I hereby invoke my old fart's right to rant about what I think is the "truth"

1. Throughout the entire COVID period (including to this day), we have let personal politics override impartial judgments. We have to get beyond politicians from the our side were always right and the other guys were always wrong.

2. COVID brought out the best and worst in us. We saw medical personnel, even those who were retired or living in "safer" areas, risk their lives and mental health in the darkest days, We saw hoarders, resellers of scarce goods, people jumping the vaccination queue, people defrauding the recovery funds, and so on. We saw favoritism and inequities on what had to be shut down. (If your Costcos and Walmarts are allowed to remain open with large crowds because they sell necessary goods, why not smaller clothing stores with minimal crowds as one that bugged me).

3. Retrospectively we have a better idea how we could have handled COVID better. I'm sympathetic to decisions which we now see as being non-optimal. However, I'm less forgiving for decisions that were not re-evaluated over time for their effectiveness and werre left in place for far too long.

4. The best response undoubtedly involved shutdowns, widespread vaccinations, and reopening as the threat diminished. As stated before, our politicians too often chose to go hard one way or another, often using or abusing statistical data to justify their positions.

5. In the initial phases of the pandemic we were grasping at straws for anything that might work. We shouldn't get worked up about initial efforts to shift production for more intubation equipment, getting people to sing Happy Birthday 10 times while washing our hands, hope for anti-malarial or other drugs, and everything else we tried before vaccines arrived.

6. We have failed to address the impact on education that occurred. Many talk about the impact of the remote "learning", but we don't seem to have done anything to rectify it afterwards.

7. The ignorance of the American public was on full display. I can't believe a supposedly educated nation can consider implanting microchips in the vaccine, changing DNA, white versus black vaccines, and other fantasies as real occurrences.

8. It's fortuitous or even a miracle that we were so far along with research on RNA vaccines, especially since scientist had first resisted the idea (I think); and we were able to react so quickly to COVID without major side effects.

9. Discussions whether the source of COVID was a lab leak or due to wet markets is non-productive and fr too politicized. Procedures should be placed on both to reduce the risks in the future.

Feel free to borrow my lawn to orate further.

The politicization of all of it was the most disappointing thing, but probably unavoidable and inevitable.

As one of the first people to respond in this thread, my point then and now was my objection to the demonization of Drs. Fauci and Collins and others, who were a) trying to avoid the politics as much as possible b) were only trying to save lives c) were working with information they had at the time which was rapidly evolving. Also, 20/20 hindsight is not helpful, nor will it be for the next pandemic (which I hope I never see) which will probably be as different from Covid as Covid was from the Spanish Flu or the Black Death.

If there’s someone to blame - as if that does any good - blame the politicians on all sides who went way too far in either direction.

Or better yet, do as drmurray does, and blame Davie.

I agree with his overarching point that our civic fabric is in tatters. I would place a lot more blame on the libertarian/populist/Freedom caucus constituency. Those 3 groups are not the same.

At bottom the virus response had to rely almost exlxclusively on science and not notions espoused by Rand Paul. Amd the response had to err on the side of caution. I don't understand people who had such a bonkers reaction to masking and quarantining and the like.

I need to get another boo. booster

over the evidence of experts, when you have leaders lying about the efficacy of masks for the 'untrained', when you have health officials more concerned about the 'stigma' of travel restrictions than their effectiveness, and when you have political leaders decrying travel restrictions when 'they' did it but advocating them when its their ox getting gored...no, no the powers that be and officials didn't handle it well. Their repeated lies and hypocrisy is what did the damage, not the public.
Cuomo's bravado that "NY is better than Italy" flipping to the demand that respirators be seized rather than rationed, as well as falsifying stats by playing games with nursing home bed counts. Running the Comfort up to NY and then letting it sit mostly empty because policy and perception mattered more than medicine, . Newsome partying, letting movie companies run meal tents while shutting down small businesses. That's not the right f'ing things up.

And a cluster Trumpster

Every single item in that list is a well documented criticism of the official response-
- WHO airborne -- Wired Magazine
- WHO travel restriction reluctance - NIH, Chatham House

The last two were rebuttal to "the right" did the damage.

As for the 'bat shit' and 'Trumpster' -- never voted for him, never will, have not voted for a Republican candidate other than Dewine and Portman since 2012.

Your act grows old, your juvenile homophobic insults increasingly pathetic, and your narrow mind on subjects outside your self aggrandizing habits increasingly obvious (e.g. your dismissal of OSINT in discussions with novadomer who happens to be a former IC official, or your knee jerk dismissal of me on another topic where the topic was something I'd been requested to present on by the Obama White House where you were utterly wrong and off base)

GFY.

Did someone claim "only the right did damage"? I don't see it.

I see vermin claimed "quite simply more damage has been done by the right."

This phrasing implicitly admits the left also did damage, but it quantifies the damage caused by each side and reaches a conclusion about which side caused more harm. You can debate the conclusion. You can debate whether the enterprise is worthwhile at all. But finding two examples of "the left," apparently embodied by Newsom and Cuomo, also doing damage doesn't even respond to vermin's point, let alone "rebut" it.

BI is 100% correct.

The pandemic took hold in NY in March 2020.

Schools went full remote in later that month.

Despite the rising death toll amongst the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, we knew by late May that Covid had represented only a minor threat to the young, especially juveniles. We also knew by that outdoor transmissions were exceptionally rare.

But New York locked down. And hard.

At the time, I was living in Port Chester, NY. It is a town known as "The Brooklyn of Westchester" for its dining scene. The NY lockdown of 2020-2021 decimated our village. Half of the restaurants - mostly owned by immigrant Hispanics - disappeared in the next twelve months. Some of these, like the Copa Cabana, were institutions that had been in business for 30 years. Had New York had Florida-like rules, many lost jobs and dreams would still be in place today. And the death toll would not be exacerbated.

DeBlasio pushed cops in NYC to write summonses to people on the streets without masks all summer - mostly to non-compliant people of color, I will add. Summonses to people hanging out on street corners in 85 degree heat, mind you. And DeBlasio overruled protests on this policy from NYPD leaders. Because he wanted to be "Covid Lockdown Tough!"

But the most heinous crime in New York was not perpetrated against diners or those enjoying the outdoors, but our school children.

Come September of 2020, the local public schools were still in full-remote mode. Those lucky not to be in an "orange zone" were able to operate on a two-day-in-person and one-day-remote model.

But NOT the Catholic Schools. They were open for business.

There is no question, as public schools (and particularly their unions) drew the ire of angry parents for either remaining fully remote or hybrid for all or most of the school year, Catholic schools earned tremendous goodwill and praise from people of all faiths for maintaining in-person learning. In the 2020-2021 school year, more than 90 percent of Catholic schools were open for in-person learning, worked within sanctioned health guidelines, navigated that year without any alarming outbreaks of COVID-19 amongst faculty, staff, and students (NCEA, 2021). As it happens, the oft criticized rule-making and enforcement that characterizes Catholic schools is also the quality that has allowed them to successfully navigate pandemic conditions—they achieved compliance with distancing, mask wearing, and sanitary guidelines in spectacular fashion. In celebrating the success of the parochial schools amidst the pandemic, Thomas Carroll, the superintendent of Boston’s Catholic schools, observed: “The Catholic Church is the one following science, and the public schools, who worship at the altar of science—they are basically the flat earth people.”

