Politicizing a Pandemic
"The conditions before me today, other than the impact to health, do not cause fear in me. For the consequences associated with doing the right thing, whatever that right thing is, I will wear proudly with a badge of honour.""I'm going to go to my own school board meeting and I'm going to do that which is right, rightful and righteous."Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, Miami-Dade County Public Schools
 |
| Quartz |
The third largest number of new coronavirus infections last week fell to the state of Florida. Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order meant to bar local officials from mandating mask wearing in the state's school system and elsewhere. Mask-wearing, declared the Republican governor, represented a personal choice not o be imposed by authorities, but one that parents of students should decide for themselves on a one-by-one basis.
The Florida Board of Education voted unanimously that Broward and Alachua counties should be punished for having mandated masks in their schools, directly defying the governor's order. As such they represent the first to be 'punished' though to date no actions have been taken against them. COVID-19 deaths in the United States have seen a five-month high, despite which state and local authorities continue to spar over requirements of mask-wearing in the face of the highly contagious Delta coronavirus strain's wide reach.
Approval from the Miami-Dade County Public Schools motivated Superintendent Carvalho, requiring the district's 360,000 students to wear face coverings despite Governor DeSantis' ban on such mandates. Measures to exempt those students with medical needs were to be part of the initiative. The total reported deaths on Tuesday soared to over a thousand people. Far exceeding the daily average of 769 deaths over the past month.
The Delta variant's spread completely disrupted the new school year in some southern states, pushing new cases to a six-month high of over 100,000 daily, over the past dozen days. Close to 5,600 students and over 300 employees at a single school district in Tampa were in isolation or quarantine after having been exposed to COVID-19 or becoming infected with the virus.
"We got information on Tuesday that was reported to us. I know of three of those teachers that passed away from COVID in Broward County. I was also told that they were unvaccinated.""But there are a lot of people that have still not gotten the vaccination. And it is becoming a deadly thing for them not to be vaccinated.""You need to get vaccinated. This disease will kill you or leave with you a lifelong complication that not only impacts you but also impacts your family and the people that you love and care about.""The eight of us on our board are adamant that we cannot have people in schools without masks, because we are living a backlash of people dying with COVID.""You can't take a risk with peoples' lives. We feel strongly that the lives of our students and staff are invaluable, and we're not willing to play Russian roulette with their lives or take a risk of losing people because we have people in schools without masks."Broward County School Board Chair Rosalind Osgood
 |
| A fleet of Broward County School buses are parked in a lot on July 21, 2020, in Florida. Three educators in the county died within 24 hours of each other from COVID-19 related complications. (Johnny Louis/Getty Images) |
Labels: Delta Variant, Masking Students, Schools, United States
posted by Pieface @ Friday, August 20, 2021
<< Home