caulfield12

That Atlantic reporter has been Top Three on this all along...Amanpour always has the best sources of info. As for those school districts not requiring masks and distancing, good luck with all the lawsuits from teachers’ unions and parents...if daycares are also shut down, we’re back to almost nobody will be working except essential workers and daycare.

Singapore. Taiwan. Australia, or even better, New Zealand. Germany. Certain areas of Canada.

Nobody has quite explained where we will get the personnel or continuous funding for massive contract tracing... or pool testing, for that matter. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/13/politics/donald-trump-florida-coronavirus-reopening/index.html

Anyone think they can find a single DeVos grandchild or even just a family member attending a school in-person, or even a school with a class size of more than 12-18?

Why are you typing in kYLe font? Victoria’s Secret Angel married to Jared Kushner’s brother gets it at least

A potential housing crisis is on the way for millions of Americans whose mortgage and rent deferrals are about to sunset. Evictions loom as the end of state and local moratoriums will no longer protect homeowners and tenants unable to make payments because of COVID-19 lockdowns. A minority of U.S. states have already expired orders against evictions, and a host of others across the country are set to expire over the next two months. Once they do, residents are facing a possible flood of non-payment legal actions. The COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project (CEDP) predicted recently that by the end of September, more than 20 million U.S. renters —many of them Black and Latino located in big cities — will be at risk for eviction. According to data released on Friday by mortgage tracking firm ATTOM Data Solutions, homeowners most at risk for foreclosures during the second quarter were those in metropolitan markets along the East Coast and in Northern Illinois, with clusters of troubled borrowers in New York City, Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “There are millions of Americans now unemployed due to the pandemic with greatly reduced means to keep up on their mortgages,” Todd Teta, ATTOM’s chief product officer, told Yahoo Finance in an email. “At some point, banks are going to need mortgage holders to pay what they owe and go after those who don't,” he added. https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/renters-homeowners-face-new-phase-of-coronavirus-crisis-evictions-172940378.html

The Covid lunacy has doomed Paul to nothing more than a niche candidacy like his father, along with his unruly mop of hair and getting tackled by a neighbor. Teacher says school reopenings would be 'epidemiological nightmare' as thousands sign remote learning petition More than 25,000 teachers, students and parents want to continue distance learning this fall until U.S. coronavirus cases — 3 million and counting — subside for 14 days in their respective counties, according to a new petition that claims in-person school would lead to a health care disaster. The Change.org proposal was written by Harley Litzelman, a history and economics teacher at Skyline High School in Oakland. Alameda County, where Oakland is located, has more than 7,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, according to Friday data. According to Litzelman, resuming in-person classes would “glorify the endless sacrifice of American teaching,” as he explained in a June 30 article on the website Medium calling for support of the petition, which uses the hashtag #14daysnonewcases. “We refuse to return to campus this fall until our counties report no new cases of COVID-19 for at least 14 consecutive days,” reads the petition. “Let it be known that this is not simply a petition, but a statement of intent, a pledge not to return until it is safe.” https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/teacher-school-reopenings-epidemiological-nightmare-thousands-sign-remote-learning-petition-215709113.html

Yet another example where minority kids in inner city districts are disproportionately affected. Access to healthy meals cut off if they don’t go, internet/online education limited if they stay home...when I worked in Kansas City, students were being paid $50-75 or so just for showing up to school, because the subsidies were so massive that it made economic sense to incentivize schools to operate in such a fashion. And this was more or less 15-20 years ago. I’m sure a limited number of teachers are providing “live/interactive” lessons with PPT’s. The numbers are even smaller for teachers over 50ish. Every lesson we did here in China was either 90 (ten minute break in middle) or 45 minutes long, and we were teaching something new everyday or having kids present through cam/mike to each other. In addition, tons of graded supplemental homework. We even taught an additional month into the summer (finished Friday) previewing senior year topics for the matriculating juniors. Many students are also doing Pioneer Project research papers with American university professors, writing EE’s for IB or studying SAT/IELTS/TOEFL pretty much the entire summer, either online or offline. After news about teachers getting sick or dying from professional development/school improvement meetings or required one or two week summer training classes in July or August, those are likely to be cut out as well. PS: Every Grade 6 and up (with creative editing) or at least high school student in the US should be required to watch Hamilton and write about what it means to them over this summer. Of course, 1/4th to 1/3rd of US parents would threaten to sue schools claiming it was BLM propaganda without bothering to first watch it themselves and do some meaningful self-reflection. (It does seem Chief Justice John Roberts is taking those lessons to heart, at least.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/21/how-some-school-funding-formulas-hurt-learning-and-make-schools-more-dangerous/

