Reply to The Urgency of Normal

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It is a relief to read these comments from people who are progressive, pro-science, pro-vaccine. It's a relief to not feel like I'm the only one who feels this way or like I can't talk about this in public for fear of being branded anti-teacher, anti-vac, anti-science.

I think reading these comments is galvanizing me to be more vocal about what I think should be a more reasonable approach. I do feel like I've been walking on eggshells for months because for a long time I wanted to be respectful of people who I do think had reasonable fears and concerns earlier in the pandemic -- teachers, immunocompromised people, even people who I don't have a higher exposure or mortality risk but simply were very anxious. I have had empathy throughout the pandemic and still do, and recognize that my position is privileged in many ways (and not in others, it must be said -- we cannot afford in home childcare, full stop, and we have to work).

But it's time to be forward looking, and it's definitely time to account for the basic childcare, mental health, and academic needs of working families and their kids. I don't want to make anyone sick and I don't want anyone to die. But it seems clear to me that we could do practical things like minimize quarantines, change the tenor of discussion about Covid in schools, and even dropping masks when cases are low, without jeopardizing anyone's life. I certainly don't see why we should maintain a mask mandate that relies on ineffectual cloth masks and masking very young children, even though neither of those things is likely to do anything but make some people feel better.

Basically, if a situation doesn't call for K95s, it probably shouldn't call for masks at all. And while I'm all for masking through this Omicron surge, we absolutely should be looking to remove the mandate when cases are lower, and look at other stressful precautions as well and consider if they are worth the impact on kids (overzealous asymptomatic testing, quarantines, etc.). It is time to synthesize what we know about Covid and Covid precautions with everything we ALREADY know about children, development, mental health, etc. It's not either or. We have to do both. There's no reason we can't -- I'd argue many other countries without the political divide over Covid we have in the US have been doing it the entire pandemic.[/quote]

+1 well said[/quote]

+2[/quote]
+3

Solidarity.[/quote]

+4 smart![/quote]

While I agree with all of this and consider myself a progressive Democrat, sadly the party's take on childcare and schools in COVID did not come as a surprise to me. For many years that party has been losing touch with working and middle class voters. Many of its pandemic policies treated public health bureacrats as gods and have total disregard for the realities of the kitchen table issues facing working families. The pandemic policies including around childcare and schools have been a lot easier on UMC people with Zoom jobs. When I discuss these issues with other supposedly liberal friends their response is often that the US should have universal income and childcare. Yeah that would be great but that's not the reality today and we have deal with today's problems. It's just a punt to absolve of responsibility for the pain the policies have and continue to cause.[/quote]

I totally am with you. I really can’t relate to the liberal pols and media talking about COVID. The whole masking in school post vaccines and omicron (milder) is just too much. It’s a massive gas lighting to ignore [b]what’s happening in the rest of the world [/b]and other states. The kids are fine and need to see faces again at school. I’m done with the party. Sadly I also can’t stand Rs. I’m going to become one of those angry protest voters and abstain. [/quote]

What’s happening in the rest of the world is that the US has had the worst - the absolute worst by any measure - pandemic response of any similarly situated country. The worst cases. The worst deaths. The worst. We have at best inconsistently impelmented half hearted mitigation measures for the bulk of this pandemic and have removed what we have implemented too soon every single time. The idiots in charge across two administrations have stupidly pursued a vaccine only policy instead of a vaccine + policy. And no one in power has leveled with people to tell them vaccines in this case are not a silver bullet, that you can get infected over and over, that there’s no evidence successive infections are easier, that the idea viruses mutate to be less virulent is actually a myth, etc etc etc. We don’t even collect proper data (remember when we prematurely decided we wouldn’t track breakthrough?) We rant about the lack of RCTs on mitigation measures and xenophobically  discount the evidence from countries like Japan, Singapore, NZ, HK, Korea, and yes China when it’s right in front of our eyes that they are living by and large much more “normally” than we have been - not because of some Asian magic or some subservient population- but rather because they have consistently and correctly implemented mitigation (probably because they have real world experiences with SARS circa 2003 and know what do so based on that and also know how dangerous SARS viruses are (news flash: it’s not the “common cold”). And as a matter of fact, we owe the fact that we can function at all as an economy at this point in large part BECAUSE China has taken a zero tolerance approach (guess where most of our stuff comes from and then imagine what would happen to us and our economy if China decided to stupidly “let it rip.”[/quote]

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