At least 10,000 times during this Republican-prolonged pandemic, I’ve been grateful that fortunate timing meant my child was already finished with Florida public schools by the time the plague rolled around. So how’s it going for Florida parents and students who aren’t as lucky? Not so well, according to an article published in today’s Tampa Bay Times:
Many parents are incredulous at what seems like a retreat from a year ago, when schools offered multiple learning platforms and touted their COVID-19 safety measures. In hindsight, some say, this would have been the better year to keep their kids home, because it feels less safe.
For those like Sophia [a kid who tried in-person classes this year but was concerned about her own and her mother’s health due to unmasked teachers and fellow students] who seek out virtual arrangements instead, the options are limited. Last year, the state allowed students to attend their regular classes online. This year, distance learners must sign up for standalone online programs not connected to their schools. That means they can lose their place in magnet and choice programs, which is another way they are punished.
Emphasis mine, and kudos to TBT for using the word “punished” there, because that’s exactly what this technique is designed to do. About half of Florida public school students are in districts that defied DeSantis and mandated masks, but the political hacks Ron DeSantis installed to run the FL Department of Education will find ways to punish them too.
Just about everyone — including, emphatically, Joe Biden — wants full-time, in-person public school instruction, and there are relatively safe ways to do that. But having thoroughly politicized mitigation measures, DeSantis is determined to herd kids into facilities that he and his lackeys actively make less safe. Mitigation measures are a reminder of how badly DeSantis bungled this public health crisis, and he knows that acknowledging the severity of the situation now won’t win headlines like Politico’s now infamous “How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic” from last March.
One parent interviewed in the linked article (whose district is “masks optional”) said she and other parents who are concerned about their kids catching COVID are running up against a mask-eschewing elementary school principal who they say is resistant to suggestions like better ventilation and volunteer supervised outdoor lunches to keep the kids safer. I looked it up via public records, and shocker, that school’s principal is a fucking Republican because of course she is.
I don’t need to tell you how this same dynamic is playing out nationwide. Over the weekend, I read a round-up at CNN of analyses from various pundits. It presents a fairly accurate (IMO) representation of where we are as a country right now. At first, I was irritated by the framing, which presented a series of grave existential crises as a political problem for Joe Biden, much as pandemic fluctuations are portrayed as political plusses or minuses for DeSantis here in Florida:
America’s extreme level of partisanship has complicated the [pandemic] picture. “The United States is hardly the only place where some people are afraid of vaccines, angry at pandemic restrictions, open to wild conspiracy theories, and distrustful of experts,” wrote Frida Ghitis. “But there’s one key reason why the world’s wealthiest nation, home to many of the planet’s top public health experts, is the red-hot bubbling epicenter of a pandemic that just won’t quit. The US is one of a few major countries where the people pushing against common sense measures hold positions of power, where they can shape policy, influence large swaths of the population, and weaponize the pandemic for their own political benefit.”
Some red-state governors, eager to win the support of former President Donald Trump’s base and damage Biden, are standing in the way of the steps needed to fight the pandemic, Ghitis noted, and voices in conservative media are spreading misinformation that can prove deadly. “Those who are promoting false cures and pushing against vaccines and masks to improve their political prospects are contributing to thousands of new deaths, destabilizing the economy, and keeping the rest of us from getting back our lives…”
Citing weakening economic forecasts, Jill Filipovic wrote, “We know who is responsible… As businesses shutter, parents are forced out of work, Americans have fewer dollars to spend and fewer places to spend them, and life as we used to know drifts ever further out of our reach, let’s be clear about who is responsible: the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and their proponents in conservative media and in the Republican Party.”
All of this is a political problem for Joe Biden, in the same way that the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was an auditory nerve problem for people within a 50-mile radius of the explosion. In other words, it’s a serious fucking problem for every single one of us.
Dog help us, much more than the political fate of Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis is in the hands of the people who will be allowed to vote in 2022 and 2024. Sufficient numbers of those voters will either reject the Death Eaters next year and reject them again two years later, or we’re fucked. I wish I were more confident in what choice they’ll make.
