James Rustad:
The company I work for did not shut down to protect the adults. It remained open with manufacturing going full tilt throughout the pandemic. Precautions were taken, but no total shutdown like you think was needed for schools.
Me:
Yep. Can’t let a little thing like a pandemic get in the way of making a profit.
Sorry, there’s not more profit in public schools, maybe they could’ve been kept open. And again, the point is not necessarily the children. Infected children go home to parents and/or grandparents.
Companies can exercise considerable control over who works there and working conditions. Schools are open to everyone, there are fewer controls on what the conditions are or on conditions where the children and/or the teachers live.
Charles, your sarcasm is noted. There are some who gouge the public and their workers for excessive profits, but working for a living is not dishonorable. Both you and I have done it. Should we have, when the pandemic first struck, immediately shut down all manufacturing, including manufacturers of ventilators, pharmaceuticals, food products? What about cooks, nurses, and maintenance staff for senior citizen housing? Not only did they interact with the public, but they were around vulnerable senior citizens. In New York, Governor Cuomo was so concerned to protect the older population that he insisted that Covid positive patients be speedily returned to their nursing homes.
Proper precautions needed to be taken. But those precautions cost. Money was the least of the cost. Although when you consider the number of working stiffs who lost their jobs, small business people who were not rolling in profits but making a living by their businesses (that distasteful profit put food on their tables and roofs over their heads) lost not only profits but their businesses and their life savings. Are they not worthy of consideration? The creative community, performers, musicians, actors, stagehands, were immediately out of work. The service and hospitality industry workers, most of them already living paycheck to paycheck were out. Do those people not matter?
You and Brian talk about acting out of an overabundance of caution as though the measures imposed by that caution was merely a matter of minor inconvenience. Statistically speaking, those measures cost lives. Or do you only believe the statistics that support your position? Was that cost necessary. Perhaps. To some degree, certainly. But you speak as though even questioning the necessity of some of the measures or the degree to which they were imposed should be forbidden.
Many conspiracy theories were floated which had no basis in fact, and many resisted necessary precautions because they were inconvenient or cut into profits. But not all who questioned the edicts that floated down from on high were so foolish, gullible, or short sighted.
