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Remember the COVID lockdowns, when billions of school children were confined to their rooms not so much because there was a reasonable suspicion that they were positive, or because they would be competing for ICU beds if infected, but frankly because their freedom was a price the adults were willing to pay to delay the spread of the disease a bit while keeping the economy going?
Contrast with the Hantavirus. Now, I am emphatically not saying that the MV Hondius should have be dealt with using Hegseth's patented double-tap method, even though the utilitarian case seems a bit stronger than for most of his other targets due to tail risks.
But it seems to me that the Hondius should be a Dutch problem, as it is sailing under the Dutch flag. Now, if the Netherlands had cut a deal with Spain to quarantine the people aboard the ship in Tenerife, or even to fly them back to the Netherlands in a charted plane, that would still seem reasonable. Instead, it was apparently decided that the potentially infected people are the problem of their respective states, and they were quickly repatriated (apart from the crew, which is mostly quarantined in Rotterdam because the Philippines were unwilling to just charter a plane to allow their countrymen the luxury of being quarantined on their home soil).
Now, I am an utilitarian. Out of about 200 people on that ship, three have died (so far -- at least another is in 'serious condition'). Without bothering to search for the ages of the victims, let's call it 60 life-years lost (but feel free to refute that). Arbitrarily, let's decide that a life in quarantine has a quality factor of 0.5 (because half the people like Netflix and half would prefer biking instead). Locking up ~200 people for about six weeks each might thus cause a loss of 12 QALYs. The point being that even without considering the the potential for superspreaders, a quarantine would seem proportional.
Yes, containing the cruise ship outbreak would not stop a pandemic if the strain is pandemic-grade, as it is likely endemic in Argentina. However, I do not think this refutes its purpose. You might as well say "sooner or later, that naive tourist walking through the slums will get murdered for his wallet by someone, so I might as well stab him right now".
Culture war angle: different countries are going to handle the quarantine slightly differently:
vs MAHA:
Currently, while some people near me claim that this will be the next pandemic, I am taking the fifth until Scott publishes one of his trademark 'much more than you wanted to know' articles. Long incubation period and high mortality (in humans -- the cute little rodents are fine!) certainly form a nice basis if it evolves to be more transmittable between humans. Of course, the WHO tells us that everything is fine, but these are basically the same people who told us that masks will not prevent COVID. (And the perspective of the other side is not very helpful either -- I would sooner take military advice from Hegseth than I would take medical advice from Kennedy.) On Polymarket, a Hantavirus pandemic in 2026 trades at around 10%. This is obviously limited by the usual effects -- even if you believe that the probability is zero, 10% gain over seven months or so is not that great of a return of investment. It would be useful if there were pandemic bonds traded on the open market (so one could compare their prices to what they are usually), but from what I can tell there are none.
I don't, because that isn't what happened. Certainly, we shouldn't have closed down schools; I think it was an extremely irrational thing to do which will prove to have had lasting negative repercussions on a generation of children. But the reason we did so wasn't because of a cynical desire to boost the economy at all costs, but rather because people were panicking about the virus and were desperate that Something Be Done. Many, many people were completely unwilling to consider any course of action except for the maximally safe one, and so we closed down the schools even though I don't think there was ever a significant risk to leaving them open.
Eh, schools were most likely going to close regardless of what people wanted. Staffing shortages were happening nationwide during COVID. Without enough bus drivers, you can't get kids to school. Without the teachers, they just sit in the auditorium on their phones after being shuffled around from overpacked classrooms (real story I remember reading in like mid 2021). Without the cafeteria workers, they can't make enough lunch. Not enough maintenance workers means things breaking. Etc etc.
Staff shortages were so bad that some school districts were going back to remote learning at least as late as Jan 2022. And even in Mar 2022, multiple states were deploying the national guard to work as substitutes. Some areas were even taking police officers off the beat in order to work as substitutes.
It's easy to say in retrospect "we should have opened the schools" but it wasn't easy at the time. Even the schools and states that were trying to reopen kept having to fall back to remote or fail somehow else.
The things you identify would be a change in US culture. And particular blue state third-worldism. Florida reopened their schools in the fall. I agree closing the schools for the spring semester probably had to happen. Too many older teachers and figuring out how to give some people an out. The staff shortages are just the same issues blue states always have. They fail at providing public goods.
Nobody is saying in “retrospect”. Many states did reopen. Many people said as it was happening that we should open the schools. Or at a minimum some form of hybrid to accommodate some staff with immune issues.
Greg Abbott had created a task force specifically about their staff shortages in Texas in 2022. In Oklahoma, they used employees across various state agencies as substitutes.. In Iowa many schools have moved to (and many are still at!) four day school weeks. And here's a story from 2024 about Florida still dealing with staff shortages of teachers, bus drivers and substitutes.
In specifically Florida, the shortages were so bad that they had to draw substitutes from non traditional sources. One district even emailed the parents asking for them to step in as substitute workers. Some shortages are still ongoing! Like last year some parents were dealing with delays in school bus pickups due to shortages of workers
Sûre, there’s a shortage of school workers- but there’s also a general labor shortage, and schools don’t pay exceptionally well(especially in non-teacher roles, school maintenance and driving and nursing roles pay much much less relative to skill set and qualifications than teaching does). That doesn’t distinguish schools from thousands of other things that did reopen on time.
Well some things are better at reopening under capacity than others. A hardware store might be able to handle 3/4th the workers by just letting some tasks go undone and having customers not served as fast. But a school with 3/4th the teachers means classrooms getting crowded, and especially with younger children who are gonna be more rowdy and energetic in general, harder to control. Likewise 3/4th the cafeteria crew and all of a sudden you don't have enough food being made in time for the children or food safety requirements aren't being met. If it's not too bad, you can get away with just telling the few kids at the end "sorry we out of X, gotta have Y" but it doesn't have too much leniency. Schools are still making up for staff shortages in this way. Large bus driver shortages mean kids don't get to school but the smaller bus driver shortages just mean some kids get to school 40 minutes later.
But still there's only so much that can be worked with, especially when dealing with the young children and legal requirements that politicians were hesitant to change over temporary issues, that during the height of COVID they just didn't have much choice.
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