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.