Weakliem writes:
It’s now pretty widely agreed that schools were too slow to return to in-person instruction during the Covid epidemic: “remote learning” usually meant less learning and students suffered from the loss of normal social interaction.
Based on my experiences as a teacher and a parent of school-age children, I agree; indeed I felt that way at the time.
Weakliem then asks:
So why didn’t the schools go back faster?
He continues:
Some observers hold that cautious policies were imposed by what Nate Silver calls the “Indigo Blob”: “the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia and public health . . . and instruments of the Democratic party and progressive advocacy groups.”
There are a couple of problems with this analysis. One is that general public opinion was not in favor of faster reopening. In April 2021 an NBC News poll asked people who had children in school “do you believe that your child’s school system has been too slow in re-opening, too fast in re-opening, or struck the right balance?” 14% said too slow, 14% too fast, and 70% struck the right balance. That’s an impressively high level of public agreement with policy, which may be because policies responded to local opinion or because people generally have a positive view of their local schools and trusted them to do the right thing. The second is that opinions on the issue were not closely related to education. . . .
Weakliem summarizes:
Returning to the question of why schools didn’t go back to in-person instruction more quickly, I’d say that it was because decision-makers were generally aligned with public opinion–the idea that children need special protection has a lot of intuitive appeal, so in the presence of uncertainty they were inclined to play it safe. Of course, there were also large partisan differences (see this post), but I don’t think that these appeared because Democrats followed the “Indigo Blob”—it was because they reacted against Trump.
Unfortunately, Weakliem is an obscure retired sociology professor so not so many people will see his analysis, as compared to the hundreds of thousands who will hear about the nefarious “indigo blob” etc etc. What can you do?
To get to the social science question: I hated the school closings and lockdowns when they were happening; the problem, though, was not that they were being imposed by a dictatorial government or that they were caused by some sort of conspiracy of the news media (let alone, by “progressive advocacy groups”). Rather, school closings and lockdowns were solutions to a coordination problem: if large fractions of the population don’t feel safe sending their children to school, and don’t feel safe going to work, then it makes sense to coordinate this behavior. The other thing was the fear of the health system being overwhelmed, hence the reasonable push to flatten the curve.
The real problem was not the shutdowns but rather that schools remained remote, even a year later! For that I’d blame a mixture of things including laziness at all levels. At Columbia, I got the impression that it was just easier for them to tell us to stay remote. Maybe they were afraid of lawsuits too? We also had faculty who were too lazy to come to work and teach, and I guess a lot of students found it more comfortable in the short term to sit at home and not go to school, but mostly I’m inclined to blame the administration—and, hey, it’s their job to make the hard decisions an take the blame, right?
Teachers & their poweful unions strongly opposed school re-openings, especially K-12.
Partly due to exaggerated COVID fear, but primarily due to the sweet deal of stayiNg at full pay & benefits.
Yes!
Becky Pringle’s ludicrous claim that covid is putting 10 year olds at grave risk
typo near the end:
“hey, it’s their job to make the hard decisions an take the blame, right?”
Well, maybe it was an intentional typo–a desire to appear folksy.
With regard to the term “Indigo Blob”, when does it require upper case “I” and upper case “B”?
————————————————————————————————————-
On a more substantive note, any decision was in danger of being disastrously wrong either because it was disastrously wrong or could be viewed that way. During that period, I watched a lot of Alex Jones’s guests accusing the decisions to be a gigantic plot, rather than just desperate decisions which might turn out to be wrong.
Emily Oster took a *lot* of crap for wanting to reopen schools. A lot of it was ad hominem stuff about where her funding was coming from, or that she wasn’t a public health official — nothing of substance. But even those kinds of pseudo-arguments came about only as a rationalization because her position was already pre-deemed verboten, and so many people felt the need to attack it/her in any way possible. Since she became the poster child for reopening schools, and she was lambasted for it, I am not surprised that few others (including administrations) not wanting to put themselves in that position.
