Ed Johnson, a Georgian who puts a high value on intelligence and thoughtful decision making, writes about the conflict among some of his fellow Georgians. Should they listen to God or science? Johnson doesn’t think that one has to choose. God is not in opposition to science. God and science walk together. God wants people to learn about COVID-19 and take care of themselves.
Will they listen?
You know how politicians like to use international test scores to bash our public schools? Here’s good reason to bash the politicians in D.C.
Teresa Hanafin of the Boston Globe writes:
The expected numbers of American deaths from the coronavirus unveiled by the administration yesterday was pretty shocking — 100,000 to 240,000 — although those numbers have been floating around among scientists, researchers, and epidemiologists for awhile now.
But for Trump to allow his task force doctors to reveal those numbers publicly was remarkable, and a sign that it has finally dawned on him that he’s is presiding over a devastating epidemic.
It’s beyond sad to contemplate how low those numbers could have been, and how many lives could have been saved, had Trump listened to the experts instead of being contemptuously dismissive for weeks.
Had he seized control of the situation and kicked the feds into high gear with an aggressive, comprehensive, and nationwide approach, we wouldn’t be talking about World War II-level deaths.
That’s what South Korea did, a country that reported its first case on the same day as the US: Jan. 20. South Korea immediately convened officials from 20 medical companies and ordered them to start producing tests.
As tests were approved, the government opened hundreds of drive-through testing sites. The tests were free to anyone who wanted one, with results within hours. Test kits were supplied to hospitals and clinics as well.
Within seven weeks, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tested about 300,000 people out of a population of 51 million.
In the same time period, the United States tested only 60,000 people in a population of 330 million.
That’s how community spread happens: When you don’t know who has the virus, you can’t stop it from spreading. At a certain point, the virus outruns you, and you can do nothing but keep scrambling to catch up. That’s where we are.
Face masks were readily available to South Koreans in local pharmacies, with each person allowed two per week. In the US, even frontline medical workers are rationing and reusing face masks.
Another factor: South Korea’s national health care system, under which nobody has to worry that they’ll get a lower quality health care than somebody richer than them, hospitals don’t have to fret about low reimbursements when they treat the poor, and people don’t have to worry about being driven into medical bankruptcy as so many Americans are.
In the US, Trump’s sustained attacks on Obamacare means that millions more Americans are uninsured than when he took office. Now, of course, those uninsured Americans are desperate to enroll, but in an act of what Democrats say is simply utter cruelty, Trump is refusing to reopen the federal exchange so that the uninsured can obtain insurance before they or someone in their family, God forbid, contracts the virus.
Fortunately, some governors have reopened their state exchanges, so if you live in a state with Democratic leadership, you could be in luck.
The bottom line:
The US has close to 200,000 cases, about .06 percent of the population, and 4,400 deaths, a rate of 2.2 percent. (That rate has increased, not declined, as more cases are uncovered.)
South Korea has 9,900 cases, about .02 percent of its population, and 165 deaths, a rate of 1.7 percent.
By late February, South Korea was getting about 900 new cases a day. Today, it’s about 100. In contrast, the number of new cases in the US is still soaring.
While the trajectory of South Korean cases has declined, the US trajectory is solidly pointing upward, increasing at the fastest rate in the world.
It didn’t have to be this way.
State Superintendent Tony Thurmond announced that public schools are unlikely to reopen this calendar year due to the coronavirus.
California public school campuses are unlikely to reopen for the remainder of the academic school year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said Tuesday in a letter to school district officials.
“Due to the current safety concerns and needs for ongoing social distancing it currently appears that our students will not be able to return to school campuses before the end of the school year,” Thurmond wrote. “This is in no way to suggest that school is over for the year, but rather we should put all efforts into strengthening our delivery of education through distance learning.”
Earlier, Thurmond had resisted suggestions that there was no hope for returning to campus. His letter Tuesday represented a shift of direction.
His statement also echoed remarks from Gov. Gavin Newsom at a midday Tuesday news conference:
“We have more work to do: internet connection, rural issues, and still trying to address the anxiety of parents like me and my wife and millions of others about whether or not kids are going to go back to school this calendar year or not,” Newsom said. “I have been clear in my belief they will not, but let me announce formally what the superintendent of public education believes and what the superintendents believe and expect that announcement in the next day or two.”
In this time of national crisis, the Trump administration announced that it was lowering federal fuel economy standards.
This move reverses many years of efforts to fight air pollution.
