Some more thoughts on the pandemic from recent articles and op-eds in the press.
In his Wall Street Journal column, Holman Jenkins hits the nail on the head in examining where governments failed from the start of the pandemic—not distinguishing between high risk and low risk populations, and focusing efforts on those at highest risk.
Indeed, so much of what we became hysterical about—mask wearing and vaccine hesitancy as applied to the low-risk—was a poor substitute for communicating about and acting on distinctions in risk.
The worst part is we knew better on day one, but political imperative did not favor realistic communication about risk or prioritization.
A remarkable finding that emphasizes this point, as I noted recently, is that unvaccinated children have a similar risk profile as vaccinated 50 year olds and most likely even vaccinated 30 year olds. Jenkins goes on to comment:
[T]he idea that everybody’s vaccination status is everybody else’s business rests on increasingly forlorn assumptions. The shrinking number of Americans who are both high-risk and unvaccinated may be fools but the consequences fall mostly on themselves.
As long ago as May 2020, we knew from scientific studies that COVID-19 was not being transmitted via contact with surfaces, yet the COVID-theatre rituals of deep cleaning persisted. As suggested in Nature in January this year, it’s likely this is because it’s easier to clean than to do the costly and hard work that actually protects people such as installing better air ventilation systems.
Nevertheless, it’s good to see (per the Sydney Morning Herald) that schools in places like New South Wales, Australia are finally abandoning the terrible practice of closing schools for deep cleaning when cases of COVID are discovered. Some other restrictions are also being relaxed. Unfortunately for students and vaccinated teachers there, the wearing of masks and negative test requirements following close contacts persist.
On the subject of masks in schools, Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins made some useful comments in a recent interview with Bari Weiss:
Cloth masks barely work. The cluster randomized trial was in adults, and we know kids are less efficient transmitters, so we’re fooling ourselves. Also, kids with learning disabilities are now showing up to speech pathologists because they can’t speak well because they’re not visualizing the foundation of words. We’re hearing guidance counselors talk about an influx of kids with all kinds of disconnect problems. Five percent of school-aged kids wear glasses. When they wear a mask, they’re fogging up their glasses. One kid told me he took off his glasses in class just because he can’t see with them on in the mask.
What are we doing? We’ve lost our sense of being reasonable. If there is an active outbreak maybe a surgical mask makes sense. But what we’re doing now is using an indiscriminate mask policy at times when it may not even be working, and we don’t have any data that it is.
While a lot of commentary on Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s loss to Republican Glenn Youngkin in the recent governor race in Virginia suggested the teaching of critical race theory in schools was a factor, it seems that may be a misreading of the role education played in the election. Recent focus groups suggest a bigger factor was the closure of schools during the pandemic and how long they were kept closed. The report noted:
Participants felt that officials had closed the schools and kept them closed without regard to science. One woman who voted for Biden for president and then Youngkin for governor said her vote was “against the party that closed the schools for so long last year.”
Related posts:
Like most parents, we won’t be giving our kids the COVID vaccine right away
The perils of COVID-zero—how policymakers should manage endemic COVID-19
No, children with COVID-19 aren’t filling up Texas intensive care units
The Private Sector’s COVID-Era Triumph
Pandemic learning gaps make clear the need for public school reform
Don’t let COVID-19 dominate your life
Reopen schools for the sake of our children
Seattle exemplifies the fast-growing private-public school pandemic gap
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