Biden, Newsom, HIt Men For Capitalism

I'm not sure what more evidence anyone needs to see that capitalism is a piece of shit system for everyone but the richest members of society. The pandemic has enriched the country's wealthiest billionaires by $1 trillion, while the rest of us are suffering the worst levels of unemployment and income loss in a century (possibly worse than the Great Depression). Nearly every major politician, including the Democrats, and especially Biden and California Governor Newsom, have been doing everything in their power to force people back to work, shop and play under unsafe conditions that have led to over 400,000 deaths in less than a year. The message should be abundantly clear to anyone who is paying attention: Human life is irrelevant in the pursuit of profits.

The fact that  Newsom, is ending restrictions for the state, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the state is still in the most restrictive purple tier, has only two logical explanations:

1. He is a multi-millionaire himself and is doing the bidding of his class allies and colleagues: open up the economy, regardless how safe, so the rich can continue to make record profits. Likewise, he doesn't want to piss off his financial backers, who all want the same. 
2. He's scared shitless about the recall campaign coming from his rightwing flank and believes that by sending everyone back to unsafe working, shopping and playing conditions, right when several dangerous covid variants, with far greater transmissibility than good old-fashioned Covid-1.0, are becoming common throughout the state, he will appease them (or kill them through mass infections). 

But in his blind allegiance to Capitalism, what he fails to see is that he will also be sickening and killing thousands of his liberal supporters and motivating liberal survivors to join the recall campaign. His policies are tantamount to being a hitman for Capitalism and a mass-murderer. 

What about Biden? Almost all the same points can be made about him, too. He's a millionaire. He continues to insist that all schools will be opened within his first 100 days, regardless of the scientific data and advice from scientists. He continues to insist that 100,000 more Americans must die in the next month and that there's nothing that can be done about it, directly contradicting the advice of his own Covid transition team advisor, Michael Osterholm's, that we must stringently lockdown the entire country for 6 weeks, while providing financial and medical relief for everyone who needs it, in order to bring the pandemic back to being only really terrible, instead of its current catastrophic level.

One important scientific point that the media and politicians have almost completely failed to mention: the greater the percentage of infected people, and the longer high infection rates persist, the greater the chances for new, highly infectious and virulent strains to evolve. Pathogens can share genes. The more concentrated they are (i.e., high rate of community infection), the greater the opportunities to share genes. They also mutate spontaneously, on their own. The greater the rate of infection, the more virus particles there are going through the process of replicating their genetic material, and the greater the number of random mutations.

Therefore, getting the infection rates down significantly and quickly ought to be our primary goal, not only to save human lives and reduce suffering, but to reduce the chances of a far greater surge down the road, due to the proliferation of the British and South African strains, which we already know exist in the U.S. and are far more transmissible than Covid 1.0. California even has its own unique strain, which was nonexistent in October, 2020, but by November, 2020, was responsible for 24% of all Southern California infections. Considering how quickly Los Angeles County lost control of the pandemic, and the fact that 33% of their infections were due to this new, Socal strain, it seems likely that the Socal strain is also more infectious than good, old-fashioned Covid 1.0.

Why Aren't the Democrats Fighting Back?

 

Trump has repeatedly said there won’t be a peaceful transition of power if he loses. He’s also said he wants to stay in power 3 or more terms. All of these are clearly unconstitutional. They clearly indicate his desire to rule the country as a dictator. And if it were to pass, it would be tantamount to a coup d’etat.

 

Yet no Democrats are calling for impeachment hearings. None are calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office, or Congressional hearings into the coup plot. They’ve even dropped all attempts to delay the SCOTUS nomination until after the election, which essentially hands Trump the most powerful weapon he has for carrying out his coup: Appealing to the Supreme Court to give him the victory, as they did for George W Bush. The only difference is that the Court was already far more right wing before RBG died than it was in 2000. Add one more right-winger, 3 of whom would be Trump appointees, and the odds in his favor go up even more.