Catholic Schools did not bend to the wishes of government, and because of this it was evident by October 2020 that schools were not the "super spreaders" that people feared. But public schools continued in full-remote or hybrid learning.

And the learning-loss has been well documented. The lockdowns (unnecessarily) wreaked havoc on New York's public school students, while those in Catholic schools, who followed the science, continued to excel.

So, no. Lockdowns in 2020, especially come September, were NOT the right thing to do. They were a politically driven one-sized-fits-all solution that was applied to the whole populous. And it flew in the face of science.

Government fucked up royally in 2020. So your pontificating that the mistakes were done in 2021 (as opposed to 2020) and "more damage" has been done by the right is really... questionable.

• Click here for link at https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-the-pandemic-progress-in-c

Valid. Especially without the benefit of hindsight.

Even without the benefit of hindsight. We figured all of this shit out for you, but you all chose not to listen.

Kids need to be in school, or at a minimum be in contact regularly with other kids (note: I think my students actually suffered more in person than in remote learning, because I had to wear a mask, and most of them are non-native speakers, so they need the added visual benefit of seeing me talk about chemistry that was really fucking hard).

Ventilation worked. Testing worked. Masking worked. We had no viral spread in school, from May 2020 on. But y'all made it political rather than scientific, so here we are.

I'd add that it was pretty easy to see, at least for my then-six-year-old, almost immediately. It was clear to us by April 2020 at the latest (having shut down in March 2020). Remote learning was basically no learning for her.

Even in our very risk-averse house (e.g., never wiped down groceries, but did transition to only one of us ever shopping; wore masks pretty much any time indoors until vaccinated; stopped wearing masks outside pretty early; had a high-risk then-two-year-old who I still think might have been among the very first COVID patients in America [hospitalized in January 2020, shortly after I got back from Seattle, for three days and on oxygen for two]), it was clear our daughter needed to be in a school to make progress. The local public schools did not guarantee that option until 2021-22.

Even in April and May 2020, however, I wouldn't have said that our experience could have been used to "figure it out" for everyone. I didn't know, and don't know, whether remote learning was bad for every kid or just really horrible for her. But it was very clear, very early, that it was horrible for her.

Her private school reopened in August 2020 and had only a small handful of positive tests throughout 2020-21. They opened windows and masked and encouraged people to stay home if sick. It worked extremely well.

And I think when public officials saw that (1) remote learning was really bad for some, and (2) in-person learning wasn't causing the disaster some thought it would, they reopened schools. I think the first point was clear (particularly as to "for some") very early. I'm not sure the second point was all that clear until we were in the 2020-21 school year, at least, and maybe not even until we were through it.

I'm not sure shutting down in 2020-21 was objectively "wrong" without the benefit of hindsight about how well ventilation and masking would work. That you had no viral spread in school from May 2020 on kind of admits that it wasn't all that clear in May 2020 (i.e., the beginning of the period of no spread). And it wouldn't really have been all that clear even in month two or month three, I would think. I think it's fair to be reluctant to fault officials for wanting to let that situation percolate a bit before reaching sweeping conclusions that might have increased the death count.

I say the same thing about remote depositions.

I have had some killer remote depositions.

I took about a 4 hour Zoom dep of plaintiff's expert in a wrongful death case a couple years ago, and used it to batter him unmercifully at trial to the point he sighed getting off the witness stand. Sometimes it's better to be in person, but I like the flexibility with exhibits that can be shown on screen and shared as PDFs, rather than carrying around voluminous medical records.

Andy is like George Clooney in Up in the Air.

Not even a close call.

I assume if it was 2 years ago, Zoom was the only option.

I also assume (with some personal experience) your clients have guidelines that dictate remote attendance of almost all depositions.

to get them under control. And I still do Zoom deps weekly. Now if I’m presenting the witness I want to be there. And my clients generally give me a lot of leeway on travel v. Zoom.

With sound protocols, including masking. The Archdiocese handled it well. Don't take too much credit. I know you have talked yourself into believing that Germany is superior to America.

Ventilation - that is, open windows -in August and September in St Louis is not an option.

For a lot of northern schools in poor neighborhoods

Creates a lot more airflow than a furnace. If you don't believe me go open your front door and a few windows and leave the heat on. Your fatherly "there's a draft" instincts will kick in hard.

And ewill is on record saying that is exactly what she had to do. i think she reported having to wear a parka some days...

This kind of "oh that won't work so let's not even try and instead leave the kids in school" reaction was what got us into the mess we ended up in. I strongly suggest you stop acting like that.

She wasn’t the one who had the issue with wearing extra layers. It was the admin and parents (gasp!) fearing for the kids in the sub freezing temps. The school is 150 years old, it doesn’t work like a normal house. And windows that require polls to open up are not something you can just open and close every 15 minutes at your leisure.

I strongly suggest you give up on your incessant arrogant view of the topic and realize you don’t have all the answers and things are not as simple as you believe. You are better than that.

We made it work. I don't often agree with airborne, but he isn't wrong on this one. Frequent ventilation worked really well--we just told the kids to put their coats on and suck it up for a few minutes. They did.

You are right that we are in a different world, though. We tested our kids and teachers every day, and mandated FFP2 masks, and all of that plus the required ventilation made for a safe, if cold, environment.

Can only imagine "But Mom, I only got a C in handwriting because my fingers were blue"

I would argue that you are making this sound harder than it was going to be. But for sake of argument, I'll assume you are correct and that there was *no way* to ventilate your wife's school.

So why did students in well ventilated schools have go remote for that reason?

In fact, my issue is that teachers unions and democratic city leaders used a 'lowest common denominator' way of thinking their default response to the pandemic. "Hey, some miniscule percentage of households have a grandmom at home so no one anywhere can go to school in person."

If you want to know what drove me insane that's what it was. There was always some hypothetical monster in the closet to keep schools closed. When I say to ditch your attitude that's what I mean. I don't mean that your wife's classroom could have been made serviceable and she's a bad person. I mean that your wife's situation should not have any impact on the system at large AND letting it do so was what got us into a never ending justification to close schools.

In my opinion, incredibly risk averse / innumerate people were in charge of the decision around risk mitigation and we got no kids in school through spring of 2021 as a result. Ewill reported from the front and is definitely more risk averse than I am but even now says it was stupid to do what we did with schools.


Finally, it's not arrogant to point out these failings. It is proper. As others have pointed out, no one that made decisions has come out with an after action review to talk about what worked and didn't work. The best response to this all has been on south park where the guys make the point that everyone was stressed and doing their best. That said, the best of some folks was awful and if we are going to heal as a nation there needs to be some accountability.

