Back-to-School

This is the first year in decades where I have not prepared for the back-to-school season: preparing technology services and software, training new faculty and staff, preparing to go back to my classroom. It is strange not only to witness the season from a distance, both in terms of time and geography, but to watch the strangest, most uncomfortable back-to-school season ever. Increasing that separation, my old school email account is finally being shut-down, too. As my former school's Director of Technology, my account was used to setup campus-wide hardware purchases, software subscriptions, DNS accounts, etc. So a year of untangling comes to an end.

To all the teachers, administrators, and school staffers out there – thank you. And with all sincerity, good luck. 

The above image is from a now-famous tweet by high-school sophomore Hannah Watters, of North Paulding High School (just west of Atlanta), in Georgia. Last week, the school re-opened, in spite of continuing community-spread of COVID-19, and against CDC guidelines (the CDC is located in Atlanta). On Tuesday Hannah tweeted her photograph of the crowded conditions and spotty use of facial masks, and was promptly suspended from school (though the suspension was 'revoked' by the end of the week). Hannah became something of a national hero when the tweet went viral, then, she gave an interview on CNN and invoked Georgia Congressman John Lewis:

I'd like to say that this is some good and necessary trouble. So, I don't regret posting this because it needed to be said.

As the image and news spread last week, more stories followed indicating that students and staff were being tested, that teachers and staff were interacting before classes while symptomatic, and that members of the football team had already tested positive for coronavirus. Students who tried to change their 'learning option' from 'in-person' to 'online' were told they could not switch. Today we learn that there has indeed been an outbreak of COVID-19 at that high school.

This morning, the US passed five million cases of coronavirus. Of those cases, forty percent are from just five states: the four most populous states (California, Texas, Florida, New York) and Georgia. In a sharp opinion piece in The Atlantic, health-writer Amanda Mull places significant blame on Georgia's Governor, Brian Kemp – "America's Authoritarian Governor":

[Kemp] has continued to double down on the state’s approach to the virus in ways that mirror not just Trump, but authoritarian leaders overseeing poorly controlled outbreaks all over the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi. He has also taken a more hard-line stance than most of his Republican peers. GOP governors in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas have implemented statewide mask rules in response to worsening outbreaks, and others who haven’t, such as Ron DeSantis in Florida and Doug Ducey in Arizona, have still allowed cities and counties to enforce their own local requirements. Not only has Kemp repeatedly refused to require masks in Georgia, but the state’s current pandemic emergency order was written with an explicit restriction to prevent local leaders from implementing their own mask rules.

Inciting this bad decision-making is President Trump, who claims that children are 'immune' from coronavirus, and insists that schools re-open:

My view is the schools should open. This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away and my view is schools should be open. If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely, but almost — immune from this disease.

As if on cue, health experts are lately reporting increased infections in children; and in Georgia, a seven year-old child died just as schools re-opened. Meanwhile Barron Trump's private school is not re-opening, following the orders of the Health Officer of Montgomery County, in Maryland.

Back on June 20, I posted a comparison between the US-EU and Georgia-Portugal. At the time, the graphs in scale, looked very much alike. Now Georgia looks so much worse than the rest of the US, and Portugal actually looks somewhat better than the rest of the EU. Had I been able to keep the Y-axis of the 'GA-PT' graph near 1700, as it was in late June, the two pairs might looks more alike, or at least have the same aspect ratio. The fact that I've had to increase the GA-PT's Y-axis four-fold just highlights the situation in Georgia.

In early April, the US and EU were both averaging around thirty thousand cases per day. The US average rose all the way through June and July and has just started to drop in August to under sixty thousand – so less than twice the rate from four months ago. The EU's rate stayed flat just under five thousand per day, from May through July, and is just now seeing an uptick to ten thousand per day – so about one-third the average compared to early April.

In early April, Georgia and Portugal were both averaging around eight hundred cases per day. Georgia's rate, after mid-June, rose steeply to the thirty-seven hundred, and has only recently trended downward to about thirty-three hundred – so four times the rate from early April. Portugal's average stayed flat in the high three hundreds through June and July, but is now well under two hundred – so almost one-fifth the average compared to four months ago.

Today, Georgia reports 216,596 total cases and 4,199 deaths; that's now four times as many cases as Portugal. Georgia's seven-day average for new cases is hovering at 3,345.6 per day; that's nearly twenty times the average in Portugal (172.1). Georgia's seven-day average for deaths is steady at 51.3 per day; that's also almost twenty times the rate in Portugal (2.6).

cases: 19,929,621 global • 5,167,701 USA • 52,668 Portugal

deaths: 731,845 global • 165,274 USA • 1,756 Portugal

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UPDATE: North Paulding High School is resuming with online classes only for at least two days for while facilities are cleaned and disinfected.