I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control
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The quick takeaway is that school is that for the most vulnerable kids, school is about a lot more than education. Taking school away from those kids can be much more damaging than many people realize.
It seems to me like that right strategy would be to just say something like:
We encourage all kids to stay home, but if you can't, that's ok. You can come to school and have a warm, quiet place to spend the day, and we'll provide free lunch to everyone who comes.
But again, some kids just want to go to school to get some damn food, regardless of age!
My impression was that infant mortality was a great deal higher back then, but there wasn’t as big a disparity after that as people tend to assume. People didn’t hit old age in their 50s and 60s, they often lived into their 80s and beyond, just like today.
Also, maybe it is wrong to disenfranchise immature people. They are people, too.
That’s not to say they wouldn’t continue to benefit, for the rest of their lives, from a nurturing, supportive, diverse community. But they can be a completely productive member of that community.
Much like conferences the "hallway class" is a huge component.
Ass onto that that many kids are bad at focusing on online classes and the whole situation is not up to the standard of in-persin schooling (with current systems).
Holy fucking crap.
(Sorry I don't normally react like that, and even given homeless might not be "living on street", that is a horrific statistic)
That said the definition of "homeless" in this count is extremely broad.
For example if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless. Even if someone stays temporarily in a hotel or motel, for example because of a fire or flood, will be counted as homeless. Even wider scope, a child who "qualified moved" within the last 36 months is considered migratory i.e. homeless.
https://nche.ed.gov/mckinney-vento-definition/ )
(I understand pointing out incomplete [is there a better word?] facts is unpopular.)
Your public contempt is reciprocated by the people you do not respect.
Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless?
And even if you're renting... Why count someone who rents a trailer as homeless but not someone who rents an apartment?
It's a social class thing. It's not about having a reliable, warm, dry, safe place to sleep. It's about whether a middle class university graduate's friends would have considered them to have failed at life. Living in a coffin sized apartment with cockroaches everywhere in New York is something they could see themselves doing at some point in their life for career goals or because of bad luck. A trailer is not the kind of place a university graduate lives in.
Many cities ban you putting an RV on your own plot of land, regardless of the purpose. They often ban trailer parks, severely restrict them, etc to the detriment of many economically vulnerable people. There's often a component of racism too as some trailer parks home lots of immigrants or hispanic folks, marking them doubly undesirables.
This is what the definition of migratory child is.
(3) MIGRATORY CHILD.—The term ‘‘migratory child’’ means a child or youth who made a qualifying move in the preceding 36 months— (A) as a migratory agricultural worker or a migratory fisher; or (B) with, or to join, a parent or spouse who is a migratory agricultural worker or a migratory fisher.
It's not just that they moved (which is what I read from your comment) but they are a child who's parents are migratory workers and moved within 36 months.
>For example if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless.
This seems to check out. It's odd in the rest of the definition.
>(i) children and youths who are sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason; are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations; are living in emergency or transitional shelters; or are abandoned in hospitals;*
It isn't true that children whose permanent residence is a trailer park are counted as homeless.
To me it reads the following aren't adequate accommodations if they are by themselves (i.e. no other housing): motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds.
I personally don't think a trailer in a trailer park with an address should be categorized as homeless, I'm just trying to interpret the law as a layperson. Maybe trailer parks were different back in 1965 (i.e. no address).
For example, it's an incomplete fact to say that "if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless", but thankfully you provided the link to the complete fact!
From your source, a little more completeness for your fact:
"living in ...trailer parks... due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations"
Thankfully, it is not true that everyone whose permanent residence is a trailer park is counted as homeless.
Wouldn't this be most people living in trailer parks?
This does not refer to people who's only economic choice generally is trailer parks.
Start at the top of the definition -- the statute concerns “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence”.
Key word is fixed.
Then you have to be familiar with the difference between a trailer -- as in RV, or motor home -- that is not fixed, and one that is fixed to a foundation (sometimes called a manufactured home, or a single/double wide.)
Living out of an RV is homeless, living in a trailer on a pad is not.
It would be a horrific statistic, if it were even remotely close to being accurate.
