I got myself in a little bit of trouble a few weeks back for expressing ideas like this, from Larry Alexander:
In general, blacks as a group are doing better than ever before materially. And for those who are not doing well, the cause is not the effects of slavery or Jim Crow. Nor is the cause racist bigotry, which, though some undoubtedly exists, is not a significant obstacle in blacks’ lives. Nor is it the vague culprit of “systemic racism.” …
The real impediment to the advancement of poor blacks – and everyone knows this, regardless of whether they admit it – is the cultural factors that have produced family disintegration, which in turn portends poor educational achievement, crime and poverty.
The guardians of the narrative are always on the lookout for heretics.
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Governor Dan McKee, along with the Rhode Island departments of health and education, implemented new guidelines for how schools handle COVID infections, yesterday. Employees and students who have been vaccinated and boosted (depending on age) do not have to quarantine, even if they had close contact with somebody who tested positive. Notably, the same applies to anybody who recovered from the virus within the prior three months. However, the most noteworthy part of the policy is this:
Students and staff without symptoms, who are identified as close contacts, and aren’t exempt from quarantine will be encouraged to follow the Monitor to Stay quarantine protocol, which allows students and staff to attend school in person and participate in school-related extracurricular activities during their quarantine period. In this case, they should – Conduct symptom screening and attest that they don’t have symptoms for 5 days; – Follow quarantine guidance when outside school, as well as updated CDC guidance about masking; and – Athletic programs should continue current testing programs for sports.
In short, “test to stay” has become “monitor to stay,” perhaps because the government is doing such a poor job keeping up with testing. Be that as it may, the state is slowly edging toward the common-sense way we’ve always handled minor-to-moderate illnesses. People who have reason to think that they’ve come in contact with an infection people should keep an eye out and address the illness if it emerges, including by taking steps to keep others from getting it.
This does not require a declared state of emergency, and it does not require a constant drumbeat of fear from the news media.
The longer this goes on, the more damage it does psychologically, educationally, and politically. A source tells me, for example that the Department of Health is not extending these loosened guidelines to private childcare facilities, despite the overlapping services. Obviously, this creates a competitive advantage for government-run pre-K.
That imbalance is merely a taste, however, of the many ways we’re sure to discover our community was distorted during this episode, and the odds are always to the benefit of people in government.
Featured image by Kelly Sikemmad on Unsplash.
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Rhode Island’s Department of Health claims that almost everybody listed as hospitalized with COVID is in the hospital at least partly because of COVID, but I keep seeing stories like this:
The majority of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in New Jersey were actually admitted for reasons other than COVID-19, officials said on Jan. 10.
Of the 6,075 people with COVID-19 and hospitalized in the state, just 2,963 were admitted for COVID-19, New Jersey Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said during a briefing.
There are so many ways to shade the data, and Rhode Island’s long-term inability to manage its healthcare system is leading hospital to turn people away if they test positive for COVID but should probably be admitted for other reasons if those reasons aren’t “dire.” Both of those factors would increase the percentage who are in the hospital because of COVID, but not because the disease is particularly virulent around here.
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With the head of one of Rhode Island’s teachers unions saying “the responsible decision” is to shut schools and force students back into distance learning, his reasons are worth a look:
… the overwhelming number of cases, the inability to do meaningful contact tracing, the arctic temperatures we are expecting so windows cannot be opened, the insufficiency of supplies, etc. etc. …
Except for the number of cases, every one of these items is a matter of money — for government processes, for air filtration, for supplies — and Rhode Island has been sitting on a billion dollars of federal windfall.
Here’s the real problem: our governing class (including the heads of the teachers unions) thought COVID was just about done thanks to the vaccine, so all that money could be laundered into their pockets and those of their key supporters. Even though their calculation turned out to be wrong, they’re not willing to give up their dreams for the sake of something as unimportant as the education of our children.
If you’re of a mind to draw a longer-term lesson, this is essentially an amplified instance of the way Rhode Island government does business every year.
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Have you ever seen a mainstream news report that treated scary environmental projections with even an iota of skepticism? Consider Tolly Taylor’s report for WPRI, which bears the headline, “Parts of Barrington will be underwater by 2035, sea-level data shows.”