It’s possible that being ostentatiously pro-virus to curry favor with worshipers of a twice-impeached, two-time popular vote loser won’t redound to Republican officials’ electoral benefit, but who knows? This I do know: there’s nothing to be done about it except keep fighting.
Open thread.
Roger Moore
The problem here is that kids seemed safe last year precisely because we were trying so hard to keep them safe. If we had blown off kids safety and kept schools open with no modifications last year, we would see them as being just as vulnerable as everyone else. Now people have this unreasonable expectation about how safe kids are precisely because we protected them, and they’re shocked when schools actually turn out to be great places for the pandemic to spread.
Freemark
We will keep fighting but it feels like we are in quicksand.
sdhays
I’ve been thankful for many things during this pandemic, but the top of my list has been that my son was born in 2019 instead of 2020 and that he wasn’t older so we didn’t have to deal with schools and socializing and all of the terrible choices parents of older children have had to make the past two years. My son has gotten to ride out the pandemic in the sweet spot of not being too affected by it at all. He (and we, as his parents) are really, really lucky.
It’s also solidified my resolve to never move to a red state. Those people (the lunatic conservative majority there) are crazy. I don’t know how all of you stand it.
Betty Cracker
@Freemark: Yep. I oscillate between hope and despair constantly. It’s exhausting.
CaseyL
I’ve told my Mom that she no longer lives in a First World state, but a 2nd-tier one (a la most of Latin America) and, at worst, 3rd World.
That’s true of anyone living in a state dominated by the GQP. They want to make the whole country not “just like Florida,” but like Mississippi.
dopey-o
29% of our country is suffering from mass psychosis. Digby talks about it here.
the prognosis is poor. I am reminded of the The Kung Fu Monkey’s “Tyrone Discovers the 27% Crazification Factor.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sounds like Death’Satana is going for the Sam Brownback lifetime achievement award in conservatism by seeing how much disease he can bring to his state before even the Republicans lose it.
StringOnAStick
I had a session with my therapist recently, after about a year of big changes like retiring, moving to a new state and all that entails, but it was the Texas mess that sent me back in because I was feeling overwhelmed. Her point was that my feeling miserable about the current state of politics does nothing to change the current state of politics, so do the happy warrior dance and try to live your life as best you can while you fight back in whatever way you choose. Being completely despondent lets them keep winning, and does nothing to impede them because one’s state of despondency means one more fighter has retired from the field. So, I’m making lists of what I can do, contributing where I can, and trying to limit the doomscrolling. The first two items help, the last one doesn’t. At my core I knew all this, though it helps having a pro state it helps me.
Baud
@StringOnAStick:
Good advice.
Starfish
Because Biden wanted us to go back to in-person schooling, online options became worse across the country. I am not sure if anyone has the quality of online schooling at what it was last year.
Before the pandemic, the magic of technology was going to create online schools, so we could steal education dollars from poor people.
During the pandemic, online schooling was the only option to get anything at all for the majority of students in public schools. A lot of good teachers did a very good job at this, but handling both online and in-person students was too hard.
None of the lessons learned from online classes or hybrid classes went to create best practices for the next year. I was surprised by this.
My expectation was that the poor quality online schools from before the pandemic would improve, but they did not.
Mike in NC
The state should be renamed “Covidia”.
RaflW
Conservatives here have never given up on the “natural/herd immunity through death-defying human lottery” method of managing the Covid epidemic.
They know it is toxic to admit that this is what they’re doing, and there is the pesky problem that having had Covid alpha or maybe even Covid delta may offer limited protection from future variants. But it is, functionally, what they’re doing. With our kids. :(
JustRuss
I can’t believe we’ve got to the point where trying not to catch a potentially debilitating or deadly disease is counter to “conservative values”. I dread to see where we’ll be in another 10 years.
cope
@Betty Cracker: It is very tiring. I am so glad I retired from teaching here in Deathsantis World four years ago. Based on what I am hearing from friends still in the biz, I would not be adapting well. For that matter, even though I am not still in the biz, I am still dealing with it by proxy through my grandkids.
