“I’m Just a Very Bad Wizard”
For two years, officials acted as if they were all-knowing and could steer society towards a zero-COVID outcome. All we have done is further harmed education, particularly poor and minorities kids.
In August 1939, the timeless classic movie The Wizard of Oz was released. It was one of the more technologically advanced movies of its day, making full use of Technicolor to cause the Emerald City, and Yellow Brick Road, and Dorothy’s ruby slippers to jump off the screen. Few of today’s teenagers have seen the entire film. However, it remains culturally relevant through the many phrases still in use today. These include, “follow the Yellow Brick Road”, “somewhere over the rainbow”, “the Wicked Witch is dead” and “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Dorothy and her three companions (Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion) approach the ominous Wizard of Oz, each asking for something they believe the Wizard can provide them. Unlike her three friends, Dorothy just wants her life to go back to normal by returning to Kansas. The seemingly omnipotent Wizard of Oz claims he will give them what they seek if they first accomplish the dangerous task of obtaining the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Government officials and drug companies, too, have promised us a return to normal if only we do what they say. First it was just two weeks of lockdown to “bend the curve.” This gave way to wearing masks and social distancing to “protect the most vulnerable” until vaccines could be developed. Once available, we were all to do our “patriotic duty” by getting vaccinated. Then came boosters. Some believed in their knowledge while others were simply complied in search of a normal life for their families and a return of personal liberties. Still others just needed to keep their jobs.
Spoiler Alert: The Wizard’s power was just an illusion. For us, Omicron has made it quite clear there is no formula that stops the spread of COVID-19. It will stop when it is done with us. Vaccines and therapies have done an admirable job protecting the most vulnerable from severe outcomes but everything beyond that is now clearly a charade. That charade has done far too much damage to our schools.
Israel has now started to concede
Israel has been at the forefront of global COVID prevention throughout the pandemic. With a relatively small population, a technology-based industry, and strong central government, Israel swiftly implemented programs and controls other governments could only marvel at. They were quick to embrace and deploy the mRNA vaccine from Pfizer. A majority of their population was fully vaccinated four months before the United States, where most vaccines were developed. It approved booster doses (3rd shot) amidst the Delta wave last summer, long before most countries. All along, it was studying the virus and providing some of the most reliable (and transparent) scientific data to the world. They even shut their borders immediately after Omicron was discovered, delaying the variant’s arrival. A funny thing happened this week. Israel achieved the highest COVID rate of all major countries on Monday. Proportionally speaking, Israelis are contracting COVID at a rate twice that of the US.
Proving that lockdowns, at best, only delay the inevitable, COVID is infecting Israelis at an average daily rate of 4,440 per 100,000 people, a level major developed countries have never seen. Only Gibraltar briefly eclipsed that level earlier this month. Gibraltar is famously the most vaccinated place on the planet (exceeding 100% due to people from across the border into the British territory for vaccination). The graph above shows rate of infection for several key countries. Israel is at the top in pink. Interestingly, the countries with infection rates higher than the US all have higher vaccination rates as well. That is not supposed to happen. Highly vaccinated places are supposed to have low case rates or at least that is what our “omnipotent” officials told us.
Israel is now admitting they have no special recipe to keep the virus at bay. They just conceded that additional boosters (4th shot) are ‘not good enough’ against Omicron. This comes just as the World Health Organization (WHO) says that there is no evidence kids benefit from boosters. In the words of their chief scientist, “There is no evidence right now that healthy children or healthy adolescents need boosters. No evidence at all.”
Israeli Professor Cyrille Cohen sits on the advisory committee for vaccines for the Israeli Government. He recently gave a rather candid interview, reflecting on where all their pronouncements have gotten the country. Professor Cohen openly admitted that vaccines have failed to stop the spread of the virus as was originally expected. In his words, “we were surprised to discover at the end of the day that the vaccines are not protecting us.” He recognizes the benefit of protection vaccines provide from reducing severe outcomes, particularly against the Delta strain. At the same time, he concedes they do virtually nothing to protect against infection or the spread of the virus. Professor Cohen’s biggest regret is the toll lockdowns and other measures have had on education.
We say the words “kids are our future” but our actions say otherwise
Almost from the beginning of the pandemic we have known that children are the least likely to be harmed by the virus. Within six months research showed schools to be one of the least likely places for the virus SARS-CoV-2 to spread. For the last six months we have had the data confirming cloth masks are useless in stopping the spread of the virus and that surgical masks have a small benefit if properly sized and tightly worn. Even left-leaning media outlets have complained that school mask policies lacked a scientific foundation. On January 14th, the CDC revised its guidance on masks to reflect this. Yet, when a newly elected governor says masking is now the parent’s choice, he is defied by school districts and harassed by the White House. All the while, no one says a word as sports fans yell and scream unmasked in tight quarters at an indoor stadium.
