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Comment by salmon30salmon | Hacker News Reader

Here is a big problem. The children need to go somewhere. Parents need to work, bills need to be paid and tax incomes need to continue to flow. So what to do with the kids?

Right now, the options are either send them to school, where there are (in the US) government employees making sure they are safe. The workers are well represented by a strong union, have good healthcare and reasonable wages. The other option is to send them to private day care, where private citizens with no oversight, very low pay and no worker protections are being asked to shoulder the risk. It seems like we have no problem hoisting even more responsibility upon the poor and least represented in society.

Teaches are essential workers, much like firefighters, DMV workers or court clerks. We expect a girl making minimum wage at Kroger to accept that she is an essential worker. Why do we not expect the same from school staff?

Disclosure: I have siblings and other close relatives that work for and in school in the US. I am not externalizing the risk.

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> The workers are well represented by a strong union, have good healthcare and reasonable wages.

My spouse and sister are both schoolteachers. Sister's situation: laid off from a private school where enrollment will drop significantly this year. Spouse's situation: works for a well-funded school in one of the most populous states in the U.S., where there is no strong union, the pay is below the poverty line after mandatory deductions, and the healthcare is so bad (no out-of-network benefits and in-network only applies within the county, basically) that most people have to expand their view of what "health insurance coverage" is in order to understand it. A number of the teachers in their network are considering teach 5 kids in a private daycare group (working 30 hours a week) instead of teaching 30+ kids working 50 hours a week under very constrained public school conditions. These are anecdotes, of course, but what we're seeing from over here is that teachers don't feel safe reopening schools, and aren't overly committed to their benefits since they're not particularly well taken care of by the standards of the average American worker. Just a different two cents.

I appreciate your perspective and I am sorry that that is the situation in your state. I admit I can only speak for my state, and as such should limit my opinions to that context.

Thank you!

Non-US tenured teacher here. I'd have to do something very, very, very wrong before I'd ever have a snowball's chance in hell of getting fired.

Most if not all of my colleagues and I have worked incredibly hard teaching remotely when that was the only option. We've been expected to use self purchased electronic equipment for that. When limited on-site teaching became possible again, we took the opportunity. Yes, older, overweight teachers most at risk also did.

We saw our bosses cared. We saw a fairly competent chain of command up to the prime minister, very much guided by the scientific approach. My guess is that made a large difference. At least with me it did.

Would we have done the same in the US? I don't think so. The scientific approach has been disregarded so badly, not to say ridiculed, at so many levels. Individual students, parents, school district leads, governors, the president. Don't expect me to voluntarily take the risk they've created.

Here are some of the important questions that need to be answered before I'd consider going back to teach on site:

- Will sufficient personal protective equipment be provided?

- Will elementary technical precautions like distancing, natural ventilation etcetera be taken?

- Will parents and students over 12 years old be required to use a facial mask in any physical proximity situation?

- Will my obese colleague with a heart condition be shielded from teaching in direct physical contact with students?

Also, it would be nice if government showed some appreciation for our hard remote work, by way of a budget for electronic equipment for remote teaching for example.

> there are (in the US) government employees making sure they are safe. The workers are well represented by a strong union, have good healthcare and reasonable wages.

What country do you live in? Most teachers are employees of the local school district, not directly of the government. (When I was a Title I teacher, I was a federal employee, but that's not very common). I was never in a union, because there weren't any in the Detroit charter schools I worked at. And I only made $27,000 a year. Does that sound well-paid to you? Even though we had decent health care, with student loans I couldn't afford the copay, so I forwent any health care unless it was an emergency.

The problem with this kind of framing is that it accepts the status quo as a sane premise in the face of a pandemic with largely unknown long term consequences.

Having public schools function as de facto daycares when there’s not a pandemic makes a certain amount of sense, but in the circumstances of the US, where we have uncontrolled spread and a dysfunctional healthcare system on many levels, it makes little.

The sane thing to do would be to implement some form of short term UBI that allows one parent or a designated caregiver to stay home and attend to children’s needs and do everything we can to get the situation under control (universal mask orders, regional lockdowns, replenish PPE, etc.)

Three questions:

1. What makes you think we _can_ get this under control without herd immunity or a vaccine? I am of the belief that there is a certain level of latent immunity via t-cells in a large portion of the population and thus effective herd immunity is around 25-30% infected. But for arguments sake, lets say it is around 70 based solely on Rt.

