The loonies were a very small set of people. They were used to tarnish the reputation of anybody who was even a wee bit skeptical of what society was doing. Just because somebody thinks closing schools for more than a year and a half is a bad idea doesn't make them a loony conspiracy theorist. Just because somebody thinks the harms of the mandates were worse than any benefit they provided doesn't make them a loony. 99% of all people were in the "non-loony" bucket. 1% were actual loonies, but according to "the experts" the whole set of skeptics are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous nonsense".
By the way, multiple times I've been accused of spreading "dangerous nonsense" by linking to state dashboards that clearly demonstrate how age-stratified covid is. Apparently linking to public datasets is now "misinformation".
Crazy crazy crazy...
As an under the age of 30 person, Covid is a small threat. But asking questions about a government mandated vaccine that was rushed through testing in an unprecedented manner labels you a loony. Questions like who is going to be liable for the inevitable even if small bad reactions? Not big pharma, they were absolved in the contract of all liability. If they were so confident and if this is so safe that I don’t have to worry about it as a citizen why did the lawyers ensure that they wouldn’t be liable?
What about the precedence of liberty this sets? In a series of weeks the government removed nearly all agency overnight and everyone complied. There was no real debate on pros and cons of the total lockdown.
The ineffectiveness of masks other than n95 when changed out daily. Which nobody had.
I have friends that still won’t consider the vanity fair article or lab leak theory as anything other than conspiracy.
Oh yea and the ever falling efficacy of the vaccine itself.
But let’s check cress to make sure I’m a dr.
Not only was there no debate, but even dissent was discouraged or even outlawed. No gatherings larger than 10 people allowed. Hard to rally against losing your freedom of movement when you can't leave your house.
[0]: https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-im-losing-trust-in-th... - the original report is at https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... with the quote on slide 31
The standards were political from the start.
The anti-lockdown protests, on the other hand were encouraged by... A few cops looking bored. Which is strange, because COVID has been the #1 killer of police officers since the pandemic started.
https://nleomf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021-EOY-Fatal...
Vaccination rates among LEOs were much lower than those other professions, which, unsurprisingly, resulted in substantially more serious illnesses and deaths.
How did you know this? What information did you use to determine that a 30 year old? How did you know to trust it? Did your view on this change in March 2020 vs March 2022 as more data and studies were introduced?
The JHU site provided metrics and details of fatality rates for ages based on comorbidities and weight, among other variables
> What information did you use to determine that a 30 year old?
I referenced the JHU site
> How did you know to trust it?
The JHU data was based on the best available data at the time, and was regularly updated.
> Did your view on this change in March 2020 vs March 2022 as more data and studies were introduced?
I've heard various things about whether or not the JHU data was negative enough or positive enough, but as far as a top line for mortality, it seemed accurate given the data at the time.
In retrospect, the fatality numbers may have been too high, but, that may also have been as a result of improving therapeutics, and recognition that some of the early responses such as putting patients on higher pressure ventilators was contraindicated.
This is further complicated by variant types which have different amounts of lethality.
But how did you decide that JHU was presenting accurate data?
Do you have a PhD in virology?
Are you a medical doctor?
Are you a biomedical engineer?
The worst types of credentialism!
You're doing the exact thing you decry in your post by painting "the experts" with a broad brush and scare quotes as being unreasonable and hyperinflammatory in their rhetoric. Not everyone who was for school closings and lockdowns was calling their opponents "grandma killing loonies". People need to stop arguing from the extreme.
The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice.
So in other words, 99% of the people were in the non-loony bucket, and you're focused on the 1% that yelled at you?
I could turn your statement around. As a teacher, I've been called a child abuser by a person I know in real life for wanting teachers to have a safe working environment. The people doing this may be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone.
So I really fail to see how what you're doing now in your second post is different from what you decry in your first.
In most cases the actual classroom teachers that I talked with didn't even support those policies. It was the teacher's unions which did most of the damage.
The "keep schools open" crowd often floated a false dichotomy where the option was between schooling as normal or closed schools. Schooling as normal was never a realistic option for many districts with missing faculty and staff. They would say "kids are not susceptible to covid, therefore schools are safe" without any concern about teachers who in fact died due to covid, as happened in my district.
