Last night, Chapel Hill/Carrborro City Schools changed their mind. Students for at least the first quarter of the upcoming academic year will be taught remotely. The previously announced plan had been a hybrid model where most students would be taught in person two days a week and remotely three days a week. However, significant push back and questions about how the district would respond when (not if, but when) students and teachers are infected as we live in a region with broad community spread at the moment would be treated. Current recommendations for people who are in close proximity for prolonged periods of time with an infected individual is for a fourteen day quarantine. My colleague, co-author, collaborator and friend, Dr. Charlene Wong, wrote that this unexpected shock is likely to be extremely disruptive to families in the fall:
You’ve just been notified that a child in your daughter’s class has tested positive for COVID-19 and that your daughter has to quarantine at home for 14 days. Questions start racing through your mind. Who‘s going to watch her for the next two weeks — especially since she has been exposed to COVID-19? Can I take time off from work, or will I lose my job if I do? Will we have enough money for food and rent? ….
unpredictable quarantines will be severely disruptive. With schools closed, parents across the country were mostly in the same difficult boat as they juggled parenting with other personal and professional responsibilities. This will not be the case in the fall as states and school districts take different approaches to reopening, and individual children and classrooms are unexpectedly quarantined.
It did not need to be this way.
We decided as a society that opening up bars for six weeks was more important than opening up schools for several months. We as a society have decided that wearing a mask is a point of contention instead of basic human decency and active citizenship. We as a society have decided to waste a season.
Just astonishing. If you remove New York State from the equation, here's our progress with this epidemic since March 5th. Congrats, everyone. pic.twitter.com/eHz0NblTCX
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 16, 2020
New England, New York and New Jersey might not have to worry about too many unanticipated school based quarantines as they have spent a season actively smashing uncontrolled community spread. As of this morning, Maine is identifying 13 new cases per million residents per day, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York are each identifying 36, 36, and 37 new cases per million residents per day respectively. These are levels of community spread where aggressive contact tracing combined with isolation and frequent testing can keep risk levels low. On the other hand, Florida has 519 new cases per million residents per day. 7 states including Texas have over 300 new cases per million residents per day. Six more states, including California, have between 200 and 300 new cases per million residents per day. At this level of community spread, contact tracing with the current resource allocation is a farce.
After my wife and I were told that the schools would be closed for at least the first quarter, my wife turned to me and said: “I never thought this would go on so long”
It will go on for as long as we value opening up bars instead of doing the mundane, boring and grinding work of smashing community spread. We wasted at least one season, and we might be wasting another.
OzarkHillbilly
FREEDUMB!!!!
Cheryl Rofer
Shout it from the rooftops:
Schools around here are deciding to start out remote too.
Barbara
This seems apropos for the post, but I noticed the following in one of the links in AL’s daily COVID update, about how the governor of Rhode Island addressed the pandemic: Rhode Island Response
Not everyone loves Gina Raimondo, and especially her venture capital background. I still wish that her efforts were more widely publicized, as a counterpoint to the private/public partnership blather coming from Jared Kushner and Mike Pence. There are people who actually can see how marshaling private parties could help. They just don’t happen to be working in the White House.
J.
Dear David,
My heart goes out to you and your wife and to all the parents of school-aged kids out there. The selfishness and self-centeredness of people continues to amaze though not surprise me. I hear you about the bars — and let’s add in casinos and megachurches, which are basically the same thing.
We are so grateful our daughter graduated a year early from college, in 2019, and that we are all able to work from home, though all three of our businesses have suffered major declines. But we know we are among the lucky ones.
Good luck to you juggling schedules this fall. And let us pray that Biden is elected on 11/3 and the Senate goes Blue. Otherwise we will never recover from this Trump-and-GOP-made disaster.
J.
Jerry
David: is there a way to see a curve of each NC county? A curve that goes back to March? I can’t seem to find anything online. All I can find is raw numbers that only show cumulative totals. I just want to see if the masking guidelines are working here in Wake county.