The first paragraph of the story gives the impression that the headline is a bit of an overstatement. The dramatic warning is that “in just over a dozen years, Barrington will contend with several key roads flooding every month.” That’s not “underwater,” and the statement doesn’t reflect “sea-level data”; it reflects projections:
These projections show a roughly three-mile stretch of Route 114, the town’s evacuation route, will be submerged twice a day by 2050. Teresa Crean, a coastal research associate at the University of Rhode Island Coastal Institute, told Target 12 that Barrington is one of the leaders in climate change mitigation across the state.
Crean, we learn in a parenthetical note tacked on to the article’s sixth paragraph, has just been hired as Barrington’s planner, which pays around $100,o00 per year, so she’s not exactly a disinterested party when it comes to projecting that the town has a lot of work to do (and a lot of money to spend) preparing for environmental changes. But the personal interests of key figures in the story aren’t the only area that screams for at least a hint of skepticism. For instance:
Rhode Island’s STORMTOOLS website shows that, because of sea-level rise that’s already occurred over the past two decades, if a storm like 1954’s Hurricane Carol hit Barrington today, it would effectively make it a series of islands.
The obvious question not asked is what Barrington looked like during that storm seventy years ago. Carol destroyed whole towns with wind, and “a quarter of the downtown area” of Providence was submerged under 12 feet of water. As terrible as that was and would be if it happens again, it’s not climate change; it’s weather. And it’s not a mandate for hundreds of millions of dollars in redevelopment; it’s a reminder to buy insurance.
Here’s another statement that justifies a bit of skepticism:
Brian Thimme, owner of Bluewater Bar + Grill in Barrington, began leasing the building 11 years ago, and said he is considering buying the property. But data shows that by 2035, his restaurant will be surrounded by water.
The featured image of this post does indeed show Thimme’s restaurant surrounded by water, but according to the STORMTOOLS website mentioned above, that is the scenario with three feet of sea level rise? Is that likely to happen by 2035?
Not at all. In fact, a 2015 report from the statewide Division of Planning projected potentially a one-foot increase in sea levels by 2035 under its second-highest scenario. The highest projection, which came from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), warned that the foot could be reached by 2029. Well, we’re at the midway point between the report’s publication date and 2029, so how much sea-level rise have we seen? Six inches?
No. Data from NOAA’s gauge in Newport puts the increase over the past seven years at about two and three-quarters inches. For perspective, keep in mind that sea level can fluctuate that much month to month. At this rate of increase, the water will have risen a foot in Rhode Island after about 30.5 years, which is within the report’s “intermediate” range. However, if we zoom out on the chart just a little, we see that there’s been essentially no increase in sea level since 2010. Shouldn’t the experts be asked to explain this 10-year pause before we heed their budgetary advice?
Before the pause, according to the Newport gauge, we saw about ten and half inches of sea-level rise over 80 years, which brings us back to the curious omissions in local reporting. Why do these stories continue to center around projections? At some point, we should be seeing documented evidence of what’s happening right now, and if it’s not there, then hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and highly paid planners might not be justified.
As local governments collect taxes and impose restrictions, residents should demand at least a regular display of evidence that the predictions are coming true.
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This is encouraging and long overdue:
[Open full post]As ESPN reports, the NCAA’s COVID-19 Medical Advisory Group updated its definition of “fully vaccinated” to account for various new vaccinations, boosters, and immunity factors.
“Fully vaccinated individuals now include those within two months of receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, five months of receiving the Pfizer vaccine series or six months of receiving the Moderna vaccine series;” reports ESPN staff writer Jeff Borzello, “and individuals who are beyond the aforementioned timeline and have received the booster vaccine.”
But perhaps the biggest development came in the following line.
“Individuals within 90 days of a documented COVID-19 infection fall within the equivalent of ‘fully vaccinated.’”
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Will McKee awaken from his purely reactive COVID strategy?
- Is it really important for teacher assistants to be woke?
- Will the General Assembly fall back to sleep (in a good way) for election season?
- Should Fung put rumors of a gubernatorial run to rest?
- Will Providence residents wake up if Elorza starts firing cops for lack of vaccination?
Featured image by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash.