The US had 580,000 total homeless in 2020. [1] That's up from the recent lows before the pandemic when it was ~50,000 lower (and it's dramatically lower than prior to the start of the federal Housing First program).
If the NSBA is claiming 1.4 million, they're knowingly lying and it's despicable.
The US national homelessness rate is comparable to France and Canada.
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
There’s homeless as in “in a shelter or on the street” and there’s homeless as in “lives temporarily with friends or family”… lots of ways to slice it
COVID is scourge to the world ... whose is to blame for it? Does any one country benefit from it? What's going on with Covid in China ... when will they rank as the number superpower in the world ... last i saw in the next five to ten years.
If you downvote me do you think the Chinese govt. is one to trust ... good for societies around the world? The world is now living like they were in the 2000s to present... with a mask on!
I mean...that's really up to the parents, not the kids.
The world needs to come down on China's govt or it's just going to get worse for every country that isnt them!
Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capacity. Mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced strictly. Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Uruguay opened up schools early for its most vulnerable kids. The point being, there are different ways to solve the problem, but only in America, can we be stuck with the worst way to do it.
I always thought that schools should have considered something I saw done at a SANS training course once. While there were ~20 people in attendance, there were also several people attending virtually. Those virtual attendees had a surrogate in the room, whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor - as if they were there in person. This allowed the instructor to teach the course as he normally would, using a full projection screen, white board, and other materials.
This surrogate method would have allowed teachers to be in their classrooms drawing on blackboards, using charts, posters, and other instructional aids they've spent years building, instead of having to pivot completely to PowerPoint. It's a shame to see absolutely no creativity or thinking outside the box among school administrators.
Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons
Edit2: Actually, for feedback-latency reasons it's probably better to split grading the other way. I wonder whether it's better to split each assignment randomly, or grade as two separate classes with shared lectures.
When I was a TA we’d split the stack of paper tests evenly and rotate them every few days to grade them in parallel. It’s even easier to do the splitting if tests are submitted online.
And with two teachers, you'd also be able to have each write half the questions, and split the grading that way.
'There are 130,930 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S.'[1]
$190 billion divided by 130,930 is $1.45 million dollars per school. Now, I will readily grant that a million dollars just ain't what it used to be, but it is, even in 2021, still a heck of a lot of money, and it sure sounds from the raw numbers that public school teachers shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies.
0: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/look-up-how-much-covi...
1: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...
Not covid supplies, school supplies pre-covid (which they also shouldn't have needed to, but did need to nevertheless).
And hiring enough surrogates would eat up a huge chunk of that $1.45 million, given that you'd need, what, ~10 per school for nearly 2 years now? Actually, that's more doable than I expected.
It won’t be an effective means of stopping spread. Instead give out surgical masks or n95 to all kids. Cloth masks allow 90%+ of the virus to enter/leave. Add hepa filters. Add space heaters and leave the windows open. Maybe teach outside in parklet if possible.
That’ll be more effective at preventing spread.
In multiple cities, political leadership at the mayoral level has been shown to be getting kickbacks and other favorable terms from our dear beloved employers to adopt that technology. In LAUSD it was Villaragosa and Apple.
When we say the money is "wasted", it's because there is corruption at levels higher than any individual school. Usually.
Still find the difference in that so weird. rapid tests are a 2-3 € supermarket item here, if you'd be buying in bulk for a school system they'd be cheaper. And at least some schools/day cares have been doing pool testing.
Plus, schools have tons of unused covid relief money: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/politics/school-federal-covid...
Stop playing the game where you spend money to cover up incompetence or corruption. Don't be a reliable patsy. Some problems only get better if you force the ones responsible to fix it.
Use a classroom to audit their own supplies and needs, and see where money intended for education actually goes. The information should ask be public.
American teachers spend a lot of time, as my Asian mom would always complain, on “arts and crafts.” The volume of construction paper and pipe cleaners and other junk my kids bring home is truly astonishing.
These expenses are symptomatic of curricular problems—and the solution isn’t to allocate more money for craft supplies. It doesn’t cost that much to have kids drill their times tables.
I know a lot of teachers spending money on hygiene products:tampons, deodorant ect, because it is distracting if students are bleeding at their desks and smell like garbage.
