An Arizona superintendent on safely reopening schools: 'It's a fantasy' (opens in new tab)

Aaand yet all the worst outbreaks early on were in the bluest parts of blue-or-purple states, and were under the control of Democrat mayors and governors. Who are also the ones with real authority, incidentally.

Now, the red parts of the map aren't exactly doing well right now either - but let's not pretend that only the Republicans fucked up on this one.

> have a national lockdown for 1-2 months or so with everyone paid to stay home so that total number of new cases drops very low, then remove the lockdown and use comprehensive contact tracing and testing to quickly respond to new outbreaks.

I honestly think that Trump could not have done this. If he had tried - which would have taken a large expansion of executive power - at a time that this would have helped, I wouldn't be surprised if he was impeached. You might remember what happened when Trump banned (a lot of) travel from China - it wasn't people saying that this was insufficient, it was people saying that it was racist and unconstitutional. Do you really think that a response a thousand times as intense would have gotten a positive response?

Nobody has hit 1000. It's a long game, and we don't even know if Sweden's approach is the right one or not. There is not much room for political mud-slinging, unless one backs a candidate that has not yet spoken.

To my knowledge, the grand-parents have a much greater role in child-care in Spain and Italy, than in Germany and Sweden. To complicate matters, closing all schools and kindergardens even increased their importance, as parents still had to work somehow. Probably, closing the schools _might_ have even made things worse, as someone has to take care of them.

But that is not necessarily an argument in favour of opening them again. It shows, how children, while largely unaffected, have potentially a huge impact on the spread of the virus.