Without it, there is a lot of simmering anger that is going to boil over.

We went back in large part because our school year runs through the end of June (public schools end of July), so we were going to miss a lot more school than most of the US schools.

Again, I will never fault a teacher, or most administrators, for anything that they did during that time. It was a total nightmare, and we were just trying to do the best that we could for the kids with the requirements that we had. We threw the kitchen sink at it, and had a lot of data to share with our friends in the US about what worked (ventilation) and what didn't (I still have a half-full bottle of spray disinfectant in my office that I keep as a reminder that it can always be worse. We each had to have our own bottle of spray that we used after every class to clean the desks. Because *that* was helpful.)

As I stated to ewill, I don’t think there are any all encompassing decisions that fit all schools, students, teachers, etc. But, to me, in a situation like Covid, which was an unknown situation, it makes more sense to be more cautious in the beginning, and listen to the experts in the field, as opposed to acting quick and listening to people who just want to be opposite of certain political viewpoints.

I think you do minimize the amount of people who have older and comorbid adults in their immediate lives. I assume it’s more prevalent in cities and rural areas and probably more so with low income families. But my wife’s school has plenty of grandparents who are the primary caregivers of the children, as their parent (s), work a lot and are not able to help out with kids in the morning or after school. And they are the lucky ones who have help.

Covid sucked for kids, no one can argue that. My daughter with ADHD was in K for 2020/21, waste, barely had school in 21/22 as class was suspended every time their was a positive Covid test, annoying, and then her second grade was fucked up because her teacher got Covid and never came back (some bad case of Long Covid) and the school screwed up by not getting a new consistent teacher until the spring. But, we will never know if she and her classmates saved lives by not going to school before vaccines.

I’m with you once vaccines were available it should be game on. I just don’t think that should have been easy to say in fall of 2020 and spring of 21 to me is a toss up. But again, some places might have been able to go earlier than others.

I do look at it as sacrifice. Sacrifice this generation had to deal with, just like our lives were fucked up for a while after 9/11, our parents during the Nam draft, and things were messed up during WW2 and the Great Depression for older generations. But, it does make me pause when you, BI and WB, who sacrificed so much for this country, do think we sacrificed way too much for Covid.

But I apologize if I’m being short tempered. I’m still dealing with the Michigan win from last night. It’s mad me an insufferable prick today.

That the Catholic schools in places like NYC and Bridgeport still serve very poor neighborhoods, and they still occupy facilities that are as dated as any public school and lack ultra-modern ventilation. They still had elderly teachers and teachers with co-morbidities. But they dealt with it - those teachers either came to work or were furloughed until they felt ready. Because the Catholic schools put the students first.

The Catholic Schools in NYC opened in September 2020, and by October 2020, it was clear they were NOT super-spreaders. Even without opening windows, masking and distancing proved adequate to keep the virus from running rampant in Catholic schools. NYC should have been using the data from Catholic schools to revise whatever ventilation standards the City decided to rely on. But they didn't, and remained closed because of intense pressure from one of the most powerful teachers unions in the country.

I'm not even totally anti-teachers' union, but they proactively lobbied to keep to schools closed, and were even shameless enough to call for the closing of Catholic schools. (Do you remember the union protests during which the teachers dumped child sized body bags on the ground?)


It was a simple formula for the Catholic Schools:

"They followed the science: Faculty and students adapted to masking, social distancing, teaching in small cohorts and contact tracing. They demonstrated that safe in-person learning was possible despite the pandemic.

In the 2020-2021 school year, only one case of COVID-19 in New York’s Catholic schools was traced to in-school transmission. Similarly in Boston, Catholic schools reopened almost a year ahead of public schools without any COVID-19 outbreaks.

With New York schools adopting safety measures similar to the proven Catholic-school measures, Adams can say that “the safest place for children is inside school.”

• Click here for link at https://www.catholicschoolsalliance.org/catholic-schools-dis

that went back in person late August 2020.

The school was in a poor, multi-generational neighborhood. The 100 year old school had windows that didn't open, poor ventilation and 28 kids with less than 3 feet between desks. Her second graders did a great job overall with masks, but they still often took them off especially while eating lunch daily at their desks. No mass outbreaks, no really sick kids, and no dead abuelas despite their presence in person in school. Plus the poor everywhere had parents all working essential and manual labor jobs where they had no luxury to work home. It was stunningly clear it was safe for children of all socioeconomic levels to be in person, in school in the fall of 2020. And the science was there based on the bravery and dedication of teachers in Europe (like ewill) and in Catholic schools.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) did the same bullshit lobbying as NYC. What still galls me to this day is that CPS teachers and admins were 1st in line behind medical professionals for the vaccine BEFORE Catholic school teachers DESPITE not teaching in person in the spring of 2021. What a scandal that should be. Pure selfishness of the CTU and pure cowardice by Chicago's political leadership to be cowed by their lobbying. And don't forget the CTU board member on her Caribbean vacation, tweeting support for not returning to in person teaching.

• Click here for link at https://wgntv.com/news/wgn-investigates/ctu-board-member-fac

In 2024! No rsv test. No flu test. Covid. 2024. These are the people who make decisions. Idiots.

We had two in catholic school and they had no instances except for the sister of the one poster here who got sick before school even started and then made it seem like a kid got her sick. I have no personal animus towards her but to was clear there was a strong media agenda to make it seem like Catholic schools were reckless. We got through the year with no issues.

which can reduce exposure by around 80% if used alone, and up to 90% when used in concert with masks. While not the perfect solution, if the other choice is crappy air turn over in an old poorly ventilated building where renovation is impossible, impracticable, or unaffordable, CR boxes have been shown to work.

• Click here for link at https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/this-diy-air-purifier-costs-

We are talking about fall of 2020 into winter of 21.

debate that talks about the CR boxes being more effective than the plexiglass shields that were actually used. These devices were coming into use by fall 2020. The first Wired article on the design was in August 2020.

Just because it was used a few places doesn’t mean a place as big as NYC is just going to go all in without some serious scientific analysis first. And that takes time

Schools needed support to open. There easily could have been a strong push to gear up schools rather than whatever it was that Trump was doing.

I think we also forget that the poorest schools needed the most help to open and had families most scared of in person learning.

had zero scientific analysis either... but anyway.

It wasn’t recommending random ventilators found in Wired magazine.

At least not in 2020/21

I would argue "northern" doesn't matter. We won't get above freezing for the next ten days here at least. I will assume that you don't understand that we are on the same latitude line as Montreal, so we understand "north" in the winter.

Again, it was lousy. But my kids put on their coats and hats and we did chemistry in the cold, ventilating every 15 minutes. And we had zero transmission in school, all the way through the pandemic. Maybe suck it up a little?

To “suck it up” when it’s 25 degrees Fahrenheit all day. I assume you realize teachers shouldn’t talk that way to young children. (And maybe you don’t realize but the Atlantic Ocean helps make Europe warmer than eastern North America, at the same latitude). But I’m talking about NY, which I believe is about the same yearly temps as northern Germany. I will note, The snark of latitude comment is why I’m going to be sarcastic right back at you.

