Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk • Hacker News Board

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#681

Post by neverartful » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

greesil wrote: post #444

mynameisvlad wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this even a discussion we're having? Yes, literally anybody would have had a better response than what we got. Just looking at the current state of the US vs practically any other country in the world shows how cripplingly bad the response has been from the current administration. Sometimes, I really hate the people in this country.

I can take a guess. People consume different information sources, and have different ideologies. So, they may arrive at different conclusions than you. I suspect this is more heavily on the ideology side because it's hard to deny the body count.

I can't help but wonder if the nature of the US being a 'melting pot' doesn't result in more difficulty in achieving agreement on national policy decisions. I'm not saying that diversity is bad. In most cases, we benefit enormously from being a melting pot. However, on some national policy topics it makes me wonder.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by maerF0x0 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

Avicebron wrote: post #646

watwut wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shelter in place works everywhere except in America, which is always special. And if people go to buy food, that totally negates lack of contact everywhere else, including restaurants, concerts, offices, schools, sport clubs and so on.

I'm curious of your claim that SIP works everywhere except in America? Can you elaborate?

Pretty sure that was sarcasm, implying it's worked very well elsewhere but for some reasons Americans are extra skeptical about the practice.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by rayiner » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:52 PM UTC

jennasys wrote: post #672

rayiner wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not a “country.” We’re 50 different states with a federal government, which doesn’t have public health as one of its assigned roles. This isn’t an ideological point, it’s a bare recitation of fact. Somehow, other federal republics like Germany managed to engage in an effective pandemic response while leaving most of the work to the states. For example, while Germany eventually had a mask order everywhere, the s…

While the states may be responsible for what happens on the ground, it is certainly the role of the federal government to provide coordination in the case of a nationwide public health issue. Clearly, that was not done in this case. The CDC, NIH, FEMA, and the surgeon general should have all been playing a role in this pandemic. The states shouldn't have had to ultimately go about creating their own regional coalitio…

The CDC issued guidelines, and Trump had regular calls with the governors to coordinate. It’s more or less the same thing Merkel’s government did. They delivered what federal stockpiles they had. What else were they supposed to do? It’s the states fault that there weren’t any test kits, tracing and isolation infrastructure, etc. Obviously it would have helped if Trump wasn’t a counterproductive buffoon that contradicted the guidelines his own administration was issuing, but I’m not really talking about Trump’s failings as a leader. My post is about the division of labor.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by usaar333 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

lubujackson wrote: post #609

usaar333 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a human aspect, but to be blunt, it's not a significant consideration as long as you aren't opening schools in an area with high community transfer (e.g. Houston today). IF you additionally filter out high risk-group teaches (known pre-existing health conditions, older than 65, etc.) excess death risk is quite low. (e.g. in the Bay Area, dying in a car crash remains far more likely (~10x) if you meet the criteri…

At least 30 teachers have died of COVID in NYC alone. That seems significant for a viral outbreak that is nowhere near containment or exhaustion, and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually. But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismis…

> and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually.

I'm not proposing schools open in an NYC/Houston/Miami type situation. But in lower infection area (e.g. the Bay Area), where about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly, you are not "almost certainly" going to get the virus.

Obviously, school opening should be gated by community transfer level. California seems to be using a 2 week target of < 100 confirmed per 100k people (with low test positivity), which seems reasonable to me.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by bjustin » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

marcell wrote: post #612

shreyansj wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if everyone had stayed locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?

I'm not sure if it's worth it or not, but after you end the lockdown, you have the same situation you did at the start of the lockdown. I think there's a huge misconception in many media sources that lockdown will somehow eliminate the virus. It can change the onset pattern of the virus, but that's it.

Even if the US is in the same situation now as we were at the start of the SIP orders in March, given that many other advanced countries have the virus under control, we should have an easier time getting materials and equipment to deal with the virus now.

Plus we have more evidence to base our decisions on. We can look at specific other countries and see what works, assuming people don't turn it into politics like they did with masks. It's really sad that some people believe wearing a cloth mask decreases your blood oxygen saturation, regardless of their education or previous interactions with doctors/dentists/etc that already wore masks on a regular basis pre-pandemic.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by michaelmrose » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #333

MattGaiser wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on the outside, it seems like pushing kids back into the classroom is poorly thought out. I can't imagine the shitshow it must seem like on the inside.

The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster. I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work. In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't car…

This is both disheartening on one hand and encouraging on another it means that remote education of school age isn't inherently broken because the current system is.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by rayiner » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

jacksnipe wrote: post #498

mtgp1000 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb. No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus…

Lives are only lost in a lockdown scenario because of god awful policy. Pay people to stay home. Feed the poor.

How do you think food gets made and distributed?

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by gowld » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

oramit wrote: post #358

What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point. Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want thin…

The financial damage is completely self inflicted. There is plenty of food, housing, and other necessities of all kinds except some items specific to treating the pandemic itself (which is important, but not the goal of "reopen it the economy").

Closing restaurants and football stadiums doesn't deprive anyone of the necessities of life and health. We can watch TV for entertainment. People doing essential work haven't stopped.

The only economic-related suffering are people being pushed out of their homes by landlords, or refused food (of which there is plenty) by the controllers of the food supply.

Government officals, corporation managers, billionaires and few others are simply unwilling to let go of their obsession with hoarding money, an imaginary social invention (which is of course useful in easier times), for a few months while we fight the commmonest real enemy the world has ever faced.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by rayiner » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

samatman wrote: post #668

marcell wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus This statement implies that there's a way to completely eradicate the virus, eg. if everyone in the world stays locked in their homes for 6 weeks, then the virus will be eradicated. That's not realistic, the level of coordination required to make that happen does not exist. So eradicating the virus was never on the table, no matter ho…

It appears to have worked for New Zealand, though notably, not anywhere else, even Australia. So you can argue that it was infeasible, and I would have to agree with you. But you can't argue it was impossible.

Island.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Post by samatman » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #674

samatman wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your pleasure in the decision, but staunchly disagree with you about the method used to reach it. The correct decision was reached, in time (before the start of the school year) for it to make a difference. Tons of people and thousands of schools vigorously debating is the democratic process. A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism, and as we've seen repeatedly this year, authoritarian decis…

I think you are at least a bit misconstruing direct democracy vs representative democracy and instead calling it democracy vs authoritarianism. The people handing down the aforementioned decisions were elected specifically to do things like this. That doesn't outright make it authoritarianism. (Yes, most elected US politicians on both sides of the aisle skew fairly authoritarian, but that doesn't mean the process its…

This is at most a conflation, not a misconstrual.

I prefer to think of these words as points in a spectrum, rather than definitional prisons with tight boundaries.

Allowing school districts to do what they are constituted to do, is more democratic than delegating it to the State governments, which is more authoritarian.

Authoritarian is also not an antonym of democratic. They correlate, but not as strongly as any advocate for democracy would prefer.