Tag: COVID-19
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School Teachers Get Virus? Too Damned Bad!
By Peter Galuszka Here at Bacons Rebellion, a favorite blood sport of late has been tearing apart school teachers by ripping up their “values,” their personal courage, their honesty, their intellects and their mindless lapdog following of their commissars at teachers’ unions The same is true for college professors and administrators (Golly Darn, Reed Fawell…
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Williamsburg the Locality Most Vulnerable to COVID-19
The City of Williamsburg is the Virginia locality most vulnerable to the stresses imposed by the COVID-19 epidemic on local governments, according to a report recently issued by Virginia’s Commission on Local Government. Other small cities — Emporia, Colonial Heights, and Norton — follow close behind on the list. The Commission based its assessment on…
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Common Sense and Coronavirus in Virginia
by DJ Rippert Stepping back. Over the past five months there has been an unending flood of information, guesses, misinformation and politicized ramblings about COVID-19. Various factions put forth their experts and cherry picked data to support their agendas. It’s time to step back and synthesize all that has been written into a set of…
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A Different Approach to Opening Schools
By Dick Hall-Sizemore I am struck by the contradictions of some people on this blog. On the one hand, they are terribly troubled, even outraged, by what they see as liberal indoctrination happening in our schools (here and here, for examples). On the other hand, they are outraged at the prospect that the schools may…
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No Known Case of Teacher Catching COVID-19 from Pupils
Perhaps Virginia teachers terrified of returning to schools this fall should read this article in the Financial Times (of London): There has been no recorded case of a teacher catching the coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world, according to one of the government’s leading scientific advisers. Mark Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and member…
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Who Wants to Visit New York Anyway?
by Kerry Dougherty This is rich. One of the worst governors in the country — Andrew Cuomo — announced yesterday that Virginians are not welcome in New York and neither are folks from 30 other states. Unless we quarantine and show a clean bill of health, that is. He’s afraid we’ll infect New Yorkers with…
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Some Kids Need School More than Others
by Kerry Dougherty Let’s stop pretending there’s any chance at all that public schools will be open five days a week this fall. They won’t. Not around here, anyway. Not in many places. The teachers have spoken. Their unions, er associations, have made it clear that they don’t want to return to their classrooms yet.…
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VEC: 1.5 Million Unemployment Claims In 2020
By Steve Haner By the end of this amazing year, almost 1.5 million Virginians may have filed claims for unemployment insurance payments, leaving the state’s once-record unemployment trust fund balance of $1.5 billion reduced to $750 million in the red, legislators were told this morning. That $2.25 billion swing is due to $2.6 billion spent…
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Civil War within the Northam Administration on School Reopening Guidelines?
by James Sherlock Steve Haner wrote a very important essay today about the new workplace guidelines about to be published by the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry(DOLI). In a similar vein, the progressive warriors in the lower levels of the Northam administration are trying to offer stricter school reopening guidelines than the Governor. States this…
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A Radical Proposal for School Reopening: Let Kids Go to School Full Time
by James A. Bacon There are no easy answers to the question of how to open up Virginia’s public schools next month during the COVID-19 epidemic. While all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that the risk to school children of contracting and spreading the virus is low, the story is different for teachers, especially older…
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How Employers Must Prevent COVID, Or Else
By Steve Haner The first thing every employer in Virginia needs to understand about the state’s new COVID-19 temporary workplace standard (here) is it is universal. It applies to every workplace, public and private, for-profit and non-profit, with 10,000 workers or two. The rules are the same, “one size fits all,” without regard to the…
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New Regions Won’t Fix Ignoring the Obvious
by Carol J. Bova Governor Ralph Northam opened his July 14 press conference with statements on the increase in cases of the COVID-19 virus in Virginia. “We have not seen the spikes that some other states are now seeing, but we’re seeing some troubling numbers and an increase in cases largely out of the Hampton…
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What If We Ran Grocery Stores Like Public Schools?
by James A. Bacon Imagine our food distribution system worked like our public schools do. Prompted by that very question in a Reason article comparing how private schools are responding differently to the COVID-19 virus than public schools, I began thinking what a public grocery system would look like. The food would be “free,” except…
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Praise for DOC COVID-19 Response
By Dick Hall-Sizemore The Department of Corrections has received praise for its response to inmates with COVID-19 from an unlikely source — an inmate who survived a serious bout with the disease. A story in today’s Richmond-Times Dispatch provides the details. The inmate, who is serving two life terms, was housed in Sussex II State…
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Bacon Bits: COVID-19 Heroes and Villains
Somebody’s got to do it. Linda Echols has driven school buses for Pittsylvania County for 48 years. At 75 years old, she’s at elevated risk of contracting the COVID-19 virus. She is concerned about her safety when the school year starts back up this summer, but worries more about her students. In marked contrast to…