But back to my initial point, the only windows in the 150 year old school that open in my wife’s school are not right at the sitting level, and the city hired scientists who decided air in certain schools were not properly ventilating. There wasn’t a simple ventilation answer at the time for the winter.

But, I didn’t know it was so simple. I’ll let my wife know how easy it was. To just open windows and tell 6/7 year olds to suck it up and to just keep those masks on. No problems there either. And it wasn’t the teachers who said the ventilation sucked, it was experts brought it by the city.

I’m kind of surprised you would make these broad assumptions that there are simple counter measures that work in all environments, all situations, and with all students and teachers. Talk about being more political than scientific.

NYC was certainly not just moving old or comorbid teachers around to make it easier for them either. I’m guessing they don’t have enough of those type of admin jobs to easily take them away from the students. But that is more of a union thing than anything else. Conversation for another time.

I will *never* snark at a teacher, because it was all fucking awful.

Fucking. Awful. If you can find any of the posts that I made in the spring of 2020 (we went back in May) or the fall or spring of 2021, you will see that I largely agree with you.

If you check the weather in Munich, you will see that it will be about 25 degrees for a high all of next week. That's not unusual. I do know how the Atlantic Ocean works--I am a scientist who has lived in Germany for 14 years, but thank you for mansplaining it to me.

Our primary teachers did exactly that--they opened the windows in our really old building and kept the masks on. It was crap, but they did it, and it worked.

I am not in NYC, though, so I don't know how it is there.

I'm not going to argue with you, because I will never fault a teacher for feeling anything that they felt. Absolutely never. They had a shit situation, and they did the best that they could do. We did what we were told to do by the authorities, and it was fucking awful, and I hated every single minute of it, but we had absolutely zero choice in anything that we did.

Don’t give me the mansplaining line. You started the sarcastic crap with your latitude line. I just fired back. That’s not mansplaining, that’s giving snark for snark. Don’t send it someone’s way if you can’t deal with it yourself. I’m fully aware what you do for a living, I’ve been here since Janet too. And you would know better than I would, that latitude does not mean same yearly temperature. Montreal and Paris are much different climates.

But back to the topic at hand. The only thing my wife hated more than teaching at the school in horrible conditions is teaching from home over zoom. Not possible for 1st graders. Not possible for my daughter in Kindergarten either. She had no issue teaching in the cold if she had to, but the “experts” decided the ventilation needed would not justify the cold the children would be under.

But as you noted you don’t know how it was in NYC, just as I don’t know how it was in Germany. Hence, why my initial, harmless, post that ventilation doesn’t always work.

Mansplaining? Boy you triggered me with that. That’s such a BS way to get around being called out for incorrect comment and sarcasm (which I noted why I was throwing it back your way).

“I will assume that you don't understand that we are on the same latitude line as Montreal, so we understand "north" in the winter. “. That’s you starting the sarcasm and “mansplaining”, not me.

I'm listening to the wind (75kph gusts) howl outside, and wasn't totally sure that you knew that despite the Gulf Stream, it gets pretty cold here in the winter.

I'm going to duck out. I don't ever want to insult a teacher that went through Covid. There are moments that I walk into school early, and it's quiet, and I have a PTSD response to not having kids in school, and I remember all of the awful stuff that I did, that I asked teachers to do, and I asked kids to do, because our authorities didn't give us a choice. It'll probably end my career, and possibly my life, earlier than it should.

Have a great 2024.

It certainly was cold that weekend, but luckily I was prepared. A few years after college I was in Toronto when it was like -10F. That was without the windchill. I had on winter clothing, but had plenty of skin exposed on my face, because I thought I was tough. I walked 2 blocks from my hotel to a restaurant and holy shit that was painful.

People who live year round in Canada, and I’m sure parts of the Northern Europe too, are absolutely nuts.

I’ve been to Germany for Octoberfest and to Berlin and Frankfurt in the summer. But, have never been there when it’s cold. I’m sure it’s beautiful in the winter.

Apologies for my quick temper. As I mentioned above, the Michigan win last night has really messed me up. Need another 24 hours to decompress.

Have a great 2024 too.

can now share a little more about, now having been fully separated from the NYPD for over two years.

I've met Bill de Blasio a handful of times, conversed with him, and even delivered a presentation to him once. Like many politicians, he can be quite charming when you meet him in person. Which can obscure how much of an absolute scumbag he can be.

Going back to late March of 2020, one must recall that de Blasio and Cuomo HATED each other, and were in a feud. And Bill couldn't stand being in his shadow as praise was heaped upon Cuomo for his daily press conferences in the early days of the pandemic.

The City had created ordinances requiring social distancing and mandating masks. In late March 2020, de Blasio had a meeting with top NYPD executives about the ordinances, a meeting a friend of mine happened to be at. One thing to note is that the NYPD has a pretty sizable medical division that employs a number of full-time and part-time doctors and is headed by a Chief Surgeon.

At this meeting, de Blasio demanded that the NYPD start producing summonses to show that this policy was being enforced. NYPD brass pushed back, noting:

a) While masking and social distancing are a good thing, our Chief Surgeon is far more concerned with indoor transmission than outdoor transmission, and taking enforcement action may not create any significant public health benefit.

b) Most importantly, there is already excellent compliance with these ordinances in most places around the City. The wealthy whites on the Upper East and Upper West Sides and the Asians in Queens have no problem wearing masks and social distancing. In those places, there is already good compliance because people fear the virus and understand the benefit of the ordinance. It's in places like Harlem and the Bronx where people are hanging around on streets and not wearing masks. There is a huge disparity in non-compliance depending where in the City you are. If you push enforcement on this, you are going to make us write summons almost exclusively to people of color, and really strain the relationship between the police and the black community. They urged the mayor not to push enforcement, and told him that the inevitable outcome would be horrid community relations and the Department bearing the brunt of the attack when the racial disparity became evident to the watchdogs. Further, this enforcement would be futile - it's not going to make the teens hanging out on a Harlem corner or in the Brooklyn projects suddenly start wearing masks.

But de Blasio overruled them, saying in essence, that he needed summons numbers, ne needed them fast, and he did not care where they came from. He was fully aware of the racial disparities in non-compliance, but he had to let people know that he was every bit as serious as Cuomo in the fight against Covid. He wanted the City government to look as strong as the State. He threatened the police brass and told them any precinct commander that is not on board should be removed. My friend was absolutely dumbstruck, calling me later that day saying "the fucking mayor is literally pitting our cops against black people so he can score points against the governor."

Of course, it played out exactly as predicted, and videos went viral of cops battling people of color on street corners over social distancing enforcement. The usual critics realized they had something good to hit the Department with, and (rightfully) went on the attack (see the below link).
In late April, George Floyd was murdered, the protests started, and all of this became suddenly irrelevant and went away.