It is only because she is a born rabble rouser and plugged in progressive Democrat here in Central Florida that my daughter was able to get both her kids into the distance learning program in her district. She actually had the superintendent (whom she knows well) have a, shall we call it, “conversation” with the principal at the school that she succeeded. Still, it’s so trying to have to deal with all the BS, even second hand.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@dopey-o: Meh, that’s just another MSM simple narrative to explain it all. That argument doesn’t hold up because Germany in 1920s was under threat of being torn apart by the French in revenge for WWI and the entire German population almost starved to death from the British blockade. The Witch Hunts were done during the Thirty Years War that between marauding soldiers, disease and famine in what was likely the biggest bloodbath per-capita in European history. Those people had a reason to be seriously afraid and in their fear lashed out at easy to get “enemies”. The delusion wasn’t the threat, it was the source of the threat. There is nothing comparable going on in the US right now.
West of the Rockies
As has been noted repeatedly now here, these fully-articulated Trumpian Turd-People cannot, will not admit they are wrong because pulling that one thread unravels the entire, ugly sweater.
Their wee little minds cannot accept that they aren’t the bestest, brightest, most hard-working and honest humans on the planet.
RaflW
I realize there is definitely regionalization, and this poll appears to be national, but I think Biden’s Test-or-Vax mandate having a +22 positive (Morning Consult: Requiring employers w/100 or more employees mandate the Covid-19 vaccine or weekly testing: 58% support, 36% oppose) and +36 for healthcare workers means that what DeSantis is doing should be f*king radioactive.
How that eludes the press is, as always, part of our failed media experiment.
waspuppet
That’s not even true. Politico would ADORE the chance to run a “DeSantis Gets Serious” headline — what? You think they’d acknowledge their earlier mistake? — followed by a three-week series on “Florida’s Comeback.”
RaflW
@JustRuss: As someone who survived the truly terrible part of the HIV epidemic in the US, I can believe that conservatives are like this.
They opposed condoms and realistic sex ed (still do!) when it could save people of all orientations and persuasions from catching a deadly disease. Since the virus was more fragile, and passed via fluids not air, many folks were able to move through life not noticing too personally that in fact the GOP response to AIDS was: die, already. But it was.
This his just that same hideousness, writ large.
Omnes Omnibus
@StringOnAStick: This is the way I have about it for a long time. I may have said things about on this blog.
Mllard Filmore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: (eta: mistyped my name “Mallard”)
Daily Kos has a post about that. “A Simple Actuarial Analysis.” Going strictly by the numbers, the GQP losses will not be enough.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/12/2051831/–A-Simple-Actuarial-Analysis
piratedan
ahhh yes, the Eugenics of GOP Politics. Because we all know that any real GOP politician would have their kids tutored by someone vaccinated.
West of the Rockies
@StringOnAStick:
Thank you for that! I found your words helpful.
smith
The really exhausting thing is remembering that Republicans moved en masse into Upside Down World along time ago, sometime during the administration of Bush-the-Even-Lesser (remember Karl Rove’s blanket dismissal of the reality-based community?) We have been besieged by a kind of epistemological terrorism ever since.
I fully expect that now that infection rates are declining in FL, Politico will again hail DeSantis as a conquering hero, crediting his stand-firm strategy for defeating covid, maybe even giving him credit for declining infection rates nation-wide.
Meanwhile, In CA, the guv deserves to be recalled because of his handling of covid. That’s the state that currently has a per capita infection rate less than a third of FL’s, and a current covid death rate less than a seventh of FL’s.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@dopey-o: That Digby piece is interesting, but which I mean frightening
West of the Rockies
@Starfish:
I taught college writing/lit and developmental English for 14 years. In my experience, online is fine for highly-motivated, mature students who already have solid academic skills. For everyone else, it’s far less certain.
