The biggest impediment to re-opening the public schools in my locale was the teacher's union. The local Catholic schools were never remote only and had full day instruction throughout the 20-21 school year. Any public school kids that relied on school for food, had special needs or had no internet were mostly SOL. Teacher's Unions do it f̶o̶r̶ to the kids!
The author completely overlooks the idea that while children are less likely to die from Covid-19 than adults they are just as likely to spread it to other people as adults are.
Putting thousands of children into a covid-19 incubator and then sending them home to infect their parents and grandparents is, well, a bad idea.
For some reason antivax people forget about the consequences of their desires. They want the kids to go back to school and if 5 of them die out of every 10,000 of them die that's fine.
Then again, we have 73,000,000 children in America, so that would be ((73,000,000 / 10,000) * 5) 36,500 children that would straight up die, assuming that covid-19 didn't mutate as it ripped through the schoolyards and become more fatal to children in the process.
They are fine with 36,500 children dying because it would make their lives easier, but that is not the end of it.
Covid-19, left untreated, people unmasked and pretending it doesn't exist and sometimes people just cough themselves to death, spreads with an R of about 3.
That means that every 1 person who gets it spreads it to an average of 3 other people.
73,000,000 children spreading covid-19 to 3 people is 219,000,000, who then spread it to 3 other people...
The only way this works out is that we intentionally let everyone get infected with it and to the survivors go the spoils.
But that's not all of it. Covid-19, like all viruses, mutate, for instance, the Delta variant.
Getting Covid-19 once isn't the end of it. Survivors are vulnerable to reinfection even from the same strand as early as 6 months or less after recovery. So in this screwed up scenario, we would have everyone in the world getting Covid-19 about once or twice a year and 2-4% of every adult (and 1/2000 children) dying of it every year in addition to other causes of death.
That's a lot of dying just so little Sally will be out of your hair for a few hours a day. A lot of miserable, hacking, coughing, pleading for mercy, begging to God, families crying by the bedside death that can be prevented.
Five million people have already died this way. 750,000 of those 5 million in America alone.
> The author completely overlooks the idea that while children are less likely to die from Covid-19 than adults they are just as likely to spread it to other people as adults are.
Actually, the author did addresses this: they cited an article from Nature that found "No causal effect of school closures in Japan on the spread of COVID-19 in spring 2020":
From the article's abstract: "By matching each municipality with open schools to a municipality with closed schools that is the most similar in terms of potential confounders, we can estimate how many cases the municipality with open schools would have had if it had closed its schools. We do not find any evidence that school closures in Japan reduced the spread of COVID-19. Our null results suggest that policies on school closures should be reexamined given the potential negative consequences for children and parents."
Newton was an alchemist, but thats irrelevant to his claims regarding physics. If you have criticism of the article, this is a great place to put it, but an ad hominem doesn't help anyone.
Sadly, it does sow doubt on the veracity or the relevance of the data the author brings forward to support her view.
For instance, the text opens with “Naked children with severe developmental disabilities were on the floor moaning, some of them smeared with feces [...] human vegetables in a detention camp” A strong image, written to bring out strong emotions. But of course the story is not about children moaning on the floor covered in feces in public schools today, or is it in any way related to the measures criticized in the story.
The author may be right to criticize current measures, but the way it is done feels like blatant manipulation.
This article is like those sad orphan videos they used to play on late-night tv to guilt you into donating $20/month only to find out that perfectly legally 80-90% of the proceeds went to paying CEO salaries and buying TV ads to get more suckers to donate, and only a small trickle actually went to the people who it was intended for.
