De Blasio stands in the schoolhouse door

The implication for NY real estate prices is again negative, as parents who may have been on the fence gave NY public schools another try, but now might as well go to the suburbs. I've said many times that the quality of governance has a big impact on local RE prices, and right now both Cuomo and Blas are proving to be totally inept.

https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/our-inept-leaders-irrational-decision-to-close-schools/

George, Any insight into why Deblasio is so eager to shut them down? Teacher unions? Cuomo may have limited control over NYC schools.

Are you trying to compare the shutdown of the schools this week to 1960s Alabama desegregation?

Many of my nightlife friends are whining about how unfair it is that their bars have to close at 10PM and coming up with what I find ludicrous arguments like "the virus isn't a gremlin," "if they weren't in my bar where we care about people they'd be at some unsafe house party," and telling me things like "it's not about my pocket book because I don't have a pocket - I've been out of work since March" and "It's not about the money, it's about not being evicted (because I don't have the money to pay rent)" and screaming how nightlife is the engine which drives NYC.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10159045002879123&id=527399122

I sure am pointing out the similarities between Blas and George Wallace. Education discrimination is much more insidious today. We still have segregated schools, just now they are segregated on class, since rich kids are still being educated in pods or independent schools and poor kids have been told by Blas to go home and suffer. It's shameful that progressives would embrace such segregation, but they just did.

We have the opposite of Giuliani and Bloomberg, and real estate prices will suffer for it.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyc-covid-gyms-indoor-dining-close-soon-mayor-de-blasio-2020-11-19/

The mayor's office and the teachers' union decided on the arbitrary 3% community positivity rate as a school shutdown trigger over the summer, back when we had no idea what the transmission dynamics would be like inside a classroom. The onus is now on both parties to get back to the table and review the situation in light of everything we've learned since then. There is no reason we can't set up a robust testing effort at every school and make more informed decisions.

I have a student in a NYC public school and the teachers and administration have busted their butts to make this work. To throw it all away now is completely nonsensical.

How furious are you on a 1-10 scale?

I'm with Nate Silver: "It's not as though 3% is some tried-and-true, empirically- derived heuristic that's proven robust over many past pandemics. Everybody is just making this shit up as they go along! It's completely arbitrary."

It hasn't taken long for most to admit we need closings as long as it's someone else's ox being gored.

As someone who grew up going to school pretty much in the shadow of George Wallace, I'll take the progressive side of that argument.

My first thought is this: Wait, George, I thought you moved to Nowhere partially to get five-day in-person school? Does that make you part of the solution?

Secondly, in modern world, rich white parents (which I suspect is a moniker that applies not just to you and to me, but also to many other posters on this board) are learning to take a step back from assuming that their privilege gives them the right to speak for other people's kids. Those kids -- whether they're "other" because they're poor, or "other" because of their different skin color -- have parents who can speak for them.

The kids may need additional advocacy -- what underprivileged people don't? -- but as a starting point, let's use the desires of the parents for their own families.

And judging from the info we have about which parents participated in hybrid learning, poor and minority parents generally chose not to send their kids in-building EVEN WHEN it was possible to do so. It's not DeBlasio and Cuomo who are standing in the schoolhouse door, it's the Coronavirus.

ali r.

Let me add one more point. The schools were not really open in-person more than 1-2 days a week. It is clearly a loss of learning for kids. I wonder what the decision of lower 25% of parents by income would have been if the schools were open in person every day.

Separately, I think George wants to emphasize his bearish view on real estate not so much of school view, the latter of which I tend to agree with.

Also, I agree with Flarf's view below.
"the teachers and administration have busted their butts to make this work. To throw it all away now is completely nonsensical."

"It hasn't taken long for most to admit we need closings as long as it's someone else's ox being gored."

We've been dealing with covid-19 for the better part of a year now. Brute force measures were justified in March when we didn't know the first thing about this virus. Let the goring now be determined by all of the empirical evidence gathered since then.

Agree with initial shutdown as we knew nothing about the virus. Teacher's unions do not care about empirical evidence. After all city employed hospital workers didn't decide to shut down the hospitals.

Yes, Mulgrew seems quite content with the 3% community threshold.

I have no data to go on here, just anecdotes, but the teachers at staff at my first grader's school (who I only ever saw on the street during drop off and pick up) seemed quite happy to be there.

With so many students in full-remote mode I would think that the teachers who don't want to be in schools don't have to be.

de Blasio on Brian Lehrer just now is waving away all of the data and evidence saying that's where we have been, and now we need to focus on where we are going. Personally, I don't expect public schools to open again before Spring 2021.

How about teachers who only want to work remotely take a 25% pay cut?