But it was an episode that demonstrated what a POS that man was, and to say that the NYPD executives could not wait to be rid of de Blasio was an understatement. They could never have imagined that what was coming next could actually be worse.

• Click here for link at https://www.pubadvocate.nyc.gov/press/public-advocate-calls-

spouting the usual bullshit with regards to Covid policy.

Rather than jousting with the stupidity below from the peanut gallery, virtually none of whom had young kids during that bullshit, I’ll add a bit of an anecdote to support your observations.

We spent the first 3 - 4 months after the pandemic hit in Chicago locked up in our apartment 22 - 23 hours a day. Given the circumstances, it was the only option we had; we also had a very young baby boy (first of several now) that we were trying to acculturate, expose to the real world, have little other buddies to play with, etc. The Floyd riots were the last straw, and we accelerated plans we already had to get the fuck out of there and moved down South closer to family in late summer of 2020.

For work and family reasons, we spent a good deal of time in places like Montgomery, Jackson (MS and TN), Mobile, Chattanooga, Augusta, etc. in the subsequent months. For those that are unaware, these are majority African-American, impoverished, difficult places to govern that simply did not give a single fuck about following pandemic guidelines outside of the official government institutions like schools and city hall. To be 100% clear, it absolutely was not just those places and the don’t-give-a-fuck attitude was probably much stronger in places like eastern Tennessee and whatnot; I can still vividly remember, after leaving Chicago for the first time in at least 5 - 6 months, stopping at a gas station outside of Thompson’s Station, TN in late summer of 2020 and not a single person acting like they gave a shit about the pandemic - no masks, no distancing, no precautions whatsoever. It was invigorating to a degree I still can’t describe with words. The more white collar communities in Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and the like at least gave a passing nod through the summer of 2020 but in reality did not enforce it with any teeth past about July or August 2020. It was done for all practical purposes minus the odd hipster bar or restaurant.

Who was going to enforce pandemic guidelines in a place like Selma or Montgomery? I can assure you the local police had no interest in doing it. The Alabama state police sure as shit wouldn’t do it given the exact racial perception fears you outlined in your post.

One final, most important observation: the most heavily African-American cities in the South in states that largely stayed open barely saw any serious riot violence or uptick in criminal violence throughout that period compared to Seattle, SF, Oakland, Chicago, NYC, DC, and all the other dipshit city governments that largely shut down operations for extended periods of time. One would think that the Floyd riots would trigger serious unrest in places with actual, significant racial oppression (which places like Montgomery and Baton Rouge have no shortage of), but it was the places with the city governments that acted like the harshest tyrants that largely saw the worst results.

I realized I was stuck in some kind of 1984 liberal hellhole when it come to governmental policy. When you took off I envied you... but we had just demo'ed our house and I was stuck.

Even NYC was more sane than Chicago. When my dad passed unnecessarily in October of 2020 I flew to CT via LGA. I had to wear the mask in the airport but the second I got out into the city... no masks... anywhere. Meanwhile in Chicago, I could see neighbors wearing masks in their own homes. People in Connecticut came together to remember my dad. We kept our distance and tried to meet up outside but by and large everyone was reasonable.

When I went to Naples and Key West in December of 2020 it was as you described. There's nothing slack jawed about folks who snow bird in Naples, FL. Key West is a great balance between class and crass but again no masks in sight other than on bouncers and staff who I think were required by the state to wear them.

Finally, I know I'm a unique case in that I have business interests in Cicero and had at the time interests in the west side and little village, but NO ONE there obeyed the city. You could drive down cermack and see all of the mexican restaurants teeming with people while the white liberals on the north side locked everything down and wore their virtue signaling masks.

As you said, many people who think the measures were reasonable did not live in one of these deep blue cities and see how excessive this shit got. They certainly weren't rational with young kids living in these places. If I made a movie of our experience and showed it to someone in 2016 they would think it was made up. Hell I know many here just don't believe us when we talk about how awful it was to be in the city proper. It's sad... I used to defend this city on these boards constantly. Now I'm like "if I could invite all of you who were in charge into an octagon I would."

general wasn't great. My spouse and I missed her father's wedding (he had been widowed) because Cuomo had instituted a mandatory week long quarantine for anyone who left the tri-state area. I'm not inclined to go look it up, but that's what I remember. Her job is one that cannot be done remotely, so quarantining for a week was not a realistic option. That was just one of the many things that those in charge in NY foisted upon the little people.

I agree that everyone was trying to do their best, but also fully agree that there needs to be an open retrospective on this. Not a witch hunt, but a careful and deep analysis of what went well, what could have gone better, and what we can learn from the experience to improve when and if a similar situation arises in the future.

Call me on my bullshit.

Of the demographics of those cities and towns


Southern white folk are almost universally trumpsters.
Southern rednecks of course didn't wear masks. masks. You are a kind of Southern redneck

In my experience many African Americans were reluctant to get vaccinated and thus wore masks more than most and longer than most.

Wearing a mask was no heavy burden.

You bald southern redneck Trumpster.

I never got angry at anything but the virus.

And I support Black Lives Matter.

How dare you. My mop tops even the best of them back here. And Trumpster? The guy I've never supported nor voted for? Point out the instances there, please.

I am beginning to think you have me confused for someone else in your alcoholic-riddled mind.

unlike your pansy ass. Try again, fatty.

Has been a national phenomena. Several southern cities saw big Floyd protests including New Orleans linked below.

They also saw a big spike in murders from a baseline that puts northern cities to shame.

• Click here for link at https://www.nola.com/news/politics/a-year-after-george-floyd

locked down relatively hard for a suboptimal impact. A Democratic governor in JBE moving contra to his peers nearby with a very liberal mayor in Cantrell being advised by a dipshit public health advisor (and ND grad, unfortunately) in Avegno did a terrible job there. An already incredibly violent city got even more violent thanks to them. Louisville had a similar story that had extra gas thrown on the fire by the Breonna Taylor bullshit.

And none of them sans Louisville had the scale and violence that the protests on the coastal cities and upper Midwest (Chicago and Minneapolis) had. Not even close.

Year. Red states have seen murder increase at a rate higher than blue states from 2003 to 2023. The jump immediately post Floyd was substantial and even between red and blue states.

I also recall reading about substantial disorder/protesting in the wake of Floyd in Nashville Atlanta and Miami off the top of my head.

Personally I think the rioting vs protesting levels were multifactorial including real slights over police misconduct and prevelance of leftist nutjobs (Portland being the standout there). I recall some very blue areas doing well during that period. Camden was I think a good example as they reformed their police dept. Prior to Floyd and saw fewer issues.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/6abc.com/amp/new-jersey-protest-camden-george-floyd-peaceful/6223952/

• Click here for link at https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-mur

Miami. Nothing in the same universe as Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, etc.

February of 2021? Because we did. It was great living on a live action set of "Iraq... but in Chicago!" for 2 years.

And seeing their headquarters mobbed in Atlanta.

This article mentions the cities I discussed.

