57. IT’S HARD TO FOLLOW THE LOGIC ON COVID 19 - Though It's A Little Easier If You Follow The Money
I really don’t want this whole blog to become just about Covid 19. However, when charged with the task of thinking philosophically about the world and applying philosophy to everyday life, the world and everyday life these days seems to be overwhelmingly about how we are handling life with this virus.
There are some other things going on, of course. Waking this morning to the news that Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died, and that Mitch McConnell is contradicting his 2016 stance that a sitting President so near to a General Election should not nominate a Supreme Court replacement until the election result is clear, gives an opportunity to take a break from the coronavirus and point out the obvious logical inconsistencies with his position. But I fear to do so is a bit of an own goal. Either he was right then, or he is right now. If he was right then, and we ought to wait until after the election is settled for the newly elected President to make the nomination, then the Democrats were wrong in 2016 and argued only the opposite for their own dishonest political expediency. If, as we all know, he was wrong then, and it was instead McConnell arguing dishonestly in 2016 for his own political expediency, then all we can do now if truth and justice is our goal is agree with both McConnell now and the argument we made then that the current, sitting President has the right to nominate RBG’s replacement, awful as that is to acknowledge. Whoever wins, we lose, to coin the old Alien vs Predator slogan.
So, much as I would like to stray from Covid 19 and talk about something else, the options seem limited for me in a week that has been very much about the coronavirus. The town where I live, after all, was placed under a new “local lockdown” on Tuesday due to a rising number of cases in the area, and the UK as a whole faced the new “rule of six” restrictions on how many people we can mix with. Meanwhile, by Friday, Boris Johnson was acknowledging the need for further restrictions as he admitted we appear to be facing a “second wave” of the virus across the country. Infections have leapt, predictably, in the weeks since schools returned. And in my own school we ended the week without a Sixth Form as one student’s positive Covid 19 result meant everyone they could have possibly infected had to self-isolate too.
Sort of…
It’s hard to be a philosopher, thinking logically, analysing arguments, and live in these ridiculous times. Our school’s policy, as per the local Council, seems actually to be to send the year “bubble” home who may have come into contact with the infected student but not, bizarrely, the teachers who also may have come into contact not just with the person with the positive test but all the other students now potentially infected too. If we operate on the assumption
1) that the ability for a person with Covid 19 to infect others around them is so high that those who have come into contact with an infected person must self-isolate to avoid infecting anyone else,
then we must also accept that this assumption entails another:
2) that any of those sent home to self-isolate could, until a negative Covid 19 test result is obtained, also be infected with the virus.
But 2) entails:
3) if 1) is true, then any of the self-isolating students have just as much potential to infect others as the initial “patient zero” and therefore anyone they have come into contact with also ought to self-isolate until a negative Covid 19 test result is obtained.
Etc.
In theory, if we follow the logic, a student in one year bubble being infected ought to lead to the whole bubble and their teachers being sent home to self-isolate. As well as anyone else any of them have come into contact with. As, in a secondary school, specialist teachers teach across bubbles, then this has a dramatic domino affect, if the principle were being followed seriously. I, for example, taught and am the form tutor of several students sent home because of close proximity to the infected student even before the whole year bubble was sent home. Since that lesson and morning registration with my form I taught Year 8, Year 10, Year 11 and Year 7, potentially infecting at least one student in each bubble who could, in theory, infect others within their bubble, who could infect others still. And that’s just me. I also, of course, interacted with other teachers teaching other classes who I might have infected too and they, therefore, might pass on the virus to other classes and year groups across the school.
The precautionary and preventative logic on which the self-isolation of the first group is based, if followed to its conclusions, should lead to much of the entire school being sent home, students and staff alike. It could lead to the whole school being closed.
Unless, of course, we had other protective measures in place. If these “bubbles” were secure then only the bubble would be affected. I have already shown how the teacher, teaching across bubbles, might spread infection from one bubble to the next, making them not a bubble at all, but even that could be prevented were certain other protective measures in place. A teacher could safely pass from bubble to bubble if:
Social distancing were maintained within the classroom
Masks were worn by all students and the teacher where social distancing was not possible
All rooms were properly ventilated
At least a 2m distance were maintained between students and the teacher
But as the government gave no extra space or funding to schools, even the Department for Education has conceded social distancing in classrooms will be impossible. Small rooms, often in old school buildings, were a tight fit for 30 students even before Covid 19. As the government dictated that schools had to reopen fully and could not open on a rota system, this meant already squashed schools had no choice but to stuff the 30 students into the same small classrooms that barely contained them before. They may be “facing the front” and not facing each other in groups, but there is not a metre, let alone two, between them (to have that would mean doubling or tripling the classroom size). And while a 2m guaranteed distance between students and the teacher is a nice idea in theory, in practice, again with no funding to make these changes logistically feasible, most classrooms have their IT and whiteboard provision hardwired into a particular and unmovable spot in the room. If it is to be worth our students’ time to be physically in school, and to avoid having to pass around pieces of paper, a teacher’s IT capacity should be at least as good, if not better, in school than it was at home during the period of remote learning. So to be able to access PowerPoints, registers, videos, and other electronic resources most teachers have to be positioned somewhere near the hardwired desks which can’t be easily moved. The combination of fitting 30 student desks in the room and ensuring the teacher can access the IT means in most classroom either the teacher has to pass through the student area to reach the desk, or the teacher’s desk is positioned directly in front of - and not 2m away from - the front row of students. All of this might be mitigated if masks or PPE were made mandatory, but the Department for Education have expressly stated that masks should not be worn in the classroom, only other communal areas of the school. While students and staff can choose to wear them, they cannot be made compulsory. So that option is out. While there are legitimate issues around teacher volume and being audible to the class if they are masked when teaching, that students could wear masks throughout should be an uncontroversial consequence of the lack of social distancing, as mask-wearing is supposed to be in every other shared indoor environment currently where social distancing is not possible. Many are choosing to wear them without issue. But the fact that not all are, and the teacher is not, does not make that bubble safe from potential teacher infection, or infection from the students to the teacher.