2. Who would pay for the UBI? My state is already running low on money. We are already having to cut programs. Raising taxes doesn't count, that would take a year to pass, a year to implement and collect and probably a few years in court litigating. So how do we pay for it?

3. How do you equitably select a parent to stay home? And how to do reimburse their employer for lost productivity? Do you guarantee their job upon the end of the pandemic?

>1. What makes you think we _can_ get this under control without herd immunity or a vaccine? I am of the belief that there is a certain level of latent immunity via t-cells in a large portion of the population and thus effective herd immunity is around 25-30% infected. But for arguments sake, lets say it is around 70 based solely on Rt.

New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Germany have done it without herd immunity or a vaccine with a variety of strategies. We should follow their examples and stop using various forms of “American Exceptionalism” as an excuse to not learn from them.

>2. Who would pay for the UBI? My state is already running low on money. We are already having to cut programs. Raising taxes doesn't count, that would take a year to pass, a year to implement and collect and probably a few years in court litigating. So how do we pay for it?

Print the money. It’s short term and there’s already massive demand and supply shocks that will only get worse if the pandemic isn’t curbed.

>3. How do you equitably select a parent to stay home? And how to do reimburse their employer for lost productivity? Do you guarantee their job upon the end of the pandemic?

I believe Canada and some countries in Europe are doing this through an employer-based grants, where the government subsidizes wages to keep them on the payroll. Whether this is ultimately desirable is up for debate, but the companies are going to be screwed in terms of productivity (and everything else) if this ravages the US labor force. How to do it equitably? Just let the parents/caregivers decide for themselves.

> New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Germany have done it without herd immunity or a vaccine with a variety of strategies. We should follow their examples and stop using various forms of “American Exceptionalism” as an excuse to not learn from them.

Two of those are islands, one might as well be and the other two are Vietnam and Germany. Vietnam is very interesting. There is a strong chance of Vietnam being a prime area to study the cross-reactive T-cells due to the previous experience with SARS. Furthermore, besides dickhead in chief, I don't believe most people made any sort of exceptionalism claim. The USA is a massive nation experiencing several outbreaks at once. The EU just happened to all have their outbreaks around the same time. We can't compare _just_ the results of each nation and rank the response. We need to look at demographics, density, cultural aspects, interconnectedness etc.

>Print the money. It’s short term and there’s already massive demand and supply shocks that will only get worse if the pandemic isn’t curved.

No. This has never been, and never will be, a sound economic strategy in anything but the most extreme of examples. Also, the pandemic _is_ flattened. Remember we were supposed to have millions dead by now had we done nothing. We did flatten it (too much, probably) and now it is curving up, but still not at the rate that was first feared. But this gets in to a different debate. I have made this point elsewhere in my comment history if you are interested in my opinion.

> believe Canada and some countries in Europe are doing this through an employer-based grants, where the government subsidizes wages to keep them on the payroll. Whether this is ultimately desirable is up for debate, but the companies are going to be screwed with in terms of productivity (and everything else) if this ravages the US labor force. How to do it equitably? Just let the parents/caregivers decide for themselves.

Most relationships are not like that. This would almost universally fall upon women to put their careers on hold. This has been researched and reported widely. We did a similar thing with PPP and it saved many jobs. It was a terrible implementation and corrupt as fuck. But it did save many jobs. But again, someone has to pay the piper and don't keep swooning over the nonsense that is Modern Monetary Theory.

National deficit spending is the appropriate and correct tool to finance national emergencies. This is not "Modern Monetary Theory," it is basic government finance. We financed every war in the 20th century this way, as well as the responses to major financial shocks.

The parent said "print the money" which very much is MMT. Bonds/other debts are a different discussion and we very much are deficit spending right now to combat this.

If you understand how deficit spending works to counter emergencies, then why did you even ask your question #2 above? It seems like you are moving goalposts.

Because UBI is fundamentally different than most deficit spending. It actively injects cash into circulation as opposed to kick-starting economic activity which leads to increased spending/circulation.

UBI has not ever been tested at a large scale, and we have no reason to believe it will work. The last thing we need in this fragile economy is inflation. And UBI without increasing revenue will cause inflation, no way around that.