Your typical NFL fan in their forties is 60 times more likely to die from COVID than an elementary school kid.
That was before Omicron, which is making kids under 5 sicker because they can’t be vaccinated, right? At least that is the narrative. It is true that hospitalizations spiked for a week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Those numbers began dropping once we got into January. The rate of kids ending up in the hospital from COVID-19 has always been quite low, roughly 1/5th the rate compared to their parents and 1/20th the rate compared to their grandparents. One by one states are admitting that most cases, which are counted as COVID hospitalizations, are actually people in the hospital for other reasons who had no symptoms and simply tested positive upon admission. Against this backdrop, Case Western Reserve University looked carefully at whether Omicron is somehow making things worse. They found just the opposite. Kids under 5 years old were 5 times less likely to go to the ER with Omicron than had been the case just a few months before with Delta.
School closures are far from harmless
It is now entirely clear that society projecting its fears on kids has done only one thing: it has further weakened their education. Nowhere is this better seen than in California, which ranks last in days kids have spent in the classroom in the 2020-2021 school year. The average kid there spent 20% of their time last school year in person. Californians are complaining that lockdowns and virtual learning have further set kids back.
Even before the pandemic, education in the US was nothing to write home about. Most students were at least one grade level behind in math and reading. That statistic doesn’t speak to the plight of minority students or kids from low-income households. These groups have chronically been on the lower end of a bad spectrum. Nationwide, the US Department of Education can’t say how bad things are because, according to them, kids weren’t in school enough to test last year.
Thankfully, private companies responsible for tests are telling us what they are seeing. Curriculum Associates (CA) reported on what percentage of students read and do math at their grade level coming into the 2021-2022 academic year. A green rank represents students testing at grade level. Historically, less than a third do so. Yellow ranking is one grade behind, and red is two or more grades behind. Let’s focus just on this worst category (red). Historically by 3rd grade roughly 30% of students have fallen into the red. By 8th grade, it is not uncommon for 45% of the student population to be into this category on reading. The same is true for math. These historical patterns are shown in the grey bars in the graphs below (Reading in the top graph, Math in the lower one). The red bars extending lower shows how many more students fell into this unfortunate category in the past year. Keeping kids out of school, and pretending that virtual learning is adequate, has caused roughly 5% more elementary students to fall at least two grades behind in reading while an additional 10% of students fell behind in math. Grades 2 through 6 were hit the hardest.
Keep mind these are just averages. Some groups had less of a slide while others fell further behind. Not surprisingly, it correlates with income and minority status. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co took this CA study and analyzed it further from this disparity angle. Across all groups (green, yellow, and red) kids fell 3.5 months further behind on math and 3 months on reading from school closures and virtual learning. But the outcomes weren’t even across groups of students. The graph below shows how much more some kids were harmed by pandemic measures compared to others.
Everyone dropped back. It is just that poor kids, minority students, and inner-city schools took the brunt of it. This is on top of a sizable racial and economic disparity prior to COVID-19.
The single most important thing we can do for minority students and low-income communities is to get kids back into school. We should keep classes going in person no matter how many cases of Omicron the country might have at any given time. In fact, we should go further. It is time we have the conversation between parents and schools: is testing and quarantining even warranted anymore? For sure, if you have symptoms stay home, whether that is COVID, the flu, or anything else. Beyond that, we should want everyone learning in person as much as possible.
In Conclusion
Having done everything that the all-knowing Wizard of Oz asked of them, Dorothy and her three companions appeared a second time before him, broomstick in hand, looking for their wishes to finally be granted. He refused to help Dorothy get her life back to normal. That is when her little dog Toto pulled back the curtain to reveal a mere man using pronouncements, technology, and misdirection to intimidate the masses. Dorothy accuses him of being a bad man to which he replies, “Oh, no my dear, I am a very good man. I am just a very bad wizard.”
I have no interest in commenting on the character of government officials or executives at pharmaceutical companies. I’ll be charitable and presume they are all good men and women, but they are hardly wizards. Omnipotent they are not. This virus will be done with us when it has run its course. We are at the point that every at-risk person in developed counties who wants a vaccine has access to one. Omicron has shown itself to be mild and able to push Delta aside. It is time to stop the charade that we can do anything more.
If officials are serious about returning us to normal and investing in our future (our children), they must prioritize in-person education, regardless of case counts. They have proven themselves to be very bad wizards. At least, they could redeem themselves as capable administrators.
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