As some of you may have heard, an epidemic of coronavirus has finally reached the rich and powerful in Washington, D.C. One infected soul (or soul-less?) is Donald J. Trump, age 74. The progress of his COVID-19 encounter mesmerized Americans, but I never saw any coverage of people concerned about deaths or serious long-term health consequences for the under-70 politicians and staff. From this can we infer that Americans don’t think that COVID-19 is hazardous for those under-70? (Maskachusetts removed the age-related statistics from its dashboard in mid-August, but the memories may linger!)
On the other hand, we are informed that schools have to be kept closed to protect students. When science deniers object that no person under 20 has ever died from/with COVID-19 here in MA, for example, the School Shutdown Karen shifts gears to say that it is, in fact, teachers who have to be protected. But unionized public school teachers can retire with full inflation-adjusted pension benefits and unlimited health insurance when they’re in their 50s. So there shouldn’t actually be anyone over 70 in a school building.
How to explain the apparent logical discrepancy?
Some background from the Official Newspaper of the Shutdown Karens, “‘I Don’t Want to Go Back’: Many Teachers Are Fearful and Angry Over Pressure to Return” (NYT, July):
“I want to serve the students, but it’s hard to say you’re going to sacrifice all of the teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers and bus drivers,” said Hannah Wysong, a teacher at the Esperanza Community School in Tempe, Ariz., where virus cases are increasing.
On social media, teachers across the country promoted the hashtag #14daysnonewcases, with some pledging to refuse to enter classrooms until the coronavirus transmission rate in their counties falls, essentially, to zero.
From Mini Mike, “Teachers Sue to Keep Schools Shut as Parents Demand They Reopen” (Bloomberg, July):
The Florida Education Association, a group of teachers unions, filed suit Monday to block an emergency order to reopen schools next month despite a spike in coronavirus infections. Meanwhile, a lawsuit in New York is seeking to ensure that schools there aren’t closed for the fall term.
On the other end of the argument, a woman and her two children in Brooklyn last week filed suit against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is still deciding whether to allow schools to reopen this fall. The suit claims the state’s order to keep schools shut thus far and offer only online instruction is unconstitutional because it leads to disparate treatment for students with special needs.
From North Carolina, this month, “Wake teachers warn board that reopening schools will put people at risk of dying” (they don’t have “Woke teachers” like we do here in the Boston suburbs?):
“It’s heartbreaking for me as a teacher because I want to see my students so badly in person, and they’re really struggling,” said Ginny Clayton, a teacher at Cary High School. “But that’s not the criteria for coming back to school — it’s safety. We ultimately have to do what’s right by our kids by keeping them safe.”
“Every meeting should be about getting our kids back into school,” said Christine Hale, a Wake parent. “Nothing should be more important to the Board of Education than education.
The board’s decision to reopen schools has angered many teachers, especially because the majority of principals wanted to continue having online classes for students in fourth through eighth grades for the rest of the semester.
Readers: If teachers aged 22-57 have a significant risk of dying from COVID-19, as the teacher unions say, why didn’t we see a lot of stories about people concerned regarding the health of Melania Trump (age 50)? From the NYT:
Many of these political brothers/sisters/binary resisters appear to be roughly the same age (or beyond) as a senior school teacher. Why aren’t the people who want to keep schools shut concerned for their well-being in the face of the killer coronavirus?
Afternoon update, from a school in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, “Keep Our Learners Safe”:
The adults are altruistically keeping the children safe from a disease that has never killed anyone their age in their state (nor in Maskachusetts, through mid-August when the statistics began to be withheld).
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Excerpt from the CDC table for “teaching age” population
Deaths
age covid all population
25–34 years 1,541 47,522 45,940,321
35–44 years 4,039 67,177 41,659,144
45–54 years 10,627 123,171 40,874,902
55–64 years 25,421 281,571 42,448,537
It is simple. The best propagandists are ones who believe what they are spreading. They may be wrong, but technically they are not lying as they believe in the spell. Much better for our lords than having skeptics teaching ‘teaching’ ‘real science’ to children. The princess ‘rona hoax(or overreaction if you must) is going to work the best on the folks whose job it is to believe and pass on ‘real science.’ Teachers are friendly fire causalities we can all laugh at.