2) they also spend money on basic supplies, pens pencils, as well as heaters and coolers for the room because the administration blew the funds on some bs like a marble facade for the school
For (1) the government already gives housing assistance, food stamps and a bunch of other welfare programs, so the parents can easily afford basic hygiene products and they should be paying for it, not the school.
For (2) it is the administration's malice or incompetence that is burning away the money. We shouldn't increase the budget even more, we should hold the administration and the parents accountable.
https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-schools-struggle-to-hire...
(It is impossible to avoid being exposed to omicron or to get rid of it. Social distancing, lockdowns, etc, won't help this one. Vaccinating yourself/N95s/Pavloxid will help exposure not /matter/ though.)
Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!
There, I just sent another 50 souls to rationalist hell.
Seems like a human solution to a (mostly) technical problem. Basically you just need a way for students to mark a message as hand-raising (and maybe a way to point out another student's message), a chat filter for the teacher to read those messages, and a USB LED (or some such) to act as a raised hand until the messages are marked as read. Of course there are some edge cases, like temporarily ignoring a child who's repeatedly raising their hand to troll, but this still seems like it could've easily been usable by the start of fall 2020.
You'd likely still need a surrogate for young children and special ed students, but you could probably eliminate ~2/3rds of them (? I'm not sure how old children need to be before they can be expected to remember they need to mark their messages & how to do so)
Our team developed https://sharetheboard.com - an app which digitizes handwritten content in real time. The practical application here is that any analog surface/content can be shared simultaneously online, in real time.
For teachers this is valuable for a number of reasons (direct feedback from educators): - it allows them to teach "as they always have" - standing in front of a board or writing on a notebook, etc. - they don't have to learn anything new - they don't have to buy new equipment - they can simultaneously address in-person and remote students (again, without "doing anything new") - they can work (in the same way) from home, when needed
You'll note that many of the above points are of interest to school administrators as well. - No hardware + no learning curve = high adoption. - Mobile/scalable = fast deployment. - Low cost = well, low cost.
For students (direct feedback from students): - the biggest plus is that this is as close to "like in class" as it gets: they get to see their teacher's natural body language, maintain eye contact, see the explanations evolve on a familiar medium (whiteboard, chalkboard, etc.) - they can do more than ask questions: the app facilitates direct interaction with digitized content - they can focus on the lesson: the app allows you to easily save board contents any time
What was meant to be a quick response to a problem is beginning to turn into an actual product. For better or for worse, some form of remote interaction seems to be in the cards (not only in education) for quite some time. Our goal is to help make it a more real/physical experience, despite being shared remotely. Interested in feedback from teachers, parents, and students on this thread.
Sweden suffered 1,504 deaths per million, while Finland had 295. To call them "similar" is disinformative, at best.
The picture since then is different than "Finland closed, Sweden open".
Pretty sure most nordic countries have kept high school and below open most of the time.
> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper. [0]
So apparently Sweden did a better job than Norway of keeping people alive longer before the pandemic, therefore having a larger per-capita population vulnerable to covid.
(It is my understanding that Sweden also fumbled early on protecting those in nursing homes, as many others did. Lots of factors I'm sure, more than just lockdown vs no lockdown.)
I'm not sure about Finland. It is possible the same applies.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
But we’re not going to have a third year of COVID anyway. Nearly everyone is going to catch the omicron in the next couple months, and by April we’ll have enough herd immunity to reopen everything.
On the other hand because the infection is now concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, patients are much more likely to exhale and spread the virus. On top of that, the virus has sufficiently mutated thus existing vaccines and prior infections have very limited protection. Combined with the lack of ventilation and increased time spent indoors in winter, this translates to more infections.
I don't know whether "everyone" is going to get it eventually. However I have heard anecdotes that multiple insular communities in the US that have largely avoided the previous Covid strains are now badly afflicted by omicron. That is how infectious the virus is.
Definitely not a dumb question.
Before the vaccine, people would have chicken pox parties so all the children were exposed simultaneously and everybody could get it over with. With Omicron, it's simply the reverse, it's blowing through everybody so fast that it will burn itself out in a couple months.