As for Wake County schools (15th largest in the nation!), they’re still going with the hybrid schedule, but you can opt for only in-person or only online. I have a feeling that they’ll be switching to online only pretty soon.
Gin & Tonic
@Barbara: Not everyone loves her, true; among those was my fellow Rhode Islander efgoldman. But she has been generally effective, has a good and effective Health Department Director whom she listens to, and a population that has been largely following directives. Every shopping trip I make, I see pretty much 100% mask compliance. With both population density and median age of population being in the top 10 in the US, strong measures were required, and were taken early.
Kay
It’s horrible what we’ve done to kids.
I would just ask that people resist blaming schools for this- DeVos and Trump are trying to make this into a battle between parents and schools because they personally benefit when we’re fighting.
Everyone is trying. There is no more difficult problem in this mess than K-12 schools. It’s just really hard and they aren’t getting any assistance- in fact, the Trump Administration are trying to shift blame to individual districts. Failing, as it turns out, but trying.
Kay
Employees with children are going to need some flexibility too. It isn’t just K-12 schools. It’s all daycares, so babies and preschoolers are in this mess too. If you’re an employer give them what they need. It is not their fault this happened and with distancing in daycares you cut capacity. People who already had trouble finding good quality childcare that was at all affordable are now really in a bind.
charluckles
I think it was a Dana Houle tweet that suggested that Trump and Republicans were going to plumb new depths of disapproval when we reached September and parents realized there wasn’t going to be any return to school normalcy before the fall of 2021 at the earliest.
I thought he was crazy the first time I read the tweet. Not so sure anymore.
Barbara
I believe that my state, Virginia, should just shut down bars and mandate take out or outdoor seating at restaurants. The more responsible restaurants have not reopened for indoor dining unless they have big dining rooms where they can put “reserved” on half the tables. I don’t want to point fingers at 20 somethings. In my office, single people in their 20s who live alone feel really isolated and this is a kind of suffering too. But mass gatherings at bars is sending our rates up locally and it needs to stop. We have now moved from 2 days at school and 3 days distance learning to all online. I thought my son was going to start crying. He’s 14. And we are lucky. There are people with younger children whose lives are going to be even more upended and whose children are going to really fall behind.
Barbara
@Gin & Tonic: She had the insight to realize that Salesforce.com’s customer relationship tracking and management software could be adapted to public health tracking. And they ended up with a product that they are selling to institutions that want to reopen. I mean, think of Jared Kushner trying to be a hero and calling Google and whoever else. To know what is really needed is not simple. To insist that you be the one to drive the train is a dangerous impulse that is most likely going to send you down a lot of blind alleys. And indeed, that’s what has happened.
Kay
It is heartening to me that Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s employees in the federal government are no longer credible. It took an amazingly long time and a HUGE pile of lies but most people don’t believe anything any of them say anymore. And they shouldn’t. The defining characteristic of these people is dishonesty. They lie. All of them.
Skip
Sorry, David. We didn’t just waste a season, we’ve lost a year (Jan 2020 to Jan 2021).
This Administration has guaranteed we won’t begin to come out of this economic mess until the middle of next year at the earliest (assuming Joe Biden takes office in January and addresses the virus first since that is the linchpin EVERYTHING hangs on).
The truly ironic thing is that through their mindless stampede to reopen or in the case of many Red States, not close, these clowns have guaranteed the entire nation will not begin to seriously come to grips with this pandemic until after the election. And then the first thing President Biden will have to do is rebuild the Public Health Community to get the virus under control. In the meantime the rest of the world will be moving on without us both economically and politically since Americans are now “persona non grata” throughout the world and will remain so until we get the virus under control and the numbers down commensurate with our allies. No tourism, no business trips, no conventions, Trump and his enablers, in the Senate, Governors, and business community have well and truly scr@#ed the American People.
debbie
@Kay:
Yeah, but will all the damage have been worth the loss of credibility?
I just completed another shopping trip of futility. Fucking empty shelves everywhere, even after four months of this.