@300. A number of the teachers I know (SUNY university-level) have been involved with the distance learning classes for several years, and all have said that even pre-covid, it took at least the same amount of time as teaching in-person classes.

Companies are gearing up to spend a lot of energy trying to convince people that because they're working from home, and often in a lower-cost region, they don't need to be paid as much. I await the discrimination cases.

I am guessing all the oxen will be gored. Spread is probably coming from laxed private interactions, has been for over a month, but people have probably not been modifying their behavior. Nothing like a general lockdown to make people “get” it, I suppose.

Nada, A large percentage of Americans do not want to listen!! Nothing will make then get it short of fines but who will enforce it when cops themselves do not wear masks.

Aaron, It is not about the effort but leaning in person for young students. So pay cut to encourage the teachers to teach in person.

As of this week, my hospital in Manhattan has over X patients with Covid admitted (~5% of the hospital beds).

In the first round, we first passed this X threshold on Mar 20.

7 days later we had 10X patients in the hospital with Covid (~50% capacity)

7 days after that, we had 20X. At that point, the entire hospital system was almost 100% covid patients (from minimal to full capacity in 2 weeks).

At that point, stroke, heart attacks, chemotherapy, etc, were mainly treated at home.

Maybe an alternative is to have people sign a waiver that they won't use medical services at all for a certain amount of time.

Also, I don't think people on the right or left are intentionally trying to segregate or do anything of that sort...this is a complex medical problem in a highly selfish society which values money over family or health. The only thing stopping the selfishness in this case are simply a lack of hospital beds/providers. If we had 100x the hospital beds and providers, I'm fairly certain the plan would be to just rip through the population, wipe out a few million - and articles would be written about how we solved the pension crisis.

"Follow the science" quickly becomes ignore the science when it leads to conclusions one doesn't like. Virtually all the research in this area supports keeping schools open, and countries that have had much worse positivity rates than NYC explicitly ruled out school closures as an option based on a rational analysis.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/13/934153674/lessons-from-europe-where-cases-are-rising-but-schools-are-open

Also, the results from other school districts that offered both virtual and in-person instruction are in, and they are horrifying. In fact, some school districts are now forcing everyone back to in-person because the failures rates have jumped for remote schooling while the COVID data have remained perfectly fine for in-person schools.

https://www.kxii.com/2020/10/13/statistics-show-significantly-higher-failure-rates-for-online-learners-versus-in-person/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/01/coronavirus-failing-grades-spike-with-fall-term-distance-learning/

I could post many more, but SE will flag this post as spam. This isn't a question of science, it's a question of political power. Unfortunately, the kids, and the disadvantaged ones most of all, will bear most of the price.

300,
The new NYPD motto appears to be "I'm not getting out of my car for *that*"

flarf,
It seems to me everyone is going to come up with "empirical evidence" pointing to everyone else's ox getting gored.

Since DeBlasio already stated in the next week or so gyms, restaurants, etc are headed for closure it's hard to argue against inonada's thesis.

Anon, I didn't get a clear sense from your post whether you believe the schools should be shut down for all ages.

The spread is likely due to the virus being highly seasonal, and time spent indoors is a known risk factor. The broad, sustained rise across multiple states and countries is a telling indicator of that. It's not clear how much behavioral change has anything to do with the recent spikes.

The 1st wave of covid almost brought the medical system to paralysis. Now we have 5 months of indoor cold weather. Assuming we do nothing, there is no plateau in sight. Nowhere near herd immunity.

My expectation is most societies in the northern hemisphere btwn now and summer will have to do the "dance":

closings to dampen
followed by openings to allow peaks

There is NO real science on any of this stuff btw. There is no time for a null hypothesis and variable stabilization. We have to roll with what we are given.

You can look at other countries, but demographics and cultural attitudes color those observations. We are not a homogenously highly educated country. We are a bimodal country where a small group is educated and the rest are not. We have almost as many diabetics as Germans have men.

The question going on in my mind is: how much over the hospital capacity can the city tolerate?

Last time we were ~6 weeks from outdoor weather when it hit, we shut down hard, yet still passed the "threshold". The threshold to me btw is when you can't access regular healthcare.

This time we are ~20 wks away. We cannot grow exponentially without check for 20 wks imo.

So in sum, I would say shut down unless there is a better plan we can implement (those exist but I don't see them happening with the current federal administration).

Anonymousbk:

How does the vaccine factor into all this along with what appears to be better methods of treatment.

Trump and Chris Christie appeared to get through this relatively easy, both, especially Christie, high risk. The former governor certainly said it was no joke. I believe he only spent about a week in the hospital, Trump spent even less time.

Did Trump and Christie get some sort of magic bullet that we don't know about? Was their care exponentially better than the average Joe can expect to receive?

