World
- New Cases: 575,845 (⬆︎ 1.07%)
- New Deaths: 8,802 (⬆︎ .67%)
USA
- New Cases: 157,253 (⬆︎ 1.42%)
- New Deaths: 1,260 (⬆︎ .50%)
Worsening coronavirus crisis pushes leaders to take new measures
Late Friday night, North Dakota’s Republican governor — long resistant to statewide orders on masking and social distancing — acknowledged that his state and country were in dire straits.
Bars, restaurants and event venues would have to cut capacity, Gov. Doug Burgum said in a solemn video posted to social media. Most after-school activities would be put on hold. Starting Saturday, masks must be worn inside businesses, indoors in public spaces and outdoors in public when social distancing can’t be maintained, backed by potential fines of up to $1,000 for the first offense.
“Our situation has changed, and we must change with it,” the governor said, as the United States breaks records for daily new cases and North Dakota leads in recent infections per capita.
A dark reality is sinking in for officials across the country, with Burgum just the latest leader to announce new restrictions in the face of surging cases and hospitalizations that health experts have been warning about for months. But doctors and health officials worry that the urgency of the escalating crisis has not gotten through to a public weary of pandemic shutdowns. And the push for stronger measures has triggered backlash and legal fights.
Chicago on Thursday became the first major city to announce a renewed stay-at-home advisory. A day later, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) reinstated many restrictions, prohibiting on-site dining and requiring nonessential businesses to close their physical locations. Three Western states — California, Oregon and Washington — urged people to cancel travel that’s not absolutely necessary, and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) announced a two-week statewide “freeze” Friday, which included curbing gatherings ahead of Thanksgiving.
A vaccine breakthrough has buoyed hopes — “The cavalry is coming,” as Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, put it — but the country is still facing what officials say could be its grimmest months yet of the pandemic, with tough decisions ahead and thousands of lives in the balance.
Many leaders are leery of stronger measures and economically painful shutdowns, as Democrats and Republicans remain stalled over a new coronavirus stimulus package that could blunt the economic fallout. President Trump on Friday said his administration would not under “any circumstances” resort to a “lockdown.”
“Lockdowns cost lives, and they cost a lot of problems,” Trump said at a news conference where officials said they hope to see millions of people immunized against the coronavirus by the end of the year.
A vaccine could be available to the general public as early as April, Trump said, a timeline echoed by experts such as Fauci. But in the meantime, coronavirus cases are soaring to new heights, pushing past 177,000 nationwide Friday — little more than a week after the country cracked 100,000 daily infections for the first time. The vast majority of states have recorded a single-day high in new cases over the past week, as total infections in the United States approach 11 million. More than 1,300 new coronavirus-related deaths were reported in the United States on Saturday, up more than 200 from last Saturday’s total. Current covid-19 hospitalizations have risen to record heights, too, approaching 70,000.
The stakes are high, and officials are bitterly divided over how to respond in some hard-hit communities.
On Friday, a state appeals court blocked El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego’s stay-at-home order shuttering nonessential businesses in an area where growing coronavirus cases have packed hospitals to capacity and led local officials to call in mobile morgues. Samaniego said the order was necessary to combat a deadly crisis.
But the measures ran afoul of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide rules. State Attorney General Ken Paxton hailed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit’s decision Friday on Twitter, decrying a “tyrant who thinks he can ignore state law” and vowing not to let “rogue political subdivisions try to kill small businesses and holiday gatherings.”
Samaniego was similarly biting in his response, accusing Paxton of gloating as the county suffered. More than half of the patients flooding the county’s health system have the coronavirus, Samaniego told The Washington Post. People are being sent out of state for care.
“Here we are in a really critical situation, he says, people, you can go to Thanksgiving?” Samaniego said of Paxton in an interview Saturday. “Just a complete disregard for our situation.”
“We MUST fight back a second wave to keep our schools open,” he said.
Many are skeptical that leaders across the country will take serious new measures amid pushback. The changes announced Friday in Oregon drew an outcry from businesses.
“We were already hearing from members they were concerned about what another shutdown would do to their chances of staying open,” Jason Brandt, president of the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association, said in a statement, adding that the new rules “will trigger an unknown amount of permanent closures.”
Veronica Miller, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health who signed an open letter this summer urging renewed shutdown measures, said she worries public health experts’ strident warnings are not getting through “to that extent that we need.”
“You can just see the graphs, they’re just really over the top, and it’s so much worse. And it’s going to get worse, and I do not see at the national level — I do not see any sense of urgency,” she said.