Wag
Each season the Trump remains in office will be wasted. He and his minions have no interest in trying to stop this pandemic. We will not be able to get it under control until he is voted out.
debbie
A whole lot more than a season is being wasted. We are wasting an entire democracy. ?
JPL
In FL a third of the children tested were positive and even asymptomatic cases were showing signs of lung damage. The article does state that they don’t know of the long term problems associating with it are. SunSentinel
Ryan
@debbie: On the upside, we set a record low for mortgage rates yesterday.
Amir Khalid
In Malaysia, most kids are back in school, subject to strict standard operating procedures to prevent spread. (The youngest four grades go back this coming Wednesday.) Malaysia’s nationwide seven-day moving average for new cases is currently seven. NC’s population is under a third of Malaysia’s; its seven-day moving average for new case is currently 1,984. I’m not sure that it’s safe to reopen school classrooms over there just yet.
Chyron HR
We wasted a
seasoncivilization.FlyingToaster
Up here in Massachusetts, we’re bracing ourselves for the return of the college students. It looks like about a quarter of them will be returning, complete with viral load. Fuck.
However, the guidance I’m seeing for schools is that pre-schools all reopen (yes masks and protective gear and bubbles). Lower grades reopen if at all possible, depending on local community spread. Grades 3-5 plan on hybrid. Middle and High schoolers mostly virtual. Revisit per local community spread before Thanksgiving. If the college kids don’t kill us all, add more in-person days as spread remains under control. Kids in the Berkshires will see more in-person school than kids in Boston.
The bars are closed, but the fucking casinos are open. The Aquarium just reopened, the Museum of Science and the Gardner next week. The Museum of Fine Arts is waiting until September. The duck boats are running. The Sam Adams tasting room opened and then closed again once they realized that all of their patrons were from out-of-state (and out-of-New-England). Mary Chungs is still closed and may never reopen. We’ve lost hundreds of restaurants and bars, including some old and storied performance spaces.
Fuck 2020.
FelonyGovt
This article suggests there may never be a vaccine, since antibodies and immunity don’t seem to last very long. We will need to rely on good treatment options, as with HIV.
John S.
Hopefully everyone (who isn’t a part of the Trump personality cult) realizes that this will not be over as long as Trump and his Republican death cult are in power.
And once everyone has that realization, they need to make sure they do something about it in November.
sdhays
@JPL: What part of children need to go back to school don’t you understand!!!111!!
Sorry, for a moment I was possessed by the demon normally inhabiting Betsy DeVos’ body.
Amir Khalid
@FelonyGovt:
Another reason there may never be a vaccine is that none has ever been successfully developed for any coronavirus, including the ones that cause SARS and MERS. If so, the whole world may be wearing masks and social-distancing for years to come.
leeleeFL
What has been squandered may not be recoverable. I am likely never going to get over the loss of respect I now have for many of my fellow citizens. I can barely talk to people who blather about conspiracy theories and their Constitutional Right to be completely selfish s–theads. I am watching management teams parse CDC mask guidelines so as to not force employees or guests to wear masks inside. Florida was f-cked the day the bars opened up and there was NO ADULT SUPERVISION of young, drunk, stupid customers who “wanted to get back to their lives”. I don’t discount some spread from protests, but I saw a lot more masks on protesters than I did on beach goers and club kids.
Opening schools while this community spread is going on is Child abuse in the First Degree. And I hear some Nursing Homes and Assisted Living facilities might be allowing visitors soon. Why those s–theads are trying to kill off the Golden Geese will never make sense to me!
AARGH!
Uncle Cosmo
@FelonyGovt: Maybe we’ll have to get booster shots every 90 or 60 or even 30 days. Maybe one of the unconventional vaccines will work over longer periods. At this point no one knows & anyone who says s/he does** should be taking with a rather large particle of halite.
** NB not accusing anyone quoted in that article of that – at least that part of the article I could read before that Fucking Frisco Rag whited out the page & demanded I subscribe.
