Hi everyone,
I haven’t written since right before the election, but I’ve definitely been working to digest and think about the results — and I hope to share some thoughts later on here. I’m not rushing to issue any hot takes and my advice is to be pretty skeptical of anyone out there right now telling you with confidence what happened, and what it means. Especially if it conveniently reinforces the policy agenda they were advocating one month ago :)
One area liberal analysts have been wringing their hands over is the Latino vote. Trump made inroads with Latinos in Florida and Texas, that many Democratic operatives weren’t expecting, but Latino turnout was also strong for Democrats in states like Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New Jersey. I think some panic among the political class would be relatively good, since even though Democrats turned out Latino voters, there’s no question that many party leaders tend to treat them as a monolith and fail to really engage with their communities. We had four years of panic about courting the white working class. I’d certainly welcome some of that attention directed to Latinos.
On that note, I’ve been reading Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism, a book that was published earlier this year by Laura Gómez, a law, sociology, and Chicano studies professor at UCLA. It’s really great and agitating so far. I’ve been learning a lot, and reflecting on how much I didn’t know, and why that is.
I also have a new story to share in The Intercept on Latino voters in Georgia, how organizers are working to turn them out for the upcoming U.S Senate runoffs, and how political parties have inadequately engaged them in the past. I hope you read the piece. One thing I want to lift up that I’m not sure everyone knows: one of the top issues to Latino voters, both in Georgia, and nationally, is COVID relief aid. Latinos have been getting sick and dying at disproportionate rates from the coronavirus, in part because they’re more likely to be working in front-line jobs, and the federal government has failed to prioritize enforcing any real semblance of workplace safety. Also: the federal government denied stimulus checks to any household where at least one member is undocumented. That alone affected 488,000 Georgia residents living in so-called mixed-status families, including 176,000 children and spouses who are U.S citizens or green card holders.
(The HEROES Act which the Democratic-controlled House passed in May would give stimulus checks to all taxpayers, regardless of immigration status, and provide a retroactive payment for those who didn’t get a check under the CARES Act. But as we know, negotiations with the Senate have gone nowhere for six months.)
I want to also recommend this Twitter thread by Bill Spriggs. He’s the chief economist for the AFL-CIO and an economics professor at Howard University. Click here or the below picture to read the full thing, which makes clear some points about COVID and racial disparities that I think have really been getting lost in the discourse.
The rest of my newsletter today is a little postscript on my schools + coronavirus story for those who are interested. It’s been almost 3 weeks since it’s come out, and I thought I’d mention a few other things I’ve seen in that time.
Unfortunately many outlets have continued to mischaracterize, downplay, and otherwise ignore evidence about coronavirus in schools that complicates the massively simplistic narrative that “schools are not spreaders.” It’s been confusing and bumming me out, to say the least.
Anyway. In early November the New York Times published a story about how San Francisco public schools were still closed, even though its community transmission rate was not very high. I thought this was a particularly revealing passage from the story. As the saying goes, it “says the quiet part out loud.”
Put differently, many people who have been urging schools to open while community transmission rates are relatively low, know that rates are expected to go back up, and it would be harder to convince people schools are safe then (because they would, in fact, be less safe.) I think there’s also a correct recognition that the decision to close schools once you reopen them is much harder, so many advocates want to get them open while the political window still appears viable. Note: that story was published on November 1. Exactly two weeks later, yesterday, San Francisco re-entered the “red stage” for COVID-19 transmission.
There’s just generally been a lot of magical thinking about how a contagious airborne virus could spread among groups in all other buildings but not in schools. I think some of it also comes from people who don’t really understand how people behave in schools? Including getting to schools.
Last week, for example, more than 9,000 Mississippi students and 800 teachers had to quarantine for COVID-19 exposure.
“The schools have become one of the bigger issues this week,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers said during an online conversation Friday hosted by the Mississippi State Medical Association…. While students and staff are generally safe during learning time in classrooms, infections are occurring during other hours, like when people are participating in after school activities, gathering for lunch or socializing in school hallways, Byers said.
In Montreal, the president of the Association des médecins microbiologistes-infectiologues du Québec said earlier this month that schools were the driver of their second wave.
…[The] Montreal Gazette has obtained data from the public health department and educational system revealing that the city’s mostly poorly ventilated and crowded schools are now reporting more infectious clusters than in the workplace and health-care institutions combined.
“The number of cases started to go up 14 days after the French-language schools opened and 14 days after the English ones opened in Montreal. Schools are certainly a driver,” said Dr. Karl Weiss, president of the Association des médecins microbiologistes-infectiologues du Québec. “It’s true for any respiratory virus,” Weiss added. “It’s true for the flu. It starts in schools, kids will bring the virus back home and infect the parents, and parents will get sick. Eventually the parents will infect their co-workers and it will spread to the community.”
Meanwhile, a lot of people have asked, well why are we keeping bars, restaurants and other retail stores open while schools in some areas are closed? Especially when European countries have done largely the opposite.
I very much believe we should be paying those workers to stay home as much as possible. Europe has done this more than we have. And closing other institutions could help keep reduce community transmission rates, which could then help schools stay open longer because there would be less probability of infected people coming into schools. We should prioritize and invest in making schools as safe as possible for as long as possible.
But I think, because we’re entering a period of the pandemic where community transmission is not expected to be low really anywhere, people are instead reaching for untrue ideas, like that schools are not higher risk even in those scenarios, or that outbreaks don’t happen in schools. Does that mean no schools should open? No, not necessarily; a lot of it I think depends on what kind of financial resources a community has to make a school safer, what the population in the school and broader community is like, what other policies are in place. There’s broad variability around things like air quality, testing, PPE. A friend of mine has been teaching in-person at a private school in the Northeast; educators at her school get weekly PCR testing. Public school teachers who demand the same thing get laughed out of the room. A recent study found two-thirds of elementary school classrooms in Philadelphia don’t even meet minimum industry standards for ventilation. Could someone, perhaps some education philanthropists, help pay to upgrade those old buildings? Sure they could. Will they?
Last week the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia recommended all schools in the region go virtual to reduce transmission, warning of a “catastrophic situation”. The director of the PolicyLab said he thought transmission “has reached the magnitude” where the governor should order school closures again like he did in the spring.
One thing I also believe has gotten lost in the “why don’t we just close bars and restaurants and open schools??!!” conversation is the complicated reality that options are a lot more limited without Congress stepping in, and there are major ramifications to sending people home without paying them. It’s been strange to see the number of people acting nonplussed about sending workers home with no financial assistance and potentially no job. This is a tweet from a journalist that I think gets at something relatively under-discussed about all these tradeoffs with the lack of federal aid.
Anyway, again, I think we should pay workers to stay home, especially since we’re having great news recently on the vaccine front, and it might only have to be through the winter. But for those who act like this is a super easy thing for cities to do with no federal support, well it’s not. We need another COVID bill. In more encouraging news, a new COVID-19 adviser to Joe Biden seems to agree on a lot of this.
I’m going end this here. Thanks so much for reading. I welcome any thoughts in the comments and if you want to support more of this, please consider sharing and/or becoming a paying subscriber. Stay safe!
Latinos in Georgia and more COVID school thoughts
This was really so, so good! I have had an avalanche of people trying to argue how low transmission this all is and between knowing people on the school board personally, teachers and students, this simply isn't the case where I live. Last week our County stated contact tracing showed them the current #1 form of transmission is schooling.