Daniel Mintz, Chair of the Department of Information Technology at the University of Maryland Global Campus posted on Facebook a very interesting thought experiment. Mintz openly acknowledged that he suffers from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). He describes the lead up to a Trump victory in November based on his speculation that Trump decides to control the election. The text of his post is below.

What would he (Trump) do? Among other things:

• Has learned that undoing executive authority, even if unconstitutional, takes a lot of time (I think Mr. Mintz needs to read Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power by John Yoo)
• Say the election was going to be stolen by Democrats
• Disparage the use of mail-in ballots
• Attempt to establish that the opposing candidate is senile and outside of normal behavior (hates God for example) – opposing candidate helps make the case
• Ignore the involvement of Russia and China in their attempts to manipulate the US election and insert misinformation since that adds to the chaos
• At the same time put strong supporters in charge of the US Postal Service to control the flow of mail-in ballots, including replacing all career operational leadership (in August so that this is not in the news in October/November)
• Keep up a drumbeat that local and state governments, especially with Democrat leadership are in favor of violent extremists
• Establish that it is ‘okay’ to send in federal representatives to ‘support’ local legal authorities
• Attempt to encourage local violence so that he can use those federal representatives to manage election polling locations, perhaps put such representatives in place to act as election judges (since there is an enormous shortage of polling judges across the country made much worse because of COVID-19)
• And thus control all aspects of the vote count

When I was a boy, I lived in a wonderful neighborhood filled with kids my age. One of these was Skipper Jaffe, who lived two doors down. When I was around 7, Skipper came down with measles. When the news got out in the neighborhood that the Jaffe house had measles, all the other moms did what most moms did in those pre-vaccine days: they sent their kids over there to play. Within days, every kid in the neighborhood had measles. In a week our neighborhood “epidemic” was over.

I doubt these mothers knew the statistics on measles, that the mortality for measles was around 0.1%, about the same as seasonal flu now, and that most of those were in children under 5. I doubt it would have made much difference. They knew that, absent a vaccine, their children were almost certainly going to be exposed to measles and the sooner they were exposed the better to establish future immunity. They did the same for chicken pox.

In 2018, even with an effective vaccine, 140,000 people died of measles worldwide and, again, most of these were children under 5. Measles is a terrible disease in the few who develop a severe infection with sometimes lifelong consequences. There has not been a measles death in the US since 2015 thanks to an effective public health campaign to vaccinate children, but the anti-vaccination movement is producing a population of vulnerable people that will be at risk for measles in the future (unapologetic vaccine plug). https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6840e2.htm.  

In the ongoing, seemingly never-ending crisis due to the Wuhan virus, SARS-CoV-2, which causes the illness Covid-19, the new battleground has become the issue of opening up the schools in the fall. Social media is rife with heated arguments for and against returning children to school, from elementary to college. In the elementary area, this has become especially contentious because of the critical nature of this period in a child’s life, both in obtaining a fundamental base of education on which to build and in developing social skills that will be crucial to their later role as socially competent, functioning adults. On the importance of this there is no real debate.

My children are grown and you could say I don’t have a dog in this particular fight, but I do have grandchildren that I love and have a great interest in. For them and their parents, this is an issue of major import.

The question of if and when to open the schools to children 15 years of age and under can be broken up into several component parts.