Victor Matheson
Mayhew,
I have refereed at least one college soccer game every year for 32 straight years. Looks like my streak may be coming to an end this year. Three D3 conferences here in New England have closed for the fall with another barely hanging on. Two D1 conferences and a D2 conference with schools in the area have also suspended athletics. Probably just a matter of time until a bunch more shut down. US old guys don’t have too many more seasons ahead of us. I hate to lose one now.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Uncle Cosmo: Even with the vaccine it will be in limited supply for a while so it’s back to contact tracing.
Barbara
@Uncle Cosmo: No one should need an excuse to focus on treatments, but I suspect that getting funding for treatment research might be easier if you put in your proposal evidence that vaccines might be ineffective. There are dozens of vaccine efforts underway, probably some that UCSF is involved in (it would be shocking if they weren’t given their stature), but certainly, not everyone needs to be involved in vaccine development. Even with a vaccine, eradicating a disease is hard, and people will continue to get sick.
Uncle Cosmo
@Amir Khalid: Um…
I see nothing in there to suggest that vaccines for SARS or MERS could not have been developed if there had been the same perceived pressing need for them as for COVID-19.
(Happy birthday, you young reprobate.)
topclimber
@Kay: We’ve wasted time and this a-hole administration still has us wasting time. Here we are bemoaning their stupidity and malevolence again, instead of talking about the strategies that might lead us to be optimal mix of educational effectiveness, reliable daycare and protecting students and staff.
Not you so much of course. But I hate to see someone who is such a resource on good practices and alternatives be distracted al all by the latest shiny object.
sdhays
@leeleeFL: The last I saw, there’s been practically no spread associated with the protests. If there’s been an update to that, I haven’t seen it.
Nicole
I don’t know why so many people have been so surprised about the minimal transmission of Covid-19 at BLM protests. Of course the vast majority of protesters would be masked. The whole reason they’re out protesting is to make the world better for everyone.
Likewise, of course the vast majority of transmissions now would be via people out to entertain themselves.
Selfishness got us where we are right now.
Cermet
@FelonyGovt: I posted this a few days ago and was mostly ignored; even in BJ people here aren’t willing to look at such terrible possiblities in the face. Just hope this article and study is not accurate.
Mallard Filmore
@FelonyGovt:
I saw on TV that a company in Finland is testing a breathalyzer device for COVID. It looks for biological byproducts given off by the infected. Results are available in minutes. A few years ago they developed a similar product for TB.
RobertB
@Amir Khalid: Sorry, but that turns out to not be the case. There are several animal coronavirus vaccines, and they’re testing a MERS one right now.
Elizabelle
@Nicole: Besides, as my Rebel Yell brother in law tells me, the BLM protesters are rioters, vandals and looters.
So of course they would mask up. They are criminals.
I wish I was kidding. (He did not say that about the masks, of course, but “rioters, vandals and looters” is right out of his mouth.)
Cameron
@Chyron HR: That’s what happens when you’re taken over by a barbarian with tiny fingers and a ridiculously long neck-tie.
Kirk Spencer
OK, I have to respond to this.
I see this a lot, even from people who …
“Flatten the curve” means, in simple, keep the numbers per day low(er) until an effective vaccine is distributed. That’s the end point, though, whether we run Texas or Malaysia — this will go on for a long time. Our choice isn’t controlling the time, it’s how many people we lose, how many suffer directly from the disease, until the time is over.
We are running a marathon.
snoey
@Uncle Cosmo: Even a very short lived vaccine would be highly useful. Beat the curve into the ground first, then reopen fairly normally with extensive testing and tracing. Any new cases get a local shutdown and ring fence with vaccine.
Fair Economist
@Amir Khalid:
This is not true. There is a vaccine for MERS, available only for the military, and there is a vaccine for the cow version of human coronavirus OC43. The absence of vaccines for human coronaviruses to date is caused by the low benefit due to very low mortality (common cold) or extremely low frequency (MERS; SARS is extinct).
The concerns about fading antibodies are also greatly overblown. Antibodies to ANY disease or vaccine fade over time. That’s how the immune system works. Memory B and T cells remain and the body can mount a second defense better. It may be a vaccine we have to take periodically or even every year like the flu, but it would be shocking if vaccines weren’t effective.
leeleeFL
@sdhays: Just figuring there might have been some spread there. I know the reports have been good about the protests, but I always try to be cautious.