Looking at the CDC stats, it appears that about 8% of older working-age deaths involved Covid-19. Presumably some of those people had underlying conditions, may not have been able to work, might have died anyway, etc. There may be other cases in which Covid-19 was a factor, but went unreported. So it’s hard to interpret the statistics and there’s plenty of room to quibble. I am personally familiar with one case in Massachusetts of a 30-something male, small business owner, seemingly in vigorous good health, who caught Covid-19 and promptly died. I suspect many people tend to be heavily affected by whether (or not) they have personal knowledge of such cases, and less by abstract statistics. Everyone that I have met, who knows someone who died or became seriously ill with Covid-19, takes it very seriously and in a couple of cases I can think of, completely changed their tune when that happened.
Any exceptions anyone is personally aware of?
This is called availability bias and should not be the basis of serious decision making, even less so policymaking.
It’s widely accepted as a fallacy that leads to erroneous decisions with suboptimal results.
Whatever eventually happens with all of the teacher’s unions and Departments of Education in America, there are going to be winners and losers in the broader economy.
Keeping millions of school-age kids at home and out of the classroom has massively increased the demand for entertainment on TikTok and recently, Triller. So if you’re a property owner in the Hollywood Hills or Laurel Canyon, you can run a party house or a collab and make a lot of money providing content to Gen Z and whatever is after Gen Z, trapped at home in their hovels. [Note: Triller was started in 2015 as an alternative to TikTok and took off with more gusto this year: “On Aug. 15, the president’s social team began publishing videos under his name. When a rap contest called the #MAGAChallenge took off on Triller, President Trump tweeted that he would fly the winners of the contest to the White House. (Two Triller employees resigned from the company after the challenge went viral.) Donald Trump Jr. joined Triller in early September and posted an eight-minute monologue on how he believes TikTok is bad for America.”]
Winners: people with insane party mansions in the greater Los Angeles area:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-09/inside-l-a-s-tiktok-party-house-real-estate-boom
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/style/triller-app-tiktok.html?referringSource=articleShare
Losers:
Nobody wants to run a TikTok/Triller content/party house in Williamson, WV, even when one of their nurses speaks about COVID at the RNC:
https://news.yahoo.com/nurse-spoke-rnc-arrested-shooting-124612077.html
“President Trump recognized the threat this virus presented for all Americans early on, and made rapid policy changes,” Ford, referring to the expansion of telehealth services, said in her nearly three-minute speech. “As a health-care professional I can tell you without hesitation: Donald Trump’s quick action and leadership saved thousands of lives during COVID-19, and the benefits of that response extend far beyond coronavirus.”
Winners Always Win. And the more kids stay home longer, the the more the winners will.
Google Street View of US-52 in Williamson, WV:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6708803,-82.2750192,3a,38.6y,2.56h,94.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sGXEv2KyyT9f258itXBrtZA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
And school is for losers, anyway. What’s studying hard and delayed gratification gonna git ‘ya in the world of the future?
From the NYT article above:
“The world moves fast,” he said. “It’s all instant gratification. There’s instant fame and instant content, and we think this is how the future of the world is going to be.”
YouTube Makeup Artist Jeffree Star is definitely a sweepstakes winner:
https://www.dirt.com/entertainers/influencers/jeffree-star-house-hidden-hills-1203304083/
“Star purchased the Calabasas pad for about $3.6 million but has since invested huge sums of money into personalizing the place: there are tufted pink walls, pink mirrors, and a custom pink vault with a multimillion-dollar collection of handbags and accessories, all guarded by a door crafted from 10,000 pounds of bulletproof stainless steel.”
That was the “starter mansion” Jeffree “outgrew.”
“According to Star, one of the reasons the pair decided to upgrade was simply because “there is so much shit everywhere,” in their current home.”