People with emphysema, asthma, and other lung conditions, already at risk for coronavirus, will suffer even more risk as the air is dirtied by emissions from cars and trucks.
This change to lower standards may satisfy the fossil fuel industry and some in the transportation industry, at least those who put profits above lives, but it is a deadly blow to public health.
It is a curious time to take steps to further endanger public health and poison the air we breathe.
Is there a bottom to the heartlessness of the Trump administration and its callous indifference to our lives?
Vicki Cobb has written many science books for children.
She writes:
I write science books for children. People are confused about what science is.
Is it a body of knowledge?
Yes, one that has been growing incrementally and exponentially for the past 500 years.
How is this knowledge accumulated?
By experimental procedures that are verifiable by others and corrected by others.
It is produced by a community and is the original wiki. Why do some people distrust science?
Partly because much of it is non-intuitive or counter intuitive.
Why should we believe that the earth circles the sun, when it looks like the heavens circles us? What is its value that no other discipline has? It predicts with accuracy.
It doesn’t need to be believed in. For those who are questioning our faith in science when it comes to the course of this pandemic, they may be dead before they learn that they are wrong.
Rob Reich and Mohit Mookim write in “Wired” about the efforts by Bill Gates, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Chinese billionaire Jack Ma to step in and do what the federal government has failed to do in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.
They warn:
Public health is a paradigmatic public good. We should never be dependent on the whims of wealthy donors—as philanthropy is increasingly dominated by the wealthy—for our collective health and well-being.
That would be a betrayal of democracy. Rather than democratic processes determining our collective needs and how to address them, the wealthy would decide for us. We wanted rule by the many; we may get rule by the rich.
The coronavirus pandemic presents us with an immediate need for a response and it reminds us of the importance to invest so that we avoid preventable disasters in the future. At the moment, it’s all hands on deck for the emergency. But this is not what big philanthropy is built for. Or what it can sustain. The richest country in the world must step up to fund public health rather than relying on the richest people in the world to do it piecemeal.
Rob Reich is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. He is the faculty codirector of The Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, which has received grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mohit Mookim is a researcher at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University.
Curiously, the co-author Rob Reich Of the article leads an organization funded by the Gates Foundation. Will Bill Gates listen to him?
This is a multiple-choice test, with a possible essay at the end.
Trump lashed out at Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer because:
1. She did not praise him enough.
2. She is a woman.
3. Trump hates strong women.
4. Other (write your own guess after reading the following Document-Based Information.)
President Donald Trump has lashed out at several Democratic governors who are responding to the coronavirus crisis, but his harshest words have been reserved for Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.
Trump said Thursday he had a “big problem” with the “young, a woman governor” in Michigan, complaining that “all she does is sit there and blame the federal government.” On Friday, he said that he told Vice President Mike Pence, “don’t call the woman in Michigan,” and later referred to her as “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer” in a tweet and said she is “way in over her head” and “doesn’t have a clue.”
Those attacks — and her direct response to them — have thrust the first-term governor further into the national spotlight as she manages her state’s efforts to slow the pandemic’s spread, which includes seeking assistance from the Trump administration. Whitmer now finds herself among other Democratic governors, like Washington state’s Jay Inslee and New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who are navigating the deepening public health crisis in their states while also confronting the President’s demand for public praise and appreciation.
Whitmer responded to Trump’s Thursday attacks in a tweet that included a hand-waving emoji, writing, “Hi, my name is Gretchen Whitmer, and that governor is me.”
“I’ve asked repeatedly and respectfully for help. We need it. No more political attacks, just PPEs, ventilators, N95 masks, test kits. You said you stand with Michigan — prove it,” she wrote.
Garrison Keillor tells this story at “The Writer’s Almanac”:
On this date in 1915, the woman known as “Typhoid Mary” was put into quarantine in a cottage in the Bronx. Her name was Mary Mallon, and she was a large and fiery Irish-American woman about 40 years old. She worked as a cook in and around New York City, and every household she worked in seemed to suffer an outbreak of typhoid fever. Typhoid is caused by a form of Salmonella bacteria, and is usually spread by contact with human or animal waste. It was common on battlefields — it may have killed more than 200,000 soldiers during the Civil War — and in poor and unsanitary housing conditions, but it was rarely seen in the wealthy households like the ones where Mallon worked.
The first outbreak associated with Typhoid Mary occurred in 1900, in Mamaroneck, New York. She had been cooking for a family for about two weeks when they started to become ill. The same thing happened the following year, when she took a series of jobs in Manhattan and Long Island. She helped take care of the sick, not realizing that her presence was probably making them worse.
