Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
I think a better apples-to-apples comparison is performed now than in 2020. In 2020, you're comparing an emerging virus to a well-understood plague (in the medical community). In 2024, you're comparing a fairly well-understood virus to a well-understood plague. I don't know how death rates from the two diseases compare in 2024 but it's probably closer than in 2020.
None of this is intended to defend Trump's atrocious handling of the pandemic while he was in office, though.
I'm annoyed that we went from "Trump's response to COVID was shit' to "Yeah well it coulda been worse" to arguing about whether or not schools should have been reopened earlier.
People did what they did. Antivaxxers and anti-maskers are stupid and their right to be stupid is still a protected right. Moving on.
It’s obvious Serms use of the term plague is in reference to the amount of devastation it had on civilization and not a reference to the literal disease itself and how lethal it is hundreds of years later with modern medicine. That’s obviously what Drone was objecting too. An apples to apples comparison of how the diseases are treated in modern day is pointless.
According to wiki the plague has a mortality of rate of 10% with treatment. COVID is less than 1%. So even accepting this argument at face value, it’s still not a very good one
On March 21 2024 05:41 Liquid`Drone wrote: Honestly I think 'Trump's handling of Covid was atrocious' and 'in retrospect there were a lot of overreactions to covid' are both correct statements. Sweden is a good example of a country which managed to not overreact but also where the government leaders did not make claims like 'Covid will miraculously go away in April when the weather warms up' or 'this is the flu' (in late february when the cases in Italy genuinely looked scary and before any vaccine or less dangerous mutations spread) or saying that 'it's something we have tremendous control over' or bleach or whatever.
But yeah unironically using 'the plague' as a synonym for covid is totally ridiculous, and many mistakes were made. Honestly I think in a similar vein to how the right wing politicized covid and started believing all sorts of anti vaxx bullshit because that would validate their beliefs, there are people on the left who (in a less personally stupid and irresponsible manner) became personally invested in believing the virus was worse than it really was because that would validate their belief that Trump's handling was atrocious. Which it still was - but there were still overreactions. I think that's mostly a 'in retrospect' - thing; back in 2020 I thought Sweden made the wrong choice and Norway made the right choice but today, I think we'd overall have been slightly better off following their path. I still think doing what we did in 2020 seemed like the right thing to do at that point, but in hindsight there were many unecessary restrictions that hurt more than they helped.
Who was using the plague as an unironic synonym for COVID? The plague killed anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. COVID was threatening to kill 1% of the population of infected people. That's nowhere near the rate of lethality of the plague, but the problem is that 1% of a population the size of the United States is still 3.3 million people.
What the people were saying who wanted NO COVID restrictions was that they were totally fine with 3.3 million Americans dying from a disease that could be easily prevented and treatable within a year because they didn't want to wear masks or temporarily work from home.
You don't need to over sensationalize how dangerous the disease is to warrant a response to it. 1% lethality isn't that bad as far as diseases go, but that was never the real danger of COVID. The danger of it was how infectous it was. 1% lethality isn't so bad if it only affects 25-30% of your population, but when your entire population gets it because of how insanely contagious it is, then all of a sudden 1% lethality becomes a big number.
COVID being treatable within a year is a hindsight argument. There was no way to know we would have vaccines that quickly. Phrasing the resistance to COVID measures as “because they didn’t want to wear masks or work from home” is tone deaf. Not everyone has a job that can be easily transitioned to work from home. It’s not as easy as “learn to code or you’re a selfish asshole.”
It isn't a hindsight argument. The CDC was telling us during the pandemic that it would take that long to develop a vaccine. The timeline I heard quoted multiple times at the start of the lockdowns for vaccine development was 1.5 years to 2 years conservatively. We beat the estimate by 6 months, which BTW is one of the talking points the anti-vaxxers use for not trusting the vaccine.
As far as being "tone-deaf" you're missing the point. The point was that if Americans COULD work from home, then they HAD to because there were so many people that NEEDED to keep working outside. It made no sense for Americans to keep getting sick because they just HAD to be able to eat out, or go to the gym. We didn't shut down the entire economy, we shut down the service sector of the economy and if you think I'm not deeply aware of how impactful that was, keep in mind that I'm a Bartender, so I know EXACTLY how impactful that was.
Some economic sacrifice HAD to be made, because the price of doing nothing was again... 3.3 million dead Americans. Whatever the cost in terms of living conditions for the people most affected by those lockdowns are things that CAN be addressed through policy after the fact, they SHOULD be addressed. But the pressing need to slow the infection rate of COVID took priority because it SHOULD have taken priority.
Can you kindly provide a source that there was a high level of confidence we would have a working vaccine within 1.5 years? I remember ruminations that such a timeline was possible but far from certain. I’m not sure how certain anyone can be on the creation and rollout of a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
There’s also no evidence that if we let children go to school it would have been a bloodbath and therefore our hand was forced. We know this because Florida did let children attend school beginning August 2020, 2 years before some in California would reopen. Despite that, when adjusted for age, Floridas COVID deaths per capita was very similar to California’s. In fact, one analysis published in the Lancet found California had a 34% worse death rate when adjusting for age and comorbidities.
Also, contrary to your belief that we kept schools closed to protect Grandma, one of the main reasons we kept schools closed and why they were closed a lot longer in California than Florida is because of pushback from teachers unions. The American Academy of Pediatrics was pushing for schools to be reopened in Summer of 2020. UNICEF was calling for schools to be reopened. The experts were the one preaching the importance of keeping schools open, it was the bureaucrats doing the opposite. Drone, to his credit, was saying the same in real time during the pandemic and said the risk to his personal safety was worth taking to fulfill his duties.
I’m on a plane right now but let me know if there are any citations I can track down and I’ll do my best
I agree with you that we don't have an alternate timeline where we test the consequences of opening everything significantly earlier than we actually did (or leaving things closed for longer than we actually did). Besides covid-related health concerns, there were certainly other legitimate concerns regarding the potential stunting of social, emotional, and academic progress of students during school closures / remote learning.
While I can't speak to the social and emotional aspects, it may be encouraging to know that any academic benefits certain states may have temporarily enjoyed by reopening earlier (e.g., Florida and some other red states) are basically gone now, and the states that played it safer and stayed closed longer (e.g., California and some other blue states) are back to their comparatively better state rankings. It didn't take that long to restore things academically on a relative scale (the rankings between states), although surely on an absolute scale we'll probably see lower scores than the pre-pandemic era (with a slow recovery over the next decade).
Here's more information on these academic measures, through standardized test scores:
While standardized testing is controversial and inconvenient, it can be used to compare student proficiencies in math and reading (and sometimes other subjects) throughout the United States. Forbes compiled testing data from 2023, from all 50 states and Washington D.C.. All 51 of these regions were ranked based on their test scores in elementary school (grade 4 math and reading), middle school (grade 8 math and reading), high school (SAT and ACT), and college (MCAT).
Here is how the data was compiled: “At the elementary level, we analyzed the percentage of fourth-grade students who scored at or above grade-appropriate proficiency in the math and reading sections of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ], according to government data from The Nation’s Report Card. We conducted an identical analysis of eighth-grade student scores. To measure high school standardized test performance, we looked at the average ACT and SAT scores among test takers who graduated from high school in 2023. This data came from ACT and the College Board, respectively. Finally, to measure how a state’s college-educated test takers compare, we used the average MCAT scores of medical students expected to earn their MD in 2023–24, separated according to students’ states of legal residence. This data came from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The 5 highest-scoring regions were: 1. Massachusetts; 2. Utah; 3. New Jersey; 4. New Hampshire; 5. Connecticut.
The 5 lowest-scoring regions were: 51. Oklahoma; 50. New Mexico; 49. West Virginia; 48. Alabama; 47. Mississippi.
Other notable regions: New York was ranked 22nd, California was 23rd, Florida was 30th, Texas was 39th, and Washington D.C. was 40th.
Much like with other metrics for measuring educational outcomes, the blue/liberal/Democratic regions generally performed better than the red/conservative/Republican regions, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Utah).
It should be noted that no regions had proficiency scores in grade 4 or grade 8 above 50%, regardless of the subject; the best-ranking regions were in the 30s and 40s across the board, while the worst-ranking regions were in the 10s and 20s. In other words, no state had even half of their students performing at/above their expected grade levels of 4 or 8. Scrutinizing how proficiency levels are decided may provide more context, and what is definitely necessary is that all 51 regions need to better educate their children.
Sidenotes for pre-pandemic data: From 1992 to 2019, there hasn’t been much change in reading performance ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf ), nor math performance from 1990 to 2019 ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnc.pdf ). There haven’t been significant increases nor decreases across those three decades of 4th grade scores, 8th grade scores, and 12th grade scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a decrease (and slow recovery) from 2020 to 2030 though, due to the covid pandemic.
I conduct technical interviews of college students/graduates at the first year calculus and calculus-based physics level and my coworkers and I joke around that the candidates seem to be performing worse in recent years overall due to the impacts of COVID. Of course, attracting quality candidates for certain jobs is also getting tougher which might confound the conclusion...
There was actually just a piece in the NYT about this. And we know way back when, it was defended for far too long. I will quote the first part.
Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic. Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year. A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting. While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.
“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place. There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects. But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students. The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind. At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students. At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade.
(A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.) Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year. Some time in person was better than no time. As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.
They go on to say the data indicate closures were particularly harmful to students in poverty and that school closures didn't appear to have any effect on COVID.
On March 21 2024 05:41 Liquid`Drone wrote: Honestly I think 'Trump's handling of Covid was atrocious' and 'in retrospect there were a lot of overreactions to covid' are both correct statements. Sweden is a good example of a country which managed to not overreact but also where the government leaders did not make claims like 'Covid will miraculously go away in April when the weather warms up' or 'this is the flu' (in late february when the cases in Italy genuinely looked scary and before any vaccine or less dangerous mutations spread) or saying that 'it's something we have tremendous control over' or bleach or whatever.
But yeah unironically using 'the plague' as a synonym for covid is totally ridiculous, and many mistakes were made. Honestly I think in a similar vein to how the right wing politicized covid and started believing all sorts of anti vaxx bullshit because that would validate their beliefs, there are people on the left who (in a less personally stupid and irresponsible manner) became personally invested in believing the virus was worse than it really was because that would validate their belief that Trump's handling was atrocious. Which it still was - but there were still overreactions. I think that's mostly a 'in retrospect' - thing; back in 2020 I thought Sweden made the wrong choice and Norway made the right choice but today, I think we'd overall have been slightly better off following their path. I still think doing what we did in 2020 seemed like the right thing to do at that point, but in hindsight there were many unecessary restrictions that hurt more than they helped.
Who was using the plague as an unironic synonym for COVID? The plague killed anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. COVID was threatening to kill 1% of the population of infected people. That's nowhere near the rate of lethality of the plague, but the problem is that 1% of a population the size of the United States is still 3.3 million people.
What the people were saying who wanted NO COVID restrictions was that they were totally fine with 3.3 million Americans dying from a disease that could be easily prevented and treatable within a year because they didn't want to wear masks or temporarily work from home.
