Do It Right

I don't want to say "I told you so," but I came across a couple articles today that echo things I've been saying for months...

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch from Pexels

In Shut it down, start over, do it right, a group of scientists and health professionals has written an open letter to the US government recommending we shut down non-essential businesses, limit essential ones, keep people home more strictly, and use that time to reprioritize efforts like testing and contact tracing. Now that things have already started reopening I can't see how people would willingly go back to "shutdown" mode, but it does echo my previous thoughts about how time was wasted during the original shutdowns.

This article from The Atlantic, A Vaccine Reality Check, has also been making the rounds, and if you were one of those people who's been making plans for "once there's a vaccine," it could be a sobering wake-up call. It will take time to produce and distribute sufficient amounts of vaccines to build up herd immunity (assuming they provide somewhat of a long-lasting immunity), and that isn't even counting all the people who say they will refuse a vaccine or are on the fence about it. Plus, it would be the government facilitating all this, and as we've seen, the current administration hasn't been great about coordinating these types of efforts.

Finally, our governor gave a big press conference yesterday that some people suspected might be an announcement that schools would not be resuming in person in the fall. However, it was really an announcement that our state will be increasing contact tracing efforts - they have a contract with a staffing agency to hire several thousand contact tracers, and a contract with a software company for a Bluetooth app that notifies users if they've been in close contact with an infected person.

This is great news (contact tracking is one of the areas Covid Act Now has consistently ranked my state as lacking), though it doesn't resolve the question about the schools. I have lots of friends who are teachers, and of course parents, and they've all been sharing their districts' plans and their concerns for their jobs and/or kids. One friend just shared that her district's school board is having an online meeting this week regarding reopening plans, "due to the Governor's most recent mandate limiting groups to 25 people or less." Now if they can't safely meet in person, how would they reopen an entire school full of kids?! And this sort of thing is happening all over. The big city near us did announce that its reopening plan is on hold, but not before holding a marathon 5+ hour board meeting. It's a shame that, just like everything else so far, this is being done in such a patchwork way...