Day 153: Bitter Roots

"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet." Aristotle

Difficult as it is for the unpaid PlagueBlog staff to muster up any sympathy for a full-time food blogger who's wealthy enough to live in New York City and still pay the nanny for the past four months of non-work (even after her husband was laid off), Deb Perelman has a point about the infeasibility of some back-to-school social distancing plans. In NYC apparently this involves the kids physically attending school for only one week out of three. The rest of the time, it's your spawn, your problem.

At the same time, many adults — at least the lucky ones that have held onto their jobs — are supposed to be back at work as the economy reopens. What is confusing to me is that these two plans are moving forward apace without any consideration of the working parents who will be ground up in the gears when they collide.

Let me say the quiet part loud: In the Covid-19 economy, you’re allowed only a kid or a job.

She's not alone in her my spawn, your problem complaints. FSU, the Florida university famous for killing passing drivers with overwrought and under-engineered concrete pedestrian bridges, warned staff this week that "[e]ffective, August 7, 2020, the University will return to normal policy and will no longer allow employees to care for children while working remotely."

It's not just NYC backing off on public education as reliable childcare. The Massachusetts guidelines [PDF] are vaguer, with a lot of mask, hand-washing, and spacing requirements but no official decision yet on whether the school year will happen at school, at home, or in a "hybrid" format of alternate weeks in school and at home. Connecticut's plans are similarly vague yet difficult to implement. None of the plans sound like much of an improvement educationally or socially over the kids just staying home. It's also unclear what happens to teachers with their own children under a hybrid or remote-learning plan.

Now imagine if this were a flu pandemic, and children were actually in significant danger from the disease. Would we escalate the current unworkable plans into a realm of pure fantasy? Time, sadly, will probably tell.

Much hay has been made over the 50,000 cases reported in the US yesterday. Bars have closed in south and central Michigan, and the entire state of Pennsylvania and most of Texas have gone under the mask, while some Palm Beach County (FL) residents are suing over a mask mandate. Florida has extended its eviction moratorium. Tracing efforts aren't going so well in New York, so they're trying subpoenas instead.

The MIT Technology Review takes on the question of why California has joined in the new outbreak despite its early anti-coronavirus success. The answer is mixed. While testing and tracing cases is still going well, the issues seem to be among low income essential workers, those experiencing lockdown exhaustion, prisoners, and, perhaps most notably for the situation across the Southwest, citizens returning from the coronaviral disaster area that is Mexico for treatment at home. The Wall Street Journal also tries their hand at the California question, but takes the usual blame-the-victim approach and concludes that they lifted their restrictions too soon and let their counties run too wild.

Cases in Massachusetts are up a sixth of a percentage point today. Governor Baker, satisfied that the partial indoor dining reopening hasn't infected us all, has announced that Massachusetts will be entering Phase 3 on Monday, with casinos, gyms, fitness centers, museums and small event venues allowed open (mostly at reduced occupancy). Phase 3 has a part 2 to come, and Phase 4 is impossibly far off, in which a vaccine (or something) permits the reopening of bars, nightclubs, and large event venues.