This is one of the retrospective arguments that drives me nuts. It may seem obvious now, but it was not at all clear at the time what the right answer was. Yet the discussion now is focused in a way that seems to ignore any possibility that both policymakers and the public looked at the level of uncertainty, in a pandemic that was killing thousands of people a day, and decided to remain cautious. Instead, it’s all about the “Indigo Blob” and “the public trust their schools to do the right thing.” How about “the public thought about it and decided that this was the timing they would accept”?
I think you are totally right.
Agreed –
There are many similar issues that involve this kind of “low probability, high damage function” risk scenarios where people think “the outcomes were suboptimal, so it’s proof the wrong thing was done.”
It’s a pet peeve for me. The risks were unknown. Of course people bring biases and “priors,” and of course in retrospect it ALWAYS could have been handled better. But the difficulty in thinking about low probability but high damage function risk seems to me to be a societal problem.
Instead we get binary thinkers – even some smart ones whose names will go unmentioned. It’s also a problem with facile assumptions about counterfactuals, as discussed here with respect to the pandemic (interesting that friend of the blog Sander Greenland gets a mention).
https://jech.bmj.com/content/75/11/1031
“were solutions to a coordination problem: if large fractions of the population don’t feel safe sending their children to school, and don’t feel safe going to work, then it makes sense to coordinate this behavior. ” … No, in an environment where there was a deadly disease that was established pretty quickly to be associated with close contact in confined spaces, places where close contact in confined spaces happened were closed.
It was really frustrating for people, but for middle class children they got a lot more time with their parents. Did this make parents exhausted and overwhelmed? Yes. Was it great for the kids to have this little house on the prairie life with just their immediate family members? Still unclear, but probably it was fine, even good. For poor kids, whose parents had to go to work anyway or who themselves may not have graduated from high school and who couldn’t afford internet, the situation was different because they were home by themselves with no one to handle the one room school house.
And I agree with Paul Alper above that people had to make hard decisions in context.
Rather than attributing it to laziness, I think you might want to consider that there were a lot of faculty, especially older faculty with risk factors or faculty doing things like living with someone with cancer or caring for a parent who were terrified of bring covid home. I work with faculty who are still fearful around these issues, not without justification since Covid has not gone away.
The biggest consequence that I have seen is that many more students now think that it is okay to be fully online and that they will be just fine. Some will, but many will not. But it has proved very hard to get college students at commuter schools back into the classroom.
“Was it great for the kids to have this little house on the prairie life with just their immediate family members? Still unclear, but probably it was fine, even good.”
I’ve had that thought as well. I would imagine that some kids who had a life that was programmed from morning until night were actually enriched. I’m sure kids were initially horribly bored, since so little new content was being generated in their on-line lives. From there, some learned to thrive under the new circumstances and thereby gained skills that will benefit them their entire lives. No doubt others did not.
Meanwhile, there was a lot of overheated rhetoric about how missing a few months of school would be devastating socially and set students hopelessly behind in their studies. Being content to keep one’s own company is a skill, and a good one to have.
It seems pretty clear now from NAEP test results that the children of the white collar laptop class did not too bad with Zoom teaching (not great, but not awful), but that the children of the blue collar half of the population had greatly benefited from going to organized places where middle class grown-ups talked at them for six hours per day.
There are a few interesting implicit assumptions in that post:
1. Formerly nonpartisan media, etc
2. Nbc news poll == public opinion
3. Public opinion should be determining public health
Regarding the last one, I remember playing poker when all 5 other people were vaccinated and currently testing positive for covid.
The news and medical literature kept saying the vaccines were preventing infection for months after it was already obvious. It appeared they only changed their claims when forced to by public opinion.
This message was never based on science/evidence*, and did not seem to respond to such either. Rather, it had to became literally too embarrassing for normal people to believe in order to get the message changed.
* Fauci published a paper one week after retiring explaining why: https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(22)00572-8
“It appeared they only changed their claims when forced to by public opinion.”
Or, you know, when the evidence became strong enough to change the conclusion. You do know how science works, right? It’s not evident from your comment, but I’m happy to change my conclusion with further evidence.
