9 ms·

Right. We should have closed restaurants, bars, whatever so we could keep schools open.

by crummy 6y ago

matz1 6y ago
No, we shouldn't have lockdown in the first place, keep everything open. Adopt measure that doesn't involve lockdown.
- jansan 6y ago
  This is debatable, but it is common sense that it shoud have been the target. And for somne reason it wasn't.
tptacek 6y ago
We also should have prioritized epidemiology studies involving schools --- there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders. The HVAC concerns about schools are apparently easily addressed with basic, portable air filters and box fans. There's a lot we could have done differently here.
- monocasa 6y ago
  > there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders There's almost no evidence for that. It boils down to the virus is absolutely out of control here, and kids are way more likely to be asymptomatic, meaning that it's way harder to nail down that a child to adult transmission occurred outside of the household.
  - _Gyan_ 6y ago
    From Association between living with children and outcomes from covid-19: OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628 "Conclusions In contrast to wave 1, evidence existed of increased risk of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection and covid-19 outcomes among adults living with children during wave 2. However, this did not translate into a materially increased risk of covid-19 mortality, and absolute increases in risk were small." "Living with children aged 0-11 was associated with reduced risk of death from both covid-19 and non-covid-19 causes in both waves;"
    - monocasa 6y ago
      From the UK, where they've closed schools pretty much universally across the country. Yes, the slight immunobump from being exposed to pretty much every year's influenza outweighs being next to one of the most socially isolated groups. That doesn't mean that if they repoened you wouldn't see the opposite.
      - _Gyan_ 6y ago
        UK schools were open most of the autumn/fall term. They have been closed since mid-December and reopened earlier this month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_education_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi...
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  Growing consensus? The only thing I've ever seen said about it -- which was said quite early on -- was "we have never seen an instance of children spreading the disease to adults".
- croes 6y ago
  The consensus is more that younger children seldom have symptoms that's why they get less tested, that's why the real number of infected is highly unknown. Otherwise studies have shiown school closing are ver effective https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
thaumasiotes 6y ago
Matt Yglesias wrote an interesting (non-paywalled) piece about this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure > in the actual United States of America, it’s Congress that can write huge checks; it’s mostly states who write rules for restaurants; and schools are a local responsibility — often run by special purpose school boards that have no other governing powers. Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for a bar and restaurant bailout, I don’t think it’s crazy that governors mostly decided they had to reopen their restaurants. And given that this decision ensured continued community spread all through the summer and fall, I don’t think it’s crazy that teachers lobbied to keep schools closed. > D.C. eventually got a leg up thanks to our unusual governance. We are a “mayoral control” city (i.e., the schools are run by a political appointee rather than by a separately elected board), and our city government also performs the functions of a state government. So the mayor, in her capacity as essentially a governor, gave teachers vaccine priority, and then in her capacity as the head of the school system said they had to reopen. I think it’s clear that San Francisco mayor London Breed would do that if she could, but she doesn’t control California vaccination rules and she doesn’t control the San Francisco public schools, so she can’t.
- lupire 6y ago
  Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because they are afraid to raise taxes on tech billionaires who made a fortune during the pandemic?
  - easton 6y ago
    Because any raise of taxes would accelerate the conversations happening at every tech company in CA as to whether or not they really need to be there now that they worked remote. Unless Tim Cook's taxes can personally pay for it (since Apple's staying because of their big new building), this isn't a good time to be raising taxes.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because the US system has evolved to one which structurally depends on federal government deficit spending to rapidly meet economic emergencies since the feds have structural advantages in borrowing independent of self-imposed limits (borrowing in a currency you control is a massive advantage) and states tend to have (self-imposed, but inflexible in the short term, since they are usually matters of state constitution) budget rules which require balanced operating budgets and, where they allow debt-financed deficit spending, have slow processes (often something like a legislative vote followed by a public election) to approve it. (Why it's counterproductive to raise taxes, instead of deficit spending, in the middle of a literally once-in-a-century economic downturn to pay for bailouts should be obvious.)
ohgodplsno 6y ago
So, for context, France tried that. Badly, like the rest of our handling of Covid, but we did close restaurants, bars, and everything else, keeping schools open. Not really for the well being of the children, but rather that their parents could not work if they had to handle children. Depressions are still through the roof, grades are low.
- croes 6y ago
  Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more harmful than any pandemic.
    - croes 6y ago
      Single deaths not mass deaths. And it's social distancing not isolation. The whole lockdown nobody I know was isolated even if in quarantine.
    - croes 6y ago
      BTW it's not social but physical distancing. You can be as social as you want, just not so much physical contacts.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        Don't expect me to use your euphemisms. Even if you, personally, don't need real human contact. Mass deaths aren't particularly more traumatizing than individual ones. You don't know these people anyway.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more. Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.
EVdotIO 6y ago
I don't understand these half assed measures. The original goal was to shut everything down to explicitly flatten the curve and not swamp hospitals. That was the fear, the exponential curve of millions on millions dead in a few weeks time if this wasn't contained, but as we have seen, this is simply not happening. Yes, this virus is bad, it is highly contagious, it kills people and deserves a serious response to control, but the lockdowns, at best, were to slow the spread and a stop gap to larger secondary effects.
- danhak 6y ago
  This is the third rail of Covid discussions. But you are correct. The area under the curve was exactly the same in all the "flatten the curve" vs zero mitigation models. The rationale behind flattening the curve was never to decrease the absolute number of infections. But somewhere along the way, the goalposts were implicitly switched from "flatten the curve" to "wait for the vaccine"
  - halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
    Because everyone realized that compliance beyond lockdowns is piss poor. Mask wearing is political and people can't preform simple hygiene to avoid spreading. Once the curve was flattened it was abundantly clear that any reopening was going to follow with an explosion of cases, which it did.

