Reopening Schools and the Public Trust Deficit

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany yesterday obliterated any good faith that the government at any level was interested in the safety of students, teachers, and parents in the course of possibly reopening schools during the pandemic:

Asked about President Donald Trump's message to parents as some schools opt to go fully online in the coming weeks, McEnany said "the president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open."

"And I was just in the Oval talking to him about that," she said. "When he says open, he means open in full, kids being able to attend each and every day in their school. The science should not stand in the way of this." 

To be clear, I was against reopening schools when it was first being talked about, but everyone had since talked about it as though it were possible to reopen schools and protect people. Thanks to McEnany, however, this is impossible.

To my mind, the idea that schools can reopen in confidence has been entirely foreclosed by this statement: As with countless other issues that have been eroded by the Trump administration, there is no way to know if school officials or state and local governments are actually trying to protect people in good faith, or are just bending to the will of the President. That the government doesn't care about the science while it is so obviously and calamitously failing to act against the pandemic speaks volumes.

There is no denying that the economic impact of the coronavirus is severe, but trying to power through it and force people to work--putting literally everyone at risk--just to boost the economy is both murderous and short-sighted. There are studies that show that regions that focus on saving lives recover faster economically than those that let people die. An article from Vox describes a 2007 paper on the economic impact of social distancing (referred to as "non-pharmaceutical interventions") and recovery after the 1918 pandemic ended. The article states:

“The increase in mortality from the 1918 pandemic relative to 1917 mortality levels (416 per 100,000) implies a 23 percent fall in manufacturing employment, 1.5 percentage point reduction in manufacturing employment to population, and an 18 percent fall in output,” they conclude. In other words, a big outbreak spelled economic disaster for affected cities.

Then they combined this analysis with an analysis of the effects of NPI policies. They find that the introduction of social distancing policies is associated with more positive outcomes in terms of manufacturing employment and output. Cities with faster introductions of these policies (one standard deviation faster, to be technical) had 4 percent higher employment after the pandemic had passed; ones with longer durations had 6 percent higher employment after the disaster.

There is also this article from John Hopkins, an interview with Alessandro Rebucci, an economist who argues that an economic depression is inevitable, and "reopening an infected economy is no shortcut."

It's impossible to argue that, with 60,000-70,000 newly discovered cases a day, the United States has coronavirus under control. States like Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Georgia, are now the primary drivers of the pandemic in the country, and while some regions are safer than others, no region is safe enough to reopen schools so long as we lack a competent federally-managed effort to control the disease.

Finally, someone made an epidemiological simulation of coronavirus' spread in a school, and is worth watching the ~10 minute video to get an idea of what schools will be dealing with should they reopen.