Fair Economist
@FlyingToaster:
That sounds – pretty good, actually. We know, from a number of European countries like Denmark and Germany, that you *can* open schools if you take strong precautions, even with community transmission continuing. We also know from Israel that you do need some controls even if the disease is contained. I think MA will do okay with that.
Amir Khalid
Thanks for correcting me re the existence of coronavirus vaccines.
randy khan
@FelonyGovt:
There are other articles that reach a much different conclusion, and in general virologists seem to be hopeful that a vaccine will be effective. But of course it’s possible that a practical vaccine regime won’t be forthcoming, or will take a while.
I’d also add that we don’t live with MERS or SARS because they were tamped down hard; in truth, the way most infectious diseases end up being handled in the world is that they become rare enough that transmission is not common.
Nicole
@Elizabelle: Ha! Well, I guess those rebels, vandals, and looters care more about the health of their fellow citizens then Real Amurricans do.
cmorenc
@David Anderson:
FWIW, those of us who referee high school / middle school soccer *still* don’t know to what extent, if any, there will be a fall soccer season – or if there is to be one, what sorts of special constraints games will operate under, or to what extent the season might happen, but on a delayed and reduced basis. I have been monitoring my emails from both NCHSAA and the Triangle Soccer Referees Association (TSRA), and the most we know as of July 17th is that the each-season required rules clinic will be held (but in virtual zoom-meeting fashion), and the NFHS re-certification testing window for 2020-2021 is imminently forthcoming. One real “tell” will be whether and if so, when the TSRA assignor sends out info about the required scrimmage window will be (to work high school soccer in NC, since voluntarily working at least one preseason scrimmage is a prerequisite for receiving in-season paid assignments.
Of course, to keep things in perspective, by far the bigger issue is to what extent and in what form each NC School district will actually try to conduct fall semester classes – now that Gov Roy Cooper has given the green light for local districts to open to the extent each decides is safe. High school sports should be only a secondary concern to this central issue.
Back to soccer, it seems that NCYSA may have green=lighted clubs to conduct fall club season, since the assignor for one of the local clubs (TUSA) sent out a recent email about the mid-August season start and a couple of club tournament events in Aug / Sept. Still to be seen is whether this actually comes off or not.
beef
@Amir Khalid:
MERS vaccines have been developed. They haven’t been widely deployed, since they’re not out of the testing phases yet. Bu,t for example, there’s a report in the Lancet that phase 1 human trials at Walter Reed have induced a immunogenic response.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(19)30266-X/fulltext
It would be good if people could stop scaremongering about the lack of MERS vaccines. They exist. MERS isn’t a major threat to society, so they are not widely deployed or far down the development pipeline. But we’re going to develop SARS-COV-2 vaccines. The challenge with COVID-19 is doing this quickly enough and at scale.
@Amir Khalid:
Logan Brown
I work in nearby Johnston County and it was clear listening to their last board meeting that they are nowhere ready to open on a hybrid plan by Aug 17. They are just now sending out surveys to parents about online learning . Hopefully they will switch over to Plan C soon because the state is not ready to have in person learning right now.
Brachiator
Yeah, this was a large part of the problem. But we also know that community spread happened when states re-opened and friends and family got together again for parties and picnics and other gatherings, and didn’t wear masks and sometimes mingled with people who were likely ill with the virus.
Community spread happened with people going to the beach, and with people going to restaurants, even when restaurants with indoor dining made efforts to implement guidelines to reduce the risk of exposure.
Human beings are social animals who sometimes. We saw a clammoring for bars and restaurants and barbershops and hair salons to open up again not just here in the US, but also in various other countries. The UK seemed to be particularly insistent to open their pubs, and in England the first openings were ridiculous and undoubtedly added to the spread of the virus.
different-church-lady
All… they had… to do…. was WATCH what was going on in the Northeast… and LEARN from it.
