trump, Leave Those Kids And Teachers And Families Alone

This is not gonna end well. Just as half our states are spiking upward on positive COVID-19 cases, trump wants to force all the K-12 schools to fully reopen - meaning ALL the kids, ALL the teachers - by this August. Per Barbara Sprunt at NPR:

President Trump vowed to exert pressure on states to reopen their school districts this fall even as large parts of the country are experiencing a spike in COVID-19 cases.

"We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools," Trump said during a roundtable discussion Tuesday afternoon at the White House.

"Get open in the fall. We want your schools open," Trump said...

On Monday, Trump tweeted, "SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!" However, during Tuesday's event, the president said he doesn't want to see the issue politicized.

"We hope that most schools are going to be open. We don't want people to make political statements or do it for political reasons. They think it's gonna be good for them politically so they keep the schools closed," Trump elaborated. "No way."

But trump is the one who's politicizing this. trump refuses to take responsibility as President to handle the pandemic crisis, and yet he blames everyone else for attacking him on it as though his critics are trying to score political points instead of, you know, actually trying to get our country back on track to reduce the infection and death numbers. Back to Sprunt:

Administration officials acknowledged the risk of students spreading the contagion to more vulnerable populations but emphasized that school closures disrupt "critical services to children and their families."

They promised the administration would share "best practices" with states on reopening in accordance with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but offered no concrete proposals on how states might mitigate risks to students and their families should schools reopen...

In other words, trump's administration is going to wing it. They're going to force the states to come up with the plans and ALL of the funding, because God forbid trump sends any more federal aid to people who AREN'T his deep-pocket buddies.

For all the arguing that trump puts out there, that it's harmful to child development to keep them away from a school environment, it is currently far more riskier sending those children into a school environment that has ALWAYS BEEN a vector of infection. It's personal experience, myself and others for God's sake, every year going back to school late summer - often post-Christmas when we come back from winter trips in flu season - we get a round of flu bugs passing around school because it happens that way. It's just in normal circumstances we're talking a "normal" flu virus that infects quickly, is gone in a week, and kills very rarely. TODAY we're talking a COVID-19 virus that takes weeks to show signs, is easier to spread, causes far greater damage, lasts for months, and can kill one in twenty of us if not more without treatment.

We can risk keeping our kids and our teachers and our communities safe for a year without in-person schooling while waiting for a vaccine by 2021.

But trump dare not wait that long. It's the economic impact of losing school - forcing parents to stay at home to work - that trump fears. Without an uptick in the nation's economy - which affects overall mood - trump is doomed to drop to Dubya-level approvals (low 30s) that cannot win him enough states this November.

So this is trump, trying to bluff the nation, trying to bluff the coronavirus, with a tough-looking move that is guaranteed to backfire the minute one infected kid shows up in a school with a thousand others. And we do not have the testing and screening in place - not now, not by August - to filter out those risks. We've wasted the whole year that could have set up something like that, and now is too late.

If this happens, if trump succeeds in forcing all our schools to open, we're going to have maybe two weeks of borderline calm while trump then forces all the parents back to work to get HIS economic engine chugging again. Two weeks. And then, mid-September probably, we're going to get a spike of positive COVID cases that will make the chart look like a rocket shot. We've seen this already in how the spikes of positive cases shot up after Memorial Day.

And given how lethal COVID is? That will be followed by an October full of dead kids. Across all 50 states, across every school district, at least one child dead.

There are 130,000 plus schools from kindergarten to senior 12th grade.

That's 130,000 children dead from opening the schools too soon. Minimum.

We're already at 130,000 dead from COVID since February in the U.S. We'll be piling on to that tragic number.

And that's not even counting the number of teachers and administrators dying. That's not even counting the number of bus drivers and school workers. That's not counting the number of sick and dying back home when the infected kids go back to pass the virus on to everyone else.

And these should not be viewed as mere numbers. THERE ARE LIVES TO EACH NUMBER WE COUNT GONE. There are names and faces and memories of survivors who are going to be haunted by this, any of us who get out of this nightmare months from now.

Re-opening the schools is a bad idea.

trump and the Republicans - and God help me, my state's governor DeSantis whose lack of leadership on this has been a disaster all its own - are still going to force the re-opening.

We are going to die by the thousands because trump failed to lead.

For the love of God, America. For the love of our friends and our families and our children, America. Stand up and tell trump and his GOP lackeys NO. Please stand now. Please stand now before you're too sick to stand. I am not exaggerating about this.