The problem with that interpretation is the evidence was strong enough *before covid*. Anyone who bothered looking into it saw there was never an example of mucosal immunity from IM vaccines. Then this was verified for the specific covid vaccines in the animal trials.
By winter 2020 any normal person could see all the vaccinated around them testing positive for covid *for months*. So even people total ignorant of science knew well before it became the new message.
The explanation that fits is public opinion determines public health.
We have seen this before, eg in the 1980s a mother found out doctors didn’t believe babies felt pain. She made a fuss in the media and within a few years now there was “evidence” babies felt pain: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/science/infants-sense-of-pain-is-recognized-finally.html
But not sure why you argue with me when the OP not only assumes this “public opinion determines healthcare” relationship exists, it implies this is a satisfactory state-of-affairs.
I’ll go with a one comment limit.
You (I assume deliberately) ignored that initially, before the more infectious variants developed, the vaccines did significantly limit infection and transmission. And there still is evidence that they do provide some benefit in that regard, and offer some protection against long covid.
That doesn’t justify the messaging which over-emphasized the “sterilizing” effect of the vaccines, which as you rightly point out was pretty much established science.
It doesn’t help anyone in any regard, imo, for ANYONE to deal with these issues selectively.
Nope, this was never the case. Go recheck your source carefully and you’ll find they did not actually measure infections. Eg, in the RCTs they specifically chose not to do regular testing because it was deemed impractical to test 20k people once per week (when millions of tests were done per day).
And what would be the mechanism anyway? Some small percent of antibodies leaking into the mucosa from the blood was proposed, but so short-lived its essentially irrelevant.
So there was never any evidence at all for that. Everything known about immunity and vaccines was consistent with what happened. Check the paper Fauci published after retiring, he explains it there. If you remove all the references to covid, it could have been published any time in the last few decades.
OK. Two.
Criticism of overstated claims is entirely valid and important to look at..
Nevertheless, In the very least there was direct evidence of reduced viral load and reduced infectious period (fromT-cell production), lgG transudation from the blood to mucosal tissue, and modest lgA production.
Those are in addition to the many studies that showed indirect evidence in population-level population studies in Israel, the UK, Qatar, Scotland,t and the US.
And Fauci’s paper discussed the limitations of vaccines in preventing infection and transmission due to weak mucosal immunity, but doesn’t state they have no impact at all.”
What? Almost noone had a COVID vaccine in winter 2020. It was exclusively for medical providers. My sister, a provider, didn’t get her second dose until end of Jan 2021. Our world in data shows we were about 1% “fully vaccinated” by Jan 20 2021 or so.
We reached 20% fully vaccinated in early April. 40% in about mid May, and then the rate decreased as hesitant people became the main ones unvaxxed.
If you look at hospital admissions they reached their low at Jun 26 or so, that low was the lowest low of the entire period between Jan 2020 and March 2022 immediately after the omicron wave made it so that upwards of 80 or 90% had been infected.
In other words mass vaccination immediately preceded the lowest levels of disease throughout the entire pandemic (defined as say the period between 0 to 85% prevalence of at least one infection)
Thanks, that was a typo. It should say 2021.
And the discussion is not about notable disease. It is about infections. Antibodies in the blood should help with (especially) severe disease as that often involves viremia (virus in the blood). However, the covid virus replicates itself the mucosa and transmits directly from there, which is a different biological compartment than the blood. Other viruses like measles require a viremia step (as far as we know).
Check the Fauci paper, he explains the role of viremia. This is really basic stuff that anyone could have looked up at the time (which I did and shared here many times).
Anon:
Please refrain from any more covid-related comments. Not just this thread, but entirely. Your statement, “which I did and shared here many times,” says it all. Many times is enough, period. My problem is not with you presenting these arguments; rather, my problem is that this fills up the threads to an extent that it turns people off from reading and adding to these comment threads. If you want to write more about covid, that’s fine; just do it somewhere else, and reserve your comments for this blog to new topics.
Yea, fair enough. Accurate information seems to have no effect whatsoever.