They had time. They had info. They had a head-start.
And they instead decided Trumpism was more important.
different-church-lady
@FlyingToaster:
I’m seeing a silver lining here…
MaryLou
@JPL: Because right now, for children with lung damage, they have no ‘long term’ to analyze.
glc
I want to see that chart with NY/NJ removed. It was a single outbreak with very similar policy response (including the mistakes, such as nursing home policy).
Lacuna Synechdoche
David Anderson @ Top:
Our country’s founders decided, as a society, to enable a xenophobic science-denying pro-slavery minority to rule over an open-minded sophisticated anti-slavery majority, through an anti-democratic slow-to-change Senate, and an anti-democratic Electoral College designed to preserve slavery and ostensibly prevent a tyrant from coming to power – though the latter function has clearly failed.
Everything else going wrong now flows from all of that.
Brachiator
@Lacuna Synechdoche:
Slavery existed throughout the United States at its founding. The South was not particularly xenophobic. Slave owner Thomas Jefferson was decidedly pro-French and pro-education and was one of the most advanced scientific thinkers of his day (even if profoundly wrong about many things).
Federalist John Adams, on the other hand, gave us the xenophobic Alien and Sedition Acts.
MomSense
@different-church-lady:
And yet you should hear people complain about our NAZI Governor. We are one of two states that has flattened the curve and most of our geographic area has almost no virus.
different-church-lady
@Chyron HR:
We were well on the way to wasting that before COVID-19 came along.
jonas
Most huge multinationals have corporate offices based around the world, so they will still be able to do business in Europe and Australia, etc., but what’s going to happen when there’s some mid-sized American company has a chance to negotiate a big contract in, say, Holland, and loses out to a Canadian firm because they sent an executive team over to make presentations in person, while the Americans had to set up a Zoom meeting, and then missed it because they got the time zone wrong?
This is going to put small and medium US businesses that rely on their in-person customer service approach at a huge disadvantage in the global marketplace.
cain
We are a bunch of entitled assholes – who have copmletely changed the meaning of freedom to mean do whatever the fuck we want with no thought of others or community.
evodevo
@Elizabelle: Yes. I, right now, am arguing with an anti-masking Facebook acquaintance who thinks the exact same thing…this is widespread among Ky MAGAts…
David Anderson
@Kirk Spencer: I disagree. Flatten the curve can mean give the hospitals a chance until there is a vaccine, or suppress community spread to the point that aggressive contact tracing and isolation has a reasonably probability of keeping spread down to being idiosyncratic and short-lived instead of broad and pervasive.
New England, New York and New Jersey are well on their way to actually being able to use the public health playbook for contact tracing and isolation to break infection chains. Most of Europe and the East Asia have adopted similar strategies to a good deal of success.
The disease is out there and vigilance is required amidst a different normal of aggressive testing, tracing and isolating but that version of life looks to be 85% of last Christmas normal instead of the 50% of normal we actually got.
Matt McIrvin
In Massachusetts, which is doing very well by national standards but really not OK by world standards, schools are being instructed to come up with three plans: one for as-safe-as-they-can-manage in-person instruction, one for distance learning, and one hybrid. Presumably the state is leaving open the possibility of switching between them as events permit.
Matt McIrvin
@David Anderson: I really can’t tell whether things are getting better or worse in MA right now. You get a different answer depending on which data you choose to aggregate. It feels to me like we got infection rates pretty low but then started reopening some stuff a little too hastily, so that we’re sort of treading water right now. At least the bars never opened.
Death rates are still declining because of the long tail of people who got sick months ago.
John S.
@jonas: I work for a huge multinational company. I still have to get on videoconference calls with folks around the world.
If a company can’t figure out how to manage time zones using any number of free and available tools out there, and manage a Zoom meeting, they are going to lose business because they are incompetent.
