Recovery – Students returning to schools physically: pro and contra – New guidelines from the CDC – Preferences of appearances over realities – Evening statistics
I slept well last night and felt almost completely recovered this morning. I strolled eight miles today without feeling at all tired afterwards, so matters are back to normal. EB tells me that the new shingles vaccine is supposed to be effective for life, so that after the follow-up shot in October or November I will not have to get it again. It was encouraging to hear this news; the experience of yesterday was disquieting, though it was happily short-lived.
Here are two stories illustrating the pros and cons of allowing students to return to schools and to be present in the classrooms physically:
Jana Coomb’s five-year old son was prepared to attend school in Coweta County, Georgia, when the administrators decided to rely on virtual instruction instead. During one of the online lessons, Coombs saw that her son was struggling with trying to assimilate to a distance learning lifestyle. He became so upset with the experience that he put his head down and cried, using his t-shirt to wipe his tears. She took a photo of him in this distraught state and posted it to social media. “I just took that picture because I wanted people to see reality,” she said.
I sympathize with her attitude. Not all children take to Internet like a duck to water. Many will find the experience of learning online a difficult and frustrating experience. They will also miss out on valuable inter-personal skills if they remain at home all of the time and rarely come into contact with children of their own age outside of their siblings. It’s difficult for parents as well. In numerous households both parents are working. Not all of them have the luxury of being able to work from home. There can be no doubt that if our educational system goes entirely virtual, its quality will decline in many ways and that some children, particularly those who live in the poorer regions, will miss out on it altogether.
But would Jana Coombs have been better pleased if she lived in the neighboring state of Florida, where parents were allowed to send their children to the schools that reopened this month and where within 15 days nearly 9,000 children were stricken with the virus? Even though the death toll among this group is low up to this point, no one has any idea what the long-term effects of the virus are. It is distinctly possible that a significant portion of these 9,000 will have to deal with heart and lung problems for the remainder of their lives.
I’m very glad that I’m not an educational administrator. The problem seems to me insolvable. No matter what decision they make, children and adolescents will be adversely affected in one way or another. My own belief is that gatherings of large groups of people in small enclosed spaces should be avoided at any cost, but I do not delude myself that the cost will be insignificant.
The CDC has made a puzzling update to its guidelines. It now says that if anyone has come into close contact with a person with a COVID infection but is asymptomatic himself does not need to undergo testing unless he is vulnerable or unless “your health care provider or state or local public health officials recommend you take one.” I’m simply bewildered by this, and I am not alone. Among other things, it means that testing criteria will now vary from state to state, or even from county to county. It sounds like a recipe for complete confusion. The timing of this announcement is rather suspicious; it came when Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery to remove a polyp from his vocal cords and thus was not in a position to speak out against it. “I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is,” he said, after he emerged from anesthesia and learned what had occurred during his absence. The assumption is that the CDC was pressured from above; and this assumption is bolstered by the general attitude of the current administration towards testing. Less testing will naturally result in fewer test positives, and thus the official figures will be driven down. No one will be any the healthier for it, but at any rate matters will appear to be improved.
This preference for decorous appearances over the realities that their surfaces may conceal is nothing new:
“In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of the mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which converses about the surface to that pretended philosophy which enters into the depths of things and then comes gravely back with informations and discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing. The two senses to which all objects first address themselves are the sight and the touch; these never examine farther than the colour, the shape, the size, and whatever other qualities dwell or are drawn by art upon the outward of bodies; and then comes reason officiously, with tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate that they are not of the same consistence quite through. Now I take all this to be the last degree of perverting Nature, one of whose eternal laws it is to put her best furniture forward. And therefore, in order to save the charges of all such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do here think fit to inform the reader that in such conclusions as these reason is certainly in the right; and that in most corporeal beings which have fallen under my cognizance, the outside hath been infinitely preferable to the in, whereof I have been further convinced from some late experiments. Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the carcass of a news anchor* to be stripped in my presence, when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes. Then I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen, but I plainly perceived at every operation that the farther we proceeded, we found the defects increase upon us, in number and bulk; from all which I justly formed this conclusion to myself, that whatever philosopher or projector can find out an art to sodder and patch up the flaws and imperfections of Nature, will deserve much better of mankind and teach us a more useful science than that so much in present esteem, of widening and exposing them (like him who held anatomy to be the ultimate end of physic). And he whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art, he that can with Epicurus content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superfices of things, such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being well-deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.” (Jonathan Swift, The Tale of a Tub, 1704)
*NOTE: Swift here actually uses the word “beau,” which signifies a brainless affected fop whose chief interest in life is clothes. Since that term is unfamiliar to most 21st-century readers, I am forced to fall back on a modern equivalent.
No one can do a demolition job as well as Swift, so I give up all attempts at amplification and move straight on to the daily statistics. These are, as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 24,314,626; # of deaths worldwide: 828,711; # of cases U.S.: 5,998,006; # of deaths U.S.: 183,597.