 

Pelosi and Schumer, the 2 top Dems, could barely muster feckless pleas for the Republicans to do the “right thing.” Fat chance, and they knew it. The only Dem to make any speech-length argument on Thursday was Bernie Sanders. But the only solution he could come up with was to beg everyone to vote, arguing that a Biden landslide would make it impossible for Trump to deny the vote. He even told us to drop our fight for “an agenda that works for all, and not just a few” until after Biden is elected, in a desperate appeal to win his base over to Biden, while not alienating Biden’s corporate backers.

 

Of course, nothing makes it impossible for Trump to deny the vote. He denies things daily that are far less controversial. And if he is willing to publicly conspire to violate the constitution, why should anyone believe that the scale of his loss would matter to him? He’ll just say it was rigged.

 

The Sanders argument (which is also being made in editorials and by other politicians), is essentially a concession in advance. Biden only needs to win by 1 electoral college vote for it to be a legitimate victory. Not 200, nor even 1000. The Sanders argument implicitly allows Trump to interpret anything less than a landslide as justification to stay in power if he loses.

 

Even Biden has dropped his earlier arguments that Trump was attempting to create a dictatorship, adopting the naïve and conciliatory stance that it’s all just bluster and there’s nothing to it. But if that was true, then why the rush to get a new right-wing supreme court justice seated before the elections?

 

Ultimately, the Democrats would much rather hold their noses and accept another 25-40 years of a right-wing court, and a potential Trump dictatorship, and along with it, all the violence and death he has threatened to unleash against his opponents and protesters, than face the prospect of a working class revolt that spins out of their control. Indeed, that is exactly what Trump’s threats of post-election state repression are intended to do: suppress any resistance by workers, students, immigrants, middle class liberals.

 

This is why Dems focused on Russiagate in their impeachment attempt, instead of the crimes Trump has publicly confessed to (no chance of workers rising up over this issue). This is why the Democratic Party and its billionaire supporters have all embraced the BLM movement, since it corrals mass public outrage into harmless demands for racial justice that pose no threat to capitalism or their wealth. Even better, its philosophical underpinning, Critical Race Theory, is entirely consistent with the identity politics they’ve adopted to replace their traditional base in the labor movement. We don’t need to pay people more or provide them with healthcare or affordable housing. We just need more woman and people of color in the boardrooms and in Congress.

 

Imagine what might happen if the thousands of people who’ve been protesting in the streets for racial justice were to suddenly start demanding the arrest of the CEOs and corporate boards of Amazon, Tyson, GM, Tesla, and Universities, for profiteering off the pandemic that is disproportionately killing Black, Latino and Indigenous people. Or the arrest of Trump for mass murder, for lying to the public about the dangers of Covid (as confirmed in the Woodward tapes), and his herd immunity policy, which has killed 208,600 Americans (again, disproportionately black and brown). Or if they were to change their chant from “Black Lives Matter” to “Workers’ Lives Matter.” What if, instead demanding the cops stop killing black people, they were to demand that the cops stop killing poor people (the overwhelming majority of victims of cop shooting are poor)? Or, instead of handing over trillions of dollars to Wall Street, they demanded trillions to the unemployed, underemployed, and those who don’t earn enough to support their families? “Not Dying for Wall Street!” And how about demanding that trillions more be spent to ramp up testing, contact tracing and PPE for truly essential workers, and free healthcare for all? Or trillions to convert our infrastructure from fossil fuels to renewables, and the creation of a green new deal with good paying, green union jobs for local communities? And what if they demanded that the money to pay for all this came from the trillions we currently spend on subsidies to corporations? And from higher corporate and capital gains taxes? How about increased taxes on stock market transactions and mineral extraction? And slashing the military budget and making peace with Russia, China, Iran, instead of constantly competing with them for hegemony?

 

While all these are completely reasonable demands, and most are desired by the majority of Americans, they would be interpreted by our leaders, Dems and Repubs, alike, as a threat to their wealth and power, particularly if they were being yelled in the street by mobs. Even more so, if those demands were accompanied by trash fires, vandalism and looting.

