I’m a Nurse in New York. Teachers Should Do Their Jobs, Just Like I Did | Hacker News Reader

I’m a Nurse in New York. Teachers Should Do Their Jobs, Just Like I Did

theatlantic.com

33 pointsjawns51 comments

This is an awful and irresponsible article. This is not a war, nurses are not soldiers and shouldn't have been put at such risk. The fact that they were was the result of a complete abdication of duty of our nations leadership. In regards to schools, based on recent outbreaks at schools that have reopened and summer camps it seems pretty clear that with the US's current level of transmission, trying to open schools is incredibly irresponsible. If we really wanted to have schools open as a priority we should have gotten our transmission down in the summer. We failed, and this is the result.

Indeed, this is a terrible point of view. Sending kids back to school before the epidemic is under control just makes it worse for everyone, including the nurses on the front lines. I understand her frustration but it still is stupid.

I wonder how acceptable it would be to swap nurse/pandemic/get sick with soldier/war/get shot, or with fireman/forest fire/get burned. Some professions have different risk profiles than others.

The right thing to do is obviously to reopen the schools, but the virus has to be under control first.

I also despise the appeal to some false authority. The entire premise for the argument seems to be, "well, I was a nurse and had to go in even when I was at risk, so they should do the same". The fact that she was a nurse or felt a duty to work has absolutely no weight in the argument.

>This is not a war,

Feeling like this is not a war is a big reason we have all had to endure so much risk. We have been unwilling to make the tough decisions, unwilling to move ahead with imperfect information, unwilling to sacrifice trivial liberty to do what is clearly safer for our fellow humans.

That is seriously wrongheaded thinking. This is just plain not a war, it is a plague. We do need to make sacrifices, but the ideals expoused in this article, needlessly throwing people into danger out of some misguided ideal of lionizing sacrifice is just going to get more people sick.

The number one thing that could have been done was the easiest, government sponsored ramp up of PPE at the first signs of an epidemic. It took nearly half a year for the Federal government to get their head in the game, and even then they've been flubbing it.

I think the war analogy is useful, in that the Federal government should be able to have access to higher authority to execute on strategies quickly. I mean, we use the "War on ____" analogy enough, this pandemic is certainly more fitting than most of those issues.

"I think the war analogy is useful, in that the Federal government should be able to have access to higher authority to execute on strategies quickly." Serious question, why? We come up with checks and balances for a reason. We have existing laws on how to handle pandemics, and states have existing laws for isolation and quarantine. We have the CDC, the Public Health Service, the NIH all as existing agencies with duties and plans that were supposed to be used for this. And those plans were ignored. We had months to prepare before the first cases appeared in the US. Our current federal leaders have proposed multiple strategies that would harm people without helping, such as promoting unproven therapies. What part of any of the federal response to this makes you think they should have had more authority?

Just because this administration has done such a poor job of it doesn't mean a competent one wouldn't have been able to use the authority given during a crisis to do something effective.

I also don't think there is any new law that would need to be enacted to grant additional authority to the executive branch. I agree, they had all the tools in the toolbox before and after the pandemic hit us. I didn't mean to seem to advocate that the executive needed more authority than they already posses, just that the authority they already posses is higher than we would normally be comfortable with without a crisis.

I mostly meant that the war analogy is useful from a public perspective, because there are a lot of people who don't think in shades of grey, it's either war or peace, and to get them to do or accept what needs to be done, they need to be motivated.

A pandemic is a war of sort. A war in which medical staff are front line troops that will be put through a lot.

Getting transmission rates and new cases right down quickly requires sweeping, war-like measures and mindset. This failed because no-one has been willing to take them, and a significant portion of the public thinks that individual freedoms trump everything else.

There are a lot of issues with using war as a mindset. There is no enemy here, it is a natural disaster. There may not be an end, even with a vaccine this may never go away. I've seen how the War on Drugs, War on Poverty, and War on Terror have been absolute failures in my lifetime and promoted incorrect thinking on how to handle these issues, I do not want to see the same thing happen here.

Using war as a mindset is very apt: It means discipline, effort, thinking as a group, individual sacrifice. All positive and useful things when fighting a pandemic.

I don't see a problem with the term.

Edit: I'm puzzled by some of the replies and ideas on what being at war means.