Also, not all teachers are equal by any means. Effective online teaching is challenging.
Roger Moore
@Mllard Filmore:
I agree with the straight demographic analysis there- they aren’t going to kill enough people to make much difference in the next election- but disagree with the political analysis. The Republicans are running a real risk of hurting their own reputation far more than they hurt Biden’s. I’m not saying there’s any kind of guarantee, but if marginal voters see Biden as fighting to end the pandemic and Republicans as doing nothing or something negative, that’s going to hurt them far more than any demographic shift.
Baud
Baud
Matt McIrvin
At some point over the winter, Florida’s new cases-per-capita number will be lower than that of some Northeastern states, and DeSantis will be a media hero again.
Martin
I put at least some of the blame here on the educational institutions. We’ve been arguing for ages that technology unlocks a number of new learning vectors and can be a valuable addition to conventional learning approaches. And I’ve been an advocate for leveraging in-school health staff and policy, which has been severely undermined in the last decade.
Other countries navigated a much more sensible path here than we have, even in blue areas like NY and CA. They didn’t suffer so badly from the sense of detachment felt by students in poorly run remote classes. Their teachers were generally better prepared for this transition than we’ve seen in the US. This isn’t a criticism of individual teachers, etc. but of a system of education that is way too slow to embrace new ideas, is too politicized both external to the institution but also within it, and of a system that too often uses education as a policy topic rather than simply focusing on how best to serve individual students.
Yes, it seems to be almost universally worse in red states/districts, but our shining stars here are still not very good. Had this been better implemented, the need to return to in-person learning for students social benefit could have been reduced.
Baud
lowtechcyclist
@smith:
And over the entire length of the pandemic, Florida is 12th in deaths per capita, and California is 33rd.
Baud
Via reddit, funny.
https://i.redd.it/4p9j7962ean71.jpg
Martin
@West of the Rockies: It is challenging, but institutions can help a LOT with that, and mostly they’ve been absent. The time to do this work isn’t the day the pandemic strikes, but in the years beforehand so that you have options.
We have entire towns burning down in the West. Education gets disrupted for a variety of reasons and having more options/more flexibility is beneficial in all manner of ways.
The Dangerman
Sure feels like DeSantis is all in here; he’s either viable for 2024 or he’s lower than the dogshit on the sole of my shoe.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin:
If they’d only raked. //
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Not to be outdone:
The bill in question prevents private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination to admit or serve customers. It doesn’t say dick about employee mandates.
As the Harvard-trained lawyer who championed and signed that bill, DeSantis surely knows this. He’s just in a race to the bottom with Abbott, Noem, etc., so no dangerous stupidity is off the table.
One hopes voters will notice and vote accordingly. I mean really, what the fuck else can we do? These lunatics have not been at all subtle. Their recklessness will either have negative consequences, or it won’t.
eclare
@Baud: That is hilarious!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Yep.
Jim Appleton
“The former president’s base” is 95% of the problem, and he is 100% responsible for their effect.
If he would broadly claim victory for the benefits of Operation Warp Speed and how it helps, most if not all of the current plague-positive gooberishness would not have happened.
Hoodie
@Martin: Yes but, as you know, it was far more important to open bars and sporting events than schools for . . . the economy! Imagine that you would sacrifice the potential of the country for some shitty low-wage jobs that could be easily and relatively cheaply replaced on a temporary basis by unemployment checks paid out of money borrowed at historically low interest rates. It’s hard not to conclude that many Americans do not value children very much, including those who value them only up to the moment they’re born.
bluefoot
Even within a single school district, there can be a lot of variability school-to-school. Someone I know teaches in NYC public schools, and has a child attending in the same district. In the teacher’s school, the administration is taking prevention seriously: vaccinated teachers move from classroom to classroom, some rooms have been reconfigured or repurposed to allow for better ventilation, lunch periods are being staggered to reduce crowding, etc. In the child’s school, the administration is basically ignoring COVID recommendations/guidelines, and the school is operating as if there is no pandemic – the students move from classroom to classroom, mask requirements can be opted out of, etc.
