outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Friends who worked in schools in Queens where most of the teachers drove from LI said the exact same thing, for the record.

But even knowing personally and anecdotally that there is some element of refusal among teachers/staff, I mistrust any argument that uses that as a foundation because it fits too neatly into anti-union, anti-worker arguments. Like...far-right conspiracy theory promoters created the problem of COVID denial, and then want to strategically use the believers that they created to undermine collective decision-making about safety for teachers. No thonx.

Forgive me if this sounds blasé, but I think we all know the reason why everyone (in the US at least) from scientific "experts" to Biden to local politicians are saying that it's okay to open schools again without full, mandatory vaccination of all teachers, and it has something to do with continuing to allow the gears of capitalism running.

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Saturday, 13 February 2021 16:42 (two hours ago) link

IIRC you don’t have kids? Because I fully understand the logic of this from a lefty perspective. It seems very neat and airtight and clean from that perspective and makes it really easy to dismiss anyone saying otherwise, including, by the way, the American Academy of Pediatrics, notorious running dog of capitalism. But when you actually get to see the effects of this on your own kids and kids around them you might find it a little more complex than that.

So teachers should put themselves at risk of dying? Is that the balance of equities here?

Also just fwiw, having read the CDC guidelines very carefully, multiple times, they actually make it much harder to reopen schools than just saying “x number of teachers need to be vaccinated.” They set up much bigger roadblocks than that. I wish they had based it more on vaccination, which seems both a smarter safety move and an easier goal to satisfy (provided it’s not a 100% requirement because you can’t force people to get vaccinated and there are significant numbers of refusers)

Surely a shitty 18 months for young children is a small price to pay for the consequently not-dying adults

So teachers should put themselves at risk of dying? Is that the balance of equities here?

― Canon in Deez (silby), Saturday, February 13, 2021 2:27 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Every day of living comes with a risk of dying. How much risk is tolerable is the hard question. Clearly I don’t consider the risk to be that high or I wouldn’t want to put my own kids at school at the risk of them bringing COVID home to me. I’d much prefer vaccination as a goal rather than the virtually unsatisfiable goals set up by the CDC. But even vaccination won’t make the risk zero.

Yes you’re okay with the risk but yknow there’s workers involved who may not be?

“Every day of living comes with the risk of dying” is rank sophistry

Have you bought that gun yet? To keep in the same home as your children? Who you’re so proprietarily concerned for?

Agree with in orbit: once teachers have actually been offered and given the vaccine, then we can figure out what to do if teachers are refusing to be vaccinated or refusing to teach if vaccinated. Until then, it's a moot point. Treat teachers like every other high risk group imo. Make the vaccine available, make it easy to sign up and get the vaccine, reach out to them to correct any misinformation, and then proceed from there. Trying to guess the attitudes of a huge and diverse workforce and make decisions accordingly is a recipe for paralysis and scapegoating.

No I haven’t. Not sure why you’ve made me some kind of personal cause but I am married to a teacher who will soon be vaccinated and going to work in person. I think vaccination would be the ideal metric, as I said, except that a lot of teachers refuse and I don’t know what to do about that other than maybe say return to school once all teachers who want the vaccine have had the chance.

Separately, accusing people of not actually caring about their own kids is a really bad look and one of the shittiest and worst moves I’ve seen among people who are against reopening schools. I don’t really expect people who don’t have kids to understand, but to me that just says that YOU don’t actually care about children at all.

It's not about having or not having kids. It's about worker safety.

I think people who don't have kids can understand. They were all kids once.

The idea that parenthood endows one with special ineffable understanding of or care for children is pretty outrageous to me also.

Me too.

I think man alive was objecting to the claim that people who want to reopen schools want to do it because they love capitalism.

I think it probably endows you with special understanding of what YOU want for YOUR child, intensely, and maybe rightfully? The most insistent voices for reopening I see in my feeds are the parents whose kids aren't doing well being out of school for whatever reasons. Advocating for your kid in that case is basically your job as a parent, and for some people I think that's probably the highest good in their hierarchy?

We are not all obligated to agree with them, however.

Kids who aren’t doing well out of school = most elementary school aged kids.

Adults who aren’t doing well during pandemic = most adults

Doing well in school and becoming a teacher so I can do well in a pandemic

The issue, for me, is that it shouldn't come down to whether teachers are willing to teach in a period of high transmission without a vaccine. There is a vaccine. We have the ability to lower transmission with lockdowns. If we're not using them, it's because we don't care enough to, and that's not on the teachers.