It does mean solidarity, collaboration, cooperation, including extensive international collaboration. A prime example is WWII.

It think it is not unreasonable to call covid-19 an enemy that must be defeated if that focuses minds. It is in fact very common to use war-like analogies in campaigns against diseases. That includes smallpox and polio.

War means enemy, killing, strict hierarchy, dehumanizing the enemy, us vs. them mindset. We need a collaborative, cooperative, understanding approach for dealing with this.

In your response to your edit I think you have a very rosy view of war. WW2 involved setting cities on fire, locking up ethnic minorities because of their ancestry, and forcing removal of people from one country on the other based on their ethnicity and language. And all of that was on the part of the U.S.

Assuming OP is an American...

Warning, generalizations ahead: Unfortunately you really can't take coordinated, collective political action on anything in the USA unless you pretend it's a "war". That's why we name things like "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror". The only way you can even hope to convince Americans to put their political team aside and get behind an idea is to convince them that they are fighting a war against some kind of enemy. So I can understand the attempt to label this a war--the intentions are good.

IME as an American calling something as a war is a way for the people calling it that to start demanding a lot of power and money and casting their opponents as soft. I don't want to see a Patriot Act/AUMF equivalent for the Coronavirus.

A war means an enemy you need to shoot at and ultimately defeat. An enemy power that want to take something (or refuses you take something) and that you need to subdue and negotiate with. The point of a war is never to exterminate a people or species. Modern asymmetric warfare already stretches the concept, but it is entirely unhelpful here.

Everything you mention should exist even without a war, it is just the foundation of a civilised society. Rule of law by definition requires us to discipline ourselves. There are plenty of situations besides playing soldier where we work with others towards a common great goal.

Seeing everything as a war just reinforces black-and-white thinking and seeing everything as a zero-sum game, when the times call for solidarity and international collaboration. We need the opposite of the knee jerk phony patriotism and nationalism that get exacerbated by all this tough talking. It is a natural disaster, not a war.

We have analogies that work. We eradicated smallpox and went almost there with polio. There is no need to find ennemies.

These two sentences, I think, best summarize the article's position on the topic:

> Instead of taking the summer to hone arguments against returning to the classroom, administrators and teachers should be thinking about how they can best support children and their families through a turbulent time. Schools are essential to the functioning of our society, and that makes teachers essential workers.

Yes, and many teachers think that the best way to support children and their families is to not put them in a position where they might die. Part of their "essential" function here is in advocating for the safest and most effective learning environment possible. Right now that seems to be attending lessons remotely until it's safe to go back to schools.

That the author thinks it's the duty of teachers to unnecessarily put children in harm's way as if there is no alternative is nothing short of bizarre and I'm disappointed to see it published by the Atlantic.

>put them in a position where they might die?

Children or teachers? In the uk we’ve recorded no deaths for the under 15s from corona and only 339 in the 15 to 44 range. The kids will be fine. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

I would argue that a child with one or more dead parents due to Corona would be harmful

And who supervises the kids? Drives them to school? Makes their lunches? Teaches them?

Children are really very unlikely to die from Covid-19. This is from the month of April in England and Wales, you can see that death rates are really very low for anyone under 50.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

You can make arguments around the spread of the disease in the larger community, but sending children to school is not really putting their lives at risk.

> ...to support children and their families...

What everyone responding to my comment seems to miss is that it's not necessarily about the children themselves dying (make no mistake, many children will die if crammed back into classrooms prematurely), but their parents and other family members who will die as the result of them becoming carriers and bringing the disease home with them.

At what point does it become "safe" enough to open the schools? What about the flu? Auto accidents? Bus accidents? Has this been articulated?

"Children were 0%-0.8% of all COVID-19 deaths, and 20 states reported zero child deaths" https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-cov...

The number of children that are going to die this year as a result of the mental health burdens being placed on them by incredibly willing adults is far greater than the number that will die from all other causes combined.

Kids are having a very hard time right now. Hell, adults are having a very hard time right now. But children have it much worse. Very little socialization, a news media hellbent on negativity, overstressed parents, and more uncertainty about the world than I ever remember (and I remember crying in school on the morning of 9/11).

Schooling is important for the mental health of the most important asset the world has. Doctors have stated emphatically the importance of resuming schooling. At some point the adults need to stand up and be adults so that the children can remain children.