You don't need to over sensationalize how dangerous the disease is to warrant a response to it. 1% lethality isn't that bad as far as diseases go, but that was never the real danger of COVID. The danger of it was how infectous it was. 1% lethality isn't so bad if it only affects 25-30% of your population, but when your entire population gets it because of how insanely contagious it is, then all of a sudden 1% lethality becomes a big number.
COVID being treatable within a year is a hindsight argument. There was no way to know we would have vaccines that quickly. Phrasing the resistance to COVID measures as “because they didn’t want to wear masks or work from home” is tone deaf. Not everyone has a job that can be easily transitioned to work from home. It’s not as easy as “learn to code or you’re a selfish asshole.”
It isn't a hindsight argument. The CDC was telling us during the pandemic that it would take that long to develop a vaccine. The timeline I heard quoted multiple times at the start of the lockdowns for vaccine development was 1.5 years to 2 years conservatively. We beat the estimate by 6 months, which BTW is one of the talking points the anti-vaxxers use for not trusting the vaccine.
As far as being "tone-deaf" you're missing the point. The point was that if Americans COULD work from home, then they HAD to because there were so many people that NEEDED to keep working outside. It made no sense for Americans to keep getting sick because they just HAD to be able to eat out, or go to the gym. We didn't shut down the entire economy, we shut down the service sector of the economy and if you think I'm not deeply aware of how impactful that was, keep in mind that I'm a Bartender, so I know EXACTLY how impactful that was.
Some economic sacrifice HAD to be made, because the price of doing nothing was again... 3.3 million dead Americans. Whatever the cost in terms of living conditions for the people most affected by those lockdowns are things that CAN be addressed through policy after the fact, they SHOULD be addressed. But the pressing need to slow the infection rate of COVID took priority because it SHOULD have taken priority.
Can you kindly provide a source that there was a high level of confidence we would have a working vaccine within 1.5 years? I remember ruminations that such a timeline was possible but far from certain. I’m not sure how certain anyone can be on the creation and rollout of a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
There’s also no evidence that if we let children go to school it would have been a bloodbath and therefore our hand was forced. We know this because Florida did let children attend school beginning August 2020, 2 years before some in California would reopen. Despite that, when adjusted for age, Floridas COVID deaths per capita was very similar to California’s. In fact, one analysis published in the Lancet found California had a 34% worse death rate when adjusting for age and comorbidities.
Also, contrary to your belief that we kept schools closed to protect Grandma, one of the main reasons we kept schools closed and why they were closed a lot longer in California than Florida is because of pushback from teachers unions. The American Academy of Pediatrics was pushing for schools to be reopened in Summer of 2020. UNICEF was calling for schools to be reopened. The experts were the one preaching the importance of keeping schools open, it was the bureaucrats doing the opposite. Drone, to his credit, was saying the same in real time during the pandemic and said the risk to his personal safety was worth taking to fulfill his duties.
I’m on a plane right now but let me know if there are any citations I can track down and I’ll do my best
I agree with you that we don't have an alternate timeline where we test the consequences of opening everything significantly earlier than we actually did (or leaving things closed for longer than we actually did). Besides covid-related health concerns, there were certainly other legitimate concerns regarding the potential stunting of social, emotional, and academic progress of students during school closures / remote learning.
While I can't speak to the social and emotional aspects, it may be encouraging to know that any academic benefits certain states may have temporarily enjoyed by reopening earlier (e.g., Florida and some other red states) are basically gone now, and the states that played it safer and stayed closed longer (e.g., California and some other blue states) are back to their comparatively better state rankings. It didn't take that long to restore things academically on a relative scale (the rankings between states), although surely on an absolute scale we'll probably see lower scores than the pre-pandemic era (with a slow recovery over the next decade).
Here's more information on these academic measures, through standardized test scores:
While standardized testing is controversial and inconvenient, it can be used to compare student proficiencies in math and reading (and sometimes other subjects) throughout the United States. Forbes compiled testing data from 2023, from all 50 states and Washington D.C.. All 51 of these regions were ranked based on their test scores in elementary school (grade 4 math and reading), middle school (grade 8 math and reading), high school (SAT and ACT), and college (MCAT).
Here is how the data was compiled: “At the elementary level, we analyzed the percentage of fourth-grade students who scored at or above grade-appropriate proficiency in the math and reading sections of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ], according to government data from The Nation’s Report Card. We conducted an identical analysis of eighth-grade student scores. To measure high school standardized test performance, we looked at the average ACT and SAT scores among test takers who graduated from high school in 2023. This data came from ACT and the College Board, respectively. Finally, to measure how a state’s college-educated test takers compare, we used the average MCAT scores of medical students expected to earn their MD in 2023–24, separated according to students’ states of legal residence. This data came from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The 5 highest-scoring regions were: 1. Massachusetts; 2. Utah; 3. New Jersey; 4. New Hampshire; 5. Connecticut.
The 5 lowest-scoring regions were: 51. Oklahoma; 50. New Mexico; 49. West Virginia; 48. Alabama; 47. Mississippi.
Other notable regions: New York was ranked 22nd, California was 23rd, Florida was 30th, Texas was 39th, and Washington D.C. was 40th.
Much like with other metrics for measuring educational outcomes, the blue/liberal/Democratic regions generally performed better than the red/conservative/Republican regions, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Utah).
It should be noted that no regions had proficiency scores in grade 4 or grade 8 above 50%, regardless of the subject; the best-ranking regions were in the 30s and 40s across the board, while the worst-ranking regions were in the 10s and 20s. In other words, no state had even half of their students performing at/above their expected grade levels of 4 or 8. Scrutinizing how proficiency levels are decided may provide more context, and what is definitely necessary is that all 51 regions need to better educate their children.
Sidenotes for pre-pandemic data: From 1992 to 2019, there hasn’t been much change in reading performance ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf ), nor math performance from 1990 to 2019 ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnc.pdf ). There haven’t been significant increases nor decreases across those three decades of 4th grade scores, 8th grade scores, and 12th grade scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a decrease (and slow recovery) from 2020 to 2030 though, due to the covid pandemic.
Unfortunately your claim is much stronger than the evidence you have provided. The “Nations Report Card” which is standardized testing comparing the Nations 4th and 8th graders comes out every 2 years. For the most recent year (2022) we found that, for example,
4th grade test scores for 2022
Reading
Florida - T-2nd in country California - T-31st in country
Mathematics
Florida - 4th in country California - T-37th in country
Florida, a state never known to dominate these standings, now had 4th graders in the top 5 of reading and math. They leap frogged many states from the previous testing (2020) to get there.
What your source did is take the NAEP findings and combined them with college entrance exams (MCAT, SAT, ACT) that apply to student: in the latter half of high school I.e students that are probably more adept at learning digitally than 7-9 year olds. Now any change you see among 4th graders is diluted by adding in a bunch of college entrance exams.
At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures. This is a small subset of total k-12 students. You can’t make any claims about 4th or 8th graders bouncing back from school closures because all you are offering is a single data point - the 2022 NAEP standardized test that showed dropping scores with Florida surging ahead relative to other states. To make the claim they have recovered you need the 2nd data point showing the test scores coming back up and since the test is done every 2 years we won’t get those results until later this year.
On March 21 2024 05:41 Liquid`Drone wrote: Honestly I think 'Trump's handling of Covid was atrocious' and 'in retrospect there were a lot of overreactions to covid' are both correct statements. Sweden is a good example of a country which managed to not overreact but also where the government leaders did not make claims like 'Covid will miraculously go away in April when the weather warms up' or 'this is the flu' (in late february when the cases in Italy genuinely looked scary and before any vaccine or less dangerous mutations spread) or saying that 'it's something we have tremendous control over' or bleach or whatever.
But yeah unironically using 'the plague' as a synonym for covid is totally ridiculous, and many mistakes were made. Honestly I think in a similar vein to how the right wing politicized covid and started believing all sorts of anti vaxx bullshit because that would validate their beliefs, there are people on the left who (in a less personally stupid and irresponsible manner) became personally invested in believing the virus was worse than it really was because that would validate their belief that Trump's handling was atrocious. Which it still was - but there were still overreactions. I think that's mostly a 'in retrospect' - thing; back in 2020 I thought Sweden made the wrong choice and Norway made the right choice but today, I think we'd overall have been slightly better off following their path. I still think doing what we did in 2020 seemed like the right thing to do at that point, but in hindsight there were many unecessary restrictions that hurt more than they helped.
Who was using the plague as an unironic synonym for COVID? The plague killed anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. COVID was threatening to kill 1% of the population of infected people. That's nowhere near the rate of lethality of the plague, but the problem is that 1% of a population the size of the United States is still 3.3 million people.
What the people were saying who wanted NO COVID restrictions was that they were totally fine with 3.3 million Americans dying from a disease that could be easily prevented and treatable within a year because they didn't want to wear masks or temporarily work from home.
You don't need to over sensationalize how dangerous the disease is to warrant a response to it. 1% lethality isn't that bad as far as diseases go, but that was never the real danger of COVID. The danger of it was how infectous it was. 1% lethality isn't so bad if it only affects 25-30% of your population, but when your entire population gets it because of how insanely contagious it is, then all of a sudden 1% lethality becomes a big number.
COVID being treatable within a year is a hindsight argument. There was no way to know we would have vaccines that quickly. Phrasing the resistance to COVID measures as “because they didn’t want to wear masks or work from home” is tone deaf. Not everyone has a job that can be easily transitioned to work from home. It’s not as easy as “learn to code or you’re a selfish asshole.”
It isn't a hindsight argument. The CDC was telling us during the pandemic that it would take that long to develop a vaccine. The timeline I heard quoted multiple times at the start of the lockdowns for vaccine development was 1.5 years to 2 years conservatively. We beat the estimate by 6 months, which BTW is one of the talking points the anti-vaxxers use for not trusting the vaccine.
As far as being "tone-deaf" you're missing the point. The point was that if Americans COULD work from home, then they HAD to because there were so many people that NEEDED to keep working outside. It made no sense for Americans to keep getting sick because they just HAD to be able to eat out, or go to the gym. We didn't shut down the entire economy, we shut down the service sector of the economy and if you think I'm not deeply aware of how impactful that was, keep in mind that I'm a Bartender, so I know EXACTLY how impactful that was.
Some economic sacrifice HAD to be made, because the price of doing nothing was again... 3.3 million dead Americans. Whatever the cost in terms of living conditions for the people most affected by those lockdowns are things that CAN be addressed through policy after the fact, they SHOULD be addressed. But the pressing need to slow the infection rate of COVID took priority because it SHOULD have taken priority.
Can you kindly provide a source that there was a high level of confidence we would have a working vaccine within 1.5 years? I remember ruminations that such a timeline was possible but far from certain. I’m not sure how certain anyone can be on the creation and rollout of a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
There’s also no evidence that if we let children go to school it would have been a bloodbath and therefore our hand was forced. We know this because Florida did let children attend school beginning August 2020, 2 years before some in California would reopen. Despite that, when adjusted for age, Floridas COVID deaths per capita was very similar to California’s. In fact, one analysis published in the Lancet found California had a 34% worse death rate when adjusting for age and comorbidities.