Today we're facing a national teacher shortage where those who would have thought about teaching are steering clear of the field, and those currently in it are looking to get out asap. The rhetoric you're displaying here is a large part of the reason why.
Maybe not, but it's what they did do.
For some reason, people mix up intentions and consequences all the time. The intentions may have been good; the consequences were not.
I've found that people who are not teachers and who have no idea what it's like to run a school are very quick to pass judgement when it comes to this issue. Usually digging a little deeper it's very easy to find this quickness to blame stems from various political viewpoints rather than any expertise or knowledge about the situation on the ground. Most people I've found blaming teachers like this don't even have any kids in school.
Anyway, teachers are the ones on the front line right now trying to fix the problems that children face today due to the pandemic, so please spare me your moralizing about how teachers are abusers and conspired to inflict collective punishment on children. What are you doing to fix the problems?
Person you replied to never said that. Could have been like my kid's school, where the kid/teacher missed a couple weeks but other than that the teachers that didn't die or whatever eventually came back and taught the kids in class in person.
>showstopping complications.
Well somehow they weren't as my county got hit worst than most and yet somehow my kid still got schooled, just through a private school. Didn't stop the show for those willing to keep the show going.
>Most people I've found blaming teachers
I definitely don't blame teachers in general. My kids teachers were great. Awesome people. The ones that gave up, and said well thinsg are challenging and I might die or whatever, well that's fine I don't blame them either. Go on and find another profession or whatever, you're not a slave. But I salute the ones who stuck around like my kid's teacher who was willing to adapt and overcome to keep things going so my child didn't get so far behind.
>abusers
The person you replied to never said teachers are "abusers."
It almost sounds like you're arguing against some other person you have beef with, rather than the person who replied to you. Either way I don't know what to tell you. My kid, and her teacher kept going on through COVID in person somehow, so I guess they proved the impossible can actually happen. We lived in our alternate reality where it is possible, and you lived in one where it was a 'showstopper.'
The problem children face today aren’t because of the pandemic. They are entirely the fault of peoples reaction to Covid. Covid didn’t close schools in blue states and then force them to wear masks. Humans did.
And when I have a kid, I will be homeschooling.
Please don't assume.
Also, I was briefly a bus driver for a school district during COVID. I was disgusted by how the school buses were run, refusing to allow students to board without masks, requiring masks on the drivers when that affected the amount of oxygen to the brain. It was a mess.
People in my district tried to protest, including me, but the police refused to let them into school board meetings, which is illegal in my state.
If anything, what you're saying feels like you telling me to believe you and not my "lying" eyes.
> Very few people died.
It takes very few deaths to throw a school and even a district into disarray. In my post history I post about 40 teachers dying in Georgia during a short period of time, whose median age was 46. What kind of effect do you think that has on other teachers, the students, and the district? Outsiders who want to argue from political positions don't want to talk about those realities. Instead they fall back to aggregate statistics like "very few died" that minimize the sheer tragedy of the situation.
IMO society could tolerate an extremely high number of deaths if it means putting their children on the best foot. Hell we tolerate a pretty high death rate just to put crabs on the table for people in a seafood restaurant. Our kids are definitely worth more than crabs. But teachers need to be compensated for this risk, and fully informed of the risks ahead of time so that they won't become upset later that they're getting into something they didn't bargain for. And it needs to be fully consensual, so teachers who want to walk away from the job should not be penalized for ending their contract. Lets bring in the risk takers who are willing to be there in person with our children, and like crab fisherman lets reward them handsomely for this risk. For those not up to the task, there is no shame in walking away.
This is what I'm talking about when I said "false dichotomy".
Teachers were educating children during the pandemic. I was educating children. They actually did learn remotely. Sure, it wasn't the best learning environment for all students, and it certainly affected lower income students disproportionately. But students did learn, as indicated by my final exams. But to say the choice was between educating and not educating is false. It was a choice between different modes of suboptimal learning with different risk profiles for different demographics.
I can accept that society must take some risks to educate children. I cannot accept others screaming that teachers must take inflated risks beyond what they signed up for, otherwise they are child abusers.