This can’t lead anywhere good.
Martin
@Hoodie: I think the issue is a bit more that the remote learning experience was very hard on kids because it was generally pretty bad, and very little was done to address the psychological/social harm done. Mind you, that’s very broad – not having your parents screaming at a school board meeting is part of that. Building positive/safe experiences to supplement what was lost was basically never done in the US.
So as a result, getting kids back into school is somewhat urgent because of this. So you have two arguments basically talking past one another – the GOP saying this is bad for kids, get them back in the classroom, and the Dems saying this is bad for kids, get vaccinated and fund better educational options.
smith
@Hoodie: I think it was Fauci who, early on in the pandemic, said we can either open the bars or open the schools, but we couldn’t do both. Obviously, the bars were more important.
Part of the exhaustion among Blue America is having to confront, again and again, the recognition of who they are. They do not care if children live or die. Their worship of the Great God Gun tells us that, their resistance to expanding health care to children tells us that, their shaming of WIC families tells us that. Why did we expect they would be any more eager to protect children from a serious disease? I sometimes think it’s our side that insanely tries the same thing again and again, expecting a different result, that thing being entertaining the idea that this time the Goobers might behave like decent human beings.
H.E.Wolf
@StringOnAStick:
@Omnes Omnibus:
In case I haven’t said it recently, you are two of the commenters who lift my spirits on a regular basis. It’s deeply appreciated – thank you.
Baud
@smith:
I agree. I think a lot of the angst is, ironically, because a lot of people on our side don’t want to admit that we have been wrong about our own world-view as the nature of half the people in this country and the reasons they behave the way they do.
Omnes Omnibus
@H.E.Wolf: Golly.
Baud
Deleted
Barbara
@smith: It’s not that the bars were more important, it’s that people did a mental calculation that told them that teachers would continue to get paid no matter what but that waitresses and bartenders would not. No, they didn’t even consider the children. But I believe that is the thinking behind tolerating school but not bar closures. Yes, it sucks.
smith
@Baud: Yep. See: well-meaning commenters who think we should be gentle to anti-vaxxers.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Can’t speak for anyone else, but the illusions I still had about my fellow citizens took a catastrophic hit in 2016. The 2020 outcome didn’t restore faith, but it did make me hope our survival instincts might be sufficient to avoid resuming a full and rapid descent into madness. The jury is definitely still out on that, but I’m trying to cling to that hope!
smith
@Barbara: I dunno. Republicans are not notorious for their concern about the welfare of waitresses. The concern was for the restaurant owners. Not that they didn’t deserve concern — it’s abundantly obvious that small businesses have suffered terribly. In my opinion, a better solution would have been to provide much more financial support to small businesses so they could weather the storm (and not shovel what money there was into the pockets of big businesses), and put a lot more thought and resources into making schools much safer for children. Instead we still have a huge chunk of the country, 18 months into the pandemic, attempting to strong arm schools into making it less safe for children.
Ruckus
@Freemark:
At least it doesn’t feel like we are locked in an armory – from the outside – that’s on fire.
Because that’s where conservatives want us to be and feel like. Because they know they can’t win without, well killing off enough of us. It’s just that they are mostly the ones they are killing off. Look at the covid stats and compare them to the political colors on the map. It is very unfortunate that most places are not 100% one color on that map and people who have the sense to come in out of the covid live there also. Or that the blue places often have a sizable population that don’t have the sense to come in out of the covid. It’s rarely an area is almost solid one way politically. Take CA. My city is 78% fully vaxed. 22% not vaxed. Now some of those are kids who can’t be vaxed, one of my coworkers has a 9 yr old. 1/3 of their family can’t be vaxed yet.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: I sometimes wonder if my somewhat cynical view of my fellow humans has allowed me to maintain my optimism. People disappoint me less because I don’t expect much from them. Therefore, I spend less time being despondent. Also, muddling through is usually good enough, and we can often manage that.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Baud! 20XX!
