Was the goalpost set all along? LA County schools won’t reopen until after the election

by DCG

Back in May I did a blog post, “Moving the goalpost: Los Angeles County may stay locked down through August.”

From my post:

“County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said the stay at home order will “with all certainty” be extended possibly until July or August.

The good doctor said the following, “Our hope is that by using the data we’d be slowly able to lift restrictions over the next three months. But without widely available therapeutic testing for the coronavirus or rapid at-home testing versions that would allow people to test themselves daily, it seems unlikely that restrictions would be completely eased.”

Read the whole blog post here.

First it was “flatten the curve” and “bend the curve.”

Then, “we need more testing.”

Turns out the goalpost may have already been set at the beginning. As the good Los Angeles doctor said in a conference call with school administrators: “We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, in early November.”

Excerpts from Fox News:

“Her comments led the California radio show hosts, who obtained the recording, to speculate about why she chose to use the General Election instead of some other day like Halloween, as a target date, and whether the county health department and schools were trying to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Democrats.

“What does it have to do with the elections?” one of the hosts asks. “That makes no sense, she just picked a date, the elections.”

The county health department said the election reference is an expected point in time to give context to how reopening plans are proceeding.

“Dr. Ferrer’s comment was related only to timing any expanded school re-openings to allow for enough time from the implementation of changes to assess impact prior to expansions,” a county Department of Public Health spokesperson told Fox News in a statement.

“When we look at the timing of everything, it seems to us a more realistic approach to this would be to think that we’re going to be where we are now until we are done with the election,” Ferrer said.”

Read the whole story here.

Los Angeles County has a population of more than 10 million people.

As of September 12, Los Angeles County has 238,523 confirmed cases of Wuhan virus and 5,824 deaths. You do the math.

Key word in Dr. Ferrer’s statement: “timing.”

What a coincidence.

DCG