@Pants-of-dog, personally, I don't think scientific organizations should be offering recommendations at all, they should limit themselves to providing data along with an assessment of the data's reliability and leave the decisions to the politicians that are actually elected. But if they
are going to be making recommendations to those making the actual decisions, those recommendations need to be based on the science and
nothing else. It is their status as scientists--and therefore the science--that gives those recommendations weight.
Rancid wrote:I invite you to find data that say's Austin residents and business owners don't want the mask requirement.
If Austin residents and business owners want to continue using/requiring masks, they are free to do so. But what Governor Abbott is saying is that they don't have the luxury of having the government provide them cover for the decision. If they as private citizens choose to maintain it, the responsibility for the decision--and its impact--is theirs.
So the Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to avoid the heat from not reopening in-person learning by pretending to re-open in-person learning. Here's some excerpts from
the LA Times's report (emphasis added):
Los Angeles students are a critical step closer to a return to campus beginning in mid-April under a tentative agreement reached Tuesday between the teachers union and the L.A. Unified School District, signaling a new chapter in an unprecedented year of coronavirus-forced school closures....
Under the agreement, members of United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers, nurses, counselors and librarians, would not have to return to work until they have had access to COVID-19 vaccinations and have achieved maximum immunity — a period of up to six weeks. That duration period — plus the amount of time needed to get vaccination appointments — is the main driver of a district timetable aiming to restart elementary schools on April 19.
The union has not signed off on a specific return date....
At the elementary level, students would attend five days a week in either a morning or early-afternoon session. The staggered schedule would allow for smaller classes, in keeping with state recommendations to keep students at least six feet apart.
Middle and high schools would resume with even starker changes. Students would attend two days a week on a staggered schedule. But instead of moving from class to class, students would remain in their advisory classroom — similar to a homeroom base — for the full day.
From their advisory class, students would carry out distance learning essentially as they are doing now; they would be trading online-from-home for online-from-a-classroom under the supervision of a teacher. Students would then “move” from class to class online — as they are doing now at home.
Advisory teachers would have their own schedule of classes — which they would conduct from school, but not necessarily to the students in front of them. To avoid mutual distraction, students would be provided with noise-cancelling headsets.
So basically, elementary school students would get continual half-days, but at least it's actual in-person learning. the middle and high school students have to continue remote learning, the only real difference being the location and supervisor. So they're going to have those students hating remote learning even more than they do now, and unlikely to perform much if any better than before. I guess the teachers' unions are hoping that if they get the students out of the homes, their parents won't care about the "school" experience their kids are suffering. I suspect they are going to be sadly disappointed, and so will Governor Newsome--now almost certainly facing a recall election driven entirely by unhappiness with his handling of the Wuhan virus (and his blatant hypocrisy).
Also, while "President" Biden is promising that if we'll all be good little boys and girls we'll get to have
small, family gatherings for
Independence Day, his immigration system is releasing large numbers of undocumented aliens testing positive for the Wuhan virus into the country--those that we're bothering to test at all.
Migrants flooding across U.S. border with as much as 10 times the COVID-19 rate as AmericansMigrant families coming across the border are testing positive for the coronavirus at between three and 10 times the rate of the U.S. population, according to a Washington Times survey of jurisdictions that are doing the testing.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Times that the families it is processing are between 5% and 10% positive.
In Brownsville, Texas, the city says it is seeing a 12% positive rate.
And in Harlingen, near Brownsville, the homeless shelter where families are being dropped off reported a group at 25% positive for COVID-19. That’s more than seven times the current positivity test rate for the U.S. public, which Johns Hopkins University’s tracker shows at 3.5%.
Pastor Bill Reagan, who runs Loaves and Fishes, the Harlingen shelter, said they’re doing the best they can with the situation.
“It would be best if Customs and Border Protection decides to release certain individuals into the United States that they thoroughly quarantine them for the 14 days and test them and only release those that rest negative,” he said. “But I also understand they’re overwhelmed.”
Some of the families are being quarantined. A senior ICE official told The Times that those in its custody who test positive are able to be held in isolation, though he said they do try to get nonprofits to help take some of them.