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Many of us sure do hope that Lindsey Burke is onto something, here:
The only way out of this mess is to free families from the clutches of the teachers’ unions. Funding students directly would empower families to access educational alternatives. The good news is that the unions’ political games could further the movement to fund students instead of systems, which already enjoyed significant growth in 2021.
It has been said that Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, has provided more fuel to school choice than Milton Friedman. Perhaps, then, a recent New York Times article asking glowingly “Can This Women Save American Public Education” wasn’t that far off.
Unfortunately, most people just don’t pay enough attention to make these connections, even for their own children. Moreover, I’ve been increasingly astonished, as I’ve gotten older, how quickly people want to move on from bad experiences, even if it means not holding accountable those who made those experiences bad to begin with, or at least worse than they had to be.
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A reddit post by somebody claiming to be a student at a “specialized high school” in New York City has been getting a fair bit of attention. (Note that the post has been edited, with some commentary found in earlier screen captures deleted.) The student describes a school day during the Omicron surge as something like a Stephen King novel (back when Stephen King was good):
… 90% of the bathrooms were full of students swabbing their noses and taking their tests. I had one kid ask me — with his mask down, by the way — whether a “faint line was positive,” proceeding to show me his positive COVID test. I told him to go the nurse. One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. There was now a lack of available seats given there was a COVID-positive student within the middle of the auditorium. …
One teacher flat out left his class 5 mins into the lesson and didn’t return because he was developing symptoms and didn’t believe it safe to spread to his class.
Conspicuously, the anecdote about the teacher (which is not in the latest version of the post) is the only mention at all of symptoms, and in that instance, it could have been anything. Was it a tickle in the teacher’s throat? A mild feeling of impending congestion? Who knows? The point is that all of the drama and fear is related to testing positive.
One needn’t dismiss the danger of COVID to find it strange that the virus itself is an afterthought in many of the horror stories about its spread. Indeed, the student’s experience could apply even to an illness that didn’t exist, as long as tests could be contrived that gave a positive at some random interval. As the parent of multiple school-aged children during this pandemic, I can testify that the fear is of the disruption and loss of opportunities that testing positive would bring.
One recalls this experiment at the University of Arizona in 2013:
Conducted in an office on the UA campus, the study included about 80 participants, some of whom received droplets on their hands at the start of a normal work day. While most of those droplets were plain water, one person unknowingly received a droplet containing artificial viruses mimicking the cold, the flu and a stomach bug.
Employees were instructed to go about their day as usual. After about four hours, researchers sampled commonly touched surfaces in the office, as well as employees’ hands, and found that more than 50 percent of surfaces and employees were infected with at least one of the viruses.
Now imagine one of those old-fashioned psychological experiments from the ’50s or ’60s in which researchers deceived participants and, in this case, told everybody the “artificial viruses” weren’t harmless. The experiment would have generated a panic not unlike what we see at the NYC school.
This isn’t to say that we should be cavalier about the coronavirus, but context and focus is important, and we’re really heavily focused on positive tests — the increasingly infamous “case” count. Don’t be surprised to learn in years to come that mass testing can produce similarly frightening evidence of “super spreader” events for viruses that we’ve lived with for centuries.
Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.
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I’ve long speculated that Rhode Islanders start businesses at a healthy clip because the economy isn’t producing work at the level of hours and/or pay that they want. That is why the Ocean State sees a lot of businesses struggle when they start formalizing things. All the business stuff is too complicated, especially when the folks starting the businesses just want to do what people in their professions do. Management is not really the job they were intending on building for themselves.
So, it’s not surprising to see Grant Welker of the Boston Business Journal report that Rhode Island saw some record business starts last year, when ordinary work patters were disrupted.
Welker also points to a SurePayroll study of startup-related Google searches. It turns out, the most-searched prospect in the Ocean State was for starting a fitness company. One imagines unemployed Rhode Islanders establishing fitness routines for themselves during lockdown and thinking, “Hey, I could do this for a living!”
While a concentration on good health is nice to see, I can’t help but think that, economically speaking, Massachusetts’s result as the only state in the country for which “consulting” is healthier. Of course, it’s difficult to know what consulting even means to people!
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