America Not Ready to Return to School

We’re now down to little more than two months before school starts in most of the country and a great many districts, if not necessarily most, are yet to announce definitive plans for how they are going to conduct school in the Fall semester. Indeed, the entire subject of school closures and openings is another example of a country trapped in magical thinking, yet another permutation of the “reopening” debate.

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How do you prevent your home from flooding? The biggest thing is to make sure there’s no flood near your house. Fix the levees or the dam. If you don’t, your house is going to be toast no matter what clever ideas or plans you come up with. We’ve seen from other parts of the world that you can reopen schools. But it’s not a matter of any particularly clever strategies. It’s just something that becomes possible once the prevalence of the disease gets really low. And it doesn’t ‘get’ low. You make it low.

The clear lesson from Europe and East Asia is that you need to get the prevalence of COVID down really, really low. Once you’ve done that lots of things become possible. People in those countries are still doing mitigation and wearing masks and social distancing. But they’ve been able to resume a reasonable level of social and economic life because they got cases really, really low. Like I said, if the water is ten feet deep on your street, you’re going to need to get a new house.

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Here we’ve been focused on these absurd “reopening” debates that are both highly politicized and highly hypothetical while the actual case counts are exploding in much of the country. Can we have schools open in September? It’s an entirely moot point unless you have cases low enough that you’re not contending with having to do another total shutdown.

From start to first we’ve treated ‘reopening’ as a parlor game or political conflict or a subject for debate as opposed to something you start doing once you’ve wrestled the disease into some kind of submission. And that is quite simply a joke.

President Trump Threatening to Pull Funding From States Who Refuse to Reopen Schools

President Trump says the White House plans to pressure governors to reopen schools in their states this fall during a roundtable discussion. On Tuesday, Trump said the move is necessary for both mental health and academic reasons and repeated claims that Democrats want to keep schools closed for political reasons rather than public health.

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It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on open schools in the fall.

Trump’s comments came after Secretary of Education Betsey Divorce criticized plans by some local districts to do in-person classes only a few days a week. During a call with governors last month, the CDC put out guidance for schools that included staggered schedules, distanced desks, physical barriers between bathroom sinks and increased disinfecting measures.

And the Trump administration has formally notified the United Nations that it’s withdrawing from the World Health Organization to move cuts off one of the WHO’S biggest sources of aid and comes amid months of criticism from the White House over how the organization has handled its response to the Corona virus pandemic, particularly when it comes to influence from China.

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Public health officials and political opponents have heavily criticized the decision, including some Democrats who say it will cost the U.S. global influence. The withdrawal won’t take effect until next year, so it could be reversed under a new administration.Joe Biden has said if he were to win the presidency, he’d undo the decision on his first day in office.