This country has a pattern of expecting teachers to put in extra labor to compensate for systemic failures, but at a certain point, our ability to give even more just becomes saturated. You can't keep making decisions that render school openings unsafe for staff and families, and act like it's the teachers who are making the call not to reopen schools.

The notion that anyone who is exposed to covid, whether they are teachers or frontline healthcare workers, is selfish or trying to ruin your life by not wanting the risk to themselves to be so high is a fucking toxic one and it needs to die already. Nobody signed up for this bullshit, the very least you should expect are safe working conditions. I was thinking about this attitude yesterday watching this video and I’m thinking about it now reading people just casually disregarding the risk to teachers.

Next time you want to order from @Deliveroo think about this 😂🤣😂🤣 pic.twitter.com/LNvXCgfUG4

— tom (@tom_the_cabbie) February 11, 2021

This country has a pattern of expecting teachers to put in extra labor to compensate for systemic failures

Uh, that's pretty much worldwide.

Agree with in orbit: once teachers have actually been offered and given the vaccine, then we can figure out what to do if teachers are refusing to be vaccinated or refusing to teach if vaccinated. Until then, it's a moot point. Treat teachers like every other high risk group imo. Make the vaccine available, make it easy to sign up and get the vaccine, reach out to them to correct any misinformation, and then proceed from there.

I mean, every decision about who to give vaccines to in the US is going to be made in that context. I was just talking about whether in-person teachers should be treated as high-risk workers or not. Whether the US should have enough vaccines for its high-risk workers is another question.

I wasn’t specifically going after you, Lily Dale, but rather highlighting yet again the global injustice that underlies this discussion, and hoping to at least ironise its America First take.

christ that deliveroo tweet and the sinister followup from hq

Someday there might be an instance of global justice. Right now I'm coming up empty on any past examples of it.

xp it’s ok, the public outrage is on the side of the driver and it means they’ve had to say he won’t lose his contract

Someday there might be an instance of global justice. Right now I'm coming up empty on any past examples of it.

Most likely apocryphal but it's frequently attributed to Gandhi on Western civilization: "I think it would be a good idea."

-Bob Marley

This platitude...

It was an observation, not a platitude. If you can cite an instance of global justice it would be helpful to see what one looks like. I fully understand that I am a beneficiary of injustices, both global and domestic. Since these are bestowed on me automatically, by default, through the working of mechanisms beyond my personal control, it is not a simple matter to refuse them. They do exist and yes, I see them.

I'm not sure how you manage to escape those same mechanisms.

By moving to France iirc

Agree with in orbit: once teachers have actually been offered and given the vaccine, then we can figure out what to do if teachers are refusing to be vaccinated or refusing to teach if vaccinated. Until then, it's a moot point. Treat teachers like every other high risk group imo. Make the vaccine available, make it easy to sign up and get the vaccine, reach out to them to correct any misinformation, and then proceed from there. Trying to guess the attitudes of a huge and diverse workforce and make decisions accordingly is a recipe for paralysis and scapegoating.

― Lily Dale, Saturday, February 13, 2021 2:42 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Most evidence suggest that teachers are not at a particularly elevated risk of COVID fwiw -- the genuinely high risk jobs are restaurant/food workers, care workers, healthcare workers, industrial workers, security guards, taxi drivers, social workers. Secondary education teachers had a very slightly elevated risk but teachers on the whole did not.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55795608 (looking at data from UK, where schools were largely open until recently).

Also worth noting that far and away the number one risk factor for death is being over 65, and especially over 75. So I don't really buy that, e.g., a 45 year old teacher that doesn't have diabetes, hypertension, cancer or lung disease is "high risk." In spite of that, I think it's worth the tradeoff to prioritize teachers being vaccinated if it means getting kids back into schools.

But also, at some point there needs to be a non-shifting standard for what is "safe." Once teachers are vaccinated, do we also need to have the lowest possible community spread AND masks AND 6 feet distancing AND barriers AND cohorting AND no eating indoors? Because at some point that makes returning to school pragmatically impossible. COVID is here to stay, we aren't going to eradicate it.