The other part of it is the idea that learning in the classroom during the pandemic would have been fully optimal for students. This view seems to miss the point. What happens when Mrs. Jones the history teacher dies suddenly in the middle of the semester? Do you just find someone to replace her during the pandemic? Is there a competent substitute waiting to take their place (hint: there isn't)? And even if you do find one, what happens when they get sick and they need to miss 3 weeks of class? Do you have a second substitute ready to take their place? Is math teacher or the gym teacher going to have to sub in to teach history? Do they even know the curriculum? What happens when half your class gets sick and has to learn from home anyway? Does the teacher deliver two modes of instruction (when they're already worked to the max)? What do you think happens to student outcomes when their favorite teacher dies suddenly, and following her is a parade of adults of unknown competency, each who have no idea who you are as a student? Is that what we call "educating children"? And before anyone accuses me of speaking in hypotheticals or counterfactuals again, this is a real scenario that happened in our district.
> Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach
A teacher dying during the semester is a very rare thing. It's a scramble for the district to handle that scenario in the best of times. 40 teachers with a median age of 46 dying over the span of 6 months never happens. Not because of traffic, not because of freak accidents, not because of other communicable diseases. Except Covid.
> 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood
This is what I mean by people who are unfamiliar with the way things work framing their arguments in aggregate statistics. It blurs everything in with the effect of removing all meaning from the deaths, which I appreciate you note are tragic. But this kind of comparison of aggregate statistics removes the deaths from the context in which they occur, effectively sanitizing them.
Logging is regarded as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, so that's pretty shocking that the rate of death of teachers in Georgia over 6 months was as high as 1/3 that rate. Moreover, deaths of loggers don't completely shut down the logging operation because it has no impact whatsoever on the ability of the trees to be cut down. There's no need to set up grief counseling for the trees. There's no need for the replacement logger to spend weeks getting acquainted with the trees. You're not giving a paper salesman on-the-job-training to replace the logger. Fewer loggers doesn't impact the safety of the trees.
> But teachers need to be compensated for this risk
This was never offered an as option by society writ large, who I guess don't agree with you and I that educating children is more valuable than crabs. So while I agree with you and appreciate your sentiment that educating children is an important function of society and teachers should be compensated well for their efforts, it was never on the table.
Instead, what was offered was an unending stream of abuse that continues to this day, as teachers were called Nazis, unamerican, traitors, abusers, and the worst of all groomers. Compensating teachers in proportion to the risk they were taking was never proffered as an option by the crowd who wanted to open schools. I actually appreciate you saying this. But what ended up happening was that endless abuse ensued, and so people just decided it wasn't worth it to face the abuse and a life-threatening disease. People retired early, people decided against joining the profession, people died, and it left a lot of very bad options. The worst part is that even today on this thread, those very bad options are collectively boxed up as "inflicting intentional punishment" by posters even here on this site, which is probably the most polite opinion in that genre I've heard.
When these teachers signed up, many didn't sign up for the risks of COVID (however large... or small they may actually be). They didn't sign up for the psychological stress that put on them either. For that, I feel bad for them, and I'll explain why.
They were offered virtually nothing in exchange for "changing up the game." They weren't compensated for these new conditions. Some, not all, but some rather than just saying out loud "fuck you not worth it" came up with faux-philosophical reasons for why they rejected this, such as scientifically unproven conjecture that the children would be better off remote. But had they been properly incentivized, I think their reasoning (as it usually does) will chase what benefits them.
We wasted tons of money pumping it into low-interest asset accumulation and 'free' business loans. I would have spent some of that money instead DOUBLING teacher pay as a reward for 'risk' (whether it be mostly purely psychological, or not, or whatever) of enduring COVID.
I would then offer the teachers this doubled wage as compensation for this risk. Teachers that can get with the program (doing in-person, or remote, as desired by the families) would stay on. Everyone else would be fired with a 1 year severance to find a new job, and the doubled wages being used incentivize replacements.
IMO elevated adult risk, and even some elevated child risk, is justified in the name of education. We seem to intuitively understand this as many of us may engage in dangerous trades or risks to help our children, but then again a stranger should be fairly compensated for such risk. I think had we compensated these teachers in a way they were fattening their bones for staying in class we would have been flooded with (for self-serving reasons) "facts" from teachers about how great in-person learning is and how everybody should be doing it.