Also, contrary to your belief that we kept schools closed to protect Grandma, one of the main reasons we kept schools closed and why they were closed a lot longer in California than Florida is because of pushback from teachers unions. The American Academy of Pediatrics was pushing for schools to be reopened in Summer of 2020. UNICEF was calling for schools to be reopened. The experts were the one preaching the importance of keeping schools open, it was the bureaucrats doing the opposite. Drone, to his credit, was saying the same in real time during the pandemic and said the risk to his personal safety was worth taking to fulfill his duties.
I’m on a plane right now but let me know if there are any citations I can track down and I’ll do my best
I agree with you that we don't have an alternate timeline where we test the consequences of opening everything significantly earlier than we actually did (or leaving things closed for longer than we actually did). Besides covid-related health concerns, there were certainly other legitimate concerns regarding the potential stunting of social, emotional, and academic progress of students during school closures / remote learning.
While I can't speak to the social and emotional aspects, it may be encouraging to know that any academic benefits certain states may have temporarily enjoyed by reopening earlier (e.g., Florida and some other red states) are basically gone now, and the states that played it safer and stayed closed longer (e.g., California and some other blue states) are back to their comparatively better state rankings. It didn't take that long to restore things academically on a relative scale (the rankings between states), although surely on an absolute scale we'll probably see lower scores than the pre-pandemic era (with a slow recovery over the next decade).
Here's more information on these academic measures, through standardized test scores:
While standardized testing is controversial and inconvenient, it can be used to compare student proficiencies in math and reading (and sometimes other subjects) throughout the United States. Forbes compiled testing data from 2023, from all 50 states and Washington D.C.. All 51 of these regions were ranked based on their test scores in elementary school (grade 4 math and reading), middle school (grade 8 math and reading), high school (SAT and ACT), and college (MCAT).
Here is how the data was compiled: “At the elementary level, we analyzed the percentage of fourth-grade students who scored at or above grade-appropriate proficiency in the math and reading sections of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ], according to government data from The Nation’s Report Card. We conducted an identical analysis of eighth-grade student scores. To measure high school standardized test performance, we looked at the average ACT and SAT scores among test takers who graduated from high school in 2023. This data came from ACT and the College Board, respectively. Finally, to measure how a state’s college-educated test takers compare, we used the average MCAT scores of medical students expected to earn their MD in 2023–24, separated according to students’ states of legal residence. This data came from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The 5 highest-scoring regions were: 1. Massachusetts; 2. Utah; 3. New Jersey; 4. New Hampshire; 5. Connecticut.
The 5 lowest-scoring regions were: 51. Oklahoma; 50. New Mexico; 49. West Virginia; 48. Alabama; 47. Mississippi.
Other notable regions: New York was ranked 22nd, California was 23rd, Florida was 30th, Texas was 39th, and Washington D.C. was 40th.
Much like with other metrics for measuring educational outcomes, the blue/liberal/Democratic regions generally performed better than the red/conservative/Republican regions, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Utah).
It should be noted that no regions had proficiency scores in grade 4 or grade 8 above 50%, regardless of the subject; the best-ranking regions were in the 30s and 40s across the board, while the worst-ranking regions were in the 10s and 20s. In other words, no state had even half of their students performing at/above their expected grade levels of 4 or 8. Scrutinizing how proficiency levels are decided may provide more context, and what is definitely necessary is that all 51 regions need to better educate their children.
Sidenotes for pre-pandemic data: From 1992 to 2019, there hasn’t been much change in reading performance ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf ), nor math performance from 1990 to 2019 ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnc.pdf ). There haven’t been significant increases nor decreases across those three decades of 4th grade scores, 8th grade scores, and 12th grade scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a decrease (and slow recovery) from 2020 to 2030 though, due to the covid pandemic.
Unfortunately your claim is much stronger than the evidence you have provided. The “Nations Report Card” which is standardized testing comparing the Nations 4th and 8th graders comes out every 2 years. For the most recent year (2022) we found that, for example,
4th grade test scores for 2022
Reading
Florida - T-2nd in country California - T-31st in country
Mathematics
Florida - 4th in country California - T-37th in country
Florida, a state never known to dominate these standings, now had 4th graders in the top 5 of reading and math. They leap frogged many states from the previous testing (2020) to get there.
What your source did is take the NAEP findings and combined them with college entrance exams (MCAT, SAT, ACT) that apply to student: in the latter half of high school I.e students that are probably more adept at learning digitally than 7-9 year olds. Now any change you see among 4th graders is diluted by adding in a bunch of college entrance exams.
At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures. This is a small subset of total k-12 students. You can’t make any claims about 4th or 8th graders bouncing back from school closures because all you are offering is a single data point - the 2022 NAEP standardized test that showed dropping scores with Florida surging ahead relative to other states. To make the claim they have recovered you need the 2nd data point showing the test scores coming back up and since the test is done every 2 years we won’t get those results until later this year.
You only picked the 2 examples where FL > CA, as opposed to the remaining 5 examples where CA > FL. That's some serious cherry-picking. Overall, California ranks better than Florida, even just a few years after the school closures. Florida is 30th in the country, while California is 23rd. Yes, Florida's 4th graders are ranked higher than their middle school students, high school students, and college students are, compared to other states; otherwise, Florida would be ranked even worse.
"At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures." Middle school + high school + college, actually. California outperforms Florida across most grades. In fact, most states outperform Florida across most grades.
But given Florida's current 4th grade success, it'll be interesting to see if - 4 years from now - Florida has a similar level of 8th grade success (since the 4th graders will be 4 years older), or if the generally-better-at-education states will catch up and surpass Florida by then.
On March 21 2024 05:41 Liquid`Drone wrote: Honestly I think 'Trump's handling of Covid was atrocious' and 'in retrospect there were a lot of overreactions to covid' are both correct statements. Sweden is a good example of a country which managed to not overreact but also where the government leaders did not make claims like 'Covid will miraculously go away in April when the weather warms up' or 'this is the flu' (in late february when the cases in Italy genuinely looked scary and before any vaccine or less dangerous mutations spread) or saying that 'it's something we have tremendous control over' or bleach or whatever.
But yeah unironically using 'the plague' as a synonym for covid is totally ridiculous, and many mistakes were made. Honestly I think in a similar vein to how the right wing politicized covid and started believing all sorts of anti vaxx bullshit because that would validate their beliefs, there are people on the left who (in a less personally stupid and irresponsible manner) became personally invested in believing the virus was worse than it really was because that would validate their belief that Trump's handling was atrocious. Which it still was - but there were still overreactions. I think that's mostly a 'in retrospect' - thing; back in 2020 I thought Sweden made the wrong choice and Norway made the right choice but today, I think we'd overall have been slightly better off following their path. I still think doing what we did in 2020 seemed like the right thing to do at that point, but in hindsight there were many unecessary restrictions that hurt more than they helped.
Who was using the plague as an unironic synonym for COVID? The plague killed anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. COVID was threatening to kill 1% of the population of infected people. That's nowhere near the rate of lethality of the plague, but the problem is that 1% of a population the size of the United States is still 3.3 million people.
What the people were saying who wanted NO COVID restrictions was that they were totally fine with 3.3 million Americans dying from a disease that could be easily prevented and treatable within a year because they didn't want to wear masks or temporarily work from home.
You don't need to over sensationalize how dangerous the disease is to warrant a response to it. 1% lethality isn't that bad as far as diseases go, but that was never the real danger of COVID. The danger of it was how infectous it was. 1% lethality isn't so bad if it only affects 25-30% of your population, but when your entire population gets it because of how insanely contagious it is, then all of a sudden 1% lethality becomes a big number.
COVID being treatable within a year is a hindsight argument. There was no way to know we would have vaccines that quickly. Phrasing the resistance to COVID measures as “because they didn’t want to wear masks or work from home” is tone deaf. Not everyone has a job that can be easily transitioned to work from home. It’s not as easy as “learn to code or you’re a selfish asshole.”
It isn't a hindsight argument. The CDC was telling us during the pandemic that it would take that long to develop a vaccine. The timeline I heard quoted multiple times at the start of the lockdowns for vaccine development was 1.5 years to 2 years conservatively. We beat the estimate by 6 months, which BTW is one of the talking points the anti-vaxxers use for not trusting the vaccine.
As far as being "tone-deaf" you're missing the point. The point was that if Americans COULD work from home, then they HAD to because there were so many people that NEEDED to keep working outside. It made no sense for Americans to keep getting sick because they just HAD to be able to eat out, or go to the gym. We didn't shut down the entire economy, we shut down the service sector of the economy and if you think I'm not deeply aware of how impactful that was, keep in mind that I'm a Bartender, so I know EXACTLY how impactful that was.
Some economic sacrifice HAD to be made, because the price of doing nothing was again... 3.3 million dead Americans. Whatever the cost in terms of living conditions for the people most affected by those lockdowns are things that CAN be addressed through policy after the fact, they SHOULD be addressed. But the pressing need to slow the infection rate of COVID took priority because it SHOULD have taken priority.
Can you kindly provide a source that there was a high level of confidence we would have a working vaccine within 1.5 years? I remember ruminations that such a timeline was possible but far from certain. I’m not sure how certain anyone can be on the creation and rollout of a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
There’s also no evidence that if we let children go to school it would have been a bloodbath and therefore our hand was forced. We know this because Florida did let children attend school beginning August 2020, 2 years before some in California would reopen. Despite that, when adjusted for age, Floridas COVID deaths per capita was very similar to California’s. In fact, one analysis published in the Lancet found California had a 34% worse death rate when adjusting for age and comorbidities.
Also, contrary to your belief that we kept schools closed to protect Grandma, one of the main reasons we kept schools closed and why they were closed a lot longer in California than Florida is because of pushback from teachers unions. The American Academy of Pediatrics was pushing for schools to be reopened in Summer of 2020. UNICEF was calling for schools to be reopened. The experts were the one preaching the importance of keeping schools open, it was the bureaucrats doing the opposite. Drone, to his credit, was saying the same in real time during the pandemic and said the risk to his personal safety was worth taking to fulfill his duties.
I’m on a plane right now but let me know if there are any citations I can track down and I’ll do my best
I agree with you that we don't have an alternate timeline where we test the consequences of opening everything significantly earlier than we actually did (or leaving things closed for longer than we actually did). Besides covid-related health concerns, there were certainly other legitimate concerns regarding the potential stunting of social, emotional, and academic progress of students during school closures / remote learning.
While I can't speak to the social and emotional aspects, it may be encouraging to know that any academic benefits certain states may have temporarily enjoyed by reopening earlier (e.g., Florida and some other red states) are basically gone now, and the states that played it safer and stayed closed longer (e.g., California and some other blue states) are back to their comparatively better state rankings. It didn't take that long to restore things academically on a relative scale (the rankings between states), although surely on an absolute scale we'll probably see lower scores than the pre-pandemic era (with a slow recovery over the next decade).
Here's more information on these academic measures, through standardized test scores:
While standardized testing is controversial and inconvenient, it can be used to compare student proficiencies in math and reading (and sometimes other subjects) throughout the United States. Forbes compiled testing data from 2023, from all 50 states and Washington D.C.. All 51 of these regions were ranked based on their test scores in elementary school (grade 4 math and reading), middle school (grade 8 math and reading), high school (SAT and ACT), and college (MCAT).
