Baker's Intentions (AKA: Why Baker Isn't Doing @#$%)

Baker's reluctance to shut anything down, even as we re-open field hospitals and see case counts higher than we have ever previously and work on re-opening field hospitals, is exactly in line with his political leanings.  If you're surprised by this, it is only because you haven't paid attention to what he believes the role of government is in society.

Baker, for those not paying close enough attention, does not believe that government is there to support the populace and small businesses.  This can be demonstrated by his general effort to damage public transportation.  During the years of the Big Dig, Baker was the architect of the financing of the high way project and placed billions of dollars of debt on the MBTA's shoulders.  After this was done, he has been a proponent for the MBTA being self-sufficient instead of a government service.  

This idea should not be surprising to anybody.  One of the main differences between the parties is this perspective on the underlying purpose of government.

This is precisely why Republicans have been reticent to close down businesses during the pandemic.  As long as government is not meant to support people and small businesses, then closing things down and having large swaths of the populace be unemployed is a VERY bad thing.  If you believe that government should support people and small businesses, then large swaths of the populace being unemployed is simply a bad thing and vastly outweighed by massive numbers of people being negatively impacted.  

Negatively being impacted by large case-counts of COVID-19 isn't limited to those who catch the disease by the way.  Keep in mind that among other things, 

• the elderly aren't able to visit with their families as easily if they don't live together.
• normal preventative care at hospitals was put on hold previously and as we reach the same levels of hospitalizations now as we saw back in April, emergency care centers are turning away some people
• healthcare providers are overwhelmed and very much being put through conditions that have given (and will continue to give) many PTSD.
• if we put schools at remote or partially-remote, there are many who are underserved and/or have special needs that are falling further behind than their more well-to-do peers.
• those unemployed for a wide variety of reasons, but including gig workers and artists... 
• by the way, imagine for a moment being a performance artist who is not only able to earn a living but also unable to continue to develop their career at the moment. 
• business owners/managers who are trying to support their business while not being able to bring in customers are they normally would (even worse for those who are actively concerned about their staff and their community as the stress is compounded by understanding the health-risk their business necessitates in order to be financially viable without governmental support).

So, instead of continuing to drive down numbers in the spring and summer as we should have done to allow more networks to be re-opened more safely than we see now, we re-opened quicker than was prudent (see my explanation of the faulty MA re-opening plan here: https://funwithmacovid-19reporting.blogspot.com/2020/11/gov-baker-has-done-real-harm-to-state.html) and have remained open far too long.

And there's the press for in-person learning.  This is a complex topic.  It is certainly true that there are many aspects of school which are better done in person and populations which are impacted worse than others by going remote.  It is also certainly true that there have been clusters of COVID-19 cases found in schools, as identified by the state's own reporting.  Were we to have driven the numbers down and kept our networks limited, we could have opened schools for in-person learning with less risk than we see today due to the lower number of overlapping networks and lower incident rate of cases.  We also wouldn't have had Baker pushing as hard for the schools to be open for in-person learning because the demand for workers to be able to hand off their kids to someone else would be less.

So, here we are: Baker is trying to play things off as ok and pressure people to return to business as usual as much as possible while also calling for people to be cautious.  These conflicting messages hurt his own case in every way and confuse the populace as to where we are with recovery... and our recovery is not a recovery but instead a disaster-in-progress.... and Baker is doing virtually nothing about it because that is what his political views demand.