Right. We should have closed restaurants, bars, whatever so we could keep schools open.

by crummy 6y ago

Right. We should have closed restaurants, bars, whatever so we could keep schools open.

matz1 6y ago

No, we shouldn't have lockdown in the first place, keep everything open. Adopt measure that doesn't involve lockdown.

jansan 6y ago
This is debatable, but it is common sense that it shoud have been the target. And for somne reason it wasn't.

tptacek 6y ago

We also should have prioritized epidemiology studies involving schools --- there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders. The HVAC concerns about schools are apparently easily addressed with basic, portable air filters and box fans. There's a lot we could have done differently here.

monocasa 6y ago
> there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders There's almost no evidence for that. It boils down to the virus is absolutely out of control here, and kids are way more likely to be asymptomatic, meaning that it's way harder to nail down that a child to adult transmission occurred outside of the household.
- _Gyan_ 6y ago
  From Association between living with children and outcomes from covid-19: OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628 "Conclusions In contrast to wave 1, evidence existed of increased risk of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection and covid-19 outcomes among adults living with children during wave 2. However, this did not translate into a materially increased risk of covid-19 mortality, and absolute increases in risk were small." "Living with children aged 0-11 was associated with reduced risk of death from both covid-19 and non-covid-19 causes in both waves;"
  - monocasa 6y ago
    From the UK, where they've closed schools pretty much universally across the country. Yes, the slight immunobump from being exposed to pretty much every year's influenza outweighs being next to one of the most socially isolated groups. That doesn't mean that if they repoened you wouldn't see the opposite.
    - _Gyan_ 6y ago
      UK schools were open most of the autumn/fall term. They have been closed since mid-December and reopened earlier this month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_education_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi...
thaumasiotes 6y ago
Growing consensus? The only thing I've ever seen said about it -- which was said quite early on -- was "we have never seen an instance of children spreading the disease to adults".
croes 6y ago
The consensus is more that younger children seldom have symptoms that's why they get less tested, that's why the real number of infected is highly unknown. Otherwise studies have shiown school closing are ver effective https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