 

Our leaders know full well that, as the pandemic persists and likely worsens in the coming months; as more and more people become destitute because of lost jobs, evictions, foreclosures, and death and illness to family bread winners; as people become increasingly desperate to go outside and play, socialize, spend time with friends and family; as climate crises (like deadly fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, floods, droughts and food shortages) become more common and more destructive; people will become more desperate, angry and willing to go out into the streets and protest. And their protests could very well become more aggressive and violent than what we’ve seen so far.

 

This is what both parties of Wall Street fear the most. And what a Trump dictatorship promises to quell, through state violence and the violence of his shock troop supporters.

 

But what if Biden is right and it is all just bluster?

 

Trump could still win legitimately. Or, perhaps Biden will win, despite offering his supporters nothing other than “I’m not Trump.” Either way, there are a lot of quite important things, (possibly the most important things), that simply won’t change. Here’s what we can expect in 2021:

·        a continuation of the herd immunity policy and hundreds of thousands more covid deaths

·        no serious investment in public health or plan to provide free or cheap healthcare for all

·        no effective plan to curtail the climate crisis and, consequently, an increasing number of people displaced and killed because of it

·        no significant change to policing, or reduction in the 1,000 people killed by cops each year, nor even a reduction in the disproportionate number of black people killed by the police

·        no reduction in the number of immigrants deported nor an effective path toward citizenship

·        continuing provocations with China and/or Russia, bringing us closer to nuclear war

·        continued bailouts for Wall Street and the country’s largest corporations; peanuts, or nothing, to the poorest and most destitute members of society

·        a wealth gap that continues to grow worse, increasing class tensions and threat of popular uprisings

·        If we are lucky, we’ll get a vaccine that has an 80% effectiveness, but that still can’t end the pandemic.  Here’s why:

o   51% of Americans have said they would either refuse it, no matter what, or they were scared and unlikely to take the vaccine,

o   Without a public health campaign to educate and encourage vaccine use (and there has been none to date), the best we can hope for would be 40-50% of the public gaining immunity, which is not enough for full herd immunity, as too many people would still be vulnerable and could catch and spread the virus

o   (80% effectiveness x 50% vaccination rate = 40% of the public gains immunity)

Careful Which Health Experts You Follow—Many are Charlatans

America has a long history of misology (hatred of knowledge). Our anti-intellectual streak goes back to the colonial days, with the lynch mob murders of accused witches, and our forebears’ love of snake oil, and it continues to this day with climate-deniers, anti-vaxxers, and most of all with President Trump and his followers.

Perhaps at no time in our lives, though, as there been a greater urgency for reason, and evidence to support it. Yet quacks, fakes and posers are coming out of the woodwork to tell us that it’s safe to go back to school and work, that Covid-19 is just a “bad flu,” that maybe we can just inject bleach or irradiate ourselves to overcome this plague.

So How Do We Distinguish Real Experts From Fakes?

Sophisticated thinkers know to examine the credentials of so-called experts to determine whether they have standing or credibility on the subject. Obviously, if both a pharmacist and a basketball star are discussing the safety and effectiveness of a prescription medicine, the pharmacist has more  expertise on the subject. But we need more than credentials to really trust an expert. Scientists and doctors are humans. They are subject to the same biases, fears, and political, economic and religious influences that affect the rest of us. Consider the scientists who’ve shilled for Big Tobacco.

I have an acquaintance with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who has done years of biomedical research, who told me that “the stats” indicate Covid-19 is like a “new flu,” not a “virus of unparalleled danger.” Clearly, this is someone who should know better. The absurdity of his statement is obvious when one considers that in a bad flu season (Oct-April), 60,000 Americans die, but Covid-19 has already killed 80,000 Americans in just 3 months.

Is he stupid? No. Does he want his personal liberty restored? Yes. He told me as much.

What I think is happening is that he is cherry picking his evidence and experts to support his desires. This is known as the Fallacy of Incomplete Evidence, and it’s completely understandable, even sympathetic, at a time like this, as it gives one the perception of safety and security when surrounded by so much fear and uncertainty.

Much less sympathetic are all the charlatans and snake oil peddlers making it onto mainstream media, since they are potentially tricking millions of Americans into supporting or doing dangerous and stupid things.

