8/6/20
Is it possible that President Trump could do a worse job handling the covid-19 pandemic, causing even more needless illness and death? I fear we’re about to find out. “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” he tweeted again this week, for the umpteenth time. That’s the equivalent of chugging blindly down the Niagara River, approaching the lip of the falls — and giving the order to proceed full speed ahead. Aided and abetted by Republican governors, Trump is pushing hard for in-person classroom instruction this fall in all of the nation’s schools, some of which have already started the new year. He has threatened to withhold federal funding from public school districts that don’t fully open; and while the official White House position acknowledges that “flexibility” is needed, Trump continues to bully local officials to “open 100 percent.” It would be wonderful for the economy, and for parents’ mental health, if this were possible — and it could be possible, if Trump had taken the novel coronavirus seriously and orchestrated a proper nationwide shutdown, like governments in other developed countries did, and driven the infection rate down to a manageable level. In that event, Americans would be preparing to safely and cautiously open schools from coast to coast. But Trump’s position all along has been that covid-19, which has claimed at least 156,000 American lives, is no big deal. “This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away,” he said Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.”
In reality as we know it, some things go away and some don’t. Rainbows go away. Highly infectious novel viruses do not, according to Trump’s own medical experts, whose expertise he is foolish enough to dismiss. Trump told his bewildered-looking “Fox & Friends” cheer-leading squad that schools can safely open because children are “almost immune” to the virus — a claim so false and toxic that Twitter, Trump’s trusty megaphone, forced his campaign to delete the video clip. Every reputable study has shown that though the vast majority of children do not suffer serious illness from the virus, they do become infected and can pass it on to others. Nations around the world are struggling with the pandemic. But those that have managed to reopen schools have done so with caution — and after first driving infection rates to very low levels. Here, the virus is still “extraordinarily widespread,” according to the head of Trump’s coronavirus task force, Deborah Birx. We’re not ready. I’m afraid the virus won’t “go away” until Trump does. According to a Pew Research Center poll released this week, only 19 percent of U.S. adults believe there should be full-time, in-person instruction in the schools this fall. Americans seem to understand, in a way that Trump fails to grasp, that opening schools now would make a bad situation much worse.