Why not

I mean, that's kind of the consensus among epidemiologists right now

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/coronavirus-dr-fauci-says-he-doubts-whether-covid-can-be-eradicated.html
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/21/world/science-health-world/vaccines-coronavirus-eradication/
the-scientist.com/news-opinion/sars-cov-2-isnt-going-away-experts-predict-68386
https://qz.com/1968898/will-the-covid-19-vaccines-end-the-pandemic/

to some extent, same reasons we never eradicated flu or the common cold, to some extent different reasons specific to COVID

But also, at some point there needs to be a non-shifting standard for what is "safe." Once teachers are vaccinated, do we also need to have the lowest possible community spread AND masks AND 6 feet distancing AND barriers AND cohorting AND no eating indoors? Because at some point that makes returning to school pragmatically impossible. COVID is here to stay, we aren't going to eradicate it.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, February 13, 2021 6:00 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don’t understand this comment...I was back to school in November and am again now and there has been no question of several of these things. There is 6 feet of distancing within the classroom, and kids do wear masks. During this time most teachers were not vaccinated although that’s changing now. I also think it is reasonable for a labor union to request vaccination before its members go to work; I wish restaurant workers and grocery store workers had for real unions everywhere. Is there someone who’s demanding all the things you’re mentioning in perpetuity, even post vaccine?

The CDC guidance that was just released doesn't take vaccination much into account and basically requires 6 feet unless COVID spread is lower than it pretty much has ever been to date. Granted "requires" has no teeth from the CDC because the federal government has no jurisdiction over schools. But the 6 feet requirement makes having school at full capacity virtually impossible in many districts.

xp Can you explain why teachers are at a lower risk of Covid, when we know from experience that our working conditions put us at a higher risk of everything else? Being a teacher generally means being constantly sick, at least until you've been teaching for long enough for your immune system to adjust.

I am going to echo what in orbit said upthread and say I am v suspicious when neoliberal experts start publicly running down teachers unions, some of the only unions left in this country where working people’s lives are terrible. I am a teacher and care about kids and agree that distance learning has been a terrible experience for many of them, especially young ones. But I also know a lot of students in my building are likely hanging out maskless drinking on weekends with their parents’ sanction, and it makes me feel a bit weird about the discourse of guilting us into going back for the kids. (Private schools with the worlds most entitled parents and no teachers unions are by no means representative, but they do inform my experience)

I guess, re your last post, man alive, I would love for public schools to have better facilities; they’ve had inadequate ones for decades. Something about these guidelines now makes me a bit crazy considering how little money or attention public schools get, and then all of a sudden they’re expected to become different places because of COVID. Fwiw the publicschools in Maryland are going back to work in the coming months and there is no way six feet of distance will happen; my husband’s boss is already talking about doubling up the number of recommended kids in the classroom. Schools will continue to cut corners in the hopes of getting as many kids as possible a decent education, but the public discourse about it feels like a smokescreen to me.

the genuinely high risk jobs are restaurant/food workers, care workers, healthcare workers, industrial workers, security guards, taxi drivers, social workers.

I see hs got here before me but just to say...those people ABSOLUTELY should be protected and getting the vaccine since we seem to demand that they work continuously for our convenience (instead of paying ppl to stay home), but the reason they aren't able to push back is they're mostly not unionized. Teachers are just the only group that still has a union (that isn't the PBA) to advocate for them.

I was just reading somewhere (where? who knows) about someone who got COVID from their home healthcare worker, who was asymptomatic, because the healthcare employers weren't testing their own employees who go into the most vulnerable people's homes.

As always, it turns out the real problem was capitalism all along.

The issue, for me, is that it shouldn't come down to whether teachers are willing to teach in a period of high transmission without a vaccine. There is a vaccine. We have the ability to lower transmission with lockdowns. If we're not using them, it's because we don't care enough to, and that's not on the teachers.

This country has a pattern of expecting teachers to put in extra labor to compensate for systemic failures, but at a certain point, our ability to give even more just becomes saturated. You can't keep making decisions that render school openings unsafe for staff and families, and act like it's the teachers who are making the call not to reopen schools.

― Lily Dale, Saturday, February 13, 2021 8:53 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This comment, 100%, as many times as it takes to sink in.

I also get worried that the kind of rhetoric Lily Dale mentions will become a pretense to shut down more public school, charterize/privatize a bunch more, and pay teachers even less/deprive them of even more rights.

I don't really buy that, e.g., a 45 year old teacher that doesn't have diabetes, hypertension, cancer or lung disease is "high risk."