• Click here for link at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/george-floyd

A few flash mobs localized to protesting at CNN headquarters was a gnat compared to what happened in Chicago (where I lived for the first half of the year). A few dozen clowns in downtown Nashville tried to declare an autonomous zone similar to Capitol Hill; it lasted all of 5 hours.

Some of us actually knew by June 2020 that schools were not super spreaders. We knew that because a small few of us went back in early May 2020 and figured out how to make sure that schools weren't super spreaders. That included hybrid learning, scrubbing down desks (ha! this was silly), and ventilation (which actually worked really well, but was super uncomfortable in February).

All of the hard work that we put in allowed folks like airborne to gloat in retrospect. "The data shows..." We provided the data, when we had *no* idea what would work.

You're welcome.

would disagree. To say the older staff were all but forced to leave the professional was an understatement. The few that could not leave the profession, were forced to wear masks and face shields to not die. I am not using the team "die" loosely.

I was there in the weeds, too, from early May 2020 on. You don't have a profile, but most here know that I am also an educator (I predate Janet, so I've been here a while). I will guess that we were back in school before you were--we went back in early May 2020, and were onsite through the start of July.

We did a really great job of tracking cases throughout the pandemic, and we had no evidence of any transmission in the school (student to student or student to teacher), in large part because we had really strict protocols (which were miserable, but that's another story).Those protocols included mandatory N95/FFP2 masks for everyone, classroom windows and doors to be wide open for 5 minutes every 15 minutes, and testing everyone in the building at least three times per week, on site, first thing in the morning.

We were also really lucky in that teachers who were deemed high risk due to age or other factors were allowed to re-structure their jobs to work from home until vaccines were widely available.

I obviously don't think that we should have just thrown the doors open in May 2020 and let 'er rip. But man, the amount of damage that we did to kids by keeping them away from each other was *massive*. Massive. I still see it, every day.

You did the correct, noble, and responsible thing, and deserve tremendous credit for it. What you did, and what my son's Catholic school teachers did in 2020, was nothing short of heroic because of the leadership it demonstrated.

But it misses the larger point being made... that policy makers this side of the pond were willingly ignoring the data you provided, other public health data re: Covid and the young, and later data provided the American Catholic Schools, just to placate special interests. They put politics above science, and hurt America's children in the process.

I don't think anybody is gloating. It was infuriating then and it is infuriating now, because as BI pointed out in the original post, nobody has been held to account... and this failure diminishes regard for our public institutions. Airborne is pissed, and rightfully so.

With that broad a brush. This is an interview with Ashish Jha who Biden put in charge of COVID policy for a while. He was pushing to be more aggressive on opening schools in fall of 2020 but doing it in an evidence based way.

Normally you'd have a competent executive response and public health would provide information to balance risks vs benefits and such. Instead you had the president reject basic scientific facts and push reopening with no adjustment to the reality on the ground. Fauci had to co traditional POTUS on live TV not over policy but basic science.

That led to a false dichotomy over 100% open vs 100% lock down. A lot of governors on the left defaulted to the maximal shutdown possible instead of balancing factors like reasonable governors (examples being Polis in Colorado and Dewine in Ohio).

I fear the next time we have a pandemic (and I expect another in my lifetime) our lesson will be we should have YOLO'd the last one.

• Click here for link at https://www.edweek.org/leadership/schools-need-to-be-bolder-

Their analysis continues to ignore the costs of the quarantines, school policies etc.

It also assumes that the draconian measures saved lives when they did not.

Never again.

The assessment of the responses to the the pandemic will be the focus of healthcare and public health research for decades. I am certain there is a lot more to be learned about what worked and what didn’t, and what the short and long term costs really were.

But one thing is for certain. The next pandemic will not follow the rules of COVID.

There will likely be lessons we learned from this experience that will help us address the challenges of the next. However, the next pandemic may present, spread, and affect the population in ways very different than COVID and it could easily be the case that the best, or perhaps only, defense we would have as a population is severe widespread quarantine.

Those in charge in the future may be dealing with as uncertain and unclear challenges as those who were leading us in 2020 and 2021. Hopefully what we have learned with COVID will help. But ruling out the use of quarantines and lock downs could prove disastrous.

Is that something much worse will come along, authorities will try to stop it with quarantines/masks/lockdowns, and a subset of the population will say "fuck you, I'm going out."

The good news, I guess, is that viruses tend to be self-limiting. Sars-Cov2 was the sweet spot of infectiousness vs. mortality. Anything that kills more quickly (MERS?) doesn't last.

If COVID popped up in India and had a 5% mortality rate with a similar age distribution we'd get a similar picture in terms of catching it a month or two too late.

MERS and SARS didn't blow up primarily due to how they spread (at peak symptoms for both and MERS just doesn't spread well).

If SARS 1 spread like SARS COV 2 you might have seen societal breakdown/basic services shutting down. Scary stuff.

Let’s be extremely clear and precise on that.

If a new variant of covid is 10x - 30x deadlier than any of the prior versions, should we skip lockdowns again? Should we take into consideration the facts and circumstances of the situation at hand, or should we fight the last war?

I am not wasting time relitigating my conclusion. Simply put, the response was awful. That doesn’t mean the response would be appropriate give a different set of facts. The mask mandate ended in Chicago in February of 2022. Allowing local despots to abuse emergency powers and treat citizens worse than criminals is something that should only be tolerated in the most extreme of circumstances.

Old people dying a couple of years early because they have metabolic disease isn’t a valid justification for such outcomes. Holding out anecdotes about a few people who didn’t fit that profile doesn’t change the data. Further, there is no evidence any of these measures did anything. We knew early that COVID hit in waves and whom it impacted most.

Whatever.

With a hard (not soft) lockdown two weeks (two weeks!) earlier. Was that worth it? I guess it depends on whether or not it was one of your parents.

Whatever.

You really need to be less emotional about the issue.

Anger management and tranquilizers would definitely help.

Were under 65. That's an expected death curve for any pandemic with modern medicine at least until the health care system breaks down.

You say that as if the ridiculous measures that were enacted and remained in place through 2022 had any ameliorative impact or reduced that harm.

They did not. Through June of 2020 carte Blanche was warranted. After that measured skepticism was healthy. After the vaccine was released every ridiculous measure should have been subjected to strict scrutiny. They were not. They persisted and now the government will be viewed with heavy skepticism the next time there is an emergency.

Such skepticism will be warranted.

The first vaccine was approved in December. You have no fucking idea, and don't pretend that you do. I know that you are ignoring me, so I don't expect you to reply. Don't really care, actually--you are the world expert on everything, so I am probably wrong.

Like Fauci, Birx and the CDC. They put out guidelines for reopening safely. Trump countered with wanting everything open without help. You then got polarized responses. Included in that were idiots closing beaches, masking 2 yeas old etc.

I will say that once you got to school aged kids their ability to mask paralleled their parents attitude towards it. Among ny coworkers the kids were better about wearing masks than we were.

