Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for July 21, 2020

Why Florida Teachers Are Suing the Governor
Also, the worst coronavirus relief idea yet

 

Public schools in Florida are set to open as soon as August 10. (Alex
Menendez via AP)

First Response

Last Friday the governor of Missouri, Mike Parson, told a right-wing
radio host that coronavirus would infect children and we all just have
to put up with it. "If they do get COVID-19, which they will," Parson
said
,
"they're going to go home and they're going to get over it."

The nonchalance of this comment reinforces the impression of the
Republican Party as a literal death cult. Not only do children suffer
serious injury, and yes, die, from the virus, but as Parson appears not
entirely aware, kids don't teach themselves. And teachers and school
personnel aren't as sanguine as the Governor of Missouri of being
marched into a contagious environment and playing the equivalent of
Russian roulette.

The flashpoint for this is Florida, where yesterday state and national
teachers unions filed suit

to block Governor Ron DeSantis' executive order reopening public
schools. School districts in the state begin classes as early as August
10, and teachers must report a week earlier. So this is a last-minute
effort to prevent a public health disaster.

"Teachers are scared, they have a high trepidation of going back into
school buildings, given that Florida is the epicenter," said Fedrick
Ingram, president of the Florida Education Association, one of the
plaintiffs in the lawsuit. "We can't make our schools vectors for the
virus, infecting parents and multi-generational families at home. Our
goal is to not open schools, it's to keep schools open."

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Florida educators have a leg up in this case, because the state
Constitution states explicitly that "[a]dequate provision shall be made
by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system
of free public schools." The words "safe and secure" are paramount here,
requiring the Governor and the Commissioner of Education institute
policies meet that standard, the lawsuit explains
. And
they have not done anything close to that.

"The only thing the [DeSantis] executive order says is that there will
be a brick-and-mortar option five days a week," Ingram told the
Prospect. No guidelines and certainly no money for social distancing
policies have been included. If you need to cut class sizes in half to
allow children to be separated from teachers, will there be money to
hire twice as many teachers? Or give overtime to the existing ones to
double their workday?

That's just the beginning. No testing and tracing regime has been
instituted. No money for PPE has been allotted. No decisions have been
made on band or chorus rehearsals, recess, or assemblies. If a teacher
gets sick and needs to quarantine for 14 days, there's no
understanding of whether they would get their job back. Air conditioning
within the schools, a critical issue in Florida, that recirculate air
would need to be altered. Buses would either have to run twice as much
or with twice as many drivers hired. "I can go through a myriad of
issues and we can talk into tomorrow," Ingram said. Yet no money has
been put toward this purpose, in a state that has historically
underfunded its schools.

Reopened schools in several countries around the world have generally
led to decent results, although that's not universal. In Israel,
schools had to be shut

two weeks after opening after outbreaks raged through them, and new
studies show

children over age 10 can spread the virus as efficiently as adults.
Critically, most countries getting back to school have low and
decreasing levels of the virus, the opposite of what we see in Florida,
which has registered 10,000 new cases every day for the last two weeks.
The initial CDC guidelines on reopening generally call for a 14-day drop
in cases.

The case, which has the support of the American Federation of Teachers
and the National Education Association, includes several Florida
teachers. One, Ladara Royal, is a young African American man with
asthma, who according to Ingram would leave the profession if forced to
go back to work. Another, Stefanie Beth Miller, spent 21 days on a
ventilator in a medically induced coma from COVID-19. A third, Mindy
Festge, has an immunosuppressed son that she's keeping out of high
school, and doesn't want to bring the virus home to him.

"We're forcing these parents and teachers to make lifelong decisions,"
Ingram said. "We have other teachers making out their wills because they
have to go back to school." He noted that the state started last
academic year with over 3,000 classrooms without a certified teacher.
That shortage is sure to increase at a time when more would be needed to
properly social distance.

The lawsuit calls for emergency relief to protect the first wave of
teachers and students set to enter schools in just a couple weeks. A
state where over 17,000 children have already contracted the virus would
be home to a grisly and uncertain experiment unless the DeSantis order
is stopped. The consequences of not opening schools are tragic for
students who might fall behind and parents needing to concentrate on
work during the day. But the consequences of creating thousands of death
traps is worse.

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America's Worst Idea

We're days from the end of expanded unemployment, and Republicans have
managed to find the perfect solution: help the working instead of those
out of work. That's the payroll tax cut idea

insisted upon by President Trump. But now it gets unbelievably worse:
the plan is not necessarily a tax cut, but a tax deferral, meaning that
the payroll tax on employees would be lifted for now and owed later,
unless Congress waives that requirement.

I can't think of a more catastrophic policy. It would either force
people to prepare for paying back the government by hording cash in the
middle of a downturn, defeating the entire purpose of pulling more money
into the economy; or people would spend it without knowing they'd have
to pay it back, and then you have created mass amounts of debt during a
downturn that people can't handle. And the sword of Damocles would
stay over the head of every salaried worker until the next Congress,
giving Republicans likely to be in the minority in the Senate filibuster
power over a tax hike on hundreds of millions of people that they would
then blame on Democrats.

Messing with payroll taxes is a terrible idea that diverts relief away
from those who actually need it. But you can always count on making a
terrible idea worse, I guess.

Monopolized

Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power releases today, and you
can learn more about it and pick up your copy here
.
Tomorrow I will go into why the pandemic has made the themes of the book
more, not less, urgent.

Yesterday I was on The Majority Report with Sam Seder
talking about the book;
listen here .

(RIP Michael Brooks
,
so sorry for the Majority Report family.)

Also thanks to The Damage Report with John Iadarola
for having me on to
discuss it. You can watch that here
.

Support Independent, Fact-Checked Journalism

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

116
.
We did however get the third report

of the Congressional Oversight Commission, which explains how the "Main
Street Lending Program" has issued one loan, the municipal bond facility
has issued... one loan (at a time of crisis for state and local
government), and the Fed and Treasury are content with those numbers
because they see their programs as a last resort. This feature did not
extend to corporate bond purchases, which they Fed said they had to do
to "maintain credibility." So the bazooka is being inconsistently
operated, with the largest companies getting the greatest benefit.

Bharat Ramamurti, one of the commission members, also announced
that
there would be a hearing on the Main Street Lending Program "in the
coming days." So maybe this fruitless search for an oversight chair
really is fruitless. Maybe the bailout oversight chair is the friends
you make along the way.

We Can't Do This Without You

Today I Learned

* Oh good we get a presidential briefing today
,
that'll help. (Axios)

* The Trump mask tweet was about four months too late
.
(CNN)

* A Trumpville emerges in Oklahoma

of people camped out in line for unemployment assistance. (Washington
Post)

* The EU sets a $857 billion relief package
;
this is a continent that has largely contained the virus. (New York
Times)

* Testing capacity will falter in the fall
during
flu season. (Financial Times)

* An economy with mass wage cuts

doesn't sound like one where high unemployment compensation is a
disincentive to work. (Politico)

* Vaccines are moving forward
,
and Derek Thompson talked me off the ledge

on the notion that their strength would fade. (The Atlantic)

* For some reason the only movie Hollywood really cares about getting
into theaters is Christopher Nolan's "Tenet," and now it's postponed
indefinitely
.
(Wall Street Journal)

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