Mitigation should be part of any crisis response. What lessons should governments and people have learned from Covid? How can these be better and more widely applied?
At the height of covid, most schools went partially or wholly virtual. And… it sucked. The technology just wasn’t ready for virtual learning.
But as the pandemic went on, the technology improved vastly, because it had to. By the end of last spring, it… well, OK, it still sucked, but it sucked much less.
And so this past fall… everyone abandoned all attempts at virtual schooling, because it sucked. And also abandoned all attempts at making it better.
There’s going to be another pandemic eventually, and we’re going to have to go back to virtual learning, and if we don’t work to improve it now, when we can, it’ll still suck. Plus, even aside from the pandemic, there will always be a few students out sick with something or other, and it sucked a lot less for them to be able to just join the Zoom than to not get the lessons at all. But all anyone remembers about the virtual schooling is that it sucked, and so we don’t have it any more.
That an unpleasantly large percentage of the population should be deported to Russia.
Don’t politicize a pandemic. Trust the science. Be responsible. Don’t be selfish. Don’t trust loons.
I’ve heard that some schools may not have snow days any longer but instead do virtual learning.
To trust the medical professionals. Vaccines work. Social distancing and mask-wearing help slow down the spread of any virus, and while we already knew that, an alarmingly large percentage of the US population didn’t want to, or wouldn’t believe it, for a variety of reasons.
We need to stop second-guessing the experts who know how to fight contagious diseases that kill people… lots of people and instead trust them. The government can’t force people to do the right thing, they have to want to do it for the right reasons. Too many people died needlessly from the pandemic for the dumbest of reasons. Hopefully that will never happen again… but don’t count on it.
NYC schools have announced this. Whether they will actually do it or change their minds is not clear.
The lesson I hope the media learns is that pandemics shouldn’t be a way to help increase your clicks and engagements, you don’t need to make every article into a pro wrestling match
Leave that for sports articles or other stuff where public health isn’t at stake.
I hope people have learned that you dont have to be up my ASS in line FOR ANY REASON!!! I also hope the medical professionals learned that if im coming into the office for a routine checkup why do i want to be in the same office as someone who is sick without a mask!!! Make them wait in the car
Because of covid, I learned that Neil Young is married to Daryl Hannah.
Thanks, covid!
Vote Democrat.
We’ve been promised a full inquiry in the UK (of course they’ve promised it, but with this lot delivery is another question). They’ll have to bear in mind that even the experts were playing catch-up with the developing scientific knowledge. But there were clearly structural/cultural issues that made for a slow initial response (when it was supposed we had one of the best pandemic preparedness systems).
One was the years of fiscal austerity running down reserve resources and structures - just how much seeming “redundancy” in resources and shadow organisation should you tolerate, just in case?
Another was the lack of co-ordination between central and local government over test and trace systems, and inter-agency “we know best” wrangling, which lost the opportunity to get a grip early on.
Another was the rush to create (and re-organise) agencies, and the seeming cronyism in appointing people close to the government to run them and to get priority in consideration for service and supply contracts.
And another was frequent muddle in issuing guidance at very short notice - and then U-turning when there was opposition that should have been foreseen.
And all that comes down to political preferences and management styles (if that’s the word) at the top.
When schools were in hybrid mode, that was the plan, and that was what was done. But now all the infrastructure, and infostructure, for that has been dismantled. The cameras aren’t set up in the classrooms any more. The teachers don’t have home licenses for the relevant software. There’s no designated online venue for the students to meet, and even if you set one up, there’d be no way to tell students about it. There’s no longer a concerted effort to make sure all students have Internet access from home.
We learned that mask mandates and lockdowns are ineffective at ending pandemics. Actually we already knew that before Covid but we have had to re-learn those things.
In as few words as possible,
In the event of a more lethal pandemic . . . we are fucked.
^ You can say that again. As I understand it (=not much), things would be much worse if common soap didn’t destroy the virus.
Here’s my contribution: You wanna get high? Bring your own gawdamm dope to the bar. The days of sharing the doob are over (man).
Global free trade and outsourcing can bite you in the ass when things go weird
The lesson, tragically, is that if people are stubborn and selfish, a pandemic can’t be beat.
Covid required the most modest and easiest of measures: Just wear a mask, keep distance and get vaccinated. But even this, the lightest of burdens, was considered intolerable and too much by half of America.
So if even that is too much, what isn’t?
Disagree. The technology for distance learning (Zoom, Edgenuity/Canvas/similar LMS systems, Google Drive) have been in place for many years and numerous universities have utilized them with significant success.
The problem wasn’t the technology, it was the students. What works in a university generally does not work in middle school. Or grade school. Or even high school.
Fist, we generally think of kids as being tech-savvy, but the reality most kids are content users, not creators. They know how to use TikTok and Instagram like pros but ask them to format a MS Word document, convert it to a fillable .pdf, then submit it electronically through an LMS system and I guarantee you 9 out 10 will have no clue what you’re even asking, let alone how to do it. The tech is there but most kids have never been taught how to use it.
On a more fundamental level kids need lots of guidance – in-person, hands-on guidance – to learn. Some need more, some need less, but the idea that we could simply assign readings and online worksheets supplemented with occasional Zoom lectures and expect any level of success was preposterous. Kids failed because there was nobody to guide and direct them. There were no mentors. There was nobody to help them formulate plans and then help see them through to fruition. They were essentially left to their own devices and we expected that to work. Clearly we were wrong.
Unfortunately I dont know what the answer is for next time. With Covid it was an “any port in a storm” situation but it didnt work. So I agree with the reat of your post: we better figure out what works before there is a next time. Because distance learning, in any form or capacity, is simply asking for failure.
I would say that the chief lesson to be learned is that we need plans for when something like this happens again. Comprehensive plans that are integrated from the Federal level through the states, cities and counties. The Federal government needs to use its grants-in-aid type things to ensure that the states actually do this.
There should be a series of these by category of disease, such as respiratory, hemorrhagic fever, insect-borne, and so on, as well as sub-plans by lethality, transmissibility, and so on.
That’s what I got out of this, is that it was all flying by the seat of everyone’s pants until probably early-mid 2021, at which point it seemed to become less chaotic and confused, and more orderly and sensible. Planning and trying to enact those plans would have helped a lot.