“the vaccines were preventing infection”
this is a bit of a strawman. no vaccines prevent infection or positive tests. the immune system defeats the infection (presence of virus in body). it responds faster if vaccines have already primed it to recognize a virus. the problem is idiots in public health, not vaccines.
April 2021 poll!
nobody is discussing April 2021 when the pandemic was still front and center of everyone mind.
the argument is about slow opening in 2022 – 2023.
sorry we need relevant data……
Jazi:
You say, “nobody is discussing April 2021.” You might not be discussing April 2021, but Weakliem and I are. We’re not nobodies! If you want to write something separate on 2022-2023, go for it.
my point was that when critics say “slow school re-opening was madness”, they do not refer to early 2021.
there was a legit discussion in march 2021 about this. and I never felt that keeping schools closed then was extraordinary strange.
but after “return to normal” in 2022/23, there was no excuse to keep schools closed, while certain places did.
and when people like Nate Silver say “slow reopening was madness” they refer to 22/23, not 2021.
Weakliem’s last line is the most important one. Why was US pandemic response such a shambles? I think you have to work pretty hard to come up with an answer that isn’t the obvious and correct one, which is Donald Trump.
The issue is that blaming Trump is boring and nobody likes a cold take. Somehow, the jacket copy for “In Covid’s Wake,” a high-profile new book from two Princeton political scientists, doesn’t mention Trump at all: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691267135/in-covids-wake (and in this interview, they only say oh yes, well, Democrats were polarized against him: https://tocqueville21.com/books/covids-wake/ ).
But it’s about more than just polarization, which is such a limiting way to look at it. For 10 years Trump has been an engine pumping chaos and irrationality into our political system, and during the first year of Covid—and, honestly, after that too—everyone was orbiting his insanity and incompetence. We can criticize the communications of public health professionals, but with a normal president, even someone conservative-but-not-insane like Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio, there would have been communications professionals or elected officials doing the communicating, and the actual functions of government would have been turned towards solving real problems. Trying to explain why US people and institutions acted as they did in 2020 and 2021 without making the explanation about Trump is like trying to explain the motion of the planets without making it about the Sun.
People like Silver who blame the indigo blob – and he’s not alone, plenty of other liberals-but-not-leftists are now adopting the same position – aren’t wrong, but they are framing their explanations in a way that mostly helps settle scores against other factions on the left side of politics. On top of that, a lot of people who liked to believe that some remnant of the technocratic administrative state would save us were bitterly disillusioned and embarrassed by the mess they saw, so there’s almost nobody mounting a partial defense of the process or the outcomes. But the reason it was such a mess is Trump and I think we all know it, even if it’s not that interesting.
Did fewer people die of covid in New York where Governor Cuomo won a special Emmy award for his genius TV briefings?
Really?
President Trump was obviously incompetent at communicating where the science of covid would end up years later, but you could argue that was less harmful than Governor Cuomo’s plausible sounding rationalizations of his own cluelessness.
Steve:
I thought you were kidding about Cuomo receiving an Emmy, but then I looked it up, and . . . wow, he really did get that award. From the news article:
I guess this is comparable to the American Statistical Association and the American Political Science Association giving major awards to plagiarists.
David –
As horrible as Trump was, and indeed he was horrible, I’m but sure that someone else as president would have resulted in significantly more positive outcomes. Yes, the ridiculous claims about HCQ, and the virus just going away in the Spring, and increased testing causing more cases, and the body bags at the WIV, and SCoV-2 being a Chinese bio-weapon, etc, were all painful to watch during a stressing time. But I don’t know what different decisions another president would have made thsr would have made a big difference, and it’s at least arguable that Trump was uniquely effective at getting the vaccines priced quickly. If that’s true, then Trump was actually responsible for saving a great deal of morbidity and mortality.
I agree that hindsight is not entirely helpful on this question; when the pandemic was still developing and much was unknown, people erred on the side of caution. No surprise.
I recall that teachers (and their unions) were big advocates of distance learning, again for obvious reasons.
