection mutations" vs "if we had just stayed home for two weeks, covid would be over" )
Normally, the middle 90% would just be laughing at the wingnuts. But the problem is that part of our political identities is invested in the wingnuts of "our side." Dems are stuck with the covidians and Reps are stuck with the anti-vaxxers.
It's sad, really.