The lack of money for making old classrooms “Covid secure” also means there is no guarantee that a classroom has good ventilation to help the airflow and keep the room safe either. Many existing classrooms have windows that either don’t work or are painted shut, and doors which cannot stay open. Even having a doorstop for every classroom costs money and not every school and classroom has one, let alone two or three for when they get lost or stolen. Heavy fire doors are not designed to be propped open. Students also, complaining of the cold, often close windows or hide doorstops as they understandably put their short-term comfort ahead of their long-term health and safety. So we have students not wearing masks and not socially distanced, sitting closely together with a teacher, also not masked, and also not able to be a full 2m apart from them in rooms which are not always well-ventilated. The idea that an infected student is somehow less likely to infect a teacher than a classmate is preposterous, as is the idea that the teacher, then infected, won’t be able to pass it to the other year groups that they teach.
And all that is before we acknowledge how students mix bubbles outside the school gates, walking home with their younger or older siblings or sharing bus journeys together, or, because they are children and don’t always fully understand the consequence of their actions, sometimes even in school when the desire to see a friend in another year group, or convenience of a shorter route from A to B causes them to break from their bubble area and trespass into another bubble’s domain.
But to acknowledge the true extent of possible infection brings us back to the logic detailed above. The logic which would entail, in the instance of just one positive case of Covid 19, having to send most staff and students home and potentially closing the school.
Of course this could also be avoided, or at least limit the impact, if testing were quick, easy and available. All of the self-isolation is based on suspicion of infection. Confirming or denying that suspicion with a definitive test cuts out the guesswork and allows people to return to work or school quicker. But as we have seen in the UK these last few weeks, the testing is not available on the scale that is needed. Some are travelling 100 miles to their nearest test centre. Others are waiting days and days to get their results. Some results aren’t coming through at all, lost in the processing. The system is a national joke; the punchline embarrassingly global.
But it could also be avoided if we had a working tracing system too. While I can understand some people’s legitimate concerns about our mobile devices tracking our location and interactions at all times and sending that information to the state, the bluetooth handshake between devices, if sufficiently anonymised from a personal privacy standpoint, seems the most efficient way of letting us know if we were in the close vicinity of anyone positively tested for Covid 19. Other countries have a working system up and running (I am told weekly by my iPhone that I haven’t been in contact with anyone in Ireland currently testing positive for Covid 19, which makes sense; I am not in Ireland). Rather than the guesswork that one student in one year bubble may have infected everyone in it, and their teachers; and that the teachers may have gone on to infect other bubbles and so on and so forth, we would know quite specifically which individuals were in the danger zone. If they could then self-isolate and get tested quickly, we would only have to send others home if any of their tests came back positive, and then only those with whom they had been in contact.
In a country with no testing, no tracing system, asking for full attendance in schools which have no capacity for social distancing between students or between the teacher and their students, little proper ventilation, and no requirement for mask wearing in the classroom, looking for logic in any Covid 19 protocols designed to keep the schools open is a fool’s game because the underlying premise of the whole endeavour is not really about keeping students and teachers safe, it is about keeping schools open. Because this is the organising principle around which any attempts to keep schools safe have been made, any time the logic of the argument for safety reaches the unavoidable conclusion that we should close a school, or all schools, that conclusion is ignored. On this premise many of the major stakeholders seem to be in agreement. The government, the Head Teachers, the teachers, the unions, the parents…all think schools must remain open or else a whole generation will fall behind in their education. I have talked extensively elsewhere about why this is false, at least in the sense of physical schools being kept open. There is no reason that remote teaching, done properly, with proper infrastructural support in the form of high speed broadband and computing devices provided free for all who need them, and buy-in from all parties - teachers and students alike - cannot be as good, if not better, than the education received in school. Nor is there any reason why a blend of mainly remote learning, with occasional in-person sessions, spaced out, socially distanced and done safely, when (and only when) needed couldn’t be done effectively if properly planned for. But absolutely no effort has been put into planning such a curriculum or approach to education in this country, despite the clear likelihood as soon as Covid 19 started spreading that we would be heading for radical changes across the world for at least a year or two as we await a vaccine.