Here is how the data was compiled: “At the elementary level, we analyzed the percentage of fourth-grade students who scored at or above grade-appropriate proficiency in the math and reading sections of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ], according to government data from The Nation’s Report Card. We conducted an identical analysis of eighth-grade student scores. To measure high school standardized test performance, we looked at the average ACT and SAT scores among test takers who graduated from high school in 2023. This data came from ACT and the College Board, respectively. Finally, to measure how a state’s college-educated test takers compare, we used the average MCAT scores of medical students expected to earn their MD in 2023–24, separated according to students’ states of legal residence. This data came from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The 5 highest-scoring regions were: 1. Massachusetts; 2. Utah; 3. New Jersey; 4. New Hampshire; 5. Connecticut.
The 5 lowest-scoring regions were: 51. Oklahoma; 50. New Mexico; 49. West Virginia; 48. Alabama; 47. Mississippi.
Other notable regions: New York was ranked 22nd, California was 23rd, Florida was 30th, Texas was 39th, and Washington D.C. was 40th.
Much like with other metrics for measuring educational outcomes, the blue/liberal/Democratic regions generally performed better than the red/conservative/Republican regions, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Utah).
It should be noted that no regions had proficiency scores in grade 4 or grade 8 above 50%, regardless of the subject; the best-ranking regions were in the 30s and 40s across the board, while the worst-ranking regions were in the 10s and 20s. In other words, no state had even half of their students performing at/above their expected grade levels of 4 or 8. Scrutinizing how proficiency levels are decided may provide more context, and what is definitely necessary is that all 51 regions need to better educate their children.
Sidenotes for pre-pandemic data: From 1992 to 2019, there hasn’t been much change in reading performance ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf ), nor math performance from 1990 to 2019 ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnc.pdf ). There haven’t been significant increases nor decreases across those three decades of 4th grade scores, 8th grade scores, and 12th grade scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a decrease (and slow recovery) from 2020 to 2030 though, due to the covid pandemic.
Unfortunately your claim is much stronger than the evidence you have provided. The “Nations Report Card” which is standardized testing comparing the Nations 4th and 8th graders comes out every 2 years. For the most recent year (2022) we found that, for example,
4th grade test scores for 2022
Reading
Florida - T-2nd in country California - T-31st in country
Mathematics
Florida - 4th in country California - T-37th in country
Florida, a state never known to dominate these standings, now had 4th graders in the top 5 of reading and math. They leap frogged many states from the previous testing (2020) to get there.
What your source did is take the NAEP findings and combined them with college entrance exams (MCAT, SAT, ACT) that apply to student: in the latter half of high school I.e students that are probably more adept at learning digitally than 7-9 year olds. Now any change you see among 4th graders is diluted by adding in a bunch of college entrance exams.
At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures. This is a small subset of total k-12 students. You can’t make any claims about 4th or 8th graders bouncing back from school closures because all you are offering is a single data point - the 2022 NAEP standardized test that showed dropping scores with Florida surging ahead relative to other states. To make the claim they have recovered you need the 2nd data point showing the test scores coming back up and since the test is done every 2 years we won’t get those results until later this year.
You only picked the 2 examples where FL > CA, as opposed to the remaining 5 examples where CA > FL. That's some serious cherry-picking. Overall, California ranks better than Florida, even just a few years after the school closures. Florida is 30th in the country, while California is 23rd. Yes, Florida's 4th graders are ranked higher than their middle school students, high school students, and college students are, compared to other states; otherwise, Florida would be ranked even worse.
"At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures." Middle school + high school + college, actually. California outperforms Florida across most grades. In fact, most states outperform Florida across most grades.
But given Florida's current 4th grade success, it'll be interesting to see if - 4 years from now - Florida has a similar level of 8th grade success (since the 4th graders will be 4 years older), or if the generally-better-at-education states will catch up and surpass Florida by then.
Who is the one cherry picking here? Here’s the website for “the nations report card”
Florida had higher average scores than California in
4th grade reading 4th grade math 8th grade reading 8th grade math
Funny enough that’s all the categories they both tested in. A perfect 4-0 sweep. I didn’t include the 8th graders in my post because the scores were similar enough to be considered a wash but since you said I was cherry picking I feel obliged to mention that Florida had higher average scores among 8th graders too.
Cherry picking would be trying to use Californias better performance on college entrance to extrapolate how they did educating k-12 throughout the pandemic.
Sure California has better SAT scores than Florida. I’m sure they had better SAT scores before the pandemic. It tells us nothing. You need to consider how something changes in relation to another. Has the gap between California’s SATs and Floridas SAT scores grown wider or gotten smaller since the pandemic? Do you have that data?
On March 21 2024 05:41 Liquid`Drone wrote: Honestly I think 'Trump's handling of Covid was atrocious' and 'in retrospect there were a lot of overreactions to covid' are both correct statements. Sweden is a good example of a country which managed to not overreact but also where the government leaders did not make claims like 'Covid will miraculously go away in April when the weather warms up' or 'this is the flu' (in late february when the cases in Italy genuinely looked scary and before any vaccine or less dangerous mutations spread) or saying that 'it's something we have tremendous control over' or bleach or whatever.
But yeah unironically using 'the plague' as a synonym for covid is totally ridiculous, and many mistakes were made. Honestly I think in a similar vein to how the right wing politicized covid and started believing all sorts of anti vaxx bullshit because that would validate their beliefs, there are people on the left who (in a less personally stupid and irresponsible manner) became personally invested in believing the virus was worse than it really was because that would validate their belief that Trump's handling was atrocious. Which it still was - but there were still overreactions. I think that's mostly a 'in retrospect' - thing; back in 2020 I thought Sweden made the wrong choice and Norway made the right choice but today, I think we'd overall have been slightly better off following their path. I still think doing what we did in 2020 seemed like the right thing to do at that point, but in hindsight there were many unecessary restrictions that hurt more than they helped.
Who was using the plague as an unironic synonym for COVID? The plague killed anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. COVID was threatening to kill 1% of the population of infected people. That's nowhere near the rate of lethality of the plague, but the problem is that 1% of a population the size of the United States is still 3.3 million people.
What the people were saying who wanted NO COVID restrictions was that they were totally fine with 3.3 million Americans dying from a disease that could be easily prevented and treatable within a year because they didn't want to wear masks or temporarily work from home.
You don't need to over sensationalize how dangerous the disease is to warrant a response to it. 1% lethality isn't that bad as far as diseases go, but that was never the real danger of COVID. The danger of it was how infectous it was. 1% lethality isn't so bad if it only affects 25-30% of your population, but when your entire population gets it because of how insanely contagious it is, then all of a sudden 1% lethality becomes a big number.
COVID being treatable within a year is a hindsight argument. There was no way to know we would have vaccines that quickly. Phrasing the resistance to COVID measures as “because they didn’t want to wear masks or work from home” is tone deaf. Not everyone has a job that can be easily transitioned to work from home. It’s not as easy as “learn to code or you’re a selfish asshole.”
It isn't a hindsight argument. The CDC was telling us during the pandemic that it would take that long to develop a vaccine. The timeline I heard quoted multiple times at the start of the lockdowns for vaccine development was 1.5 years to 2 years conservatively. We beat the estimate by 6 months, which BTW is one of the talking points the anti-vaxxers use for not trusting the vaccine.
As far as being "tone-deaf" you're missing the point. The point was that if Americans COULD work from home, then they HAD to because there were so many people that NEEDED to keep working outside. It made no sense for Americans to keep getting sick because they just HAD to be able to eat out, or go to the gym. We didn't shut down the entire economy, we shut down the service sector of the economy and if you think I'm not deeply aware of how impactful that was, keep in mind that I'm a Bartender, so I know EXACTLY how impactful that was.
Some economic sacrifice HAD to be made, because the price of doing nothing was again... 3.3 million dead Americans. Whatever the cost in terms of living conditions for the people most affected by those lockdowns are things that CAN be addressed through policy after the fact, they SHOULD be addressed. But the pressing need to slow the infection rate of COVID took priority because it SHOULD have taken priority.
Can you kindly provide a source that there was a high level of confidence we would have a working vaccine within 1.5 years? I remember ruminations that such a timeline was possible but far from certain. I’m not sure how certain anyone can be on the creation and rollout of a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
There’s also no evidence that if we let children go to school it would have been a bloodbath and therefore our hand was forced. We know this because Florida did let children attend school beginning August 2020, 2 years before some in California would reopen. Despite that, when adjusted for age, Floridas COVID deaths per capita was very similar to California’s. In fact, one analysis published in the Lancet found California had a 34% worse death rate when adjusting for age and comorbidities.
Also, contrary to your belief that we kept schools closed to protect Grandma, one of the main reasons we kept schools closed and why they were closed a lot longer in California than Florida is because of pushback from teachers unions. The American Academy of Pediatrics was pushing for schools to be reopened in Summer of 2020. UNICEF was calling for schools to be reopened. The experts were the one preaching the importance of keeping schools open, it was the bureaucrats doing the opposite. Drone, to his credit, was saying the same in real time during the pandemic and said the risk to his personal safety was worth taking to fulfill his duties.
I’m on a plane right now but let me know if there are any citations I can track down and I’ll do my best
I agree with you that we don't have an alternate timeline where we test the consequences of opening everything significantly earlier than we actually did (or leaving things closed for longer than we actually did). Besides covid-related health concerns, there were certainly other legitimate concerns regarding the potential stunting of social, emotional, and academic progress of students during school closures / remote learning.
While I can't speak to the social and emotional aspects, it may be encouraging to know that any academic benefits certain states may have temporarily enjoyed by reopening earlier (e.g., Florida and some other red states) are basically gone now, and the states that played it safer and stayed closed longer (e.g., California and some other blue states) are back to their comparatively better state rankings. It didn't take that long to restore things academically on a relative scale (the rankings between states), although surely on an absolute scale we'll probably see lower scores than the pre-pandemic era (with a slow recovery over the next decade).
Here's more information on these academic measures, through standardized test scores:
While standardized testing is controversial and inconvenient, it can be used to compare student proficiencies in math and reading (and sometimes other subjects) throughout the United States. Forbes compiled testing data from 2023, from all 50 states and Washington D.C.. All 51 of these regions were ranked based on their test scores in elementary school (grade 4 math and reading), middle school (grade 8 math and reading), high school (SAT and ACT), and college (MCAT).
Here is how the data was compiled: “At the elementary level, we analyzed the percentage of fourth-grade students who scored at or above grade-appropriate proficiency in the math and reading sections of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ], according to government data from The Nation’s Report Card. We conducted an identical analysis of eighth-grade student scores. To measure high school standardized test performance, we looked at the average ACT and SAT scores among test takers who graduated from high school in 2023. This data came from ACT and the College Board, respectively. Finally, to measure how a state’s college-educated test takers compare, we used the average MCAT scores of medical students expected to earn their MD in 2023–24, separated according to students’ states of legal residence. This data came from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The 5 highest-scoring regions were: 1. Massachusetts; 2. Utah; 3. New Jersey; 4. New Hampshire; 5. Connecticut.