FL governor: If we can open Home Depot, we can open schools CNN's Bianna Golodroya reports on Florida Gov. Ron Desantis pushing to reopen schools in the fall despite health concerns from other local leaders amid the coronavirus pandemic. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/07/10/schools-reopening-guidelines-governors-pkg-golodroya-vpx.cnn Govs. DeSantis and Kemp...what’s next, pushing for 100% attendance at the GOP Convention in Jacksonville and The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party aka the Georgia/Florida game? It’s somehow not much of a surprise that one of the Florida counties is now at a 33% positive rate and growing.

It will likely be an all-out battle between Pence, Nikki Haley, Cruz, Rubio, Paul Ryan and those governors like Hogan, Baker and DeWine...maybe Kasich will jump back into the fray as well.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/09/us/california-coronavirus-imperial-county/index.html Unbelievable at this point that an entire CA hospital could spin out of control after all this time... GOP governor: I think President Trump is confused President Trump slammed the CDC's guidance for reopening schools, but Maryland's GOP Gov. Larry Hogan says the guidance was helpful and he believes Trump is confused about it. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/07/09/governor-larry-hogan-trump-confused-newday-vpx.cnn https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/09/us/us-coronavirus-summer-reopening/index.html US Could Face a Double Whammy, Experts Say Stop saying what should happen. Figure out how. And it's also why Trump's demand that schools open is so craven. Of course the schools should open. Everyone wants the schools to open. It's how to open up without spreading the disease that no one can seem to figure out. One very simple thing would be to wear a face mask in public to shut down people like this Ohio lawmaker who thinks nothing is wrong. If the schools open, as Trump demands, and teachers and other adults who work there get sick, they'll close again. Just like the states that must now pause reopening. Yesterday, it was a summer camp in Arkansas that closed after people started testing positive. Now Nashville says it's delaying the opening of its school year -- which had been planned for August 4 -- until Labor Day at least. Presidents and policymakers need to play chess: Think ahead, identify possible outcomes and be ready for contingencies. That's hard to do when you don't believe there's a problem.

How many National guard, active military and police would you need to actively shut down borders and highways? How to monitor/enforce those not wearing masks without massive nationwide CCTV like China or UK? How to create a nationwide green/yellow/red mobile app everyone would accept (privacy!) and follow for entering public spaces? How to ramp up contact tracing when we have 10-15% of public health budgets and personnel required to actually do so? How to effectively deal with outbreaks in rural areas? Prisons? Homeless/veteran communities? Illegal or legal immigrants afraid to interact with hospitals or basically any government entity? How to take care of all those long lines of people seeking food assistance, to prevent even more spread? How to create local delivery/logistics systems that can scale up to the level of feeding everyone at home? How to keep people from leaving home...we don’t have everyone living in apartment blocks with fences and gates to lock down...so there’s no realistic way to stop people from going out. How to deal with the issue of those who are losing health insurance or don’t even have it, meaning they’re not going to get tested, and are even unlikely to seek treatment? How to deal with implementing school safety policies with massive increased costs, but also massive budget shortfalls? And how to get the 2/3’rds of the country to “reunite“ with the 1/3rd who are against masking, against vaccines (conspiracy!), against any abridgment of “freedoms” to suddenly become compliant when we’re increasingly nearing every man for himself territory...the inherent selfishness of our capitalist system pits everyone against each other, young vs. old, essential worker vs. those getting more than previously for sitting home, teachers vs. students vs. parent vs. daycares vs. employers, CEO’s and Top 1% vs. the middle class, white collar workers vs. disproportionately minority lower wage workers??? The system ends up with a survival of the fittest mentality, compared to countries like Australia/NZ, Germany, Denmark/Finland/Norway, Iceland, Canada, etc., that have much more equal or balanced societies. So you’re either seeing success from authoritarian systems where citizens are forced to comply/cooperate (China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore), more “obedient/collectivist” but democratic countries (Japan, South Korea) or the type of fair/equitable counties listed in the aforementioned paragraph. The US just doesn’t fit into any of those three categories.

