For the children, we must choose facts over fear.
Fifteen weeks ago, American children were sent home from school with thick packets of worksheets and the understanding that they would be out for “two weeks to slow the spread” of COVID19. Two weeks seemed impossibly long — especially since the virus did not seem to affect children — but powers greater than us dictated the form our lives would take for the foreseeable future.
We dutifully went home to “quarantine” our perfectly-healthy selves, confused about things like the acceptability of playdates (“is it really just screens from here?”), and when hugs would come back into favor. In the intervening weeks, many of us have independently realized that something is amiss: the threat posed by the virus, and our response to it, do not align. The chance of survival if you get COVID19 is 997.4 out of 1,000 — not appreciably different than flu, with its 999 out of 1,000 survival rate. And getting infected is not so easy: we all know people who limited infections within their own households. Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt — who has been studying COVID since its earliest days in Wuhan, China — estimates that each individual’s risk of dying of the virus is equivalent to his or her chance of dying of any cause within the next 30 days.
These facts should conclude the discussion on “whether schools should reopen.” The answer is unequivocally yes, and urgently so. We don’t close for flu, so we should not close for COVID. All other countries have beat us to fully or partially reopening schools, and many others never even closed them. Unfortunately, in America, we get stuck on the hurdle of “public demand.” Politicians curry favor by coddling scared people; those people may be genuinely unaware of the extremely low risk posed by COVID, or they believe nationwide suffering and chaos will help their political party win an election. Either way, they form a triangle with idealogically aligned media and politicians, and trap the rest of us in the middle of it.
Hoping to appease these people, state governments are now releasing lengthy “return to school” guidelines, mandating that each child be kept in an isolated bubble, six feet in circumference, at all times. School buildings cannot accommodate this traumatizing, death-focused, isolating, delusional “distancing” standard and also do a little thing called “full-time educating,” so on the altar of COVIDflu, each American child will now receive a piecemeal education: one or two days per week in-person — held at arm’s length all day; treated as a germ vessel instead of a vulnerable and sensitive human — and three or four days at home on screens. Leaving aside the psychological effects of such a sterile and, let’s say it, totally creepy educational environment (no touching, no leaving the half-empty classroom all day, no real contact with friends, no recess), this will irreparably damage the lifestyle and income of every young family. Think about teachers who have children. They will need to be present at school every day — sometimes with “group A,” sometimes with “group B or C” — yet their own children will need supervision at home three or four days per week. Translate this to all working parents. And now consider non-working parents. How many people have the mental bandwidth and available resources to sustain a system like this? It will damage everyone, hitting the disadvantaged and working mothers particularly hard.
In pursuit of “greater safety,” we can’t lose sight of the humanity we are supposed to be “protecting.” Fortunately, pre-COVID pandemic planning guidance tells us exactly how we should be conducting ourselves. To preserve fairness and justice for all, we only need to choose facts over fear.
Pandemics with fewer than 500,000 projected deaths call for “consideration” of school closures of less than four weeks. After that, school is open — full-time, for every child.
In 2007, the CDC released interim pandemic planning guidance, including a useful “pandemic severity scale” which calls to mind the classification system for hurricanes (“Category 1” through “Category 5.”) COVID19 falls under the “Category 2” umbrella, with an iCFR of .26%, and projected deaths between 100,000 and 500,000 (translated to today’s population from the 2006 population).
For Category 2 pandemics, the CDC recommends that school closures up to four weeks in duration be “considered.” They are not mandatory. This year’s fifteen-week (so far) closure is already almost four times as long as the maximum recommended duration. (!!) Comedically, the CDC does not recommend school closures of fifteen weeks even for Category 5 pandemics with two million projected deaths. (See p. 34–36, below).
The CDC guidance also states that social distancing will not work when a pandemic is already well-established when it is discovered:
“[M]athematical models that explored potential source mitigation strategies that make use of … infection control and social distancing measures for use in an influenza outbreak identified critical time thresholds for success. These results suggest that the effectiveness of pandemic mitigation strategies will erode rapidly as the cumulative illness rate prior to implementation climbs above 1 percent of the population in an affected area.”
(P. 25).
I don’t know how else to say this. We freaked out so much about a disease hardly more dangerous than the regular flu — which less than half of us bother to get vaccinated against — that we acted as if half the country was about to die. We acted like our pandemic planning guidelines were not adequate for this, although in actual reality, we only had a Category 2 on our hands. We threw our whole playbook out the window, ran home, and hid under our beds. We stopped educating children, forced businesses to close, shamed our neighbors for things like walking too close when they pass us on the street and sneezing in the grocery store. We even supported the blockading of parks.
In short, we acted like monsters.
