Letters to the Editor: The pandemic harmed students. Obsessing over test scores will harm them more.
There’s a reason we don’t trust the tests. They don’t have a clue.
There is a reason we don’t trust our elected officials. We know they’re corrupt. Our money flows to them not only from taxes, but from the sale of our lives. They have no incentive to stop corruption.
If all the schools in Colorado were run by robots, the teachers still would be the humans. But the tests and the tests alone would make the robots not only unreliable, but worthless.
If this pandemic had been the latest in a long string of “lessons learned” from previous pandemics like the flu, it would be the perfect time to change and improve everything. It would be an opportunity to test the idea for the first time in years, and to realize that this virus should be handled not only by its own medical community, but in the hands of the whole medical community.
Instead of listening to people who have never been diagnosed with the virus, the CDC spent the past two weeks arguing over which of four possible strains of the virus was the “new” flu. This is not to say the CDC knew the answer before January. But when it found out they were wrong, they spent the next two weeks telling us they were wrong.
The CDC claimed that the virus they knew wasn’t the one causing the pandemic they were investigating was a strain of bird flu. This created a perfect storm of misinformation that has affected our lives and destroyed our economy. The CDC also claimed that the virus was “swift-moving.” This created an impression that the virus hadn’t been found and spread in the human population, which was the opposite of the truth.
They had no one to blame. They didn’t know. They didn’t do a public study. They did the exact same thing with the H1N1 flu that broke out in 2009. It was a perfect storm of mistakes, and everyone knew there was a human component. No one was able to do one simple thing: make it obvious that these flu reports were based on the virus, not the people. In 2009, more than 1 million people died because of the H1N1 flu that only infected a few sick birds. In 2017, according to the CDC, an estimated 564,000 people died because of the flu
