For a year filled with fear and uncertainty, as plague collided with the final eruptions of the Trump era, the political lessons of 2020 are uncannily clear. Elite institutional authority is everywhere collapsing in a bonfire of self-immolation even as elite institutions become ever more powerful.
What ties the impeachment drama that began the year together with the pandemic, months of political violence and faulty predictions of a Biden blowout, is a system-wide failure of expert knowledge and elite institutional response. “Where were all the experts?” asked New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo in April, at the height of his state’s Covid outbreak. Cuomo blamed more or less every wing of the sprawling structure of elite expertise, pointing the finger for what happened on his watch at “the international health community… the WHO, the NIH, the CDC… the intelligence community… the New York Times… the Wall Street Journal”.
Sure, the governor’s complaint was self-serving given his own disastrous handling of the pandemic, but it wasn’t wrong. Weeks earlier, the Center for Disease Control, after months of declaring face masks ineffective and imploring the public not to wear them — a position echoed by the US Surgeon General, by Biden’s soon-to-be chief medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci, and by most of the media — abruptly reversed course and endorsed face covering as vital to containing the spread of Covid.
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.
Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.