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Those who equated 'you should open the parks and other sprawling outdoors public areas' with 'you want to sacrifice human life to the god of Wall Street' (a nice updated version of an accusation ppl like myself hear a lot) are some of the worst people in American politics.
Folks interpreting this as anti-lockdown are making my point. You can close schools and offices and bars and limit public transportation etc while still making sure ppl had a (science-approved!) release valve for stir craze. Parks, trails. And in terms of beaches:
If you only open a couple per region you’ll see crowds and out of state travelers. There are *more permissive* policies toward outdoor spaces that are *less likely to spread the virus.* This uncoordinated stuff cost lives. Being smart & humble is better than acting tough here.
It does seem to. https://twitter.com/liberrocky/status/1264678666291892226?s=21 https://twitter.com/liberrocky/status/1264678666291892226
Our understanding of things like child transmission changed over the course of a couple months, but our policies around them didn’t. Also, federal govt didn’t give enough financial support to biz it ordered closed; schools handled ‘remote learning’ as poorly as humanly possible.
When you combine lower childhood transmission with the absolute disaster of ‘remote learning,’ are you going to have ppl saying ‘don’t leave the schools closed for another year or my kid is never going to be able to catch up’? Yes. Was that preventable? Maybe!
Some countries didn’t close elementary schools to prevent that disaster and to ensure more parents could work even if it was from home, which worked better than distance learning and was safer for them. I’m skeptical of that approach starting out, but for school year two? Maybe.
Likewise, we’ll wonder if closing colleges at the late stage we did was the right call. It might not have been. Was every element of the lockdown smart? Good god no. But again: You can leave most of the lockdown in place with a couple key exceptions and make a huge difference.
And what do you when you see reports that in some places the clear majority of deaths were nursing home deaths? Well, you start by realizing that some politicians enacted deadly policies and now lecture others to cover up for it. Trust in them is going down? No kidding!
If you have members of the public who instinctively distrust the proclamations of, say, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, you have found ppl probably more qualified to run things than Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio. They’re not always wrong! But hold ppl accountable.
Anyway, point is the coronavirus challenge isn’t going away, so we need to be able to have real debates over the full menu of policies we enact to address them.