In 1906, a doctor named George Soper noticed this strange pattern of outbreaks in wealthy homes. He went to interview each of the families, and found that they had all hired the same cook, but she never left a forwarding address when she moved on to other employment. He finally tracked her down after several cases in a Park Avenue penthouse, so he interviewed her. She didn’t take it well, and swore at him, and threatened him with a meat cleaver when he asked her to provide a stool sample. He finally called in the police and had her arrested.
Urine and stool samples were taken from Mallon by force, and doctors discovered that her gall bladder was shedding great numbers of typhoid bacteria. She admitted that she never washed her hands when cooking, but she didn’t see the point, as she was healthy. No one had ever heard of a healthy carrier of typhoid before, and she refused to believe that she was in any way sick. They wanted to take out her gall bladder, and she refused. They demanded that she give up cooking, and she refused to do that too. They confined her for a while and put her to work as a laundress for the Riverside Hospital, and in 1910 — after she promised to give up cooking and only work as a laundress — she was released. It wasn’t long before she changed her name to Mary Brown and took a job as a cook. For the next five years, she stayed one step ahead of the doctors and the law, spreading disease and death in her wake, until they caught up with her on Long Island. Authorities placed her in quarantine on North Brother Island in the Bronx for the rest of her life, and she died of pneumonia in 1938.
A story in the Washington Post today. Trump’s lies could kill many people because scientists are not believed.
In the one month since the first U.S. coronavirus death, America has become a country of uncertainty.
New cases of infection and casualties continue multiplying. New York and Louisiana hospitals are grappling with a flood of patients that threatens to overwhelm their health-care systems. Meanwhile, the president and political conservatives are increasingly agitating to end drastic restrictions meant to buy time and save lives.
Running beneath it all, in a continuous loop through our national psyche, are basic questions leaders are struggling to answer: When can we safely lift these quarantines? How many people could die if we do it too early? Just how dangerous will this pandemic turn out to be? And what exactly should be our next step?
This is why epidemiology exists. Its practitioners use math and scientific principles to understand disease, project its consequences, and figure out ways to survive and overcome it. Their models are not meant to be crystal balls predicting exact numbers or dates. They forecast how diseases will spread under different conditions. And their models allow policymakers to foresee challenges, understand trend lines and make the best decisions for the public good.
But one factor many modelers failed to predict was how politicized their work would become in the era of President Trump, and how that in turn could affect their models.
In recent days, a growing contingent of Trump supporters have pushed the narrative that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump’s reelection efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible. Trump himself pushed this idea in the early days of the outbreak, calling warnings on coronavirus a kind of “hoax” meant to undermine him.
The notion is deeply troubling, say leading health experts, because what the country does next and how many people die depend largely on what evidence U.S. leaders and the public use to inform their decisions. Epidemiologists worry their research — intended to avert massive deaths in situations exactly like this pandemic — will be dismissed by federal leaders when it is needed most.
A veteran school nurse offers advice to parents to help them while they are schooling their children at home.
A huge google Doc with parent resources from RelentlessSchoolNurse, link at bottom of page:
The Relentless School Nurse: Dear Parents, A Message From Your School Nurse
The Relentless School Nurse: COVID-19 Survival Guide for Parents and Kids
Related FB group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/445786889466638/?ref=share
Here is the bio of “The Relentless School Nurse.”
Published by Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN
Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN is a Nationally Certified School Nurse (NCSN), currently in her 19th year as a New Jersey school nurse in the Camden City School District. Robin is the Legislative Chair for the New Jersey State School Nurses Association. She is proud to be a Johnson & Johnson School Health Leadership Fellow and past Program Mentor. She has been recognized in her home state of New Jersey and nationally for her community-based initiative called “The Community Café: A Conversation That Matters.” Robin is the honored recipient of multiple awards for her work in school nursing and population health. These awards include, 2019 National Association of School Nurses President’s Award, 2018 NCSN School Nurse of the Year, 2017 Johnson & Johnson School Nurse of the Year, and the New Jersey Department of Health 2017 Population Health Hero Award. Robin serves as faculty in the School Nurse Certificate Program at Rutgers University-Camden School of Nursing, where she teaches the next generation of school nurses. She was presented the 2018 Rutgers University – Camden Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award for Part-time Faculty. Follow Robin on Twitter at @RobinCogan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 