How do you look at how things are playing out in pretty much the rest of the world outside of the US and then arrive at this tone?

If adults were standing up and being adults, we wouldn't have 150,000 dead, with 1,000 more dead each day.

How many deaths would we have if adults were standing up and being adults? Zero is wishful thinking an not being an adult. Avoiding all risk is just as bad as taking all risk, in this case every choice has lives on the line.

An actual competent, coordinated federal response starting in January/February and leaders all calling for mask wearing as soon as it became obvious it made some difference and we'd have meany fewer deaths (and probably a more active economy!).

Neither of those things come anywhere close to "avoiding all risk", they are just simple things that were not done, with no good explanation. Wearing a mask in certain public circumstances isn't emasculating or any kind of meaningful impingement on freedom.

Is there any good data on what impact opening schools[1] actually has on the spread of the virus?

Here in Sweden schools were kept open so that essential workers wouldn't have to stay home from work to take care of their children, and that decision doesn't seem to have impacted us negatively [2]. So it seems to me that, unless a child is in an at-risk group, there shouldn't be a negative impact from sending them to school.

The U.S. and Sweden are of course very different countries, so there might be some other factors at play that I haven't thought of.

[1] by schools I mean for kids up to the age of about 15, not universities and the like

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

We need to be making more science based risk decisions here. The commentary I see on this topic, like this article, are justifications of whatever viewpoint the person is anchored in (due to emotions, political leadership, or personal home situation). HN should be linking to meta-studies on the topic, not opinion pieces.

No. We have some idea of what works and what doesn't based on the effects as different countries rolled out different policies in different orders, see [0] for a recent example. But specifically for schools, there just aren't enough data points. Instead they have to be clumped together with closing universities, since almost every country closed all forms of education at the same time.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.28.20116129v...

This is disgusting. It's just a "I went through it, so they should, too." argument.

The completely legitimate concerns of teachers are being waved away as emotions.

> It’s going to be hard; it’s going to be stressful; it’s not going to be perfect.

It's not just going to be "stressful". People are going to die! And she's missing the huge differences between hospitals and schools. Patients don't go back and forth between the hospital and school every day. Students don't have to go to school to avoid death.

Teachers doing their part means refusing to participate in a system that will cause more deaths just so someone else can score political points.

Just because their argument appeals to emotion doesn't make the argument for school closure any more valid. There will always be a risk of death in life... what if a child gets the flu? These are remote risks that we accept may happen, we accept them and move on with our lives.

166 children died from the flu in 2019-2020 season, so far there have been 86 child covid deaths. https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/04/10/fluupdate041... https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP%20and%20CHA%20-%20Chil...

I’m not saying her argument appeals to emotion. I’m saying it dismisses teachers’ reasoning as emotion. It says that teachers are “nervous”, not that they think that reopening schools will put themselves, their students and community at risk.

It dismisses their arguments as emotion, because that seems to be the primary argument. Based on the evidence we currently have:

>there is little to no danger for the kids themselves

>they are unlikely to spread to adults if they are infected

>Online doesn't work with teachers not trained to do it

>there are significant dangers to keeping kids out of school, socially and developmentally

Does "doing your job" involve the requirement to be willfully complicit in a situation that will guarantee that some of the children you teach and the coworkers you work with will die when they otherwise would not have done?

That might be unavoidably true in medicine; there is no sane justification for why that might be true in education.

If that's your standard, then you can never open up schools (or restaurants, or movie theaters, or parks, or beaches) again, at least not until all disease is eradicated. People, including children, have died of the seasonal flu every single year that there have been schools, and many of them contracted it at school.

This article is one big strawman. It assumes that teachers' only concern is their own safety, and then attacks that as insufficient reason to threaten "safety strikes" etc. In the process it totally ignores arguments based on the epidemiological effect of premature school openings. Granted, there has been much coverage of the teachers' (and other staff's) own risks, but only because that issue had previously been given insufficient attention. It was never because the risks to the surrounding community didn't matter.

It also ignores a fundamental difference between the roles of nurses and teachers in this pandemic. Nurses have been caring for people who are already sick, and furthermore in an environment where majority of the people in a room understand about infection control. Teachers are trying to prevent spread before it occurs, in an environment where the vast majority of people in the room are kids who can't be expected to follow infection-control protocols. Hospitals also have different HVAC systems than schools do, and by now we should all know why that matters.