thaumasiotes 6y ago

Matt Yglesias wrote an interesting (non-paywalled) piece about this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure > in the actual United States of America, it’s Congress that can write huge checks; it’s mostly states who write rules for restaurants; and schools are a local responsibility — often run by special purpose school boards that have no other governing powers. Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for a bar and restaurant bailout, I don’t think it’s crazy that governors mostly decided they had to reopen their restaurants. And given that this decision ensured continued community spread all through the summer and fall, I don’t think it’s crazy that teachers lobbied to keep schools closed. > D.C. eventually got a leg up thanks to our unusual governance. We are a “mayoral control” city (i.e., the schools are run by a political appointee rather than by a separately elected board), and our city government also performs the functions of a state government. So the mayor, in her capacity as essentially a governor, gave teachers vaccine priority, and then in her capacity as the head of the school system said they had to reopen. I think it’s clear that San Francisco mayor London Breed would do that if she could, but she doesn’t control California vaccination rules and she doesn’t control the San Francisco public schools, so she can’t.

lupire 6y ago
Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because they are afraid to raise taxes on tech billionaires who made a fortune during the pandemic?
- easton 6y ago
  Because any raise of taxes would accelerate the conversations happening at every tech company in CA as to whether or not they really need to be there now that they worked remote. Unless Tim Cook's taxes can personally pay for it (since Apple's staying because of their big new building), this isn't a good time to be raising taxes.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because the US system has evolved to one which structurally depends on federal government deficit spending to rapidly meet economic emergencies since the feds have structural advantages in borrowing independent of self-imposed limits (borrowing in a currency you control is a massive advantage) and states tend to have (self-imposed, but inflexible in the short term, since they are usually matters of state constitution) budget rules which require balanced operating budgets and, where they allow debt-financed deficit spending, have slow processes (often something like a legislative vote followed by a public election) to approve it. (Why it's counterproductive to raise taxes, instead of deficit spending, in the middle of a literally once-in-a-century economic downturn to pay for bailouts should be obvious.)

ohgodplsno 6y ago

So, for context, France tried that. Badly, like the rest of our handling of Covid, but we did close restaurants, bars, and everything else, keeping schools open. Not really for the well being of the children, but rather that their parents could not work if they had to handle children. Depressions are still through the roof, grades are low.

croes 6y ago
Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.
- anoncake 6y ago
  Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more harmful than any pandemic.
  - croes 6y ago
    Single deaths not mass deaths. And it's social distancing not isolation. The whole lockdown nobody I know was isolated even if in quarantine.
  - croes 6y ago
    BTW it's not social but physical distancing. You can be as social as you want, just not so much physical contacts.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      Don't expect me to use your euphemisms. Even if you, personally, don't need real human contact. Mass deaths aren't particularly more traumatizing than individual ones. You don't know these people anyway.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more. Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.

EVdotIO 6y ago

I don't understand these half assed measures. The original goal was to shut everything down to explicitly flatten the curve and not swamp hospitals. That was the fear, the exponential curve of millions on millions dead in a few weeks time if this wasn't contained, but as we have seen, this is simply not happening. Yes, this virus is bad, it is highly contagious, it kills people and deserves a serious response to control, but the lockdowns, at best, were to slow the spread and a stop gap to larger secondary effects.

danhak 6y ago
This is the third rail of Covid discussions. But you are correct. The area under the curve was exactly the same in all the "flatten the curve" vs zero mitigation models. The rationale behind flattening the curve was never to decrease the absolute number of infections. But somewhere along the way, the goalposts were implicitly switched from "flatten the curve" to "wait for the vaccine"
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  Because everyone realized that compliance beyond lockdowns is piss poor. Mask wearing is political and people can't preform simple hygiene to avoid spreading. Once the curve was flattened it was abundantly clear that any reopening was going to follow with an explosion of cases, which it did.