Not a two sides argument here. Other than Sweden and Brazil, no country has been worse at this...UK even recovered from their early missteps and have done much better than the US, all things considered. We spend many multiples per patient or per capita US population on health care compared to any country in the world except for Switzerland and Luxembourg. So it’s a false equivalency. Fauci’s “fearful/conservative” science vs. “we just have to live with/muddle through” are not two sides of the same coin. It doesn’t really matter how much information and advance warning roughly 1/3rd the US population had, they weren’t willing or were simply unable to listen until something dramatic happened to change or completely upend their personal circumstances...sick family member, lost job or house, etc. I started this thread the first day the world really started taking notice, the morning of the lockdown here in Wuhan. If you look at all the concerns over those months about accuracy of testing, access to PPE, ventilators, therapeutics, vaccines, hospitals pushed to capacity, contact tracing/public health departments underfunded, nothing has fundamentally changed except doctors and nurses learning through trial and error, then pooled experience, the optimal strategies to minimize the death counts upon hospitalization. And how could we possibly expect mayors and governors to have more expertise than the CDC (muzzled or undercut repeatedly), NIH and HHS/FDA?

Scared for my life,' but needing a salary: Teachers weigh risks as COVID-19 looms https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/07/09/covid-school-reopening-teachers-health/5403160002/ The Federal government is responsible for about 8% of school funding. The bigger issue is supplemental grants and the local/municipal budget crunches that are taking place all over the country. If 1 in 5 teachers don’t return and also wait to make these decisions at the last second, running a lot of schools around the country under even normal circumstances would have been challenging at best. Really feel bad for K-5 teachers in particular, whose students who are constantly in close contact with each other by nature.

In a statement to CNN, Leanne Stephens of the Tulsa Health Department said, "Our epidemiologists and contact tracers are inundated with following up with Tulsa County residents who are confirmed positive as the numbers have been extremely high in recent days. Yesterday, we set a new single day case high and you can see on our website where the trends are moving." This coronavirus has a lengthy incubation period -- the time between when someone gets infected to when they start showing symptoms (if they get symptoms at all).The incubation period is about three to 14 days, with symptoms typically appearing "within four or five days after exposure," according to Harvard Medical School. Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told CNN, "There were literally no health precautions to speak of as thousands looted, rioted, and protested in the streets and the media reported that it did not lead to a rise in coronavirus cases. Meanwhile, the President's rally was 18 days ago, all attendees had their temperature checked, everyone was provided a mask, and there was plenty of hand sanitizer available for all. It's obvious that the media's concern about large gatherings begins and ends with Trump rallies." https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/08/us/tulsa-covid-trump-rally-contact-tracers-trnd/index.html This is just asinine. They didn’t require anyone to wear masks in Tulsa, so only about 10-15% actually did. Just like they zip-tied rows of chairs together at Mount Rushmore to deliberately prevent social distancing (better optics for Fox News), then made an excuse about fire codes...when the danger of a fire was caused by going against the advice of nearly everyone connected with that national park to shoot them in the first place when the fire risk was elevated. Temperature checks are and were almost pointless, as they’re simply not going to catch a virus with a lag time of 14 to as many as 28 days. At best, they’re roughly 3-5% in terms of general effectiveness. As far as the protests go, 75-80% of the country is on the side of BLM at the moment, and turning back to 2015-16 and 1968-1972 isn’t going to change a thing. That type of divisive campaign only works once. Ever since the coronavirus emerged in Europe, Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered. This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better. “They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/sweden-become-worlds-cautionary-tale-121752098.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/sports/baseball/tony-kemp-as-twitter.html?referringSource=articleShare