While safeguarding concerns regarding vulnerable children have been used as an argument for schools to stay open, it was shown at the start of Covid 19 that “closing schools” does not actually have to mean closing them to all. Those who truly need to be somewhere other than home, being a minority of students, can safely come to school if they are closed to everybody else, just as a rota of fewer staff than a full school requires to run could supervise them and provide one-on-one support safely. Meanwhile, for those who don’t attend, or don’t engage in the remote learning, social services or those educators in pastoral roles can still monitor and visit just as effectively at home as they currently do in schools. Probably they can offer better support, rather than limited behavioural sanctions, with dedicated focus on these students instead of juggling their welfare against all the other pressures of time in the day-to-day operation of a busy school.
A transformation of the role of the physical school building and of how we provide social welfare would be perfectly possible and sustainable long-term if our concern with school closures was really the vulnerable children. But we know this is not the real motivation for keeping schools open (if they government cared about the vulnerable children there are many other ways they could help make them less vulnerable long before they even get to school). The government have been quite explicit on this from the very first guidance they gave on school re-opening when the Department for Education said “For many households, school closures have also affected their ability to work. As the economy begins to recover, we need to remove this barrier so parents and carers can return to work.”
We can’t close the schools because we want the parents to go to work, and they can’t go to work if they have to stay home with their kids.
Except, again, they could if their jobs could be done remotely, which many could be but the government spent much of the last month encouraging those remote workers to return unnecessarily to offices again. The reason being, much of our economy has been built around fulfilling the created needs of the commuting worker. The sandwich and coffee shops people used to need for their sustenance throughout the working day were finding themselves without customers. The high street was becoming a ghost town. If I don’t have to leave the house to go to work, I don’t browse the shop windows I pass on my way to the office and get advertised to. I can eat what’s in the fridge and drink what comes out of the tap. I can save my money and buy less. All of which is a serious problem in a parasitic economy such as ours. Because we are not given a universal basic income, we are forced to work for a living, and many of our jobs rely on exploiting a consumer by creating a false need which only our business can fulfil. But as we saw in March, when everything but the most essential businesses were closed, most of the businesses, and therefore the jobs, we can actually do without. Rather than acknowledge that - which would mean having to restructure our entire world - the government is determined to force everybody back into inessential and, as we are increasingly seeing, dangerous jobs so we can get back to that old “normal” as quickly as possible (despite absolutely nothing changing with the coronavirus, its ability infect, its potential deadliness, or the lack of a vaccine in the time between the first national lockdown and the country’s re-opening which would make it any safer to do now than it was in March).
Imagine: if parents didn’t need to work then the kids could learn at home. Or, imagine something a little less radical: we could keep schools open if, at any sign of illness, the kids could self-isolate for 7-14 days and get a Covid test and their parents would be paid their full wage during that time so that they could stay home too; the absence from school not costing them their job or leaving them unable to pay the bills. Instead, we have neither. We have parents who need to work or they will lose their homes, understandably feeling like they cannot afford to take 14 days off to self-isolate and get a test just because their child has picked up an Autumn cold during the start of a new term. This means those children come into their crowded school and the one in a hundred who may actually have the coronavirus instead of a common cold starts the infection dominoes falling. They and their peers are sent home, maybe a whole year group. The parent has to take the two weeks off anyway. Then the infections ramp up and more students and teachers are off self-isolating. The school has to close for a while and the parent has to take further time off…another parent who has done the same can’t afford to take it off a few months later when their kid comes down with a Winter cold…rinse and repeat.
It is the desire to sustain an unsustainable economy built on myths which the coronavirus continues to expose which is at the heart of all the twisted logic hurting our philosopher-brains right now. If schools and education were truly the priority, we would have already closed the pubs and restaurants where families might mix and come into contact with potentially infected strangers from different “bubbles” than their own. As the R number continued to rise, we would not limit mixing in our homes and gardens with close friends and families who make our lives richer and could provide the necessary childcare to ensure the school self-isolating protocols are followed, we would limit mixing in offices and town centres with people we neither want or need to see. The fact that right now, in a city supposedly in a strict “local lockdown”, my wife and I could not invite five safe and well friends or family members into our home, but we could, if we wanted to, go for a meal in a restaurant full of strangers, sit with more strangers for a few hours in a full cinema, and finish up with a quick pint at a busy pub, all after a day of teaching two hundred children from two hundred different families from around the city demonstrates that this is not an argument about safety from the coronavirus or health and wellbeing.
As a philosopher it’s hard to follow the logic around Covid policy because in many cases there simply isn’t any. There is only the illusion of logic. A symbolic nod to a vague sense of health and safety which doesn’t dare follow its own argument to a conclusion for fear of what that conclusion might say. At every turn in their legislation since March, the government have made it easier to see your boss and work colleagues than it is to see family members and friends from other households. This is because the real logic has never been about safety and wellbeing, but about maintaining the old economic order even as the redundancy of its model is made clear.
It is going to be a long academic year.
Author: DaN McKee
Buy my book - Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - HERE