Dr. David Katz is one of these quacks and he has found success on both right wing Fox and liberal Bill Maher’s Real Time show on HBO, precisely because his lies and distortions promote hope that the worst of our fears are unwarranted and that it is safe to return to our normal lives.

Katz sounds like he has valid credentials. The Bill Maher program starts by discussing his volunteer work at a front line Bronx Covid ward, and the fact he’s a Yale professor and physician. However, about 20% of the way into the broadcast, they flashed on the screen that he is founder and CEO of Diet ID Inc., which ought to draw everyone’s suspicions. When I looked deeper into who this Katz character was, I discovered that the overwhelming bulk of his professional career has been dedicated to nutrition and how lifestyle influences health, not the epidemiology of infectious diseases. Another red flag is that he promotes himself with 5 or more acronyms after his name. Nobody who is really good at what they do bothers to mention the lesser degrees and affiliations. At a certain point in one’s career, the high school diploma and bachelor’s degree gets dropped. More importantly, nobody who is really good at what they do has time for 5 fields of expertise.

This is an example of the False Authority Fallacy. David Katz is so desperate to get us to trust him that he tacks acronyms and degrees onto his name like medals on a general's breast. But he is NOT an authority on infectious diseases, nor pandemics.

But let’s look at the meat of what he has to say, since one doesn’t have to be an expert to have something valid to say.

Like Trump, Boris Johnson and many Wall Street leaders, he has suggested that the “cure is worse than the disease.”

Worse for whom?

The “Cure” of sheltering in place is bad for profits, but it will also save thousands, possibly millions of lives. How could staying home from work and surviving be worse than going to work and dying?

He argues that flattening the curve doesn’t reduce the number of deaths; it only delays when people die. This is a Straw Man Fallacy (defeating an argument that was never made; vanquishing a false enemy). The primary goal of flattening the curve is to reduce the burden on hospitals and the medical system so they aren’t overloaded and can continue treat patients, not to prevent deaths. So, to claim it doesn’t reduce deaths is blaming it for something it was never intended to do, at least not as its primary objective.

However, flattening the curve does save lives indirectly, because when the medical system is overloaded, people die from neglect and abandonment, as happened in NY, Italy, Spain, even Detroit, where patients were triaged and allowed to die because there weren’t enough hospital beds and ventilators. So, flattening the curve does save some lives, even if that isn’t the main goal.

He says that flattening the curve doesn’t allow people to gain immunity, but there’s no indication that people gain any lasting, robust immunity to this disease. It may turn out they do, but so far, the data does not show this to be the case. Low level, short-term immunity might be enough to slow down the pandemic, or it might not. We won’t know for a long time, probably years. Therefore, letting the disease run rampant could result in millions of deaths. That’s just plain cruel and, for young people like Dr. Katz, selfish, too, since he’s less likely to die from it. But it’s also stupid and short-sighted, because if millions of people get sick, even healthy young people with mild cases will still suffer from mass shortages and possibly famine.

Bill Maher, his interviewer, says that Sweden, which did not implement strong social distancing policies, had numbers that weren’t much different from countries that locked down, but this is not true. If you look at the data from Worldometer (as of 5/8/2020) Sweden had 314 deaths/million people and 2500 infections/million people, more than triple the mortality of Denmark, and nearly 8x the mortality of Norway. (Denmark had 90 deaths/million people and 1764 infections/million people. Norway had 40 deaths/million people and 1489 infections/million people. And Finland had 47 deaths/million people and 1036 infections/million people. Clearly, Sweden is being hit much harder than its neighbors who implemented social distancing policies.

In his attempt to get us all to relax and learn to love Covid-19, Katz says “There are risks we willing take on each day.” This is another fallacy. Sure, we take risks getting into car or planes, but it’s our own choice, not one forced upon us by the president, our employer, or our desperation to put food on the table. We could choose to take public transit, instead, which is much safer than driving ourselves, or choose not to vacation by plane. Also, a good driver has a lot more control over their own safety than they do in the workplace, where so much of their safety depends on the boss’ willingness to provide safety equipment, and on coworkers respecting safety and social distancing protocols.

