To quote Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm fucked up or sumthin'.

[LuckyCharms]

I happened to have the TV on in the background this morning after awakening prematurely at 200 am.

There is a show on MSNBC at 500 AM called "Way Too Early’ hosted by Jonathan Lemire.

Mr. Lemire was interviewing someone , if I heard this correctly, who essentially seemed to be leaning toward the notion that in spite of the Covid pandemic/Omicron variant, that it was safe to have children attend school.

OK.

Maybe it is safe. Maybe not. I have no idea.

The person making these statements was a Professor of Economics.

A Professor of Economics was indicating to an audience of (millions?) that it was safe to have children in school during the Omicron wave.

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm fucked up or sumthin'.

Shouldn't maybe a medical doctor of high regard who has a strong background in communicable diseases be addressing a large audience concerning this?

It's entirely possible that this professor was indeed qualified to speak on the subject, and I just did not catch her full credentials. It's also entirely possible that the whole interview was a dream I had.

But I'll admit, sometimes I think MSNBC, as well as other cable networks, drag people off the street to talk about important subjects. If that is the case, I wish they would drag me in for an interview because I have plenty of things I want to talk about to a national audience.

[SheltieLover]

1. You are not fucked up.

I believe M$NBC was showing it's true colors having an Econ professor discuss the importance of keeping schools open: daycare to keep parents working! Not the safety of kids!

Wtf aren't they discussing effective means to filter the air, the importance of NIOSH masks, etc?

This is precisely why I have no TV service, not just cable. No service at all.

Zero tolerance for bs!

[Celerity]

2. Dr Emily Oster

https://emilyoster.net/about/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Oster

Emily Fair Oster (born February 14, 1980) is an American economist and bestselling author. After receiving a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and 2006 respectively, Oster taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She later moved to Brown University, where she is Professor of Economics. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology.

COVID-19 and schools

Oster has been an advocate for opening schools during the coronavirus epidemic, spearheading a project to collect data on the spread of coronavirus in schools, and appearing frequently in media discussing why schools should open. In early October 2020 she wrote an influential and much cited article in The Atlantic entitled "Schools Aren't Super-Spreaders" which inspired numerous articles.

The Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the CDC cited Oster's work as a reason to open schools during the pandemic. In August 2020, Oster launched a dashboard compiling information on the spread of COVID-19 in schools. Critics of Oster's dashboard have said it has methodological problems that they believe undermine its usefulness.

In September 2021, Oster launched the Covid-19 School Data Hub which includes information on virtual and in person status of schools across 31 states. According to The New York Times, the data hub "one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to document how schools operated during the pandemic.



Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders

Fears from the summer appear to have been overblown.

By Emily Oster

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-arent-superspreaders/616669/



CDC director cites this website to back in-school learning. Its designer calls that 'bananas'. (interview with Emily Oster)

Emily Oster said she is surprised to hear that the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is relying on the Covid-19 School Response Dashboard, a website she started to promote in-person learning for schoolchildren.

https://watson.brown.edu/news/2020/cdc-director-cites-website-back-school-learning-its-designer-calls-bananas-interview-emily



Prof. Emily Oster Develops COVID-19 Dashboard to Track Cases in Schools

https://economics.brown.edu/announcements/prof-emily-oster-develops-covid-19-dashboard-track-cases-schools

Professor Emily Oster and Qualtrics partner to launch the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard, which tracks the virus in schools from 47 states. This is the 1st nationwide database that follows and tracks schools’ responses to the pandemic across the US. The Dashboard will enable school leaders, policymakers, parents, and students to visualize and understand current conditions in their own communities (and in the country) to come to the most well informed decision for their lives.

[LuckyCharms]

5. Thank you for the information.

There appears to be mixed opinions about her conclusions, based on this New York Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/us/emily-oster-school-reopening.html

My initial take:

1) The dates of articles I am finding show that most of her work was performed before Omicron became prevalent.

2) I sense a pre-conceived implicit bias in her conclusions. Consider her comment "working parents can't wait around for ever". This mindset would probably tend to color the results of any data that she gathered. This makes me question if she used true scientific methods in both the gathering of her data, and her conclusions.

3) She has no experience in public elementary education.

I believe that opinions on this matter should be determined and delivered by scientists and medical professionals who are only interested in and intimately experienced in the nuts and bolts of how and where infections spread, and how variants of these infections increase or decrease risks in any public settings, including, but not limited to schools, and whether or not any particular variant of a disease would have different impacts on people of varying age groups.

[msfiddlestix]

6. Sure seems to have institutionalized creds

I'm not a fan though.



Somehow the notion that schools are not a super-spreader environment for any viruses/contagions, much worse Covid,just isn't in the world of reality. colds, flues. chicken pox etc etc etc should be evidence enough.

But we know, covid has hurt the economy and the media has to give it to an economist to make the case the whole thing was overblown.

My DIL is a high ranking educator and she argues the shutting down the schools was harmful to students, but for other reasons, which gives more weight in my mind to evaluate the rational for opening/closing..

Dealing with the contagion factors is essential to keeping schools open.

[padah513]

3. I stopped watching MSNBC in the morning since Lemire became host and

I don't watch again until Nicole comes on. After her, I wait until the nighttime lineup starts with Rachael. There's something in the air there in the morning that I can't quite place my finger on. True colors? Probably, but way too much freakin' equivalence especially with Moanin' Schmoe. One of these administrations is not like the other, definitely a day and night's worth of difference between them, but according to some on MSNBC, you wouldn't know it.

[msfiddlestix]

4. ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️

Just love the way you framed the entire narrative.

Moanin'Schmoe is certainly steal worthy, just the best moniker for him, imo.

One of these administrations is not like the other, definitely a day and night's worth of difference between them, but according to some on MSNBC, you wouldn't know it.

Boy howdy, you nailed it.

[dalton99a]

7. A Professor of Dismal Science is what we all should rely on in a pandemic

especially someone from the factory of laissez-faire economists aka U of Chicago

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While working on her PhD in economics at Harvard in her 20s, she came across research showing that pregnant people who are carriers of hepatitis B were more likely to have male children. She wondered whether that could explain the imbalance between male and female births in India, China, and elsewhere in the world — a phenomenon described as a problem of “missing women” by economist Amartya Sen and more typically ascribed to sex-selective abortion or infanticide.

Studying birth data across China, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, she found that hepatitis B could account for a stunning 50 million of the 100 million women “missing” worldwide. The work attracted public attention, with economist Robert Barro discussing it in a BusinessWeek column, and Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt writing in Slate in 2005 that her analysis showed “economics is particularly useful for challenging a received wisdom.”

The analysis helped make Oster’s name as a rising young economist. It also happened to be wrong. Even before her final paper was published, others in the field were raising questions about her findings. And in a 2008 paper, economists Ming-Jen Lin and Ming-Ching Luoh studied data from 3 million newborns in Taiwan — a much larger sample size than the previous research Oster had seen in graduate school — and found that maternal hepatitis B had only a small effect on the probability of male births. Oster and a team of co-authors confirmed this finding and published their own study, also in 2008, refuting Oster’s previous claim: “Hepatitis B cannot explain skewed sex ratios in China,” they wrote.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22556296/emily-oster-covid-schools-expecting-better-cribsheet

[Jacson6]

9. Why Haven't you applied for a political pundit job at MSNBC?