This is a short diary. I am a member of a local school board in rural Maine, and a parent of two boys at our high school. We of course are discussing whether to re-open our districts six schools, and how to do so if we do. My wife is a teacher in another district. I’m looking at this from many different angles, but one thing to note — the county where we live has had only 25 cases of Covid-19, and just one death due to it.
This rant by Joe Morice of Fairfax County, Virginia, raises so many interesting points that it really needs to be widely disseminated.
UPDATE: I’ve been asked to add a summary to entice you to click through the link. Here is a snippet:
“Children only die .0016 of the time.”
First, conceding we’re an increasingly morally bankrupt society, but when did we start talking about children’s lives, or anyone’s lives, like this? This how the villain in movies talks about mortality, usually 10-15 minutes before the good guy kills him.
If you’re in this camp, and I acknowledge that many, many people are, I’m asking you to consider that number from a slightly different angle.
FCPS has 189,000 children. .0016 of that is 302. 302 dead children are the Calvary Hill you’re erecting your argument on. So, let’s agree to do this: stop presenting this as a data point. If this is your argument, I challenge you to have courage equal to your conviction. Go ahead, plant a flag on the internet and say, “Only 302 children will die.” No one will. That’s the kind action on social media that gets you fired from your job. And I trust our social media enclave isn’t so careless and irresponsible with life that it would even, for even a millisecond, enter any of your minds to make such an argument.