Anon, Hospital capacity projection is indeed a very good benchmark. I hear you on the comment about big difference in education even though I think of that more as Americans not wanting to do anything which remotely interferes with their freedom to do what they like.

I'm guessing most of us have seen the South Dakota nurse talking about people literally breathing their last breaths dying from Covid still denying it exists.

30, I saw it but I trust statistics and I see plenty of people in NY who have masks (clearly they know corona is here and dangerous) but hanging below their nose as they do not like the feeling of masks covering their nose.

I have an acquaintance that tested positive yesterday. He 'was' a denier...

"You can look at other countries, but demographics and cultural attitudes color those observations. We are not a homogenously highly educated country. We are a bimodal country where a small group is educated and the rest are not. We have almost as many diabetics as Germans have men."

Interesting point on demographics. The obesity rate in the US is 36%. In Vietnam 2%, Japan 4%.(death rates much lower in Japan/Vietnam) Germany 22%. Diabetes, high blood pressure and what usually comes with obesity all add to an already dangerous Covid virus. Average age in Africa is 19, education level is much lower and their reported Covid deaths(if they are reliable stats ) are quite low. But Japan and Germany are #2 and #3 in Germans of average age of population (Italy #5, US #60) and we know older populations should get hit harder. A good amount of data points to consider when comparing death/hospitalization rates in various countries /regions.

I would add that parts of Asia have had a longer history of SARs like viruses ( i.e 2003 SARS outbreak HK) which may help their immune systems to resist Covid vs say Europe which did not have past exposures.

I think Biden has said he does not think he will have a national mask mandate or a lock down. His policy may very well be the same as what we have now.

Re opening of schools. I heard Greenwich Academy (all girls/Greenwich) tests teachers and all students every week. That would have helped a great deal if De Blasio could have pulled that type of testing arrangement.

anonbk, I tear up every time you post. Be well.
30yrs, LOL on the cops.

Most of the private schools in NYC have planned for weeks, even before this outbreak, to go fully remote after thanksgiving until at least after the winter break, and perhaps until February 1. Given how much the schools are closed anyway over the next 8 weeks, seems to me that the schools should cancel 2021 spring break, presidents days, easter/passover holidays, and not go remote, but simply shut down for 6 or so weeks.

One private I know of requires 2 week quarantine/virtual school after winter break - and only with negative PCR test. Seems sensible, on top of major masking/social distancing in classroom. But who knows what the future holds. The local zip codes are way below 3%.

@George - I feel like you must know some of the people I know as the talk track you started this thread with appeared on twitter from some of my former besties at just about the same time as you started this thread (I went back and checked).

What I found interesting about one of my former talking head friends who is quite passionate about this subject on twitter is that she had never previously woven concern for people of color into her diatribes. I thought the only reason she was bringing it up now is that she had not been able to get all of her children into private school in NYC so, horrors of all horrors, she has one child in the public school system. I was thinking that her passion must have been stemming from how furious she must be to have to now deal with that child. However, once the talk track started popping up from others in the group, I realized that someone must have sent out a memo. I should have known better than to think she had an original thought. You, however, have expressed it more eloquently than any of the others trumpeting this theme on twitter; makes me wonder if you have someone on the inside who consults you for clever angles of attack. This is a good one, which is not to say that I agree with it (I have no opinion) but the discussion surrounding it will be significantly less inflammatory than were the issue framed another way (such as "I don't care if some whose children are in public school with mine don't have access to healthcare and die of COVID while I am willing to run the risk for my family because we are rich and have access to excellent healthcare).

The foregoing is not meant to express any opinion on what is actually going on with NYC public schools and the pandemic. I have no insight and not even close to sufficient information to weight in on the subject itself. I am just admiring the dexterity with which George tees up issues that could quickly turn ugly were they raised by a less skilled orator.

BTW - did you hear Megyn Kelly is finally fed up with NYC and is making the moves to the suburbs? Oh darn. She will be missed.

When I speak privately to MDs, we spend most of our time complaining about how these shutdowns are a sign of ineptitude. So it's not that I think these are the best measures that we can do as a species or society, it's more that, on a practical level, I don't expect anymore from our leaders. In the absence of any plan, this is prob better than the other plan, which is just keep compounding until we reach an irreversible situation.

I have no doubt that part of the consideration may be related to the holidays. Predictions have to be made as to how people will behave between now and the end of the year because this disease has such a long lag.

@Keith:

Chris Christie is a good example of what I keep explaining to people:

Covid is Russian Roulette with the number of chambers determined by your risk factors BUT the pull of the trigger still contains plenty of randomness.