Attached is a thread that follows my thought process.

• Click here for link at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1740780365692723533.html

make his points without being a douchebag about it. Unfortunately, the ability to do so seems to be a thing of the past.

Edit to add - "he" in this context is the author of the thread that you linked.

I'll add that when the wretchedly horse-toothed Kathy Hochul became the governor of New York in August of 2021, following the Andrew Cuomo scandal, she further proved BI's point.

In her very first month as governor, she issued an executive order stating all children in daycare, aged 2-4, now had to wear masks in daycare facilities. So did the daycare providers. To Cuomo's credit, he followed the science closely enough to recognize that such an act would have been futile.

But Kathy wanted to be tough on Covid!

My youngest was 2.5 years old at the time. My wife and I had both been vaccinated, as had every member of the daycare staff.

He struggled to wear a mask for eight hours a day, struggled to express his words and emotions while wearing a mask, and struggled to read cues given to him by the masked staff members. It was horrible.

The science was clear at this point that masking 2 year olds created more harm then good. The treatment was worse than the disease. But where was Fauci to repudiate this decree by Hochul? He remained silent as not to run afoul of a political ally.

Maybe you're not a parent. OK. But I am. And to parrot BI, government "botched it." And my child suffered.

• Click here for link at https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/Hochul-says-masks-w

And before anyone says "nice source" the photo is from the Gov's facebook page, as captured by someone on Twitter...I liked the "MS Paint" vibe of this particular one. Goes with the pre-school mental processes of the people standing in the back row of the picture.

GFY

election was, too. As much as I was admonished about it, I still contend that the environment around running and serving as a politician is such that we wind up with terrible candidates, and the primaries wind up pushing more moderate voices aside in favor of those with more extreme views. Hochul is misguided and seemingly hell-bent on imposing her wrong and harmful policies on the state, Yet, she was elected. One of these years I will get out of here. To where, I do not know. Hopefully somewhere with a more moderate regime and population, so that I can avoid lunatics on both ends of the spectrum.

It's purple. More sanity than insanity. Sure, the taxes are not as low as Florida, Texas, South Carolina, or Tennessee, but I do not find them to be burdensome, like I did in New York and Connecticut.

I certainly have my policy preferences, which skew to the right, but I've come to believe that single party rule - in either direction - is a bad thing and that both parties need each other to find balance.

And the BBQ here is kick-ass.

as we love our house and our property, we don't love the state or frankly most of our fellow residents where we live, and it's not specifically about political affiliation as our area is not aligned with the overall state leaning. As you well know as a former resident the less populated areas aren't in agreement with those closer to the big cities. But, there are other issues, as there are anywhere. I am an independent, focused on what I believe would be prudent choices rather than pushing an agenda from either side. Watching the potential of the area being squandered has been heartbreaking. I agree with you that single party rule is a problem. I'm living it - see prior comment. As for the barbecue, NC is good, but having grown up in Kansas City, I still prefer it.

I'm glad that you are enjoying NC. If we decamp from NY, we likely would wind up in PA until such time as we decided to move someplace like NC. Unless things get horrific here, going to PA is unlikely, as we have decades invested in our house and property and enjoy it. The day will come, though, of that I am certain.

Have a great day and a happy new year!

..."you have no idea, can never know and will never know." Know what? 2020 was as horrific a time for me and my family as it was for your and yours. Like everyone else, I hunkered down and got my shots at the earliest opportunity.

"...non-military who purports to argue with your assessment of your service" What does that mean? What assessment are you talking about. I'll bet you could not describe in any way what my service involved.

I taught remotely for two weeks, and then dove back in. When y'all start talking about "what does your back to work wardrobe look like?" I just chuckle. I didn't have it as bad as Vermin, but I don't have any experience with work-from-home, because we didn't really do it for long.

(Sorry, I was trying to find a way to phrase that and went ambiguous for the “wait, what?” With a small dose of awkward humor)

Those of us in the US are well versed in how wildly the individual states over or under corrected in 2020 based on a lack of good federal guidance. Hell, even if we’d had a competent administration, we’re not set up for a strong federal response with 50 state health models. As a result you have people championing Florida or California or whatever and I think neither angle had it completely right.

We all read stories (and your reports!) in 2020 about Germany’s methods - boosting businesses to pay employees (rather than haphazardly trying to make them apply), having consistent rules that changed on the best available data and people who actually followed them.

But certainly nobody bats 1.000, right? What are some things that could have gone better over there?

We were building the plane while we were flying it. No one had it completely right or completely wrong.

IMHO vaccines were the biggest failure. Our response was so unbelievably slow--we didn't order enough doses, our vaccine board didn't recommend them for kids for a *long* time after we had gotten through the high-risk population, and we are *still* only recommending it for the highest risk individuals. So, unlike my mom who has had six shots (eh, feels excessive, but still...) and no Covid, I have had three shots and two bouts with the illness.

I also thought that our restrictions on outdoor activities were too harsh for too long. We were ahead of some countries on encouraging people to get get out for a walk or a run or a bike ride, but not with *anyone* else. I think the thing that made the Bavarians say "enough's enough" was cancelling the (outdoor) Christmas markets in December 2021. I think that they lost the "hearts and minds" battle at that point.

Schools were hit/miss. We did a lot right, prioritizing onsite learning was good, and how we made sure that schools were safe was great, but the way that we did it (being told by the county which students would be onsite, hybrid, or remote, every Friday for the following week) led to a lack of consistency and security that hurt *everyone.*

On a related note, the German educational authorities failed in a big way to learn *anything* from the many great, innovative things that we did with remote learning during the pandemic. 18 inches of snow, followed by an ice storm? Airport is closed, trains aren't running? Doesn't matter--get to school today or else.

There is a school of thought that the autumn 2020 lockdown was too soft and too late. I think that this is probably valid, as we could likely have saved a lot of lives in that short period of time. But, if we could have then rolled out vaccines quickly in January, we'd have been in a great place. That...didn't happen.

I think that the best things that we did (at least from a school perspective) were testing and ventilation. Everyone tested onsite at least 3x per week (for a while it was every morning), and we were required to open the windows for 5 minutes every 15. I don't ever want to do that again, but it worked.

I had to confront this virus every single day, I had the added burden of knowing that because of my job I was a major threat to anyone I cared about, I was shunned by some of my family with good reason because I saw that virus kill countless people and leave more permanently disabled. You never saw that aspect, the media never saw that aspect because of both federal guidelines (HIPPA) and the ethics of healthcare professionals. My darkest days were November-December 2020, the vaccine was a miracle I first received on Christmas Eve 2020. That finally gave me hope.

I know I know nothing about your service, I respect that I know nothing and always shut up when I’m told that by any veteran. I’m asking for that same respect and deference in this matter because while the world baked sourdough bread, dealt with zooming everything and having kids not go to school, I had to suit up, face death head on using communal masks I had to share and reuse (despite them being designed to be a one time use item) with no means to stop or even slow disease progression, go see patients in makeshift hospital rooms (because all our normal rooms were full,) and put my life in danger because that was my job and my duty during a god damm plague.