I don’t know how to respond to this because a lot of it is simply counter factual. We haven’t flattened the curve, we have several uncontrolled outbreaks raging in the US, no reasonable forecasters were predicting millions dead by this time, instead of speculating about special Vietnamese immune characteristics, we can just do what they did with mask wearing, lockdowns, contract tracing, etc and see if it works. I see also no consideration of Germany.

Ideological opposition to MMT is fine, I guess, but that’s not really a rebuttal or explanation of how allowing the disease to ravage the labor force won’t be worse, let alone in anyway moral, given its disproportionate impact on the poor and minorities.

There are always tough choices with caring for kids, but even paying a caregiver to stay home would be more equitable than the status quo (where this already happens as largely uncompensated labor).

It isn't counter factual. We flattened the curve! Why did we not have outbreaks in Florida three months ago? Because we had flattened the curve! The naughty truth that the brigade of curve flatteners failed to mention early on is that as soon as mitigation strategies are let up, the cases would skyrocket. This is exactly what is happening. Flatten the curve is, was and will continue to be a pipe dream. The virus will win. It will infect _n_ people until it reaches _x_ saturation and burn out. Or we get a vaccine and distribute it to artificially help it reach _x_ faster. That is the only way out of this. What did you expect when a population with little prior exposure locked down for three months and then unlocked? They would be protected by their good intentions?

You are making an assumption that this would ravage the labor force. Not to be glib, but unless your country has a labor force primarily comprised of 75+ year old workers, no labor force is getting ravaged by this disease. Yes, people will get sick. Some will die. Some will die from loneliness. In the time it took me to write this, hundreds of children died of preventable disease the world over. Some died of starvation. Some of lack of access to clean water. A woman was just murdered and another killed her lover, probably, somewhere. We can't ever have zero risk and to advertise otherwise is irresponsible at best.

Also please note, the poor and minority people that you are claiming to protect through blunt force lockdowns are actually the ones still working. Still butchering your meat, picking your fruits, delivering your Amazon order and washing your apartment complex. And the poor who aren't lucky enough to still be in work and in debt, falling further behind and face the least amount of economic security in 100 years. Let people decide what is best for them, you have no moral authority to claim righteousness in your cause and disparage mine.

Please, don't accuse me being counter-factual unless you want to counter my facts. Yes, I left Germany out. Germany is interesting. There are some theories around about that, but I am not well versed enough on them to comment, so I didn't include it. Well caught. I apologize for not blindly speculating and instead passing it over.

Finally, we were already told that mitigation saved two million lives: https://www.cato.org/blog/did-mitigation-save-two-million-li... so the corollary is that had we not mitigated, two million would be dead. And the Imperial College model really did estimate that much. Though they didn't give such a precise timeline: https://www.cato.org/blog/how-one-model-simulated-22-million...

And lets not forget the folks at the UW: A different, data-driven model from researchers at the University of Washington predicts “about 1 million cases in the U.S. by the end of the epidemic, around the first week in June, with new cases peaking in mid-April,” said UW applied mathematician Ka-Kit Tung, who led the work. “By the first week of June, we project that the number of new cases will be close to zero if current social distancing policies are maintained.” That model predicted two weeks ago that the number of new daily cases would peak around now, as seems to be the case. (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-mod...). Again in that model, nobody ever talked about what comes next. I will tell you. More cases. Or immunity. One of those two.

Maybe the issue lies more in your first statement that children need to go somewhere. That's a fairly modern notion. If we've created a society where we rely on strangers to care for our kids, then maybe that's something that needs to be looked rather than creating additional covid hotspots?

While we're doing that, maybe a compromise with A/B school days to limit student numbers, with online participation for whichever group is at home. Schools also need to create strict rules as far as cafeterias, masks, etc... With clear consequences for violations.

The school I am at has dividers in the cafeteria and staggered lunches with no talking while eating. Masks at all times. Temperature checks at the doors and such. This is countrywide (not US) and there has been no spread in schools.

Well the issue may well lie in my first statement. I am not disagreeing in principle with you. But we a day late and a dollar short to actually make large scale societal change in the time needed to respond to _this_ pandemic. The children need an education, parents need to work. That is the fact of the times.