Katz argues that people should be allowed back to work because “We don’t want to destroy people’s lives and livelihoods.”

Of course not, but it is not an either/or choice. We should be looking first at people’s survival needs. Contrary to common belief, work and income are not necessary for survival. Food, housing, and medicine are. These 3 necessities can be given to people, even in a system that lacks money or “work.” People’s jobs, businesses, lifestyles, can be rebuilt after the pandemic is over. Dead people cannot be brought back to life. More importantly, though, if too many people get sick or die, everyone’s survival is threatened anyway. This is why suppression of the pandemic is necessary.

Katz suggests that we should all want to get the disease and get over it so we’re immune and can go out, live our lives, without worry, but there is no evidence that people who’ve recovered from Covid-19 have robust, lasting immunity that protects them from catching it again. Worse, there IS evidence that the newer mutant strain that evolved in Europe and has become the dominant strain worldwide, is both more infectious AND makes people prone to 2^nd infections.

His “middle road” hypothesis of only protecting the most vulnerable, and forcing the rest of us back to school and work, is based on the premise that both extremes are wrong (i.e., letting the pandemic run its course, unmitigated, versus a complete lockdown). This notion is NOT supported by scientific data, which shows that 20% of hospitalizations in the U.S. are among people aged 20-44,  and that people from any age group can die. It is premised on the cynical and selfish idea that it’s okay to sacrifice people other than himself, since he presumably wouldn’t die due his youthfulness and good health.

The “middle road” hypothesis is based on another fallacy, that extremism is inherently bad and that moderation is inherently preferable. This is the same argument that gets millions of Americans to vote for the “lesser evil” every four years, instead of for what they really want.

So, are the extremes in this case inherently bad?

Well, locking things down has resulted 30 million unemployed Americans, and mass hunger, despair, fear and uncertainty. The quality of education online is most likely worse than if kids were able to learn in person. But the other extreme of sending them back into schools and workplaces while the pandemic is still running rampant, without PPE, mass testing, contact tracing and quarantines, is genocidal. It will cause infections and mortality rates to skyrocket. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions will die.

Is Katz’ “middle road” the best alternative? NO! 

First, what does he even mean by protecting the most vulnerable? Will everyone over 70, or with an underlying health condition be allowed to continue sheltering in place? If so, that’s a lot of people. Obesity is a risk factor for dying from Covid-19. There are 70 million obese Americans, nearly a quarter of the population. There are 34 million Americans with diabetes and nearly half of all Americans have heart disease. If all of them continue to shelter in place, how much more productive would the economy become?

Katz argues that the middle way minimizes deaths and averts economic ruin. But it doesn’t. Any return to work without first having significant declines in infections, and ongoing testing, contact tracing, quarantines, risks causing new surges in infections and deaths, and potentially far worse economic outcomes than we’ve seen so far. We could easily get to a point where the economy collapses purely from too many people being sick to work and shop.

Extremism is not inherently a bad thing. We are in the worst crisis the world has experience in generations. When all is said and done, this pandemic could turn out to be far deadlier, and far more economically devastating than the Spanish flu. Under such conditions, extremism is exactly what’s needed. It’s the only possible way to slow this thing down and possibly stop it.  Furthermore, if we did ramp up testing to weekly universal tests, combined with contact tracing and quarantines, we could theoretically isolate the vast majority of infections and stop the pandemic that way, or at least slow it down long enough to allow us back to work and give scientists the time to find a vaccine to prevent future outbreaks.

Disease Far Worse Than Cure-Just Look At the Numbers

In their attempts to reopen economies and relax social distancing measures, many people (including Trump, Boris Johnson, Dr. Michael Katz, Thomas Friedman) make unfounded claims like Covid-19 is not that dangerous, it's like a bad flu, you can't hide from germs, you're going to catch it eventually, anyway, so why not just go out and get it over with.