The 5 lowest-scoring regions were: 51. Oklahoma; 50. New Mexico; 49. West Virginia; 48. Alabama; 47. Mississippi.
Other notable regions: New York was ranked 22nd, California was 23rd, Florida was 30th, Texas was 39th, and Washington D.C. was 40th.
Much like with other metrics for measuring educational outcomes, the blue/liberal/Democratic regions generally performed better than the red/conservative/Republican regions, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Utah).
It should be noted that no regions had proficiency scores in grade 4 or grade 8 above 50%, regardless of the subject; the best-ranking regions were in the 30s and 40s across the board, while the worst-ranking regions were in the 10s and 20s. In other words, no state had even half of their students performing at/above their expected grade levels of 4 or 8. Scrutinizing how proficiency levels are decided may provide more context, and what is definitely necessary is that all 51 regions need to better educate their children.
Sidenotes for pre-pandemic data: From 1992 to 2019, there hasn’t been much change in reading performance ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf ), nor math performance from 1990 to 2019 ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnc.pdf ). There haven’t been significant increases nor decreases across those three decades of 4th grade scores, 8th grade scores, and 12th grade scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a decrease (and slow recovery) from 2020 to 2030 though, due to the covid pandemic.
Unfortunately your claim is much stronger than the evidence you have provided. The “Nations Report Card” which is standardized testing comparing the Nations 4th and 8th graders comes out every 2 years. For the most recent year (2022) we found that, for example,
4th grade test scores for 2022
Reading
Florida - T-2nd in country California - T-31st in country
Mathematics
Florida - 4th in country California - T-37th in country
Florida, a state never known to dominate these standings, now had 4th graders in the top 5 of reading and math. They leap frogged many states from the previous testing (2020) to get there.
What your source did is take the NAEP findings and combined them with college entrance exams (MCAT, SAT, ACT) that apply to student: in the latter half of high school I.e students that are probably more adept at learning digitally than 7-9 year olds. Now any change you see among 4th graders is diluted by adding in a bunch of college entrance exams.
At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures. This is a small subset of total k-12 students. You can’t make any claims about 4th or 8th graders bouncing back from school closures because all you are offering is a single data point - the 2022 NAEP standardized test that showed dropping scores with Florida surging ahead relative to other states. To make the claim they have recovered you need the 2nd data point showing the test scores coming back up and since the test is done every 2 years we won’t get those results until later this year.
You only picked the 2 examples where FL > CA, as opposed to the remaining 5 examples where CA > FL. That's some serious cherry-picking. Overall, California ranks better than Florida, even just a few years after the school closures. Florida is 30th in the country, while California is 23rd. Yes, Florida's 4th graders are ranked higher than their middle school students, high school students, and college students are, compared to other states; otherwise, Florida would be ranked even worse.
"At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures." Middle school + high school + college, actually. California outperforms Florida across most grades. In fact, most states outperform Florida across most grades.
But given Florida's current 4th grade success, it'll be interesting to see if - 4 years from now - Florida has a similar level of 8th grade success (since the 4th graders will be 4 years older), or if the generally-better-at-education states will catch up and surpass Florida by then.
Who is the one cherry picking here? Here’s the website for “the nations report card”
Florida had higher average scores than California in
4th grade reading 4th grade math 8th grade reading 8th grade math
Funny enough that’s all the categories they both tested in. A perfect 4-0 sweep. I didn’t include the 8th graders in my post because the scores were similar enough to be considered a wash but since you said I was cherry picking I feel obliged to mention that Florida had higher average scores among 8th graders too.
You accidentally cited the wrong year. You're looking at 2022, not 2023. Check my site for the 8th grade info on 2023. CA outperformed FL. It's not a huge deal, but it was telling that you only referenced the 2 metrics that FL did better on, out of the total 7. That's cherry-picking. The other 5 metrics show FL isn't doing well, relative to most other states (including CA).
If FL did better back in 2022 with respect to 8th graders, then the fact that CA has already overtaken FL makes me think that FL is losing ground even faster than I would have guessed. Four years from now, those old 4th graders from Florida probably won't be ahead in 8th grade.
On March 21 2024 05:41 Liquid`Drone wrote: Honestly I think 'Trump's handling of Covid was atrocious' and 'in retrospect there were a lot of overreactions to covid' are both correct statements. Sweden is a good example of a country which managed to not overreact but also where the government leaders did not make claims like 'Covid will miraculously go away in April when the weather warms up' or 'this is the flu' (in late february when the cases in Italy genuinely looked scary and before any vaccine or less dangerous mutations spread) or saying that 'it's something we have tremendous control over' or bleach or whatever.
But yeah unironically using 'the plague' as a synonym for covid is totally ridiculous, and many mistakes were made. Honestly I think in a similar vein to how the right wing politicized covid and started believing all sorts of anti vaxx bullshit because that would validate their beliefs, there are people on the left who (in a less personally stupid and irresponsible manner) became personally invested in believing the virus was worse than it really was because that would validate their belief that Trump's handling was atrocious. Which it still was - but there were still overreactions. I think that's mostly a 'in retrospect' - thing; back in 2020 I thought Sweden made the wrong choice and Norway made the right choice but today, I think we'd overall have been slightly better off following their path. I still think doing what we did in 2020 seemed like the right thing to do at that point, but in hindsight there were many unecessary restrictions that hurt more than they helped.
Who was using the plague as an unironic synonym for COVID? The plague killed anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. COVID was threatening to kill 1% of the population of infected people. That's nowhere near the rate of lethality of the plague, but the problem is that 1% of a population the size of the United States is still 3.3 million people.
What the people were saying who wanted NO COVID restrictions was that they were totally fine with 3.3 million Americans dying from a disease that could be easily prevented and treatable within a year because they didn't want to wear masks or temporarily work from home.
You don't need to over sensationalize how dangerous the disease is to warrant a response to it. 1% lethality isn't that bad as far as diseases go, but that was never the real danger of COVID. The danger of it was how infectous it was. 1% lethality isn't so bad if it only affects 25-30% of your population, but when your entire population gets it because of how insanely contagious it is, then all of a sudden 1% lethality becomes a big number.
COVID being treatable within a year is a hindsight argument. There was no way to know we would have vaccines that quickly. Phrasing the resistance to COVID measures as “because they didn’t want to wear masks or work from home” is tone deaf. Not everyone has a job that can be easily transitioned to work from home. It’s not as easy as “learn to code or you’re a selfish asshole.”
It isn't a hindsight argument. The CDC was telling us during the pandemic that it would take that long to develop a vaccine. The timeline I heard quoted multiple times at the start of the lockdowns for vaccine development was 1.5 years to 2 years conservatively. We beat the estimate by 6 months, which BTW is one of the talking points the anti-vaxxers use for not trusting the vaccine.
As far as being "tone-deaf" you're missing the point. The point was that if Americans COULD work from home, then they HAD to because there were so many people that NEEDED to keep working outside. It made no sense for Americans to keep getting sick because they just HAD to be able to eat out, or go to the gym. We didn't shut down the entire economy, we shut down the service sector of the economy and if you think I'm not deeply aware of how impactful that was, keep in mind that I'm a Bartender, so I know EXACTLY how impactful that was.
Some economic sacrifice HAD to be made, because the price of doing nothing was again... 3.3 million dead Americans. Whatever the cost in terms of living conditions for the people most affected by those lockdowns are things that CAN be addressed through policy after the fact, they SHOULD be addressed. But the pressing need to slow the infection rate of COVID took priority because it SHOULD have taken priority.
Can you kindly provide a source that there was a high level of confidence we would have a working vaccine within 1.5 years? I remember ruminations that such a timeline was possible but far from certain. I’m not sure how certain anyone can be on the creation and rollout of a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
There’s also no evidence that if we let children go to school it would have been a bloodbath and therefore our hand was forced. We know this because Florida did let children attend school beginning August 2020, 2 years before some in California would reopen. Despite that, when adjusted for age, Floridas COVID deaths per capita was very similar to California’s. In fact, one analysis published in the Lancet found California had a 34% worse death rate when adjusting for age and comorbidities.
Also, contrary to your belief that we kept schools closed to protect Grandma, one of the main reasons we kept schools closed and why they were closed a lot longer in California than Florida is because of pushback from teachers unions. The American Academy of Pediatrics was pushing for schools to be reopened in Summer of 2020. UNICEF was calling for schools to be reopened. The experts were the one preaching the importance of keeping schools open, it was the bureaucrats doing the opposite. Drone, to his credit, was saying the same in real time during the pandemic and said the risk to his personal safety was worth taking to fulfill his duties.
I’m on a plane right now but let me know if there are any citations I can track down and I’ll do my best
I agree with you that we don't have an alternate timeline where we test the consequences of opening everything significantly earlier than we actually did (or leaving things closed for longer than we actually did). Besides covid-related health concerns, there were certainly other legitimate concerns regarding the potential stunting of social, emotional, and academic progress of students during school closures / remote learning.
While I can't speak to the social and emotional aspects, it may be encouraging to know that any academic benefits certain states may have temporarily enjoyed by reopening earlier (e.g., Florida and some other red states) are basically gone now, and the states that played it safer and stayed closed longer (e.g., California and some other blue states) are back to their comparatively better state rankings. It didn't take that long to restore things academically on a relative scale (the rankings between states), although surely on an absolute scale we'll probably see lower scores than the pre-pandemic era (with a slow recovery over the next decade).
Here's more information on these academic measures, through standardized test scores:
While standardized testing is controversial and inconvenient, it can be used to compare student proficiencies in math and reading (and sometimes other subjects) throughout the United States. Forbes compiled testing data from 2023, from all 50 states and Washington D.C.. All 51 of these regions were ranked based on their test scores in elementary school (grade 4 math and reading), middle school (grade 8 math and reading), high school (SAT and ACT), and college (MCAT).
Here is how the data was compiled: “At the elementary level, we analyzed the percentage of fourth-grade students who scored at or above grade-appropriate proficiency in the math and reading sections of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ], according to government data from The Nation’s Report Card. We conducted an identical analysis of eighth-grade student scores. To measure high school standardized test performance, we looked at the average ACT and SAT scores among test takers who graduated from high school in 2023. This data came from ACT and the College Board, respectively. Finally, to measure how a state’s college-educated test takers compare, we used the average MCAT scores of medical students expected to earn their MD in 2023–24, separated according to students’ states of legal residence. This data came from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The 5 highest-scoring regions were: 1. Massachusetts; 2. Utah; 3. New Jersey; 4. New Hampshire; 5. Connecticut.
The 5 lowest-scoring regions were: 51. Oklahoma; 50. New Mexico; 49. West Virginia; 48. Alabama; 47. Mississippi.
Other notable regions: New York was ranked 22nd, California was 23rd, Florida was 30th, Texas was 39th, and Washington D.C. was 40th.
Much like with other metrics for measuring educational outcomes, the blue/liberal/Democratic regions generally performed better than the red/conservative/Republican regions, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Utah).