2 min ago Tulsa is seeing an increase of Covid-19 cases after a week of declining numbers From CNN's Kay Jones Dr. Bruce Dart, executive director of the Tulsa Health Department, said that there was a 20% decline in new Covid-19 cases the week of June 28 through July 4. However, he said there are high numbers being reported this week —nearly 500 new cases in two days — and the trends are showing that those numbers will increase. Tulsa Health Department reported 266 new cases today, bringing the total number in the county to at least 4,571. When asked if the cases are going up due to the rally President Trump held on June 20, Dart said that there were several large events a little over two weeks ago, which is about right. "I guess we just connect the dots." Meanwhile, we have Covid-positive idiots like Bolsonario in Brazil vetoing a plan to help thousands of indigenous people in Brazil who have contacted the virus and/or are considered high risk...this is what we worried about in January and February, countries in the developing world being overwhelmed or indifferent in the face of a health care crisis. Somehow, we’ve avoided massive spread in Africa, but that will be one of the next dominoes to fall. Indigenous communities face particularly daunting odds to survival during the pandemic. Most of Brazil’s roughly 896,000 Indigenous people live in the Amazon region, where the nearest hospital may be days away by boat and offer limited care. Indigenous Brazilians also have higher rates of malnutrition, anemia and obesity than the general population – risk factors for severe COVID-19. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil-indigenous/brazils-bolsonaro-vetoes-plans-to-offer-covid-19-support-to-indigenous-people-idUSKBN2492XX

Here’s the question every parent should be asking... Are you and your children willing to pay another 15-25% in university tuition increases if 1.2 million international students from China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Canada, etc., are blocked from coming to the US, deported or forced to choose universities in UK, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore instead? It’s basically the same question that goes for bringing back significant amounts of manufacturing to the US...can the middle class really afford to give up the subsidies that cheap foreign labor and sky-high international education provides (keeping in-state tuition lower)? Can we afford to lose 40% of the potential start-ups that would have been driven by students from other countries after graduation? https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/08/americas/international-student-visa-united-states-intl-hnk/index.html

What’s another 50-100,000 lives at this point? "In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!" he tweeted. All those countries have suppressed the virus in one way or the other, whereas the US is rocketing up at record levels -- making it harder and less safe to open the schools. The President then tweeted his disagreement with the US Centers from Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for safely reopening schools, calling their recommendations "very tough" and "expensive." https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/08/politics/donald-trump-schools-coronavirus-education/index.html Waiting for about 1,000 lawsuits, beginning with MIT and Harvard in Massachusetts District Court...

The word "regulators" has lost all meaning for me since 2008-09...industry, regulators and politicians are all in bed together. Follow the money. And perhaps if more were “wound tightly” enough to take this seriously, there would be better outcomes?

We shall see. Another interesting aspect of this is the "cytokine storm" phenomenon, which can be a problem for the young/healthy because the immune system goes awry and the inflammatory "over-response" can flare out of control. Can stimulating that response in the older or those with pre-existing conditions work, and how to regulate that....? It's just incredible to me how we have these cities of tens of millions of people here in China (at least 100 with a million plus) and we're still flipping out in places like Beijing with under 100 asymptomatic cases and start talking about 28 day quarantines. At one point, there was an idea in the US that if the daily death count for a state was somewhere between 25-75 people (depending on the population), things would be closing in on being ready to reopen. We still can't travel pretty much anywhere outside Hubei Province without going through these endless quarantine periods (then quarantining about return, making most travel almost pointless.) Frustrating, because I have the same questions over and over again from students who just graduated and are stuck because they can't get visa appointments, plane tickets....or even get their basic questions answered about university fall plans since they're still changing nearly every 24 hours. That uncertainty is what's almost an equal enemy to the virus itself. I have students who missed an entire year of school because they couldn't go to Australia during the outbreak, and I'm having to recommend Canada and the UK/EU or even HK/Singapore over the US even though I'm an American and part of my job security is tied into being an expert on getting kids into the Top 30-40 US schools. One of them has been staying in a friend's place in Florida since classes were over at Duke (he was afraid to come back to China and then not be able to return to the US) and he's studying biochem and that's a subject that you necessitates in-person lab work and research/application of theory to practical situations. He's really unsure what will happen, they keep using the phrase "hybrid" classes, but God knows what definition the Trump administration will try to apply before they start deporting students (must have half or more classes "in person"? but what if those classes themselves are split between online lectures and in-person labs, how would that be counted?)