Quarantining saved lives by pushing peoples first illnesses until after they were vaccinated thankfully a majority of this country did not get the disease until after they were vaccinated, unfortunately this has caused most to conclude Covid was a big joke and the thing that saved their lives (quarantining and the vaccine) were unneeded bothers. I pray I’m retired before an illness proves the common idiot wrong.

Why, then, bring it up? What does my long-ago service have to do with Covid?

…so trust that he has a different perspective and knowledge base, just as you do about the realities of military service.

I cannot imagine the horror you saw nor comprehend the level of courage you have to have faced it the way you did. I remember your daily posts describing the situation you faced. They were incredible and I salute you for what you did.

A granddaughter of mine was firmly in the anti-vax contingent. Firmly. Absolutely.

Then a cousin of hers, a young woman who had been like a sister growing up next door, caught the virus. It killed her and did it slowly enough to make the full horror of the situation clear to all three of my grandkids in that branch of the family. More than two years later, they still cannot talk about it without tears.

And all of them are fully vaxxed. They saw nothing of the horror that you did, but one much-loved patient was sufficient for them to learn the truth.

The day is coming when the anti-vax movement will combine with the home schoolers to produce a degraded herd immunity that will have terrible, and totally preventable, consequences.

school our children, but painting everyone who does with a broad brush is neither warranted nor welcome.

is part of the "Parental Rights" coalition that also includes the anti-vaccination requirements folks. Many of the home schoolers are anti-vax as well and the result is that they are an important part of the fight against vaccine requirements for school kids, especially the kids who are home schooled.

The article at the link has a bit about it. So does this article, albeit a minor part. There have been others as well.

https://wapo.st/3H5dTbf



*I get a lot of my information from the WaPo. It's definitely a bit to the left of center, but the reporting is really pretty good.

• Click here for link at https://wapo.st/3S2YIFy

defend it by saying "according to WaPo" and citing an opinion piece. That some home schoolers are also anti-vaxxers means what? If you want to attack anti-vaxxers, so be it. But your post includes a cheap shot at home schoolers, who have every right in the world to raise their kids and teach them as they see fit, rather than as some fucked up powers that be want to indoctrinate them.

There are places where there are exceptional school environments and educators, and places where there are not.

have every right in the world to raise their kids as they see fit". Ok for the parents, but what about the kids?

The home school movement makes the parental rights argument an absolute. Thus a significant part of our school age children are being educated in an environment that rejects any form of regulation, be it for health, the credentials of the educators, or the curriculum studied. While I'm confident that many of these schooling efforts are doing a good job, I've also seen people with no teaching skills or language capability teaching kids Spanish in their home schooling efforts.

Thus, my concern is about "places where there are not." That includes rejecting some - many- all vaccinations for the kids. Is it the parent's right to put their kid at risk of the diseases that the industrialized world has managed to all but eliminate through vaccination? Note that it was through vaccination that smallpox was eliminated.

Whether you agree or not, there are very serious health and educational effectiveness issues in this. While the parents are making the decisions involved, it is the children who live with the results.

As to cheap shots, do you have any reference whatsoever that disputes my assertion that there is a significant overlap between the home school and anti-vaxx communities? It's fine to just blast away if you want, but an intellectual discussion here requires something beyond simply asserting that I'm either wrong or unfair.

Including them simply reveals your inherent bias.

Be well, and have a nice day.

Is it bias about the home school community? Perhaps. If it is, it was developed as I watched family members home schooling their children. Is it bias about the anti-vax movement? If it is, it has developed as I've watched that group using everything from misinformation to outright lies to promote the idea that the diseases are better than the vaccines. Is it bias because I've concluded that the two movements include a lot of the same people, both from reporting that I can reference and from personal observation that I can't?

But on what do you base your assertion, or what I believe your assertion to be, that the home school community does not include a significant number of anti-vax believers? Or is it that the anti-vax community does not include a lot of home school believers?

I don't understand the basis for your assertion.

But this is of no matter. My best to you, and to all ndnation posters, for a wonderful New Year.

You have the ultra crunchy left and the zealous right and everything in between. The most vehement anti-vaxer I came across during our homeschooling time was a woman who was an anti-religious vegan meat is murder nutter. On the other hand, another family simply turned in the exemption form because they didn't care what the Board of Ed though their kids should get - their kids were fully vaccinated (except for one vaccine for a toddler aged disease that wasn't relevant to their teenage kids...).

I see your anecdotes and raise you mine.

There's a school of Christian thought that views public schooling/public sector rules as anathema to their morality.they also operate private schools. In a horse shoe fashion there's cross pollination with hippie wierdos on the left. This faction represents an opposition to general public health measures and childhood vaccination.

Concerns about homeschooling is more a symptom of that development. There are several good reasons to homeschooling, but a lot of homeschooling fall into that camp. By painting all homeschooling with that brush you're likely to push other people into the camp you're looking to avoid.

to that of some ex-smokers. That is, to me you seem to be unwilling or incapable of seeing nuance or shades of grey in positions, particularly those with which you disagree. Not everyone who home schools their children has motivations that a reasonable person would find objectionable. If you want to assert that the Venn diagram of those two groups has significant overlap, please cite studies that bear out that conclusion.

It felt like a gratuitous shot out of the blue, which as I noted was neither warranted nor welcome. It was an inflammatory statement for no good reason.

While we disagree fairly strongly, I thank you for your well-wishes and I extend the same to you and your family. Have a happy and healthy New Year.

Talk about your gratuitous shot out of the blue.

Not everyone who is an ex-smoker gives a shit about people smoking. If you want to assert that Venn diagram...eh, never mind. I'm just fuckin' with ya. I really don't give a shit. I actually still like the smell of secondhand smoke.

Happy New Year.

what came to mind. I'll edit to add _some_ ex-smokers.

Have a Happy New Year as well!

We have just in time supply chains for about everything, including basic medications. Most generic medications we use come from China/India. Our ability to mass produce a lot of workhorse medications are similar to ppe.

What we saw in every country that let it rip was a bad variant. Brazil got gamma. Sub Sahara africa got beta. India eventually got delta, etc.

Gamma was 3 to 4 times more deadly than our original variant. Beta was 2 or 3 times worse. Delta was 2 to 3 times worse. The reason delta overwhelmed everyone was massively worse transmissibility.

Brazil had total breakdown of hospital services in one city. I heard a doctor discuss how they had neonates dying of non COVID diseases that are 100% survivable without any disability because they ran out of oxygen. Hell, Los Angeles was having oxygen distribution issues in January After the release of The Great Barrington Declaration when they had a much wimpier variant.

‘Our New York Moment’: Southern California Reels as Virus Surges https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/california-coronavirus.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

• Click here for link at https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/in-los-angeles-and-be

2020 was the worst year of my professional life. I have never seen so much death in such a wanton manner. If you didn’t experience it, you can’t understand it.