Frankly, nobody knows what to do. Here we are, pondering what to do with the kids.
* The school district is open for business in spite of being the ground zero of USA outbreak. Because no kid has tested positive yet. Meanwhile, the testing scale is tiny [thousands, in a nation of 300M] and the latency is horrendous [5 days]. Most likely the virus is already endemic in the kid population.
* OK, so let's keep the kids at home, as SPS will eventually have to face the obvious and close the schools. For how long? A week? A month? Until summer? Until next year? Send them to school and pray for the best once everybody in the family eventually gets the disease?
Hard to do, when the correct thing for the administration to do is to stand back and hand decision making authority and control of resources to the bureaucracy. As long as the administration keeps interfering in the response, anything about the issue can't avoid being political.
The executive and administrative branches together respond to a crisis like this - for example by coordinating actions, providing more funding for health services or in extremis ordering quarantine in affected areas. None of that has been done. I don't think you can effectively separate the two responses, nor do I think this outbreak is somehow Trump's fault, but he and his administration are responding remarkably badly to it.
Exactly! That is what is meant by not letting polarized politics drive the issue. We shouldn't care what 'side' is doing what, we should be focused on preventing an epidemic. Personally, IDGAF about assigning blame to any side, I'd rather that the petty bickering is dropped and effective measures are taken.
I realize the climate in the US isn't conducive to this, but assigning blame doesn't fix anything. Rather than blaming people, effective steps need to be taken. Focusing on assigning blame just puts the other side on the defensive; which is counterproductive to the kind of cooperation that will be needed to effectively respond to this crisis.
The problem is that this holds true regardless of who you consider to be “the other side.”
Here in Oregon, our governor is politically on the opposite end of the spectrum from the US president. Yet the messaging from both has been nearly identical: everything is fine, carry on, wash your hands.
Making this into a political issue in either case just creates conflict, and causes the target to dig in their heels. It does very little towards a more effective response.