Acceptable Amount of Death

The CDC, politicians, pundits and school leaders continue to use the word "safely return" to school. This is impossible during a pandemic. "Safely" implies that mitigation efforts are successfully preventing transmission. In reality, they are, at best, only reducing transmissions. Even the 2 reports cited by the CDC to support their back-to-school plan showed some transmission still occurring, in spite of mitigation efforts.

What the CDC, politicians, pundits and school leaders are ACTUALLY calling for is not a "safe" return to school, but one that they know will result in some degree of transmission, serious illness and potentially death (if not among students and staff, then at least among their family and community members, when they bring the virus home). Therefore, they are not offering us a truly safe to return. What they are really telling us that if we follow their plan, there will be an ACCEPTABLE number of hospitalizations and deaths that are DELIBERATELY part of that plan.

Of course, they won't say this publicly because it is so horrific and damning, and it shows their utter disregard for human life.  Perhaps some of the folks promoting a rapid return to school are just plain naive or delusional, and really believe that it can be done without a single transmission occurring at any of our schools, without any spread to the homes and communities of students and staff. But they would have a much harder time believing this naive or delusional viewpoint if we were more honest up front and called it what it really is: An ACCEPTANCE of some risk of transmission and death.