It should be noted that no regions had proficiency scores in grade 4 or grade 8 above 50%, regardless of the subject; the best-ranking regions were in the 30s and 40s across the board, while the worst-ranking regions were in the 10s and 20s. In other words, no state had even half of their students performing at/above their expected grade levels of 4 or 8. Scrutinizing how proficiency levels are decided may provide more context, and what is definitely necessary is that all 51 regions need to better educate their children.
Sidenotes for pre-pandemic data: From 1992 to 2019, there hasn’t been much change in reading performance ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf ), nor math performance from 1990 to 2019 ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnc.pdf ). There haven’t been significant increases nor decreases across those three decades of 4th grade scores, 8th grade scores, and 12th grade scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a decrease (and slow recovery) from 2020 to 2030 though, due to the covid pandemic.
Unfortunately your claim is much stronger than the evidence you have provided. The “Nations Report Card” which is standardized testing comparing the Nations 4th and 8th graders comes out every 2 years. For the most recent year (2022) we found that, for example,
4th grade test scores for 2022
Reading
Florida - T-2nd in country California - T-31st in country
Mathematics
Florida - 4th in country California - T-37th in country
Florida, a state never known to dominate these standings, now had 4th graders in the top 5 of reading and math. They leap frogged many states from the previous testing (2020) to get there.
What your source did is take the NAEP findings and combined them with college entrance exams (MCAT, SAT, ACT) that apply to student: in the latter half of high school I.e students that are probably more adept at learning digitally than 7-9 year olds. Now any change you see among 4th graders is diluted by adding in a bunch of college entrance exams.
At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures. This is a small subset of total k-12 students. You can’t make any claims about 4th or 8th graders bouncing back from school closures because all you are offering is a single data point - the 2022 NAEP standardized test that showed dropping scores with Florida surging ahead relative to other states. To make the claim they have recovered you need the 2nd data point showing the test scores coming back up and since the test is done every 2 years we won’t get those results until later this year.
You only picked the 2 examples where FL > CA, as opposed to the remaining 5 examples where CA > FL. That's some serious cherry-picking. Overall, California ranks better than Florida, even just a few years after the school closures. Florida is 30th in the country, while California is 23rd. Yes, Florida's 4th graders are ranked higher than their middle school students, high school students, and college students are, compared to other states; otherwise, Florida would be ranked even worse.
"At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures." Middle school + high school + college, actually. California outperforms Florida across most grades. In fact, most states outperform Florida across most grades.
But given Florida's current 4th grade success, it'll be interesting to see if - 4 years from now - Florida has a similar level of 8th grade success (since the 4th graders will be 4 years older), or if the generally-better-at-education states will catch up and surpass Florida by then.
Who is the one cherry picking here? Here’s the website for “the nations report card”
Florida had higher average scores than California in
4th grade reading 4th grade math 8th grade reading 8th grade math
Funny enough that’s all the categories they both tested in. A perfect 4-0 sweep. I didn’t include the 8th graders in my post because the scores were similar enough to be considered a wash but since you said I was cherry picking I feel obliged to mention that Florida had higher average scores among 8th graders too.
You just cited a different year lol. You're looking at 2022, not 2023. Check my site for the 8th grade info on 2023. CA outperformed FL. It's not a huge deal, but it was telling that you only referenced the 2 metrics that FL did better on, out of the total 7.
If FL did better back in 2022 with respect to 8th graders, then the fact that CA has already overtaken FL makes me think that FL is losing ground even faster than I would have guessed. Four years from now, those old 4th graders from Florida probably won't be ahead in 8th grade.
There is no 2023. This is a standardized test done every 2 years. The reason your site has California higher is because they look at % proficient instead of average test score. So 22.97% of Californian 8th graders are proficient in math compared to 22.95% of Florida 8th graders. I don’t consider that 0.02% to be significant. Since you keep citing this as your only evidence that California middle schoolers are outperforming Florida middle schoolers I take it you think that 0.02% difference is massive.
On March 21 2024 05:51 Vindicare605 wrote: [quote]
Who was using the plague as an unironic synonym for COVID? The plague killed anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. COVID was threatening to kill 1% of the population of infected people. That's nowhere near the rate of lethality of the plague, but the problem is that 1% of a population the size of the United States is still 3.3 million people.
What the people were saying who wanted NO COVID restrictions was that they were totally fine with 3.3 million Americans dying from a disease that could be easily prevented and treatable within a year because they didn't want to wear masks or temporarily work from home.
You don't need to over sensationalize how dangerous the disease is to warrant a response to it. 1% lethality isn't that bad as far as diseases go, but that was never the real danger of COVID. The danger of it was how infectous it was. 1% lethality isn't so bad if it only affects 25-30% of your population, but when your entire population gets it because of how insanely contagious it is, then all of a sudden 1% lethality becomes a big number.
COVID being treatable within a year is a hindsight argument. There was no way to know we would have vaccines that quickly. Phrasing the resistance to COVID measures as “because they didn’t want to wear masks or work from home” is tone deaf. Not everyone has a job that can be easily transitioned to work from home. It’s not as easy as “learn to code or you’re a selfish asshole.”
It isn't a hindsight argument. The CDC was telling us during the pandemic that it would take that long to develop a vaccine. The timeline I heard quoted multiple times at the start of the lockdowns for vaccine development was 1.5 years to 2 years conservatively. We beat the estimate by 6 months, which BTW is one of the talking points the anti-vaxxers use for not trusting the vaccine.
As far as being "tone-deaf" you're missing the point. The point was that if Americans COULD work from home, then they HAD to because there were so many people that NEEDED to keep working outside. It made no sense for Americans to keep getting sick because they just HAD to be able to eat out, or go to the gym. We didn't shut down the entire economy, we shut down the service sector of the economy and if you think I'm not deeply aware of how impactful that was, keep in mind that I'm a Bartender, so I know EXACTLY how impactful that was.
Some economic sacrifice HAD to be made, because the price of doing nothing was again... 3.3 million dead Americans. Whatever the cost in terms of living conditions for the people most affected by those lockdowns are things that CAN be addressed through policy after the fact, they SHOULD be addressed. But the pressing need to slow the infection rate of COVID took priority because it SHOULD have taken priority.
Can you kindly provide a source that there was a high level of confidence we would have a working vaccine within 1.5 years? I remember ruminations that such a timeline was possible but far from certain. I’m not sure how certain anyone can be on the creation and rollout of a novel vaccine for a novel virus.
There’s also no evidence that if we let children go to school it would have been a bloodbath and therefore our hand was forced. We know this because Florida did let children attend school beginning August 2020, 2 years before some in California would reopen. Despite that, when adjusted for age, Floridas COVID deaths per capita was very similar to California’s. In fact, one analysis published in the Lancet found California had a 34% worse death rate when adjusting for age and comorbidities.
Also, contrary to your belief that we kept schools closed to protect Grandma, one of the main reasons we kept schools closed and why they were closed a lot longer in California than Florida is because of pushback from teachers unions. The American Academy of Pediatrics was pushing for schools to be reopened in Summer of 2020. UNICEF was calling for schools to be reopened. The experts were the one preaching the importance of keeping schools open, it was the bureaucrats doing the opposite. Drone, to his credit, was saying the same in real time during the pandemic and said the risk to his personal safety was worth taking to fulfill his duties.
I’m on a plane right now but let me know if there are any citations I can track down and I’ll do my best
I agree with you that we don't have an alternate timeline where we test the consequences of opening everything significantly earlier than we actually did (or leaving things closed for longer than we actually did). Besides covid-related health concerns, there were certainly other legitimate concerns regarding the potential stunting of social, emotional, and academic progress of students during school closures / remote learning.
While I can't speak to the social and emotional aspects, it may be encouraging to know that any academic benefits certain states may have temporarily enjoyed by reopening earlier (e.g., Florida and some other red states) are basically gone now, and the states that played it safer and stayed closed longer (e.g., California and some other blue states) are back to their comparatively better state rankings. It didn't take that long to restore things academically on a relative scale (the rankings between states), although surely on an absolute scale we'll probably see lower scores than the pre-pandemic era (with a slow recovery over the next decade).
Here's more information on these academic measures, through standardized test scores:
While standardized testing is controversial and inconvenient, it can be used to compare student proficiencies in math and reading (and sometimes other subjects) throughout the United States. Forbes compiled testing data from 2023, from all 50 states and Washington D.C.. All 51 of these regions were ranked based on their test scores in elementary school (grade 4 math and reading), middle school (grade 8 math and reading), high school (SAT and ACT), and college (MCAT).
Here is how the data was compiled: “At the elementary level, we analyzed the percentage of fourth-grade students who scored at or above grade-appropriate proficiency in the math and reading sections of NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ ], according to government data from The Nation’s Report Card. We conducted an identical analysis of eighth-grade student scores. To measure high school standardized test performance, we looked at the average ACT and SAT scores among test takers who graduated from high school in 2023. This data came from ACT and the College Board, respectively. Finally, to measure how a state’s college-educated test takers compare, we used the average MCAT scores of medical students expected to earn their MD in 2023–24, separated according to students’ states of legal residence. This data came from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The 5 highest-scoring regions were: 1. Massachusetts; 2. Utah; 3. New Jersey; 4. New Hampshire; 5. Connecticut.
The 5 lowest-scoring regions were: 51. Oklahoma; 50. New Mexico; 49. West Virginia; 48. Alabama; 47. Mississippi.
Other notable regions: New York was ranked 22nd, California was 23rd, Florida was 30th, Texas was 39th, and Washington D.C. was 40th.
Much like with other metrics for measuring educational outcomes, the blue/liberal/Democratic regions generally performed better than the red/conservative/Republican regions, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Utah).
It should be noted that no regions had proficiency scores in grade 4 or grade 8 above 50%, regardless of the subject; the best-ranking regions were in the 30s and 40s across the board, while the worst-ranking regions were in the 10s and 20s. In other words, no state had even half of their students performing at/above their expected grade levels of 4 or 8. Scrutinizing how proficiency levels are decided may provide more context, and what is definitely necessary is that all 51 regions need to better educate their children.
Sidenotes for pre-pandemic data: From 1992 to 2019, there hasn’t been much change in reading performance ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf ), nor math performance from 1990 to 2019 ( https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnc.pdf ). There haven’t been significant increases nor decreases across those three decades of 4th grade scores, 8th grade scores, and 12th grade scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a decrease (and slow recovery) from 2020 to 2030 though, due to the covid pandemic.
Unfortunately your claim is much stronger than the evidence you have provided. The “Nations Report Card” which is standardized testing comparing the Nations 4th and 8th graders comes out every 2 years. For the most recent year (2022) we found that, for example,
4th grade test scores for 2022
Reading
Florida - T-2nd in country California - T-31st in country
Mathematics
Florida - 4th in country California - T-37th in country
Florida, a state never known to dominate these standings, now had 4th graders in the top 5 of reading and math. They leap frogged many states from the previous testing (2020) to get there.
What your source did is take the NAEP findings and combined them with college entrance exams (MCAT, SAT, ACT) that apply to student: in the latter half of high school I.e students that are probably more adept at learning digitally than 7-9 year olds. Now any change you see among 4th graders is diluted by adding in a bunch of college entrance exams.