Overall, this comes across as a very slanted and ultimately false comparison, more grounded in a sense of grievance over the author's own burdens (which she took on voluntarily) than in any epidemiological or other necessity. It's the "Blue Lives Matter" of school-reopening rhetoric.

In addition to the other concerns raised - this article seems to be glossing over the fact that nurses are given extensive training, experience and equipment in how to avoid getting infected by airborne respiratory diseases.

The relation between nurses and diseases is expected to be different from teachers and disease.

What a dystopian morning read. This is what happens when leadership fails.

I'm in the NJ suburbs, living outside of NY by 30 minutes. The school board recently had a debate and vote about which of a couple different plans should they adopt for the year - whether to do some in person or whether to do all remote. Of course, they did this vote over video conference. If a dozen or so grown adults can't space themselves out in a room for an hour or two and avoid transmission, I don't see how we think that many classrooms consisting of small children will be able to do the same. I agree with other commenters, that the comparisons between the demands on nurses and teachers are quite different and thus not helpful in this case.

Are Teachers requesting that they be furloughed without pay or that school district taxes be refunded to tax payers? If not, it seems a bit rich to ask taxpayers to pay for a service they are not receiving.

Additionally - part of that service is not only the academic instruction, but SUPERVISED instruction, breakfast/lunch and sports. Moving classes online comes nowhere close to replacing the original services contracted for.

This comes across as callous but it's not wrong.

More to the point, the sad state of affairs is that for many children, being in school is the only time they are well fed, have social interaction, or escape an abusive household. There is a real human cost to closing schools, just as there will be a real human cost if we open them. The question should be what are the relative costs.

What saddens me is that she thinks so little of her abilities. Admittedly, I am not a teacher, but I am pretty sure I know as much as them as far as health and infection diseases go. (which is pretty much none) Have nurses and doctors been put at an unnecessary risk through all of this? Absolutely. We should have treated them better, given them better equipment, etc., but that is not the point of this article. What I do know is their knowledge of controlling dangerous diseases and such is vastly superior to mine. They know how to handle themselves to minimize risk way better than teachers or myself do. For one of them to say, "everyone else should just suck it up," greatly diminishes the understanding they have superior knowledge in the field of health and medicine.

Nurses acquire a halo effect by their proximity to other medical professionals. Their training doesn't prepare them for processing or understanding the science that underlies their profession, it involves teaching procedures and protocols. Medical professionals in my family have complained about rampant antivaxxism, religiosity (belief in faith healing, etc) and other superstitions in the nurses they work with.

Do teachers takes oaths? Do nurses? I was under the impression the medical profession was held to a much higher standard on ethics, assistance, and duty?

One of the phrases that's used around this is "duty of care", and teachers (and other members of the educational profession) definitely have one towards their students[1]. It's not a trivial thing, regardless of how (or even if) the two are ordered.

[1] https://www2.education.vic.gov.au/pal/duty-of-care/policy

How is this a comparison in risk?? It's literally her job to deal with potentially dangerous situations from sick people.

Most elementary and high schools are underfunded, overcrowded, and probably half full of people who do not take COVID seriously at all.

"But kids can't get it!!" Being asymptomatic != not getting it. The fact that kids are often asymptomatic makes it WORSE not better. Kids are just going to unknowingly spread amongst themselves, amongst their families, and their communities.

Opening the schools is a good way to make her job a lot harder for a lot longer.

here in Australia we had home schooling with the support of the teachers. it sucked but it was do-able and it worked.

Much of the US could do that as well, but the real problem i see is that in the US, School is how many children get the only meal of the day they'll get.

that is fucked. the Us let their children and future down in the name of cost cutting and individual responsibility years and years ago.

I don't think food is why people want schools to re-open. I'd guess the two reasons are not believing that kids are learning remotely and wanting to be able to go to work.

>I don't think food is why people want schools to re-open

It is absolutely one reason.

Meh, childcare and education really need to be decoupled. By combining them we have something that effectively provides neither.

Teaching is something that absolutely can be done remotely, the Australians have been doing it forever.

Regardless of how quickly we should open schools, this article is thoughtless, immoral, and makes a wildly fallacious analogy.

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