Late Friday night, North Dakota’s Republican governor — long resistant to statewide orders on masking and social distancing — acknowledged that his state and country were in dire straits.
Bars, restaurants and event venues would have to cut capacity, Gov. Doug Burgum said in a solemn video posted to social media. Most after-school activities would be put on hold. Starting Saturday, masks must be worn inside businesses, indoors in public spaces and outdoors in public when social distancing can’t be maintained, backed by potential fines of up to $1,000 for the first offense.
“Our situation has changed, and we must change with it,” the governor said, as the United States breaks records for daily new cases and North Dakota leads in recent infections per capita.
A dark reality is sinking in for officials across the country, with Burgum just the latest leader to announce new restrictions in the face of surging cases and hospitalizations that health experts have been warning about for months. But doctors and health officials worry that the urgency of the escalating crisis has not gotten through to a public weary of pandemic shutdowns. And the push for stronger measures has triggered backlash and legal fights.
Chicago on Thursday became the first major city to announce a renewed stay-at-home advisory. A day later, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) reinstated many restrictions, prohibiting on-site dining and requiring nonessential businesses to close their physical locations. Three Western states — California, Oregon and Washington — urged people to cancel travel that’s not absolutely necessary, and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) announced a two-week statewide “freeze” Friday, which included curbing gatherings ahead of Thanksgiving.
A vaccine breakthrough has buoyed hopes — “The cavalry is coming,” as Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, put it — but the country is still facing what officials say could be its grimmest months yet of the pandemic, with tough decisions ahead and thousands of lives in the balance.
Many leaders are leery of stronger measures and economically painful shutdowns, as Democrats and Republicans remain stalled over a new coronavirus stimulus package that could blunt the economic fallout. President Trump on Friday said his administration would not under “any circumstances” resort to a “lockdown.”
“Lockdowns cost lives, and they cost a lot of problems,” Trump said at a news conference where officials said they hope to see millions of people immunized against the coronavirus by the end of the year.
A vaccine could be available to the general public as early as April, Trump said, a timeline echoed by experts such as Fauci. But in the meantime, coronavirus cases are soaring to new heights, pushing past 177,000 nationwide Friday — little more than a week after the country cracked 100,000 daily infections for the first time. The vast majority of states have recorded a single-day high in new cases over the past week, as total infections in the United States approach 11 million. More than 1,300 new coronavirus-related deaths were reported in the United States on Saturday, up more than 200 from last Saturday’s total. Current covid-19 hospitalizations have risen to record heights, too, approaching 70,000.
The stakes are high, and officials are bitterly divided over how to respond in some hard-hit communities.
On Friday, a state appeals court blocked El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego’s stay-at-home order shuttering nonessential businesses in an area where growing coronavirus cases have packed hospitals to capacity and led local officials to call in mobile morgues. Samaniego said the order was necessary to combat a deadly crisis.
But the measures ran afoul of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide rules. State Attorney General Ken Paxton hailed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit’s decision Friday on Twitter, decrying a “tyrant who thinks he can ignore state law” and vowing not to let “rogue political subdivisions try to kill small businesses and holiday gatherings.”
Samaniego was similarly biting in his response, accusing Paxton of gloating as the county suffered. More than half of the patients flooding the county’s health system have the coronavirus, Samaniego told The Washington Post. People are being sent out of state for care.
“Here we are in a really critical situation, he says, people, you can go to Thanksgiving?” Samaniego said of Paxton in an interview Saturday. “Just a complete disregard for our situation.”
“We MUST fight back a second wave to keep our schools open,” he said.
Many are skeptical that leaders across the country will take serious new measures amid pushback. The changes announced Friday in Oregon drew an outcry from businesses.
“We were already hearing from members they were concerned about what another shutdown would do to their chances of staying open,” Jason Brandt, president of the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association, said in a statement, adding that the new rules “will trigger an unknown amount of permanent closures.”
Veronica Miller, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health who signed an open letter this summer urging renewed shutdown measures, said she worries public health experts’ strident warnings are not getting through “to that extent that we need.”
“You can just see the graphs, they’re just really over the top, and it’s so much worse. And it’s going to get worse, and I do not see at the national level — I do not see any sense of urgency,” she said.
- and -
How many Trump voters were in a district.
Union power also played a role, but covid-19 rates didn’t.
Debates about whether to open schools have raged since the summer. Whatever else might shape these decisions, it would make sense that the local intensity of covid-19 spread would play a major part: School districts with low rates of cases would be more likely to open than school districts with high rates. Those districts would likely stick with a more cautious, online-only approach.