Problem #1: We do not currently know if people gain any robust, long-term immunity that protects them from future infections

Problem #2: There is evidence that the newer mutant strain that evolved in Europe and has become the dominant strain worldwide, is both more infectious and makes people prone to 2^nd infections, 

Problem #3: It's already clear that this is much worse than a bad flu. In a bad flu season (Oct-April), we generally get around 50-60,000 deaths in the U.S., primarily among the very old, infants, and immune-compromised. Whereas with covid-19, we already have nearly 80,000 deaths, and that was primarily from Feb-April. Since we know this is going to continue for another 12-24 months, we can assume there will be at least tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of more deaths by the end of the pandemic, even if the nominal mitigation efforts currently in place continue. 

One of the big problems with people like Katz, Friedman, Trump and Johnson, and others who claim the "cure" is worse than the disease, and who are calling for us to just go out there and take our chances with this "bad flu," catch our immunity and move on, is that they don't bother to extrapolate the number of deaths that would occur, let alone put that into a context that is meaningful to the general public.

But here's an attempt:

• Because  Covid-19 a brand new zoonosis, humans have no natural immunity (unlike the flu, where we have been exposed to dozens of different flu strains over our lives and have developed immunity to many of them. And there are vaccines. This gives us the possibility of some protection against novel flu viruses). Consequently, in a typical flu season, 9-40 million Americans catch the disease, which translates to 2.5%-12% of the population.
• With Covid-19, we have no natural immunity, nor a vaccine, which means almost everyone is vulnerable. Consequently, the CDC and WHO predict that, without mitigation, 60-70% of all humans will catch the disease.
• In the U.S., that translates to 196-230 million people getting infected.
• Even if no one died, and if only 10% of these people got too sick to work, that's still 19-23 million people not working. When you consider that we currently have 30 million unemployed (official count), we are now looking at the disease doing as much damage to the economy as the "cure."
• But that's assuming it spreads in a random, heterogeneous manner. In reality, diseases don't spread heterogeneously. For example, Amazon warehouses, food warehouses, grocery stores, nursing homes, meat processing plants, are all places where we've already seen the disease spread rapidly among workers or patients who, by the nature of these facilities, are either crammed close together or have human vectors (eg nursing homes) passing the disease from person to person.
• So, if we let the disease run its course and see millions of people too sick to work, with concentrations in the food industry, we could see severe food shortages, even in a wealthy country like the U.S. In poor countries, particularly war-torn ones, it is nearly certain that we will see famines of biblical proportions.
• Now let's talk about deaths, since that's what really scares people. If we take the WHO-estimate of 3.8% mortality and multiply it times 200 million sick Americans, we're talking about 7,600,000 deaths, which would easily be the deadliest pandemic in history. The Spanish flu, which up until now was the deadliest pandemic in history (at least that we're aware of) killed 675,000 Americans and 50-100 million people worldwide.
• But the true mortality rate is, no doubt, lower than 3.8%. Let's be generous and give Covid-19 the same mortality rate as a bad flu (0.1%). That would still translate into 200,000 deaths, which is far worse than seasonal flu, and serious enough that to suggest we should just let it run its course, rather than doing everything in our power to mitigate it and reduce the deaths, is like proposing premeditated mass murder, just so the economy can reopen.
• The actual mortality rate, however, may actually fall somewhere between 3.8% and 0.1%. We just won't know for a while, probably not for a few years. But let's say it's actually 1%. That would translate into 2 million deaths.

To deliberately send us back into unsafe schools and workplaces knowing that it could result in 2 million deaths--That is Genocide!

Return to School Cost-Benefit Analysis Doesn't Add Up

We're hearing a lot about what school might look like when it resumes in the fall. The assumption always seems to be that children and teachers will return to their school sites for some form of live, in-person education.

Why? What are the benefits? And do they outweigh the costs?

The Benefits

As far as I see it, the most compelling reason the state has for resuming school is the free childcare service that schools provide. The  American Federation of Teachers (AFT) makes this argument in their plan to "safely" reopen the schools. When children are in school, their parents can go to work. If we continue sheltering in place (SIP) and doing distance learning from home, parents have to stay home with young children and, therefore, cannot work, undermining the profits of Wall Street and the big corporations. However, the AFT plan provides weak, toothless proposals, like relaxing social distancing  after 14 days of reduced infections in a community. So far, no state has met this prerequisite, including those that have ended social distancing. Secondly, even if they had, their infection rates would still surge again if no social distancing was practiced, at least until the pandemic ended.

