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.
> 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.
"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;"
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
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".
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
What you are talking about? There were multiple rounds of several federal bailouts for small businesses affected by COVID-19:
What's more, state governments are getting many billions of dollars from the federal government as well, which they can use to support for state bailouts of any businesses which fall through the cracks of those federal programs.
Re-opening the business where you have to take off masks and distancing is impractical is a good way to overwhelm hospitals, which costs a lot more money than keeping bars closed. Restaurants also have the option of switching to takeout-only to keep operating with no additional risk of infection.