Should this be an ongoing conversation to prepare for the _next_ pandemic? Certainty. But we lost the benefit of time on this one.

Respectfully, this is a sunk cost fallacy. The idea that we’ve already screwed up so there’s no way to radically change course is a recipe for disaster. Even the UK, who foolishly tried to go the probably-nonexistent “herd immunity” route realized their error, turned things around, and is now doing much better than the US (although worse than Europe, because of their early mistakes).

It is only a fallacy if incorrectly applied :D

In some cases, it is better to continue course with known variables.

Also, I wouldn't say it is non-existent. As I said in another response, I currently see a lot of evidence for the cross-reactive t-cell immune response causing the virus to burn out after around 25% infection rate.

There are no “known variables” under the circumstances you describe in a novel pandemic because we don’t know the long term consequences of the disease.

There’s likewise no firm understanding of the duration or quality of immunity, nor will there be for probably years, making every appeal to herd immunity little more than dangerous speculation.

But the variables in the other direction aren't firmly known either. We don't know that suppression can be maintained in the medium term, and we don't know that a vaccine will be able to eliminate the virus in the long term. We have no option but to make choices based on dangerous speculation.

We don't know the long term consequences of completely shutting down a majority of society for an unknown period of time, including depriving children of an education. So let's not compare unknowns. This whole thing is an unknown and we need to accept some risk in each direction or be motionless.

> We expect a girl making minimum wage at Kroger to accept that she is an essential worker. Why do we not expect the same from school staff?

I wish that as a society we could decide that anyone we're going to call an "essential worker" and draft to the biohazardous front lines should bloody well be paid at least as much as the rest of us who can be gone for a week with little ill effect to society at large.

Not just during an emergency either - they're essential the rest of the time too.

Over here in Asia where we live in joint families or our parents/grandparents live in the same house as us for our entire lives this is a non-issue, I always found it weird how people in the west headed out to live independently as soon as they turn 18 or go to college. I knew a guy in Germany who was working a job and said he was peer pressured to leave his parents home because it was seen as something negative, that he was still "freeloading" by the time he was ~24.

It could be argued that the multi-generational home is one of the cultural ingredients for such a bad outbreak in Italy. That is a lot more common in that country than in some other parts of Europe.

It is also somewhat common in immigrant groups in western Europe and the US (though somewhat out of economic necessity rather than cultural norms) and those groups are also the hardest hit in the US (apart for retirement homes).

Causality is hard to prove, but it is something worth looking at.

The teachers don't expect the same, because they are still getting paid.

I'm not saying they don't have legitimate questions about how schools will reopen safely, but to be frank, it's really easy to argue that it's "just not safe enough", when you're still pulling a paycheck sitting at home and the closing of schools is felt by working parents who are SOL -- not by yourself.

Ding ding ding.

I heard of teachers outright disappearing, claiming "technical issues" during this time.

Of course there will be people like this. Do you think they are anywhere close to the majority?

No but it's unacceptable.

In my city all sports teachers were suddenly ill for several weeks. they had the lowest risk, but apparently also the smallest brains.

Lol. Nice work if you can get it

Most teachers would rather be in the classroom than do online learning. They'd also like people to be safe.

The issue comes with trying to force kids to wear masks when so many parents are against them in many places, maintain social distancing, and keeping things clean and sanitized.

Keeping kids focused and learning has become difficult enough, but add on all those measures plus the possibility of contracting covid, just means you will lose a lot of experienced teaching staff.

"Most" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. And lets also be real, there is a self-reporting bias there, where I doubt very many people (myself included) would admit to _wanting_ to not work and still get paid, even if that is the motivation.

Most teachers are still working doing online learning though, which why I stated they'd prefer to be in the classroom. Online learning is all the worst parts of teaching with very little of the joy.

Sure, if someone wanted to pay me to do whatever I wanted I'd take it no qualms whatsoever. But yes, I may not admit to it.

I think that like most things in the states, this is super dependent on where you are. I know in my area, teachers were _not_ working every day, despite still doing online learning. They were supposed to check in with the kids every few days. In fact, most went on unemployment (at the request of the district) to be able to make the lower work scheme work without impacting district budgets.

Are you kidding? Every teacher I know has had to radically reinvent their classrooms for fully remote learning on the fly with minimal support and are working around the clock to do so.

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