Covid Makes an Antiwoke Fortress of a New Age Florida School; N.Y.C. Life Expectancy Dropped 4.6 Years in 2020, and other C-Virus related stories

Photo: Courtesy Centner Academy

Covid Makes an Antiwoke Fortress of a New Age Florida School

Centner Academy’s skepticism of masks and vaccines proves ‘a highly effective curation process.’

“This is Miss Gabriela,” Leila Centner says. “She’s our mindfulness coach.” I’m visiting Centner Academy, the private K-12 school Mrs. Centner and her husband, David, founded in 2019 after his retirement as a “serial tech entrepreneur.” In the “mindfulness room” I watch Gabriela Jimenez lead a circle of fifth-graders in an exercise that involves passing a candle around and formulating “an awesome wish that you have for yourself.”

“Do we have to say it out loud?” a girl asks.

“Well, you don’t have to,” Ms. Jimenez answers. But it would be helpful: “When we express what we want, we move the energy from the bottom, from the first chakra all the way to the throat. So we manifest things when we speak about them.”

You might call Centner a countercultural campus; it calls itself “America’s Happiest School.” “Mindfulness is interwoven into the fabric of the school,” says my tour guide, Josh Hills, whose title—no joke—is director of brain optimization. He shows me another room, which he says is “dedicated to failure.” Here, students undertake projects in “Lego robotics, 3D printing, architecture” and other technical pursuits. It’s a sort of safe space: “We remove the stigma behind failure,” Mr. Hills says. “If we have kids who are not scared to fall or fail, then we have kids who are not scared to reach.”

At the school cafeteria, the food is “sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, non-GMO, all organic, locally sourced,” Mr. Hills says. Much of it comes from the Centners’ Regener8 Farm and Retreat half an hour away in Homestead. Mr. Centner says he and his wife intend “to tightly integrate it into the school . . . so the kids actually go to the farm and have curriculum to teach them about science, Mother Earth, grounding, mindfulness, entrepreneurship.”

If you’re rolling your eyes, stop it. This New Age school is also resolutely and admirably antiwoke. Mr. Hills begins the tour by listing the three things he makes clear to visitors “before I let anybody into this building”:

First, “we have zero Covid policy at this point.” He doesn’t mean a zero-Covid policy; he means zero policy regarding Covid. Even by Florida standards, Centner moved quickly to return to normal during the pandemic, and its unorthodox approach drew indignation from local news organizations, one of which went so far as to urge the White House to intervene. --->READ MORE HERE

Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

N.Y.C. Life Expectancy Dropped 4.6 Years in 2020, Officials Say:

A wave of illness hit New York City, with little warning. Soon, it was sending the death rate rocketing upward.

It was 1834. New York City was just expanding its first railroad line. The penny press was flourishing. Cholera had struck. And smallpox was resurgent.

It would be nearly 200 years before another shock that seismic, when the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 caused the death rate in New York City to once again climb about 50 percent over the previous year, according to new data released Friday by the city’s health department. Additionally, life expectancy dropped citywide from 82.6 years inrop of 4.6 years. 2019 to 78 years in 2020, a d

Throughout the 19th century, periodic outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, and other infectious diseases caused the city’s death rate to surge. But by the early 20th century, vaccines, improved sanitation and a variety of public health advances — from the disinfection of drinking water to the pasteurization of milk — had largely subdued this cycle of epidemics. The city’s death rate began to see drops and plateaus, a pattern that largely held for more than a century — until 2020.

The story of the city’s declining death rate, and how Covid upended that trend, is instantly communicated in a well-known chart published regularly by New York City’s health department, and now updated to include the first year of the pandemic. --->READ MORE HERE

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