If you are 500 lbs and 65, you have a high chance of surviving covid. Over 50% - without any treatment! In fact, you may not even have symptoms at all. Many people with covid, even in "bad" demographics, don't even realize it. They got the empty chamber even though they had a 1 in 5 pull vs someone else who got bad luck even though they had a 1 in a 100 pull.

This is the same with smoking by the way. People smoke forever and don't get lung cancer (often)! And many never smoke and get lung cancer. The reason is not exactly the same but by abstraction, it is the same.

Of course people wonder why? Maybe I can change my immune risk?

You could potentially do things to increase the number of blanks but these are things you can't control:

1- Specific genes of the virus you get. Everyone's covid is "slightly" different & at larger level, seems to be a difference btwn outbreak 1 and outbreak 2 - which is sometimes referred to as European/Italian covid. In a few yrs, I'm sure we will know of many different classes that we didn't have time to study this year.

2- Types of "snips" of molecules that you have antibodies for. Your antibodies are created like taking pieces of legos and snapping together multiple configurations with a large amount of randomness (estimated to have ~10B types/person).

Some, for ex, don't have the right snips for a certain food, so label it wrong forever and develop food allergies. This doesn't necessarily mean that the person has an immune problem as a whole. It just means that for that one specific snip, they don't have the right label. They could be 100% immunologically intact with the exception of that 1 label missing. Of course, it could also mean that they have a hyperreactive immune system but not necessarily.

So some people may simply have antibodies that are close enough to covid-19 that when it enters, your body starts responding quickly to the point where the viral load always remains low.

Other immune systems may completely miss it because they have no labels close enough to warn them of the danger. And because it grows exponentially, there is a large amount of luck in the early stages.

3- Randomness at the biochemical stage. Too much to write about this but one electron in your body in the wrong position at the wrong time can create a butterfly effect.

As far as early stage treatment - if you wait too long and have low oxygen, you can put your body into a higher risk category. Getting to the hospital early and getting oxygen, getting proned, & potentially getting dexamethasone (if late stage) seems to show significant benefits. Other things are still borderline/questionable: regeneron, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, etc are all meds that are still not resolved fully. I wouldn't be surprised if all work or if none work, but either way, it doesn't seem like the current data shows strong benefits. Dexamethasone otoh reduces death by about 1/3rd for ICU ventilated patients.

There are also many things the media won't focus on until later. For ex, if you survive the virus, it seems that a large % of people have strange long term multi-month symptoms: loss of smell, fatigue, some with vascular conditions (clotting), memory/cognition "fog", etc.

Why these long-term symptoms? Does it live in your brain forever like chickenpox? Why the vascular problems? Why these bilateral massive pulmonary infiltrates? Why are people able to talk with 50% O2 sats (my guess is this is related to the vascular process). All confusing for now. But simply put, this is not "normal".

While many laypeople think the govt is trying to screw them over by shutting things down, my thought is that they are lying about the opposite and trying to pretend it is not as wild as it has really been; specifically they are very quiet about long-term effects and imply that if you survive it, all is well.

I hope so.

BUT, I am optimistic that the vaccine will work. I am also pleased to hear that the vaccine pathways seem to be moving and we may have 100m vaccine dosages by Marchish (I am not uncorking the champagne on that yet). It may be that it becomes annual but anything to put an end to this misery.

Sorry for long-winded explanations...I'm trying my best to spread some concepts around that the media seems to be too distracted to be concerned about.

Some broad strokes from de Blasio on school reopening today but very little detail. District 75 (complex special ed) first, then 3K/PK, then elementary and so on.

If NYC goes into "orange zone" status then the State would mandate every student and teacher to have a negative test before going back, and 25% would need to be tested every week thereafter. Last I saw there were ~60k tests conducted on a typical weekday in NYC, so this would take up a lot of the existing capacity at full tilt but should be quite manageable if phased in by grade level.

Cue Mike Mulgrew and his no-backsies claim on the 3% community positivity rate...

Thanks anonymousbk... I'm going to focus on the part where your optimistic!

MCR, I guess I'll take your comments as a compliment. I'm not on Twitter, either posting or reading. I do enjoy calling out hypocrisy on both the far left and far right. Blas is such a clown that it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Cuomo is almost as much a moron, as is Gavin Newsom. I won't kick Trump on his way out. The door is hitting him in the a$$ already.

As for Megyn Kelly, it's a shame because she is one of the best center right commentators. We need more of her and less Hannity.

This is a case study of sheer incompetence. Since he's this bad at managing schools, think of what else he's f'ing up. Quality of government matters for real estate prices!

And the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/nyregion/deblasio-school-reopening.html

I'm sure most people have seen the news that the latest plan is to re-open pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, with any future shutdowns to be guided by positive cases at individual schools. Makes a ton of sense, would have been great if that was the plan since September, but better late than never.