A Letter to the Editor from a doctor at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center figured prominently in this week's discussion in NH. He advocates for the reopening of the schools, largely on the basis that the transmission of C19 to children is much less common, and they are also much less likely to show severe symptoms. It is an idea that has some merit. He completely neglects the fact that some children live with, or are even brought up by a grandparent, but still, it's not like in Italy - or in some American cities - where living with a grandparent is almost as common as not having one nearby. Also, even though transmission rates to children are low, a school is an intensely contagious environment, of many people in close quarters for an extended period, day after day. Still, he has a point.
He lost me with his rather snide remark at the end, however, that schools are "more essential than liquor stores or gun dealers." It apparently bothers him that those are considered essential and still open.
Hmm, well, not necessarily. He is making "schools" the automatic equivalence of "educating the young." As we have seen, that can be accomplished from home, either by parents, by remote teachers, or a combination. But until home brewing/distilling and 3D printing of firearms becomes much more common, those cannot be accomplished at home.
6 comments:
It's the "new" virus, the ignorant ignore the 2nd order effects. Sure the kids won't get hurt, they just turn into plague vectors that bring it home to mom and dad and the grandparents. I have started to wonder about these people. I think their hidden agenda is to kill off those older people and move on. What, after all, are a few old dead people who don't contribute to our economy in the great scheme of liberal things.
I think many people are learning that being able to teach in 2 hours what schools profess takes 7 hours by highly trained and credentialed educators who need compensation higher than your wage, are beginning, slowly, to see the light. Education in this country has been a total scam since public unions were allowed and teachers allowed to strike. Well now it's a universal strike and we can see just how valueless the day care providers have been and are shown to have been.
Yeah, there are good teachers out there. By my estimate, about 1 in 20 are good teachers who educate in those things that children need to learn.
Again with the 'essential' vs 'non-essential' instead of 'safe' vs 'unsafe' (with a special category for 'unsafe but necessary', like food processing plants).
I come down against the more extreme lockdowns but it would take a lot to convince me that having schools open at this point is a good idea. To expand on one of Defiant's points, it's not just the kids sitting in the classroom, it's all the other moving parts to a school day such as the bus drivers, parents dropping kids off, and all the support staff. An enormous number of people could be exposed in a way that doesn't happen with most business places open with occupancy restrictions.
In Denmark the under-11 children have been back to school for over a week (starting on the 15th), so we will soon see empirical evidence of what will happen should that be done in other places.
My bet is that Copenhagen is going to be different from the rest of Denmark. Dense immigrant population with more people in families and less sanitary caution.
I should also think that it's obvious that nobody forces you to go to a liquor store or a gun store-- but they very much do force kids to go to school. And we restrict both gun and alcohol purchases to adults, so no question of the special protections granted to children, either. Two big reasons to treat schools and gun/liquor stores with different rules.
I think the doctor was mostly torqued off that guns and liquor were considered essential and wanted to find something as a really great counterexample, to show how warped some people's values are. He failed, because he didn't think it through. Feelings.
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