At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures. This is a small subset of total k-12 students. You can’t make any claims about 4th or 8th graders bouncing back from school closures because all you are offering is a single data point - the 2022 NAEP standardized test that showed dropping scores with Florida surging ahead relative to other states. To make the claim they have recovered you need the 2nd data point showing the test scores coming back up and since the test is done every 2 years we won’t get those results until later this year.
You only picked the 2 examples where FL > CA, as opposed to the remaining 5 examples where CA > FL. That's some serious cherry-picking. Overall, California ranks better than Florida, even just a few years after the school closures. Florida is 30th in the country, while California is 23rd. Yes, Florida's 4th graders are ranked higher than their middle school students, high school students, and college students are, compared to other states; otherwise, Florida would be ranked even worse.
"At best you can say that upper class men of high school were able to bounce back from school closures." Middle school + high school + college, actually. California outperforms Florida across most grades. In fact, most states outperform Florida across most grades.
But given Florida's current 4th grade success, it'll be interesting to see if - 4 years from now - Florida has a similar level of 8th grade success (since the 4th graders will be 4 years older), or if the generally-better-at-education states will catch up and surpass Florida by then.
Who is the one cherry picking here? Here’s the website for “the nations report card”
Florida had higher average scores than California in
4th grade reading 4th grade math 8th grade reading 8th grade math
Funny enough that’s all the categories they both tested in. A perfect 4-0 sweep. I didn’t include the 8th graders in my post because the scores were similar enough to be considered a wash but since you said I was cherry picking I feel obliged to mention that Florida had higher average scores among 8th graders too.
You just cited a different year lol. You're looking at 2022, not 2023. Check my site for the 8th grade info on 2023. CA outperformed FL. It's not a huge deal, but it was telling that you only referenced the 2 metrics that FL did better on, out of the total 7.
If FL did better back in 2022 with respect to 8th graders, then the fact that CA has already overtaken FL makes me think that FL is losing ground even faster than I would have guessed. Four years from now, those old 4th graders from Florida probably won't be ahead in 8th grade.
There is no 2023. This is a standardized test done every 2 years. The reason your site has California higher is because they look at % proficient instead of average test score. So 22.97% of Californian 8th graders are proficient in math compared to 22.95% of Florida 8th graders. I don’t consider that 0.02% to be significant. Since you keep citing this as your only evidence that California middle schoolers are outperforming Florida middle schoolers I take it you think that 0.02% difference is massive.
I don't really know what you two are arguing about. It seems toe that the most obvious explanation is that: yes, Florida's quicker reopening of schools led to better short-term outcomes, indicating that home schooling or remote schooling was not an effective alternative to classrooms. However, since the pandemic is over, it doesn't seem like it'll have a major impact on long-term education results, as even 1 year later there is a return to pre-pandemic outcomes in standardized tests.
That said, this doesn't say much about the psychological and developmental impact of the pandemic on young kids, which may be more detrimental long-term, or it may also bounce back quickly.
In any case, I'm not sure what Florida or California's policy on schooling has to do with Trump's overall handling of COVID. These were clearly both possible policies under the Trump administration of COVID, so he gets neither the credit nor the blame for any of this. What he gets the blame for is the national response, which was just overall awful. This is an excellent research article on the US' response and pretty much everything Trump's administration did right (not much) and wrong: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9115435/
(1) The administration explicitly scrapped the plans and mechanisms for a government-wide response to a pandemic. His administration was shown to be badly prepared in a simulation by the CDC in early 2019, and then claimed nobody could have prepared for a pandemic when it happened.
(2) the actual response was slow, uncoordinated and marked by Trump's denialism of the problem and wishful thinking. Travel bans were too late and informed by politics rather than epidemiology. Some problems, such as the abject failure to develop sufficient tests, are institutional problems that far predate Trump, but it's also not as if Trump rectified the institutional rot in the CDC or FDA during his term.
(3) Anti-science stance and peddling of bogus cures was counterproductive. Proper mask usage was effective at stopping the spread of COVID. Trump on numerous occasions ridiculed masks, and promoted nonsense like bleach, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as treatments.
Anyway, these are just my main takes from the article. It is extremely well researched and far more damning than any summary I can make of it. It also references other research and comparative studies in different countries' responses.
That article is quite long. I would be interested in comparative studies of different countries responses though. Would you be kind enough to link the relevant portions for that?
Also the relevant portion of trump scrapping the pandemic response plan? Did he give a reason for why he scrapped it?
I'm willing to defend my usage of the world plague to describe covid. I mentor middle and high schoolers and covid has had extensive social and emotional damage to society that we're only going to fully realize in the coming decades. A lot of really bright kids full of potential became angry depressed husks unable to do much of anything with their gifts. People shouldn't ignore things like the spike in kids thinking the holocaust was a hoax or the ever worsening gender relations that are coming. Long covid is going to be more damaging than all the deaths from covid in the short term.
Were mistakes made in hindsight? Yeah but a lot of things were learned, how long was it from the last time humanity truly had a pandemic like covid? We learned a lot from studying the last one and had a playbook ready to go for this one from what we knew best. COVID wasn't a thing that came from completely out of nowhere. Obama organized a program to Predict when a disease like covid would come and the NSC had knowledge of what to do if something like it ever got as bad as it actually did. Trump closed down the program and the department. luckily some of the people part of it were able to get jobs still in government and were around to inform Trump what was about to happen and how bad it actually was.
What trump did and his response can't be excused by ignorance, he knew what he should have done and decided not to. He closed the pandemic response office and then the PREDICT program because he didn't think it was worth the money to keep the country safe.
The reason why the covid thread was shit for years is because you're incapable of just answering simple questions and responding to what people post, instead trying to harp on the smallest part of their post you think you can score posts on, then after going 12 rounds refuse to take a step back to reflect on your behavior in any way at all.
On March 20 2024 04:49 Sermokala wrote: Blame for the start of a crisis and blame for the continuance of said crisis are distinctly different things. Trump failed at managing covid for any time at all he was president. From the start of when he was informed at how bad it was going to be he kept messaging that it wasn't a problem and would go away any day of the week. This message was constantly spread at the same time critical time was being wasted to prepare for covid. Trump got rid of the department that was suppose to manage and prepare for Covid. By the Time Rudy gobert gets sick and the nation finally starts receiving the trauma of just how bad the plague was going to be there was no leader from the oval office preparing the nation for the trial to come. Even as things were undeniably bad and the medical system was showing signs about to collapse we have Trumps kids playing games with critical supplies. Trump was constantly belittling and was jealous all the time about the one guy in his administration that knew what they were doing. He follows the simplest American directive of "throw money at the problem" to get the vaccine updated and cleared in record time then refuses to convince the people to get it. The one good thing he does his entire presidency that actually benefited people and he is so shitty of a person he can't bring himself to save peoples lives.
On the other issue you had republicans up and down saying to any media they could that the border was now open and all immigrants should come on by because joe bidens not going to do anything anymore. You have a governor thats publicly advertising how he is going to send you to the good parts of the country for free if you're able to actually get to texas. Now that everyone can agree immigration needs reform and the border needs protection who is the one that is actually working to that and who is the one who is working against that?
I think 'The US is in need of border reform, and this was the Dem approach to enact border reform. It didn't work perfectly, or great, but isn't unsalvageable' is kinda where I'm at currently. I don't like the turnaround whataboutist "But Trump is a moron!". I don't see it as helpful, and I'd hope for a US gov't free of having to compare what it does to what Trump might have, or has, done.
If you were to, free of Trump considerations, assess the current border issues under Biden, where do you end up?
Trump is a fucking disaster human. We should still be able to criticize dems despite that.
I end up with the same need for comprehensive immigration reform that is impossible to do with a house of representatives that refuses to govern.
A federal level dispersal program to prepare cities for and to accept immigrants is not only necessary but beneficial for the nation as a whole. Immigrants commit less crime than natural born citizens and contribute to the economy. There are a lot of cities in the interior that could cheaply be renovated and accept these millions of new citizens easily compared to growing brand new construction.
Bj I'm not going to respond to your nonsense posting in response to a few words out of a whole post you clearly just skimmed. You're not pleasant enough of a person to justify me reading all that shit.
Is that feasible, though?
I'm not saying that because I don't believe it is, I'm asking because given what I know I expect it isn't and/or would cause a bunch of other problems. Part of the identity of the United States as far as I understand it is that it is... well, a united collection of individual states. Republicans are certainly against 'the government' having much control over anything, so I don't understand how you'd ever get a federal program through. Even if you did, the pessimist in me just sees it being abused to send as many migrants as humanly possible to California or whichever blue state, while simultaneously cutting the funding meant to support these programs and laughing to themselves the entire time. I could be misunderstanding your idea, but generally I have no faith that the US could construct and enact a functional system, because the US is perpetually at war with itself.
Republicans love the government having control over all the things they want it to.
I agree that its impossible while we have a faction in the nation that refuses to govern. If we could be a nation that works on its issues like adults it would be in our best interest to guide the nation along to resettle immigrants into the interior like we did when it was white people, and soon to be white people, coming onto our shores. Minnesota accepts the highest per capita number of refugees and its been working well for our economy and is a much more moderate state than the presidential record would tell you. More people in an economy means a better functioning economy but the rust belt is a politically diverse set of states that could all use revitalization of its existing infrastructure. Detroit noticeably has a massive footprint and a lot of empty homes (with accompanying infrastructure to go with these developments) and Michigan split the last two elections. Same with Wisconsin Pennsylvania Ohio and others.
With climate change making a lot of third world nations much worse to live in we're going to have to figure out how we're going to deal with mass migration if we don't want to start shooting them when they come.
On March 21 2024 14:01 BlackJack wrote: That article is quite long. I would be interested in comparative studies of different countries responses though. Would you be kind enough to link the relevant portions for that?
Also the relevant portion of trump scrapping the pandemic response plan? Did he give a reason for why he scrapped it?
It mentions the comparative studies "en passant", being mostly focused on the US' response, and they in turn are even longer, but here are the relevant sections and the links to the references:
Regarding the second question, factors associated with these three perspectives shed considerable light on the dynamics that contributed to the Trump Administration's failure to proactively address the threat and effectively manage the pandemic and—by extension—to the comparatively high toll of lives lost in the US during that period. As suggested in the apt title of a recent paper by Platje et al. (2020), the COVID‐19 pandemic appears to have been “both an expected and unexpected event.” However, many of the critical challenges that vexed the Trump Administration's response were not only foreseeable but were, in fact, foreseen.
...
Responding to pandemics is challenging, and many countries struggled to manage the COVID‐19 crisis (Boin et al., 2021). It is also important to recognize that not all of the problems of the US response can be laid at the feet of President Trump. As we showed above, the CDC's initial testing failures resulted from institutional ills that were independent of the president, and the pandemic revealed dysfunction and institutional rot at the CDC and FDA that predated the Trump Administration (Gottlieb, 2021). However, despite favorable circumstances—sufficient early warning, substantial capacity, a venerable center for disease control and prevention, vast resources, high‐quality laboratories, and world‐leading scientific expertise—the Trump Administration demonstrated incompetence in responding to and managing the SARS‐CoV‐2 outbreak.