As for public opinion, I recall that lower income and minority respondents typically wanted schools to shut down longer. My hunch is they perceived less backup in case of illness spread from their kids — living paycheck to paycheck, minimal or no health insurance, etc. This hypothesis could be tested by comparing US survey data to other countries with stronger health safety nets.
Finally, the big scandal, IMO, is that little to nothing was done during the shutdown period to retrofit schools for improved air exchange. That would have made reopening safer at any speed.
Indeed, that was extremely frustrating. Additionally frustrating was a lack of focus on rapid antigen tests and/or pooled testing. I’ve yet to see explanations that made sense to me.
What struck me at the time was not the uncertainty around whether it was a good idea to reopen schools, but that the same local/state governments that ended up keeping schools closed were simultaneously allowing the reopening of indoor bars and restaurants. From a “flatten the curve” perspective this was nuts. You’ve got some budget of transmission you’re willing to allow and you’re wasting it on people being able to eat inside rather than outside instead of on making sure kids are learning, at a time where it was pretty obvious to everybody that remote elementary and middle school was useless.
I assume it’s just politics, that bar owners wanted to reopen while teachers and school administrators and lots of parents were happy to be convinced things weren’t safe, that staff at restaurants were going to get laid off while teachers were going to keep getting paid, etc. But once everything else was open, a lot of parents looked around and realized their kids’ educations were just about the lowest actual priority of their local governments.
Gotchaye,
My impression was that a lot of the reason for opening bars and restaurants was that there was a bit concern in 2020-2021 that the economy would collapse, and there was a push to keep as much of the economy going as possible.
The problem was with the communication of the reason for the shutdown in the first place. The idea was that the pandemic spread could be stopped. The shutdown was not complete enough for that to happen, so the shutdown did not achieve its objective. Since the objective was not communicated, the conditions for ending the shutdown were never stately explicitly.
However this reasoning was not adequately communicated. In an attempt to scare people into compliance people were told they were going to die, the messaging got mixed up into stay home to stay safe. Some people will do anything to stay safe, especially if it involves doing a lot less work.
I’ll have a longer comment on my blog (probably tomorrow), but my view is that covid policy in the United States was pluralism in action: determined by elected officials, mostly at the state and local level, who were influenced by public opinion, organized groups like teachers’ unions and restaurant owners, and partisanship. That doesn’t mean that the policies were the right ones, but they weren’t imposed by an “Indigo Blob.”
David:
Yes, that was what I got from your earlier post, and it’s what I was trying to convey in my post above.
Can you lay out the argument for the implied assumption: “Public opinion should be determining public health”
Like if a majority decides lepers need to go live in leper colonies, that is ok? Or lets say a majority decides god chooses our health, so medicine is banned (maybe the Taliban already does this).
Is this what the policy entails? Not trying to strawman, I’m just not familiar with thinking the appropriate medical intervention should be decided by polls.
That wasn’t my assumption: my point is that to the extent that there was a policy failure, it wasn’t the fault of scientific/medical/media/academic elites, but of political elites and the public. And political elites deserve more of the blame–you can’t expect the public to be well informed on something like this.
David Wiem is right to note the high parental approval but I don’t think he followed through on that. The reason parental approval was so consistently high (and has remained largely unchanged over the past 5 years) is because schools did exactly what *parents* wanted, and politicians had little to do with it.
Here’s what happened.
1. Schools closed in March 2020. This was INCREDIBLY stupid and I said so at the time. This was really the original sin of the pandemic. If we’d just kept the schools open through June, they never would have closed in August. And it was because of this that the actual cause of extended school closures occurred (see 2).
2. ACTUAL CAUSE OF EXTENDED SCHOOL CLOSURES: Pretty much every state legislature suspended the school attendance laws for a year. Almost every state governor reassured parents that under no circumstances would they be forced to send their kids to in-person school if they felt uncomfortable about it. This gave every parent in America the right to remote education for the 20-21 school year. There’s been nothing written about this, even though it was the single most important action taken. Since parents had a choice, districts had to survey parents to ask them if they were planning on in person or remote.
