What if Football Season is Cancelled?

A couple interesting columns in today’s WSJ worthy of a quick digest.

First, from Holman Jenkins, who has been the most astute analyst of the Covid 19 political/epidemiological nexus.
“Our media still treats each virus case and death as a failure of political leadership, a standard not applied to auto accidents,, heart-disease diagnoses or flue cases. Headlines shout that rising case counts prove states opened ‘too soon.’ The claim is meaningless: Whenever states reopened, cases were bound to rise because no vaccine exists and the virus is not extinct.”

The recent surge is a problem nonetheless, but one that revolves around mitigation capacity, not elimination of the outbreak: “The U. S. health-care system is scaled to handle annual bouts of influenza, which can mean 70 Americans out of 100,000 needing hospitalization in a bad year (such as 2014-15), for an average stay of 6.3 days. So far, 107 in 100,000 have been hospitalized with Covid. Their average stay: 11.2 days.”

How could it have turned out differently: “Maybe a central-planning solution was possible. An absurd article in the Atlantic suggests that, but for the iniquity of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the disease might have been contained in China. Huh? The virus was already in Paris, Turin and Milan even before Chinese doctors started warning each other about its existence in social media.”

As for a return to lock down mode, Jenkins cites former Obama policy guru Cass Sunstein who points out “lockdown costs compound rapidly and eventually become more more destructive than the virus. Certain island nations can tell a different story but a U. S. desire for zero transmissions was always out of sync with the timeline of vaccine development.”

Then, William Galston, the Journal’s liberal columnist, chimes in on the school question wondering if there’s some compromise solution everyone can adhere to. Getting to the heart of the problem he avers “making schools as resistant to Covid-19 cannot mean making adults [i.e., teachers] as safe from the pandemic as they would be at home. But as several gold-standard studies have emphasized, hunkering down has negative consequences for children and adolescents, including loneliness, lack of physical activity, substance abuse, depression and suicide.”

The upshot: “This forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: The interests of students aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests of teachers and staff, for whom Covid-19 could be life-threatening.”

The solution: worried parents should simply opt-out for remote learning, and those who are not should send their kids to school. Teachers over 50 or those with underlying conditions given priority as remote learning instructors. Since adolescents can be expected to self-supervise to a certain extent, something that can’t be said for the very young, elementary schools should definitely open so their parents can go to work. Because teachers never signed up for this situation, they should be given hazard pay in they teach in-school.