The US, although it represents just 4% of the world's population, accounted for over 20% of all confirmed COVID‐19 cases and deaths worldwide that took place on Trump's watch (Johns Hopkins University, 2022). This outcome was not inevitable. With a timelier, focused, scientifically informed, and sustained whole‐of‐government response, it has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of COVID‐19 deaths could have been avoided (Redlener et al., 2020; Woolhandler et al., 2021). Ultimately, in the US system, as the commander‐in‐chief, presidents are responsible for the decisions the federal government makes or fails to make, the mobilization and coordination of the federal response to national crises, and setting and enforcing the proper priorities. In the final analysis, when it comes to assessing responsibility for the avoidable failures of the federal government's COVID‐19 performance, the evidence examined here indicates that, while not responsible for everything that went wrong, President Trump was a decisive factor behind the tragically sub‐optimal US pandemic response.
Regarding the cancellation and replacement of Bush/Obama era crisis response management plans. I can't find any mention of why, but it may be in one of the numerous sources. Here is the relevant text:
In the US system, states and their local authorities have the primary “front‐line” responsibility for public health emergencies, as they do in other types of disasters (Kettl, 2003; Parker et al., 2009). However, dating back to the establishment of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1950 and the creation of FEMA in 1979, the federal government has significant responsibilities for managing national emergencies (Kapucu & Hu, 2022). As no state has the capacity to manage the nationwide consequences of a pandemic, national strategies have envisaged a crucial role for the federal government (see, for example, the Bush administration's 2005 pandemic preparedness plan).
At the federal level, the problem of pandemic response cuts across the mandates of many departments and agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the FDA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Environmental Protection Agency, the NSC, and other federal government entities, as well as requiring cooperation and coordination with state and local health authorities. It also includes thousands of hospitals and can consist of volunteer organizations, such as the Red Cross. Because the Trump Administration response was poorly led and managed in important respects, it was not able to overcome this organizational fragmentation and mount a coherent and effective federal response to the COVID‐19 crisis (Kapucu & Hu, 2022; Kapucu & Moynihan, 2021; Kettl, 2020; Rozell & Wilcox, 2020). In recognition of this organizational complexity, the Obama Administration built on the Bush‐era plans by creating an NSC “Playbook for Early Response to High‐Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” (Executive Office of the President, 2016), which it passed on to the Trump Administration. The playbook provided a detailed 69‐page guide with clear instructions and procedures to facilitate a smooth all‐of‐government response to a pandemic. The document identified the involved actors, cataloged available resources, and offered a list of specific questions that should be asked and decisions that should be made at multiple levels in the federal government.
The Trump Administration opted to shelve the NSC playbook and, in 2018, shutter NSC's Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense—which created the playbook and previously had the responsibility for supporting the White House's pandemic response (Diamond & Toosi, 2020). The Trump Administration replaced the playbook with its own set of plans centered on the revised 2018 Pandemic Crisis Action Plan (PanCAP) (FEMA, 2021). However, the 2019 HHS's Crimson Contagion influenza pandemic simulation revealed the Trump administration's arrangements to be woefully unprepared for the challenge. HHS found it difficult to serve as the lead federal agency, other federal agencies were confused about who was in charge, federal interagency coordination performed poorly, and participating states were frustrated with processes for securing resources (New York Times, 2019, p. 55). All of these problems played out in real‐time when the Administration was actually faced with responding to the rigors of the COVID‐19 pandemic.
After China's initial January 2020 announcement, a suite of measures, along the lines outlined in the response playbook, should have been launched. However, even after cases were confirmed in the US and the WHO had declared a global health emergency, the Trump Administration's response was sluggish and largely ad hoc. When it came to the steps recommended in the 2016 playbook—to move quickly to detect outbreaks, take measures to limit the spread of disease, scale‐up logistics to help with the shortfall of critical resources such as personal protective equipment, and coordinate a unified all‐of‐government response—the Trump Administration lagged at every juncture or failed to deliver. In the absence of guidance from a properly implemented preparedness plan or top leadership, the actors crucial for an effective federal pandemic response were unable to get on the same page to coordinate and cooperate (Kapucu & Hu, 2022; Rozell & Wilcox, 2020). Instead, there was vicious infighting within and between the White House, HHS, the CDC, and FDA about setting shared goals over testing and which nonpharmaceutical measures to prioritize (Diamond, 2020). The Trump Administration did not declare COVID‐19 a national emergency until March 13, 2020 and, even after doing so, struggled to produce coherent, effective policies concerning mass testing, lockdowns, masking, and public communication.
Despite 15 months of investigating Joe Biden out of revenge for Trump's two impeachments, and searching for even the smallest threads of high crimes and misdemeanors, Congressional Republicans haven't discovered anything worthy of impeaching Biden. Unfortunately for Congressional Republicans, what did end up being discovered was that some of those Congressional Republicans + Fox News + Rudy Giuliani were working with Chinese and Russian agents to invent fake stories designed to call into question Biden's character:
It's become so obvious that Congressional Republicans are lying and unable to impeach Joe Biden for any legitimate reason, that Congressional Democrats are blatantly calling out their bluffs. Republicans know that they have nothing on Joe Biden that's an impeachable offense, and can't even convince their own party members to impeach Biden. The Democrats are even offering to make the motion to impeach Biden, just to start the vote that would obviously fail, but the Republicans aren't even willing to second the motion, because then they'd have to admit that the impeachment investigation is only being used to make it appear like Biden is as criminal as Trump.
"President Joe Biden announced another round of student loan debt forgiveness Thursday, totaling $5.8 billion for nearly 78,000 public-sector workers ... the Biden administration has canceled a total of $144 billion of federal student loan debt for nearly 4 million borrowers to date ... more student debt cancellation than under any other president – despite the fact that the Supreme Court knocked down its broad student loan forgiveness program last year. That program would have canceled up to $20,000 for low- and middle-income borrowers, for an estimated total of $430 billion of debt relief." https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/21/politics/student-loan-forgiveness-emails
I apologize for the wall-of-text in the following article, but this is apparently a pretty big deal. How do you think the United States should respond to this? Another resolution, modified somehow?
Russia and China veto US resolution calling for immediate cease-fire in Gaza
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia and China on Friday vetoed a U.S.-sponsored U.N. resolution calling for “an immediate and sustained cease-fire” in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza to protect civilians and enable humanitarian aid to be delivered to more than 2 million hungry Palestinians.
The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 11 members in favor and three against, including Algeria, the Arab representative on the council. There was one abstention, from Guyana.
Before the vote, Russian U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Moscow supports an immediate cease-fire, but he criticized diluted language that referred to moral imperatives, which he called philosophical wording that does not belong in a U.N. resolution.
He accused U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield of “deliberately misleading the international community.”
“This was some kind of an empty rhetorical exercise,” Nebenzia said. “The American product is exceedingly politicized, the sole purpose of which is to help to play to the voters, to throw them a bone in the form of some kind of a mention of a cease-fire in Gaza … and to ensure the impunity of Israel, whose crimes in the draft are not even assessed.”
Thomas-Greenfield urged the council to adopt the resolution to press for an immediate cease-fire and the release of the hostages, as well as to address Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and support ongoing diplomacy by the United States, Egypt and Qatar.
After the vote, Thomas-Greenfield accused Russia and China of voting for “deeply cynical reasons,” saying they could not bring themselves to condemn Hamas’ terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, which the resolution would have done for the first time.
A key issue in the vote was the unusual language related to a cease-fire. It said the Security Council “determines the imperative of an immediate and sustained cease-fire,” — not a straight-forward “demand” or “call.”
The resolution did reflect a shift by the United States, which has found itself at odds with much of the world as even close allies push for an unconditional end to fighting.
In previous resolutions, the U.S. has closely intertwined calls for a cease-fire with demands for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. This resolution, through awkward wording that’s open to interpretation, continued to link the two issues, but not as firmly.
While the resolution would have been officially binding under international law, it would not have ended the fighting or led to the release of hostages. But it would have added to the pressure on Israel as its closest ally falls more in line with global demands for a cease-fire at a time of rising tensions between the U.S. and Israeli governments.
Meanwhile, the 10 elected members of the Security Council have put their own resolution in a final form to be voted on. It demands an immediate humanitarian cease-fire for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan that began March 10 to be “respected by all parties leading to a permanent sustainable cease-fire.” Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, told reporters the vote would take place either late Friday or Saturday morning.
The resolution also demands “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages ” and emphasizes the urgent need to protect civilians and deliver humanitarian aid throughout the Gaza Strip.
Nebenzia urged council members to support it, but Thomas-Greenfield said the text’s current form “fails to support sensitive diplomacy in the region. Worse, it could actually give Hamas an excuse to walk away from the deal on the table.”
The Security Council had already adopted two resolutions on the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza, but none has called for a cease-fire.
Russia and China vetoed a U.S.-sponsored resolution in late October calling for pauses in the fighting to deliver aid, protection of civilians and a halt to arming Hamas. They said it did not reflect global calls for a cease-fire.
The U.S. has vetoed three resolutions demanding a cease-fire, the most recent an Arab-backed measure supported by 13 council members with one abstention on Feb. 20.
A day earlier, the U.S. circulated a rival resolution, which went through major changes during negotiations before Friday’s vote. It initially would have supported a temporary cease-fire linked to the release of all hostages, and the previous draft would have supported international efforts for a cease-fire as part of a hostage deal.
The vote took place as Blinken, America’s top diplomat, is on his sixth urgent mission to the Middle East since the Israel-Hamas war, discussing a deal for a cease-fire and hostage release, as well as post-war scenarios.
Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people in the surprise Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel that triggered the war, and abducted another 250 people. Hamas is still believed to be holding some 100 people hostage, as well as the remains of 30 others.
In Gaza, the Health Ministry raised the death toll in the territory Thursday to nearly 32,000 Palestinians. The agency does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count but says women and children make up two-thirds of the dead.
The international community’s authority on determining the severity of hunger crises warned this week that “famine is imminent” in northern Gaza, where 70% of people are experiencing catastrophic hunger. The report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC, warned that escalation of the war could push half of Gaza’s total population to the brink of starvation.
The U.S. draft expressed “deep concern about the threat of conflict-induced famine and epidemics presently facing the civilian population in Gaza as well as the number of undernourished people, and also that hunger in Gaza has reached catastrophic levels.”
It emphasized “the urgent need to expand the flow of humanitarian assistance to civilians in the entire Gaza Strip” and lift all barriers to getting aid to civilians “at scale.”
Israel faces mounting pressure to streamline the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, to open more land crossings and to come to a cease-fire agreement. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to move the military offensive to the southern city of Rafah, where some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians have sought safety. Netanyahu says it’s a Hamas stronghold.
The final U.S. draft eliminated language in the initial draft that said Israel’s offensive in Rafah “should not proceed under current circumstances.” Instead, in an introductory paragraph, the council emphasized its concern that a ground offensive into Rafah “would result in further harm to civilians and their further displacement, potentially into neighboring countries, and would have serious implications for regional peace and security.”
EPT
