I'll be happy to. First, please show where I said "DeSantis is doing a great job". any link to any post will be fine.
The thread was one post in the beginning where DeSantis was going off on the media because of the narrative - which is still true. Just like you, same narrative. Never once did I say DeSantis is doing a great job. Not once. Anywhere. In fact, I've been critical of him when there are problems and praised action I've agreed with - which is what you do when you are unbiased. Something you've been at a loss for being ever since Covid came around. You just can't answer what you would do differently than Trump. Its really an easy question, too. That's what makes it so surprising. You're not about solutions. You're about whining and complaining about things and people that you don't like - that's the extent of your value add.
Universities are faring no better than K-12 schools in their re-openings. From today's UNC Chapel Hill newspaper.
Let's see how things are going at UNC-Chapel Hill Oh... it took a mere week of classes before going virtual... A stunning rise in COVID cases has led university officials to reverse course on in-person learning just a week after classes began. UNC reverses plans for in-person classes https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/17/us/coronavirus-college-university/index.html
Here's what happened when students went to school during the 1918 pandemic https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/us/schools-flu-pandemic-1918-trnd/index.html This isn't the first time leaders have struggled with deciding whether to keep schools open in a pandemic. During the influenza pandemic in 1918, even though the world was a very different place, the discussion was just as heated. That pandemic killed an estimated 5 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans, before it was all over. While the vast majority of cities closed their schools, three opted to keep them open -- New York, Chicago and New Haven, according to historians. The decisions of health officials in those cities was based largely on the hypothesis of public health officials that students were safer and better off at school. It was, after all, the height of the Progressive Era, with its emphasis on hygiene in schools and more nurses for each student than is thinkable now. New York had almost 1 million school children in 1918 and about 75% of them lived in tenements, in crowded, often unsanitary conditions, according to a 2010 article in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service. "For students from the tenement districts, school offered a clean, well-ventilated environment where teachers, nurses, and doctors already practiced — and documented — thorough, routine medical inspections," according to the Public Health Reports article. The city was one of the hardest and earliest hit by the flu, said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He was a co-author of the 2010 Public Health Reports article. "(Children) leave their often unsanitary homes for large, clean, airy school buildings, where there is always a system of inspection and examination enforced," New York's health commissioner at the time, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, told the New York Times after the pandemic had peaked there. Students weren't allowed to gather outside school and had to report to their teacher immediately, according to Copeland. Teachers checked students for any signs of the flu, and students who had symptoms were isolated. If students had a fever, someone from the health department would take them home, and the health official would judge whether the conditions were suitable for "isolation and care," according to Public Health Reports. If not, they were sent to a hospital. "The health department required families of the children recovering at home to either have a family physician or use the services of a public health doctor at no charge," the Public Health Report article said. The argument in Chicago for leaving schools open for its 500,000 students was the same: keeping schools open would keep the children off the streets and away from infected adults, the reasoning went. If social distancing was helpful then, it would have been made easier by the fact that absenteeism in schools soared during the pandemic, perhaps because of what one Chicago public health official called "fluphobia" among parents. "The absentee rate was so great, it really didn't matter" that schools were open, Markel said. Part of Chicago's strategy was to ensure that fresh air was circulated. School rooms were overheated during the winter so that windows could remain open at all times, according to a 1918 paper by the Chicago Department of Health. The paper concluded that an analysis of data showed that "the decision of keeping the schools of this city open during the recent influenza epidemic was justified." A fifth-grade class knitting for a Junior Red Cross project in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1917 or 1918. And in New York, then Health Commissioner Copeland told the New York Times: "How much better it has been to have the children under the constant observation of qualified persons than to close the schools." Markel, who with other researchers pored over data and historical records in looking at the response of 43 cities to the 1918 pandemic, isn't as convinced. New York "didn't do the worst, but it didn't do the best, either," Markel said, adding Chicago was slightly better. Research showed that cities who implemented quarantining and isolation, school closures and bans on public gatherings fared the best, he said. "The cities that did more than one" of these measures "did better. School closures were part of that contribution," Markel said. Public health experts, including Markel, are quick to point out that Covid-19 is not influenza, which was a well-known disease in 1918. There is still a lot to learn about the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, Covid-19. The right decision today, Markel said, is school closure. "It's better," he said, "to be safe than sorry."
We should go back and see what happened to kids who went to school during the Black Plague in the Dark Ages. That should provide a relevant model to today.
