January 15, 2022
We're Doing It Wrong, Why Won't You?
by Hal Wright

I recently became aware that one tool ReOpen Bucks folks are using to reach out directly to school board members is a graph of positivity rate vs. time, disaggregated by school district masking policies. Unsurprisingly, there is little correlation between masking in schools and what ReOpen calls "community prevalence."

I say unsurprisingly, because ReOpen makes no attempt to control for other variables leading to community spread. As anyone living in Bucks County knows, our communities have largely given up mitigating the spread of COVID-19 via common sense measures. Many of us, maybe most, are behaving as though we live in a post-COVID world. Absent any attempt to account for the myriad ways COVID-19 is spreading in our communities, the ReOpen data compilation is worse than useless. In essence, it's a call for schools to do nothing about COVID-19 because much of Bucks is doing nothing about COVID-19.

It's telling that Doylestown Hospital has asked Central Bucks School District's board members to beef up their COVID-19 mitigation plan, because they are overwhelmed with COVID-positive patients. Healthcare workers do not have the luxury to ignore the presence of a pandemic in our community — until those workers give up out of exhaustion or disgust, as some are doing.

We know ReOpen doesn't care about public health. If they did, their web page would include statistics about how the unvaccinated are clogging the ICUs of Bucks County hospitals right now. They would be exploring creative ways to help local businesses thrive in spite of the pandemic. Instead, they accept sickness as a necessary consequence of turning a profit. And they promote a peculiar form of "dignity" which derives from the absence of any concern for one's neighbors and from sticking one's head in the sand.

If the lack of something essential can be regarded as a malignancy, ReOpen Bucks is a malignant expression of a lack of realism and of empathy for the vulnerable among us.