This is a welcome article in The Atlantic, but long, long overdue: “Many parents feared the worst, but so far, no widespread COVID crisis has come to America’s classrooms:
"Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been." — @aaronecarroll:https://t.co/aiLyVvndys
— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) December 2, 2021
Welcome to the party, pal:
"What is pretty certain… is that schools are not to blame. They didn’t cause the surges. They didn’t cause the massive numbers of hospitalizations and deaths that Florida experienced this summer and that Michigan appears to be experiencing now." https://t.co/aiLyVvndys
— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) December 2, 2021
From the article:
Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been.
One of the frustrating things about the pandemic has been our inability, even at this late date, to understand why surges occur. They hit communities with mask mandates, and communities without. Last year, we believed that the surge from October through February was caused by seasonal changes. The cold drove everyone indoors, where COVID was much more likely to spread, and therefore cases developed more quickly. This year, though, the surge began long before the weather turned cold. Vaccines are certainly protective and likely mitigate the severity of surges locally. Even so, things may worsen again—the data right now aren’t looking good for much of the country, and many people fear more hardship to come from the emergent Omicron variant—but no predictable pattern has emerged to explain what sets off periods of dramatic increases.
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You know, some of us predicted that schools weren’t a problem for the last year. Isn’t that an “interesting development”?
Sometimes in this pandemic, the most interesting developments have been those that *haven’t* materialized as predicted: https://t.co/UUFa956qI2
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) December 2, 2021
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