3. This leads to the fact that no one anticipated and really can’t be explained: race played a huge role in parental preference. Whites were the outliers in wanting inperson education as early as summer 2020. Nonwhites, in both surveys and revealed preferences, wanted remote. Whites were very consistent at 3:1. Non-whites said one thing and did another, making it difficult to figure out, but they polled generally at only 30-40% in favor of in-person but showed up in much smaller numbers.
4. American schools reflect their diversity in total,but not individually. A district had to be 60% white to safely get a majority wanting in-person instruction. Lots of districts aren’t anywhere near that percentage, but still had lots of whites.
5. If you were in a remote district, your district didn’t care about what the teachers thought. The district had polled the parents and the parents wanted remote in large enough numbers that opening the schools would be very impractical.
6. Key point that I think only I have observed: parents who wanted remote were *guaranteed* the right to remote by the state laws. But parents who wanted in-person education had no guarantees. This was incredibly unfair. Unfortunately, all the parents howling for open schools refused to understand that they were the minority. I think if a group of parents had sued for equity, saying that they weren’t being treated equally to the parents who wanted remote, they might have had a shot. But the parents who wanted in-person were overwhelmingly white people who sent their kids to white schools in a non-white district and it just never entered their righteous heads that they weren’t representing all parents.
7. What solved the problem was not science. It wasn’t angry parents rioting. It wasn’t sudden awareness of learning loss. It’s just that the yearlong suspension of absentee laws ended, and people believed the vaccine would end covid. If they hadn’t believed that, the suspension might have been extended. As it was, there were a lot of nonwhite parents asking for virtual schools and being unhappy they couldn’t continue in remote.
Reiterating: remote ed was ended by legislatures allowing the absentee law suspension to expire. Otherwise, the problem would have continued. You know who didn’t fight the end of the suspension? Teachers. I can’t find a single instance of a union asking for the laws to be suspended another year.
If people had realized sooner that the vaccine just mitigated,but didn’t end covid, there might have been more resistance. The real issue isn’t “why were the schools closed” but “wow, we were lucky they weren’t closed for longer.”
8. Randi Weingarten is a representative of the progressive movement who is paid for by teacher dues. She was only a teacher for about 5 minutes, and clearly became a teacher simply to get into the union so she could be a union leader. I don’t like her. I don’t agree with her. But she could have written the entire CDC guidelines herself and it wouldn’t have mattered a single bit. (for one thing, lots of states ignored those guidelines. Others didn’t. That was, in fact, mostly red/blue politics.)
Teachers had no influence over whether schools opened. It doesn’t matter what union reps say. Teachers have very little influence over anything in schools at all, and when they get what they want, it’s usually because one of the actually influential groups agrees with them. Actually influential groups: politicians, district management, courts, parents. Protip: it’s usually the parents. In fact, since teachers are mostly white, the few polls of teacher preferences show that, like parents,they wanted inperson instruction.
9. People always say DeSantis opened the schools. He didn’t. What DeSantis (and Abbott and other southern governors) did do was say all parents had equal right to their choice. So white parents got what they wanted. Of course, white parents are also the majority in those states. But 30% of Florida students were in remote all year, including nearly all of Broward and Miami-Dade. Look at all the cities in southern states where “schools were open” and you’ll find high percentages of remote instruction. And not for nothing, but Florida and Texas both lost more points in the first NAEP test post-pandemic than California did. Possibly because California, a majority non-white state, spent a lot more time thinking about how to teach in remote. (By the way, the whitest part of California is the northeast. Schools were open there almost all year long.)
10. Polls have consistently showed before, during, and after the pandemic that parents were happy with what their schools did during the pandemic. They have also been polled specifically on whether or not they got what they wanted and only 15% of parents wanted in-person but were stuck in remote.
15%. That’s it. But it’s a very loud, very white, very influential 15%. The very few non-whites who agitated for schools opening seemed to be south Asians (notably Bhattacharya). It’s hard to come up with many others.
I wrote a lot of articles about this: here’s the last one, but it has a link to all the articles at the bottom.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2023/09/23/the-pandemic-counterfactual/
realist –
And not for nothing, but Florida and Texas both lost more points in the first NAEP test post-pandemic than California did.