Soprano2
Our mask ordinance went into effect yesterday. Last night I went to a birthday party for my one-year-old great-nephew. It was in a building at a city park. Everyone was good about wearing masks, only taking them off to eat or when they went outside. Most people will do it if you tell them they have to. I only hope they did it in time; I guess in about two weeks we’ll know.
mrmoshpotato
@cain:
Let’s not forget all of the selfish shithead children who decided “Fuck Hillary! I’m not gonna vote!”
Matt McIrvin
@FelonyGovt: I am seeing such absolutely contradictory information on this front–some people saying the drop in antibodies means a vaccine will likely be impossible, others saying T-cell immunity seems to exist long-term and hopes are high.
It seems like the less hope people hold out for medicine, the more likely they are to endorse fatalist “take the punch” approaches, even though that has the same problems as a vaccine plus many more.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: My experience at all the outdoor gatherings I’ve been to is that everyone starts out with the masks, they come off when it’s time to eat, everyone starts loudly conversing over the food and then the masks never come back on, I guess because people figure if that was OK there’s no point.
There’s also a general perception that being outdoors and six feet apart is protective enough and you don’t need masks on top of that.
Matt McIrvin
@cain: I’ve heard a lot of people outside the US saying that the problem with our country is that we’re too focused on individual rights and not on the general good.
But I don’t think that’s exactly true. You see what they did to George Floyd and it doesn’t speak to a culture that prizes individual rights. I think it’s more about enforcing a social hierarchy–some people get the stick, together with moralizing lectures about personal responsibility; other people are little lords who are able to do whatever they want without regard for community.
mrmoshpotato
@Matt McIrvin:
Fixed.
Pittsburgh Mike
We’re still wasting time. Before you can reopen schools, you need to greatly increase the testing capacity of the country. Realistically, that means guaranteed payments to testing labs so that they know they can recoup the costs of expanding their testing capacity. What would really help are tests that can be collected at home — throat swabs or saliva tests, which could then be forwarded for testing every few days. Only the Federal government has the money to actually expand the country’s testing capacity.
I was reading about a school in Germany (in an article I can’t find right now) that has students collect throat swabs every 4 days, so that sick students can be quarantined before an outbreak spreads too far. That’s how you reopen schools before you have a vaccine / anti-body treatment.
So, the only path out of our current disastrous situation is to first increase testing capabilities, and then do another lockdown to get the case numbers low enough that testing and tracing can keep up with the outbreaks. And some things, like crowded bars and restaurants, just don’t come back before there’s a vaccine. It sucks, but there you are.
But unless you explain the whole plan to the public, including how testing and tracing happen after cases numbers drop again, the public won’t accept a new lockdown (they may not accept it anyway, but they certainly won’t if it’s spun as “Well, let’s just try it again.”)
Right now, I don’t see any evidence that we’re making any effort to solve the testing side of things. And that means that we even a new lockdown will end with uncontrolled spread as soon as cases drop and the public expects to go back to normal behavior.
We are so f**ked.
J R in WV
@debbie:
Actually, I just completed a shopping trip with nearly universal success.
I first went to the local Steak and Seafood shop, got sashimi grade tuna and local pork chops, and fresh local corn and ‘maters at the farmer’s mkt. Then to Kroger’s, which not too long ago added a small liquor shop, YAY~!~
I did get a typical amount of the usual stuff at Kroger’s, except for paper towels, I did get a pack of toilet tissue there. Oddly they had a ton of toilet paper yet no paper towels.
Then I stopped at Aldi’s on the way home and they had paper towels and inexpensive but pretty good coffee, which I got 4 bags of as well.
Was home by 2ish.
Jinchi
There’s no way that schools will be safe to open in states that refuse to close bars during an outbreak and certainly not in places that prohibt the enforcement of mask policies.
Unfortunately, any governor that has decided to open bars/gyms/indoor dining is almost certainly going to declare schools open for business, and they will remain so until, one by one, they experience outbreaks of their own.
So ironically, the worst prepared places will be the ones to open schools, and the evidence will immediately suggest to the rest that opening schools isn’t safe.
Matt McIrvin
@debbie: Oddly, here in the Massachusetts suburbs, the shortages are basically over. I don’t really understand the supply-chain quirks that make this so uneven.