But a new study we conducted, examining some 10,000 school districts across the country — some 75 percent of the total — remarkably finds essentially no connection between covid-19 case rates and decisions regarding schools. Rather, politics is shaping the decisions: The two main factors that determined whether a school district opened in-person were the level of support in the district for Donald Trump in 2016 and the strength of teachers’ unions. A third factor, with a much smaller impact, was the amount of competition a school district faces from private schools, in particular Catholic schools.
The finding is a testament to how the nationalization of partisan politics affects governance at all levels. Traditionally, local governments — and particularly school boards, whose members are often elected in nonpartisan, unusually timed elections — have been more technocratic than their state or federal counterparts. Public officials at the local level concentrate on problems like keeping streets paved and deciding whether to build a new elementary school or buy new buses. Yet this study suggests that the polarizing politics of red and blue caused school boards to drift away from a dispassionate analysis of covid-19 numbers toward the political preferences of their constituents.
The “nationalization” of local politics at all levels has been observed for years by political scientists, but this may be the first time it has been documented so starkly in school boards.
The database of school districts we used included information about whether school districts opened — and to what extent. To capture the prevalence of covid-19 cases, we drew on information from Johns Hopkins University; we focused mainly on the number of new cases per 10,000 in the last two weeks of August in each district, when many school boards were making their first decisions about whether to open in-person. The measure indicating support for Trump was straightforward: the share of votes in each district for Trump.
The link between covid-19 cases and a decision to open was minuscule and inconsistent: We found no statistical link between the level of cases and a decision to teach in an online-only mode (as opposed to hybrid or in-person). We did, however, find a slight statistical relationship between cases and the decision to open schools in-person (as opposed to hybrid or online-only); the relationship, however, was so tiny that it suggests almost no effect.
But the effects of partisan politics were consistent and large. As Trump’s share of the vote in 2016 went from 40 percent to 60 percent, across districts, for instance, the proportion that remained in remote-learning mode dropped 17 points: from 27 percent to 10 percent. Conversely, a rise from 40 percent support for Trump to 60 percent was associated with a substantial increase in the likelihood of returning to fully in-person schooling: The probability of opening in-person increased from 7 percent to 16 percent.
One striking detail is that neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump districts changed their minds about opening even when they were located in areas with the very highest levels of infection: Even then, the partisan effect trumped the covid-19 numbers. (Throughout the study, we controlled for differences across states, to account for state-level policies that shape districts’ decisions. We also controlled for the density of a district to ensure that suburban and urban districts were not being inappropriately compared.)
News reports have suggested that teachers’ unions have tended to resist in-person education. We investigated whether such stances affected districts’ decisions by evaluating whether districts with stronger unions were less likely than others to reopen in person. We used two measures for union strength. Previous research has shown that the larger the district, the more potent the union, so that was our main metric. Next, where possible, we checked whether districts and unions bargained collectively — another sign of union potency. That data, however, was available to us in only 1 of 5 districts. Regardless of the measure used, the stronger the union, the more likely a school was to close, controlling for other factors.
Competition with private schools also mattered, although less than partisanship and union strength. Parents, after all, can “vote with their feet” if they disagree with a local district’s decisions and have other options. We concentrated on whether public schools had to compete for students with Catholic schools, which enroll some 37 percent of all private-school students and are often the only affordable private-school options for middle-class families. Private schools have tended to open at a higher rate than public schools, and their presence did affect public-school decisions, we found. When the share of Catholic schools in a district went from zero per 10,000 students to four per 10,000, the probability of public-school districts opening rose by 4 percentage points — from 14 to 18 percent.
It may be that where the private sector threatens the public system’s market share, districts find that they have to compromise the partisan preferences of the community to keep their wealthier families invested in the public system.
The implications of national and partisan disputes pervading local education governance offers something of a political Rorschach test: On the one hand, it shows that schools are responsive to voters and to local interest groups. That is, by one measure, how democracy is supposed to work, and so it might be applauded. At the same time, some observers may regret that scientific data hasn’t so far played a large role in schools’ response to this massive public health crisis.
Union power also played a role, but covid-19 rates didn’t.
Debates about whether to open schools have raged since the summer. Whatever else might shape these decisions, it would make sense that the local intensity of covid-19 spread would play a major part: School districts with low rates of cases would be more likely to open than school districts with high rates. Those districts would likely stick with a more cautious, online-only approach.