From the Atlantic. Who would have guessed? Remote Learning Is a Bad Joke My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I. AUGUST 18, 2020 Emily Gould Author and essayist 3more free articles this month Sign in Subscribe Now ROMAIN GAILLARD / REA / REDUX One exciting thing about being alive at this pivotal moment in history is that I’m constantly learning about strong opinions I didn’t previously know I had. Before mid-March 2020, if you’d asked me how I felt about videoconferencing, I’d have shrugged. It’s fine? Now I would have to amend that opinion slightly. It’s not fine. It’s horrible, a form of psychic torture, and I hate it so deeply that my hatred feels physical, like an allergic reaction. This allergy isn’t caused by my adult professional experiences: I can force myself to participate in online panels and meetings and literary events (though I will not, I’m sorry, attend my extended family’s weekly Zoom happy hour). I can plan ahead and deal with the sucked-dry, brain-dead exhaustion that follows a Zoom-heavy day. My hatred comes, rather, from having coached my 5-year-old son Raffi through virtual schooling in the spring. And I’m dreading the fall, when his kindergarten class will be conducted at least partially, and possibly entirely, remotely. I’m eager to be proved wrong, but I suspect that for him and for my family, Zoom kindergarten might be worse than no school at all. To say that virtual pre-K didn’t go well would be an understatement. On day one Raffi cried, screamed, hit his parents, hit his brother, broke things, and spat a cup of juice all over my laptop. The next day, my husband and I tried it again, and things went about the same way. But we kept trying, because we had no idea what else to do. School was a lifeline of normalcy that we were clinging to. Eventually, we scaled back to requiring that Raffi scrawl his name and a few letters and numbers before heading out to the park in the morning, and we sat down to the Zoom classes only if he seemed amenable. But they took so much out of him, out of all of us, even when they went okay. They seemed to use up all of his being-agreeable energy for the day, leaving us to deal with what remained. After the school year ended, I could assess our failures from a slight distance. Our first mistake, I think, was expecting that Raffi would be as excited about online school as we were. We’d been so eager to see his wonderful teacher and his classmates that we hadn’t paused to think about how jarring it would be for Raffi, who had only recently learned that the people in the TV set weren’t tiny puppets. Previously, he’d experienced online interaction only via one-on-one FaceTime sessions with his patient, indulgent grandma and grandpa. So we had unrealistic expectations of Raffi’s ability to sit in front of a screen that wasn’t playing Wild Kratts. Raffi had unrealistic expectations too: He was used to being able to talk to his classmates directly, to hug them and hold hands with them and fight with them. “X stepped on my hand on the playground on purpose,” he told us repeatedly that spring, not angrily but in the bemused tone of someone nurturing a grudge into full flower. This eventually became a tone of nostalgia: If only X would step on his hand again! He was used to being able to sing and speak in a chorus. He had no prior experience of muting himself. Arguably, this was a good time for him to learn that valuable skill. He would argue that it was not. He would argue, I’m pretty sure, about anything if he thought it might distract you from making him do something he didn’t want to do. Raffi has matured somewhat since the spring—for instance, he has recently stopped making his little brother cry, because he understands that my husband and I will follow through on our threats of “If he cries, no Batman!” And I’m optimistic that, given a summer to prepare, rather than a handful of crisis-filled days, his teachers will have a better handle on what they’re hoping to achieve via video. For some kids, online education might be neutral or even good, and I know that teachers are giving their all to put these plans in place, despite the fact that it’s no one’s favorite way to teach or learn. I even think Raffi might be able to improve his digital etiquette—to get better at waiting his turn to speak without slamming the computer shut because he’s bored, to sit through a lesson without whining or screaming. When I imagine the worst-case scenario for Raffi and the fall, I see the kind of operatic tantrum that leaves the apartment trashed and everyone’s nerves shot, like what happened daily in the spring. When I imagine the best-case scenario, I see a kid who has fought and lost, who’s gritting his teeth through a required task because we’ve promised him fruit snacks—hardly horrifying, but definitely sad. Even our worst-case scenario is a privileged one; a trashed apartment and frayed nerves are nothing in comparison with what other parents are about to undergo. My husband and I can work at home, and we can afford some assistance with child care. The huge number of parents who must work outside the home, parents who can’t afford any child care, and parents who don’t feel comfortable managing a sitter’s viral risk alongside their own are in a far worse situation. But no one’s situation is good. Kids like Raffi—who seem predisposed against online learning—are going to turn the fall into a battle. While I won’t go so far as to preemptively throw in the towel, I’m not sure how long or how hard I’m prepared to fight.