Open Schools *or* save lives. Choose one.
In aggregate, rapid testing is awesome at driving down the number of people who are walking around spreading the disease. If we could get everybody tested, we could quarantine the people who test positive and dramatically reduce the rate of transmission in the next cycle.
The problem is that it is nowhere near 100%. The rapid tests only catch about 84% of cases, i.e. about one in six sick people will still be out there walking around. That's nowhere near good enough for a school environment, where dozens of people are sharing air all day every day, because in that environment, it doesn't matter if one person is sick or six; they're all getting it.
What's needed is a much more drastic approach. Pick a day about six weeks into the future. Announce that on that day, all businesses are shutting down for two weeks, and everyone must stay at home and not congregate. Steep fines for all violations. At the
end of those two weeks, if nobody in your household is showing symptoms, everybody takes a rapid test. Otherwise, everybody takes a PCR test and quarantines for an additional two or three days while they wait for results.
For anyone who tests negative, you're done. The combination of no symptoms for two whole weeks plus a negative test means you're very unlikely to be sick. The few random cases that still make it through can be mopped up with contact tracing. For anyone who tests positive (by either test), you remain quarantined. The government will provide someone to bring you a food delivery every couple of days so you don't run out, and everyone in your household takes a rapid test every day. Two weeks after the last positive rapid test, they let you go (or one week for single-person households).
Do that, and the virus will be approximately gone by Christmas.
My wife tells me she has patients who still tell her this is all a hoax, who are seeing her because of COVID19 issues. Yeah they didn’t die but now they have cardiac problems. But they still think it is all nothing.
One problem is that we don't teach psychology in school until college, and it is optional even then. As a result, we have entire generations who don't recognize obvious psychological disorders when they see them.
Another problem is that many people see political parties as part of their identity, rather than seeing elections as a choice between two (or more) people, which results in poor decision-making and party-line votes, rather than intelligent discourse and finding actual solutions to real problems.
Finally, far too many people can't tell the difference between leadership and bullying, and mistakenly see strength as a sign of leadership even when it is used in hurtful ways. (And just so we're clear, I'm not saying that this is just a Republican thing; take a look at New York's politicians over the years if you don't believe me.)
All of these things point to a broken education system that has failed to prepare our young people for the moral, ethical, and civic responsibilities that will face them as adults. Until we stop under-funding our education system — until we pay teachers enough that good teachers won't flock to other careers over education so that they can pay the bills — we're going to continue having a populace that lacks the breadth of education required to make good decisions, and lacks the drive to learn things on their own that will enable them to get that education outside of the system, which means that their only source of knowledge will be the people who feed it to them; unfortunately, those people don't always have their best interests at heart.