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I see muddling through as being aspirational for the Baud Org.
Ruckus
@cope:
I wonder if parents got together and sued a principal or the school board superintendents for not protecting their children when they are forced to send their kids to a school that doesn’t follow reasonable healthcare guides, like masking, if that would work? Now of course getting enough people together and money to sue might really be an issue…
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
Maybe we should change the name of their party from republicans to Mad as a Rabies Infested Dog party.
The MRID party.
Or easier, Drooling Simians party.
Hey! This is first round, I’ll work on it.
smith
@Ruckus: A threatened lawsuit might help, but an actual one would take a long time to come to fruition, and the kids are endangered now.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ll co-sign Lily Tomlin’s quote: No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up!
RaflW
@smith: No telling how judges these days might rule, too.
Felanius Kootea
@Jim Appleton: I think the problem is bigger than TFG now. He has unleashed something that not even he can control. The fact that he got booed when he tried to tell the crowd at a recent rally to get vaccinated, announced that he himself was vaccinated, then shrugged and moved on, tells me that he is also riding the tiger now. The Republican politicians all are. None of them knows where that ride will lead, but they’re praying it’s somewhere where Biden gets eaten and they alone remain to pick up the pieces. I don’t think things are going to work out the way they are hoping.
Unfortunately, they won’t change their behavior until they are decimated at the polls and it isn’t clear that they will be decimated at the polls.
Ruckus
@RaflW:
Actually a very good point, on more than one level.
Small, closed minds like republicans sort of worked, at least partially, at one time because the populations were smaller and the numbers of the completely out folks was smaller and the concept of class structure worked because the upper crust controlled so much. Once that level of control was evened out, the politics started to unravel. Conservatives want what was, often a very long time ago, because it gave them, or at least seemed to give them, an advantage, even if it was a small one. This concept that we are equal is like swallowing a box of poison, or horse dewormer to them. The concept that a disease, like for example HIV, that they think they aren’t going to get because they ARE NOT GAY, gives them power and stature. Of course it’s BS, they can get HIV, just like Covid can kill them. But their supposed superiority makes them immune to everything but stupidity. Which of course gives all those diseases a pathway right into their bodies. If only their god had given them more brain power than a wet bag of cement.
I had to go to Lowes today and while the vast majority was masked, there were at least 3, our of about 30 that were unmasked and as it’s CA there are masking requirements indoors. Stupid is everywhere, at least you don’t have to talk to them now to find out.
Kim Walker
My daughter in KY has vaccinated kids in middle school, a little one in grade school and a brand new baby. Last year the schools in her district were socially distancing, half-time at home on zoom, half in school, plexiglass everywhere (especially the cafeteria), masks required. This year, no distancing, all the kids back in crowded schools and the plexiglass is down. There is a school board meeting about mandatory or optional masks. Daughter really wants them at school because they like it and learn much better. But if masks are made optional, she’s pulling them all. I hate to see it.
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: The reaction to Obama, ACA and BLM were the first signs to me that our populace was way more fucked up than I had ever imagined. It has only become more and more painfully clear with 2016, Trump, Covid and the violent Insurrection attempt. And it’s not just Partisanship because all of them had a bunch of Independent/No-Party people in the mix too. The one upside is that it’s gotten much easier to know who the garbage people are in our social circles because they insist on showcasing it for all to see.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
I don’t think it was that. To the extent they were doing any calculation, it was that schools could remain open remotely, but that doesn’t work for bars. But I doubt most people were thinking that carefully. There are just a lot more people who wanted to go to bars than who care about schools.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud:
I got their nature, I underestimated their number, still can’t quite grok it
J R in WV
@Roger Moore:
I guess this must be so — but my Kroger’s grocery store / pharmacy / liquor store has all the spirits we need. They do run low on tonic water at times… sad! But I think we outgrew bars.