ICE is only able to take about 100 of those family members a day. Those on the ground in Texas say there are between 500 and 800 people coming across daily, and they are being farmed out to local shelters that don’t have the power to compel someone to stick around if they don’t want to.
In Harlingen, migrants were dropped at Loaves and Fishes, the city’s homeless shelter.
Mr. Reagan told The Washington Times they saw two groups, both last month. The first on Feb. 18 was 49 people, and it had a COVID positivity rate of 25%. The second group arrived on Feb. 19 and Mr. Reagan said they came so late that they weren’t tested.
He said even when the newly arrived migrants are tested, that doesn’t catch everyone.
“I think this is probably true for all the places people have been released from Border Patrol custody. All of them have been in close quarters for a long period of time. They all come together on the bus, they’ve all been detained together, and I would suppose on their trip from Central America they have been mixing with all kinds of people,” he said.
“Say they come to us on a particular day — they may just have been exposed that day or a day earlier and not test positive because of that,” he said.
At the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that the federal government has offered Texas a system to test and isolate, but she said Gov. Greg Abbott refused to allow it.
“Their proposal and agreement would cover 100 percent of the expense, testing, isolation and quarantine. But Governor Abbott has decided to reject that,” she said.
A reporter pressed Ms. Psaki on why the federal government would block a traveler from entering at an airport without a COVID-19 test or quarantine procedures, but does not apply that same rule to migrants who break the law to jump the border.
“Well, again, I can just describe to you what our policies are,” the spokeswoman replied.
The White House has changed its version of events over the weeks. Originally Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the process was for ICE to test everyone.
Ms. Psaki last week said their policy was actually for “COVID-19 testing to be done at the state and local level and with the help of NGOs and local governments.”
But thousands of migrants have still been released without any testing, said Sheriff A.J. Louderback in Jackson County, Texas. He said Ms. Psaki was misleading the public.
“The lying is starting to bother me,” he said. “This whole piece of criminal and irresponsible government needs to be stopped, one way or the other. Either with public pressure or legal means.”
There are five broad categories of border jumpers at this point.
The first is migrants who can be expelled under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s coronavirus pandemic health order, which the Trump administration issued and the Biden team has kept in place.
The second is migrants who had been mired in Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, which the Biden team did cancel.
Some 25,000 people who were part of MPP are now in the process of being admitted. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) is overseeing COVID testing of those folks in Mexico, and migrants are only supposed to show up for admittance once they’re in the clear.
A third group consists of the unaccompanied minors, who are supposed to be quickly transferred from Customs and Border Protection to the federal Health and Human Services Department. Dona Abbott, senior advisor at Bethany Christian Services, which helps resettle the children, said during a virtual event hosted by the National Immigration Forum that the children are entering at a rate of about 435 a day.
The children have overwhelmed CBP, leaving thousands stuck in border processing facilities longer than the legal limit of three days.
A fourth group of migrants is those who jump the border, aren’t expelled, and are processed by ICE. They are mostly families, and they are being tested and, if positive for COVID, quarantined. A senior ICE official told The Times they are able to process 80 to 100 a day.
A fifth group — again mostly families — is being caught and released at the border without testing by the government.
Some of those, particularly in Texas, are being tested by local governments and nonprofits such as Mr. Reagan’s shelter.
But not all.
In Cochise County, Arizona, migrants are being dropped at a Texaco, a Walmart and a Safeway. In Yuma County, it was a Jack in the Box restaurant.
Both U.S. officials and nonprofit group leaders said families are being released because Mexico has limited its cooperation in recent weeks. Mexican authorities will no longer accept back families with children ages 6 and under.
“Those families, we’re getting between approximately 500 and 800 every single day,” Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, said during the National Immigration Forum’s virtual event.
Sister Pimentel’s organization is doing the testing for McAllen, one of the major population centers in deep southern Texas.
She and her team have not responded to repeated inquiries from The Times over the last two weeks about her operations and the COVID positivity rate for the migrants she is receiving.
In Brownsville, another major city, Communications Director Felipe Romero said they’ve tested 1,700 migrants as of Tuesday, and 204 tested positive. That works out to a 12% rate.
The most recent week of March 4 through March 9, however, was lower, with a 9.25% positive rate.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke
- By Godstud
- By Doug64