Interesting, and thanks for the insightful comment!
Many things in public discourse annoy me these days, but perhaps the most annoying for me is when right-wingers and anti-wokers claim schools closed due to the preferences of the “laptop class.” They position themselves as defenders of minorities and “essential workers,” implying these groups suffered because of “elite” demands.
That narrative is lazy, condescending, and disingenuous. It ignores that minorities and essential workers often favored keeping schools closed. It also overlooks that without widespread non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), the substantial financial support—like enhanced unemployment insurance—that helped non-elites navigate the pandemic wouldn’t have existed. So the non elites would have had to choose between working and risking their families’ health, or losing their jobs with no safety net. It’s no coincidence that groups more likely to live in multigenerational households strongly supported NPIs.
Sorry, just realized I totally screwed up David Weakliem’s name! No idea why.
Schoolteacher Ed Real has pointed out that black parents were strongly against early reopening of schools.
Recall that blacks got killed in sizable numbers by covid in the first half of the 2020, probably because covid is spread largely by face to face socialization (which, in my experience, is one of the best things in life). Blacks tend to work in service jobs involving socialization and tend to be sociable in their off-hours.
In the second half of 2020 onward, African Americans did an impressive job of reducing their vulnerability to covid and their covid death rate dropped.
Personally, I can’t blame African Americans for being cautious about their children’s health. Perhaps, knowing all that we know now, that wasn’t the optimal choice. But it was pretty reasonable at the time.
Oh, I now see Ed Real expressing Ed Real’s point of view above better than I did.
Keep in mind that the Black Lives Matter movement during the “racial reckoning” of 2020-2021 was mostly a giant flop, leading to a 44% increase in black deaths from homicide and a 39% increase in black deaths from motor vehicle accidents from 2019 to 2021, probably due to less proactive policing.
That said, the huge increase in black covid caution over the course of 2020 appears to have saved a large number of black lives.
Considering the difficulty of decision-making about the novel coronavirus in 2020-21, the drop in black NAEP scores during this period seems far more forgivable than the highly predictable increase in black-on-black homicides and the somewhat predictable increase in black traffic fatalities during the peak of the anti-police movement. After all, both had already happened due to the Ferguson Effect, so it should have come to no surprise that the Floyd Effect got even more Black Lives Murdered.
Steve –
, leading to a 44% increase in black deaths from homicide and a 39% increase in black deaths…
This wouldn’t be the place to get into this in-depth, but since you’re posting on this blog, you really ought to be more careful on treating causality. In the very least you should be more respectful to uncertainty.
Pretty sure most people blame the shutdowns for the drop in NAEP scores, even though they started before the pandemic. Speaking of treating causality and being respectful of uncertainty.
It really wasn’t just blacks. Hispanics and most particularly Asians opposed reopening schools. In New York City, for example, only 19% of Asians chose hybrid. 30% of blacks, and 33% of Hispanics. 49% of whites did. Graph in link above.
Whites *hated* part-time hybrid. They much preferred full-time hybrid–that is, full-time in person for those who wanted it, but teachers had to teach remote kids as well. And even with that nearly half of them chose it in NYC.
Yes, where did this belief actually come from? Eg, I doubt you’ll find Fauci saying it, or any official communications from Pfizer. They may have misled by omission while others spread the misinfo, but were not directly responsible. Definitely it was all over this blog, but thats just repeating what was heard elsewhere.
I don’t think people appreciate that its like the medical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Claiming it will happen without an explanation for how it works and really good data isn’t even interesting, it should get you marked as a crank.*
So why was this belief so widespread? And is it really acceptable to people that public opinion is determining the health guidelines when it is directly contrary to decades of publications in the medical literature?
* To responses above about small amounts of short-lived leaking antibodies. Reminds me of a recent experience trying to install Julia on windows 7. It says its supported, devs will argue its supported, and it is in some really technical sense of passing some automated tests. But it is not actually usable for real-life purposes (eg, takes one minute to type each letter).