Florida teen received unproven treatment at home (hydroxychloroquine) before dying of COVID-19 at hospital, report says https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-teen-treated-hydroxychloroquine-home-143901969.html Even WITH a vaccine, we're probably screwed for a number of reasons. 1) Only 2/3rd's of Americans will take it, at best. Might be lower than 50% if it comes from another country or is deemed as too expensive. 2) The virus is constantly mutating and evolving, so it's quite possible the immunity derived from a vaccine would only last for 2-3 months, and not long-term. 3) Due to that 2-3 month limited immunity and lack of a comprehensive plan or strategy for citizens all over the world to receive treatment, it's going to keep recirculating around the globe and "herd immunity" will be almost impossible to achieve, at least in the next couple of years. We don't have a multilateral approach through the WHO, we have America on its own, the EU on its own, and China/SE Asia attempting to educate the rest of the world with a limited reservoir of effectiveness and trust available to call upon. For example, if the solution is tied into the Gates Foundation, it won't be much different that George Soros himself developing a cure. There will be all those anti-science/conspiracy theorists around the world stubbornly resisting until they get desperate or someone in their family dies first. 4) All those people (mostly under 40) who end up being asymptomatic, roughly 30-40%, are developing even less of an antibody/immune system response than those who actually become ill. But they are quite effective at spreading it around to everyone else.

"Perhaps 27% of wealthy English landowners appear to have succumbed to plague," Science tells us, "whereas counts of rural tenant farmers in 1348 and 1349 show mortality rates mostly from 40% to 70%." It pays to have money...also, the Federal Reserve announced in May that nearly 40 percent of Americans with a household income below $40,000 had lost their jobs, whether they were laid off or furloughed. Already, the specters of hunger and homelessness loom large. In New York, at least two million families are facing food insecurity every day. The strain on food banks is severe: at some larger distribution sites, the New York Times reports, "people line up as early as 5 in the morning and wait as long as six hours." Soup kitchens that had been serving 300 meals a day are now distributing 900. The miles-long lines of cars elsewhere in the country—the food-bank lines, not the testing lines—serve to illustrate the scale of the suffering. And now, across the country, the evictions have begun in earnest. It's hard to see what's changed since April, when I reported on New York's rent strike movement and its spread to other cities. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, like pretty much every other executive around, has resisted calls to cancel rent and provide relief to smaller landlords—which, in fairness, would probably be costly enough to require federal intervention. But beyond the moral atrocity of evicting someone during a pandemic, it's just a practical absurdity: people who can't work can't pay. And restaurants and other businesses operating at limited capacity—at best—can't pay in full. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a33215422/coronavirus-pandemic-economic-turmoil-trump-statues/

Perot running in 1992 is one of the main reasons Clinton was able to win...siphoning off mostly right center voters who were upset that Bush Sr. went back on his “no new taxes” pledge. Nader (Reform Party) in 2000 (Gore) and perhaps Jill Stein and Gary Johnson upended Clinton in 2016, although that one isn’t nearly as clear. Then you have to go back to George Wallace for a similar impact when the Dems started deserting the South/Dixiecrats. Right now, we have a combination of the Wallace campaign and Jefferson Davis’ reign over the CSA...still having at least a 1/4 shot to win re-election, which is pretty incredible and scary all at the same time for the Year 2020. This is at 50+ and well over 150+ years since the Civil Rights and Civil War/Reconstruction eras were thought to have been decided. He’s essentially running a primary campaign in the midst of the general election...his approval number tumbled from 39% (already not good) to 33% among independents in new Gallup data.

You’re not going to get hardly anyone ages 18-30 defending Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Confederate generals/Stone Mountain, Mount Rushmore’s KKK-affiliated sculptor, etc. You’re also going to continue to lose suburban housewives. If you can actually provide a viable health care replacement program (no signs of that,) sound scientifically-driven Covid strategy and a recovering economy, sure. But the last 6 weeks since Memorial Day weekend has destroyed that. Being on the wrong side (meaning a minority of Americans are supporting your handling) of all three major crises of the day, that dog just doesn’t hunt. A unilateral approach towards China, Russia, North Korea, Syria and Turkey doesn’t work either. The luckiest development has been China pushing India more and more towards the US. Most decisions in presidential election years are made in May and June, at least for the undecided/independents. Attacking Biden hasn’t worked, despite spending millions more in advertising than in all of 2016. In 2016, the spread was around 3-5% for most of that summer and 2-3% going into those last ten days when Comey/email servers and Anthony Weiner flared up again. And that’s where it ended, based on national and not individual state electoral college breakdown-wise. Clinton underperformed her numbers (especially with African Americans and non college educated males), moreso than Trump dramatically expanded his.