Why did we behave so irrationally? Because we were living in a false reality, created by the media, in which COVID was equivalent to Black Death. Journalists and politicians owed us an ethical duty to accurately and unemotionally communicate risk during a pandemic, and they did anything but. They intentionally misled us. By psychologically abusing everyone, they served their own selfish purposes. They can’t gain popularity by becoming a “savior” unless people are terrified, so innocent folks had to die, in pain, at home, too scared to call an ambulance. Tens of thousands of cancer diagnoses are being missed. Vaccinations programs for deadly diseases have stopped all over the world. Deaths of despair have ramped up. But what do media and politicians care, as long as their audience sticks with them? They care nothing about truth and justice; they only need to“look good.” They say they are the caring ones, and as long as people go along with it, that makes it true.
People “trust experts.” “Experts” know that this trust can be exploited. We willingly gave up our collective prosperity, our wellness, our relationships, our hard-won equalities, and the quality of our social fabric in order to follow them. We didn’t notice small details that collapsed their claims, such as the fact that eight weeks into lockdown, people were still getting sick, most of them even though they stayed home. We forgot that all past epidemics went away on their own, without any quarantine of healthy people.
For “safety” we didn’t need, we threw the scientific playbook that would have saved us out the window. We believed experts who told us we were good, compassionate people if we did what they said, and it made us into selfish egomaniacs. The Nazi party loved to say, “do this, it’s for your safety.” An effective tactic to this day.
“Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.” -Voltaire, Questions on Miracles (1765)
Reducing our exposure to and belief in absurdities reduces injustice. So let’s return to science. It is boring, but safely non-absurd.
When American schools closed their doors in March 2020, active, COVID-specific CDC guidance advised them to stay open: closing schools would not slow the spread.
The media seized the opportunity to dramatically frame COVID as something about to kill your children. It couldn’t report little things like the CDC’s sober, “stay at school if you want to follow science” guidance — something so dry and boring would have punctured its desired image just as fast as the entrance of an angry father kills the drunken apex of a teenage party. The media wants you seated on your sofa, eager to consume more media, which you will not be inclined to do after you read guidance like this:
Available modeling data indicate that early, short to medium [school] closures do not impact the epicurve of COVID-19 or available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations). There may be some impact of much longer closures (8 weeks, 20 weeks) further into community spread, but that modelling also shows that other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In other countries, those places who closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).
Now that governments have tanked economies and ruined lives with unprecedented school closures and “lockdowns,” this document has been archived and replaced with a thick tome of regulations designed to rewrite history in order to make it seem as if governments made good choices and served the public interest. The document will also make it nearly impossible to educate children, but no matter — to preserve fragile egos, in America, it will be necessary to continue to harm disadvantaged children.
Children are more likely to be struck by lightning than they are to die of COVID19.
This fun fact just has to be said. Please repeat it often to lockdown-advocating friends. Yes, your child under age 15 is safer at school during a COVID19 outbreak than he is outdoors during a thunderstorm. Flu is far more dangerous to kids; it has already killed around ten times as many this year as COVID. We don’t close schools for flu, or even require flu vaccinations, yet we are destroying American education for a disease ten times LESS dangerous. That is how rationally we are currently behaving. And we don’t even know the full impact this little experiment will have on our children. We are building a plane while flying it, all because we are ignoring FACTS in favor of completely irrational FEAR.
The “danger” to school staff is similar to flu and can be easily managed.
Hardcore lockdown proponents know they are on the defense on the issue of schools. Their “inflammatory-syndrome-that-is-exactly-like-Kawasaki-but-which-is-not-Kawasaki-because-new-threats-are-scarier” died in the water. Kids are not dying of COVID. When they get it at all, they are asymptomatic, and asymptomatic transmission by a child has not been documented anywhere in the world. There are precisely zero outbreaks linked to schools. School staff is not dropping dead in droves, even in countries where they reported to work as usual throughout the entire epidemic. We can be sure the media would have reported on that continuously for 72 hours.
It was unreasonable to ever expect outbreaks to happen in schools. Italy’s situation was only scary viewed through the prism of mainstream media. A basic internet search reveals they have far fewer ICU beds per capita than the United States, and they run extremely tight on beds every single winter (85–90% capacity). Plus, Diamond Princess’s contrasting situation provided a strong counterpoint. On this floating petri dish for coronavirus, the population of which leaned elderly, each passenger stood a 19% chance of getting infected, and a ~.3% chance of dying. Those statistics still hold true across populations, likely because up to 80% of us have pre-existing t-cells that protect us from COVID19. The scientifically discredited, experimental “lockdown” models out of Imperial College London and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation never accounted for that.
The lockdown experiment failed, scientifically speaking. We do now know more about the magnetic pull of “the group,” and the power of fear and shame, which should never be underestimated. But until we acknowledge what occurred — that we indulged in fear over facts — we are stuck in a situation that continues hurting each one of us, particularly children and the poor. I know we don’t want this. We are not hypocrites. We want the greatest good for the greatest number. We need to prove that with action, by acknowledging that it was fatal error to cave in to fear over facts, and thereby give meaning to our unprecedented sacrifices.
“Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.” -Yuval Harari, Homo Deus
Suffer we did. But now we can end it. We get the ball rolling by sending the kids back to school.