Drinking at home means not getting in trouble drinking and driving!
cain
My fiance is telling me all kinds of stories about how kids and teachers are getting sick and the district having trouble backfilling. I don’t know how they are going to find people to back fill if teachers get sick. If any of those teachers die, that’s going to lead to a lot of walkouts since nobody wants to die for the job just to make some of these parents happy.
All in all, it’s a shit show. Plus some of these kids have never been in person so all kinds of problems for kindergarten teachers.
cain
@J R in WV:
We’ve been donig pretty good on drinks – but I do miss having to go to a nice restaurant. While I can make fancy meals at home – the point is not to put effort.
As for bars, I’d go for the live music – but ambiance is a thing – and of course nothing like a well crafted cocktail! :-) But yeah, if you’re just going to drink beer then do it at home!
Ruckus
@Barbara:
They weren’t kids, they could go to bars, where there aren’t kids. And as long as it didn’t interfere with their lives they just weren’t as concerned as maybe they should be about their kids. Also a lot of the conservative side may run older, geezer like in fact and haven’t had kids living in the home in a while. But they still can drink and go to bars to see and drink with their friends. Close the bars and they can’t go see their friends on neutral ground. Close the bars and they can’t walk in and get a meal and 2-5 drinks. That directly affects them. And that seems to be a direct point for a lot of conservative “thought.” They seem far less interested if the matter does not directly effect them.
Jinchi
They weren’t even doing that calculation. The people who’ve been arguing no masks, no vax, no shutdowns; always insisted that we open bars and schools (both this year and last) and that those kids should never wear masks.
There was no balancing of costs involved. They simply declared that there would be no outbreak, that kids were totally immune from the virus, that teachers were whiners and that it would probably be best if a few (
hundred,thousand, million) people simply died so the rest of us wouldn’t be inconvenienced.Ruckus
@smith:
True but it might change some minds it their pocket books were involved. Also if a number of parents were in a major suit, say 5 million or so that might get their attention.
Hell it might not even be legal to sue them. If it’s not obvious, IANAL.
Quicksand
@Freemark: Yeah, sorry about that.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
You are taking away half the fun! Getting home alive. And without handcuff wrist.
Kristine
@StringOnAStick: Thanks for posting this. I needed to read it today.
cope
@Ruckus: it’s hard for me to keep track of all the things my progressive, activist daughter is up to but if I recall, she is involved with an effort by the state teacher’s union to bring suit for not being protected by the state DOE.
Roger Moore
@J R in WV:
You should try making tonic water at home from cinchona bark and spices. It blows any store-bought stuff away.
That said, bars are about more than just the drinking. They’re about a specific social environment that can’t easily be re-created at home. That’s why people were so eager to get the bars to reopen. There’s something similar about restaurants.
I remember someone suggesting closing restaurants had actually been a bad idea. They thought restaurants serve an important social function as a place for people to meet. When we closed restaurants, people stayed home and obeyed the social distancing rules for a while. But after some time, they felt the need to socialize again. If restaurants with outdoor seating had been open, they could have gone to the restaurants to meet their friends in a relatively safe environment with someone there to enforce the rules. With restaurants closed, they just visited their friends and relatives and ignored the rules, actually making things worse. I’m not sure if it’s correct, but I think there’s some truth to that idea.
StringOnAStick
@H.E.Wolf: Wow, thanks.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
There is a restaurant near me that has a patio on 2 sides of the indoor seating, with the roof overhanging the outdoor area. They have closed off the entire outdoor area with clear plastic, so that for all intents and purposes that outdoor area is now indoor. And they have gotten away with it. At least I no longer wonder how good the food is, and will never find out.
Bonnie
When I went to grade school, people were getting poll–even Presidents. Can you imagine what the country would be like if we never got the Salk vaccine! I can’t believe that Americans are more stupid now than we were in the 50s. I had no children; and, I feel very lucky that I made the decision not to.
KrusherKing
My granddaughter (age 11) caught COVID we presume on the bus on the way to school in FL. Very fortunately she was asymptomatic, but I am livid with a governor who sees her life as nothing he needs to be concerned about.