Much of the discussions about reopening schools in the fall are in the context of how it could be done "safely," which it can't. A common proposal is for children to only attend live classes 2 days per week b/c of social distancing (keep class sizes down to 10 students per class). If this is how schools will operate in the fall, then reopening schools won't even solve the free day care problem. Not by a long shot. Are nurses, grocery store workers,Amazon drivers, cops and firefighters going to be allowed to work only 2 days per week, so they can care for their children the other 3 days when they aren't in school?

Pedagogically, in-person learning is better than Distance Learning. But the way in-person learning will have to be implemented during a pandemic won't come close to providing those benefits. K-5 teachers won't be able to hug young children. Secondary teachers won't be able to kneel at their students' desks to provide one on one help. Students won't be able to collaborate around tables or lab benches. All of these require social proximity. If our main goal is for students to be able to collaborate on projects, Google provides ample methods for remote collaboration. 

Psychologically, children need the social interactions. My child is going nuts not being able to hang out with friends. It's heartbreaking for me to have to repeatedly say no, and explain why. But does reopening the schools under these new conditions really provide healthy, robust social interactions if students aren't allowed within 6 feet of each other? If they can't hug, shake hands, high five, watch sports together, dance? How does a band practice or perform 6 feet apart? How does a basketball team practice 6 feet apart? How do kids eat lunch together and socialize 6 feet apart? How do schools even enforce social distancing during lunch and recess?

By the way, it should be pointed out that not all the social interactions that happen at school are positive. Here's an editorial by a middle school girl in NY who loves distance learning because she can work at her own pace, in a quieter, more relaxing environment than her traditional classroom. 

The Costs

The CDC now says there will be 3,000 Covid-19 deaths PER DAY, by June 1, just in the U.S., thanks to the premature relaxing of SIP and Social Distancing policies! That's just in June. By August-September, when schools usually reopen for their fall semesters, those numbers could be much higher. Remember, this disease doubles very quickly. It is very unlikely to be "safe" to send kids and staff back, even with smaller class sizes and increased hygiene.

Each time I see an article talking about the return to school, I wonder if I'm missing something. Is there some compelling reason to reopen the schools in August that makes the risk of killing thousands of people worth it, when education can be done remotely. Or is this just another cold calculation based on the assumption that Covid-19 primarily kills old people, that only a few kids and teachers will die? 

If so, our leaders are butchers and stupid. Children and young adults can still get very sick from Covid-19, and some of them are dying. 20% of Covid-19 hospitalizations are people aged 20-44. No child or teacher should have to die to get an education or a paycheck. School is not that important. 

Even if we knew that no child was going to die from this, we know that children can spread the disease to older family members, caregivers,teachers and community members, including those with underlying conditions. Their older relatives with underlying conditions should not have to die for their education, either. According to Ed Week, fully 1/3 of all teachers are at an elevated risk of severe illness from Covid-19 due to age and underlying health conditions. Nearly 30% of teachers are older than 50, and teachers have significantly more social contact than other adults.

Sending a bunch of kids back to an environment where they are swapping more germs than they were when they were when sheltering in place (e.g., schools, daycares, religious facilities), means a much quicker spread of the virus to grocery store workers, healthcare workers, emergency responders, the people we all rely on.

According to Dr. Howard Markel, who studies pandemics, closing schools early and keeping them closed is one of the best lines of defense against a pandemic. It's one of the best ways to slow the spread and reduce the casualties. And he has data from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic to support this conclusion.

So, When Can We Reopen the Schools?

When infection rates are down to 1 in a million; AND we've implemented regular testing of everyone (ie weekly); AND we're doing contact tracing; AND we are enforcing mandatory quarantines of everyone infected and their contacts; AND providing financial relief & adequate medical care for those infected & quarantined; ONLY THEN can schools reopen. And even then, it's still not risk-free or truly safe. It's just less risky and social distancing, good hygiene, etc., still need to continue.,