But a new study we conducted, examining some 10,000 school districts across the country — some 75 percent of the total — remarkably finds essentially no connection between covid-19 case rates and decisions regarding schools. Rather, politics is shaping the decisions: The two main factors that determined whether a school district opened in-person were the level of support in the district for Donald Trump in 2016 and the strength of teachers’ unions. A third factor, with a much smaller impact, was the amount of competition a school district faces from private schools, in particular Catholic schools.
The finding is a testament to how the nationalization of partisan politics affects governance at all levels. Traditionally, local governments — and particularly school boards, whose members are often elected in nonpartisan, unusually timed elections — have been more technocratic than their state or federal counterparts. Public officials at the local level concentrate on problems like keeping streets paved and deciding whether to build a new elementary school or buy new buses. Yet this study suggests that the polarizing politics of red and blue caused school boards to drift away from a dispassionate analysis of covid-19 numbers toward the political preferences of their constituents.
The “nationalization” of local politics at all levels has been observed for years by political scientists, but this may be the first time it has been documented so starkly in school boards.
The database of school districts we used included information about whether school districts opened — and to what extent. To capture the prevalence of covid-19 cases, we drew on information from Johns Hopkins University; we focused mainly on the number of new cases per 10,000 in the last two weeks of August in each district, when many school boards were making their first decisions about whether to open in-person. The measure indicating support for Trump was straightforward: the share of votes in each district for Trump.
The link between covid-19 cases and a decision to open was minuscule and inconsistent: We found no statistical link between the level of cases and a decision to teach in an online-only mode (as opposed to hybrid or in-person). We did, however, find a slight statistical relationship between cases and the decision to open schools in-person (as opposed to hybrid or online-only); the relationship, however, was so tiny that it suggests almost no effect.
But the effects of partisan politics were consistent and large. As Trump’s share of the vote in 2016 went from 40 percent to 60 percent, across districts, for instance, the proportion that remained in remote-learning mode dropped 17 points: from 27 percent to 10 percent. Conversely, a rise from 40 percent support for Trump to 60 percent was associated with a substantial increase in the likelihood of returning to fully in-person schooling: The probability of opening in-person increased from 7 percent to 16 percent.
One striking detail is that neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump districts changed their minds about opening even when they were located in areas with the very highest levels of infection: Even then, the partisan effect trumped the covid-19 numbers. (Throughout the study, we controlled for differences across states, to account for state-level policies that shape districts’ decisions. We also controlled for the density of a district to ensure that suburban and urban districts were not being inappropriately compared.)
News reports have suggested that teachers’ unions have tended to resist in-person education. We investigated whether such stances affected districts’ decisions by evaluating whether districts with stronger unions were less likely than others to reopen in person. We used two measures for union strength. Previous research has shown that the larger the district, the more potent the union, so that was our main metric. Next, where possible, we checked whether districts and unions bargained collectively — another sign of union potency. That data, however, was available to us in only 1 of 5 districts. Regardless of the measure used, the stronger the union, the more likely a school was to close, controlling for other factors.
Competition with private schools also mattered, although less than partisanship and union strength. Parents, after all, can “vote with their feet” if they disagree with a local district’s decisions and have other options. We concentrated on whether public schools had to compete for students with Catholic schools, which enroll some 37 percent of all private-school students and are often the only affordable private-school options for middle-class families. Private schools have tended to open at a higher rate than public schools, and their presence did affect public-school decisions, we found. When the share of Catholic schools in a district went from zero per 10,000 students to four per 10,000, the probability of public-school districts opening rose by 4 percentage points — from 14 to 18 percent.
It may be that where the private sector threatens the public system’s market share, districts find that they have to compromise the partisan preferences of the community to keep their wealthier families invested in the public system.
The implications of national and partisan disputes pervading local education governance offers something of a political Rorschach test: On the one hand, it shows that schools are responsive to voters and to local interest groups. That is, by one measure, how democracy is supposed to work, and so it might be applauded. At the same time, some observers may regret that scientific data hasn’t so far played a large role in schools’ response to this massive public health crisis.
There's a fair amount of Both-Sides bullshit here.
Intentionally or not, the authors invite the inference that the Teachers Unions' support for staying out of the classroom was just as politically motivated as the redhats' resistance to masks and quarantines and other restrictions.
Where's the statistical analysis that looks at how often one side or the other lines up with the clinical consensus of the local health departments? - or the CDC guidelines? - or the vaunted "common sense" that these Trump-lodytes are supposed to posses in massive quantities but never mange to demonstrate?
wear your mask
keep your distance
wash your hands
what's so fuckin' hard about this?
And why can't we count on the Press Poodles to get that one right?