After that, it will simply have a constant endemic background level like chicken pox prior to the vaccine and the flu.
We are in the endgame. It isn't the endgame we wanted, but it is the endgame.
Before Omicron, we had a hope of creating an R0 < 1 and stamping Covid out. Omicron spreads so well in so many different mammals that it simply wipes that option off the map.
Omicron, irrespective of whether it is mild or not, is simply going to blow through the population no matter what we do. Afterward everybody will have been infected with Covid, vaccinated, or both.
At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the new world.
I agree. Just like we do for RSV, other common cold variants, etc. We'll get used to it.
However, it's impossible to get rid of it because it infects animals and we're not going to vaccinate them.
> Only has so far it can mutate
Says who?
I believe the understanding is that the omicron variant may have evolved further in an immuno-compromised person (e.g. with AIDS, or undergoing chemotherapy), since it got to stay in the host longer without being killed by the immune system, it racked up more mutations until it got to its current virulent form and started infecting other people.
And there's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening again I guess.
In my area I think this is where the vast majority of the district income variance comes from, and it is known about and largely planned for before the year even starts.
However for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, they set a baseline so that schools received funding based off of their 2019-2020 (preCOVID, normalized) average daily attendance. This was good for big schools that had lower enrollment but caused issues for suburban/rural districts that saw a lot of growth.
Take this parent comment and substitute “academic progress”, “student engagement”, “socio-emotional”, “school safety”, etc for “covid” and you’ve entered the Ed reform debate of the last 20-30 years.
Overcoming COVID in schools requires a collective problem-solving approach that is incompatible with the individualist (e.g. I’m just worried about my kid), class-segregated public school system that we’ve built.
Administrators are culpable but I think their role is akin to an engineer building questionable technology. Why should they buck the system that puts food on their families table, especially when there is no guarantee that doing things differently will lead to a different ultimate outcome?
Anecdotally this plays out in the increase of violence and violent threats toward principals, superintendents and school boards who are trying to institute science-backed rules for dealing with the virus.
It will be a pandemic of 5 to ten years in total.
In short words like you were 5, two factors converged to make this a reality: 1. World for the most part failed to lead like China an stop it cold fast and yes places like the USA gets fair blame for that.
2. Speed of mutations.
Only have one of those factors then it would be far less years of a pandemic.
That is not to say that there is not hope on the near future where we take either a booster or one pill per year to contain it however.
But, 30 years ago a lady wrote a very famous book called.. the Coming Plaque..
She pointed out that it was not Science failing us towards facing the next pandemic but governments putting public health on a diet.
and that books is at archive org
https://archive.org/details/comingplaguenew000garr
Public health should be a number one Military spending budget as with 9 billion or more it is no longer something that is optional
Just TRUST your doctors, there's not a conspiracy to make everyone baren or something crazy, the vaccines are safer than going to a bar and having a few drinks.
ironically Covid itself probably has a better chance of making one sterile than the vaccine as ACE receptors are in the testes, and other reproductive organs, so it could sterilize people who get bad infections.
The virus had spread too widely for that to be possible. If you blame the USA, you also have to blame China for suppressing and destroying early information about the contagion.
I would prefer to blame nobody, since everyone’s systems played a part in the outcome.
Citation? I am familiar with Japan's national Covid policies, and I have heard nothing of this. In general, Japan allows the prefectures to make their own decisions, and for issues like this, prefectures issue requests, not mandates. This paper suggests that even at the outset of the pandemic, the range of NPIs imposed by Japanese schools was quite variable:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8
This news story from September 2020 explicitly says the exact opposite of what you're implying -- school districts operating at maximum capacity, and interventions varying based on what (for example) the PTA decided to pay for:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-schools-back-in-session-c...
"Typical classrooms in Japan would seem to flunk the 3C test, however. In Ms. Katayama's classroom, desks were spaced just enough to walk between. Regulations allow up to 40 children per classroom."
"Last month, a panel of scholars and education researchers in Tokyo launched a petition to urge rapid adoption of smaller classes. Class size "should be reduced to 30 right now, and quickly, to 20," the panel said."
"Japan's Riken research institute, working with Kobe University, argues that even large classes can be held safely — provided ventilation is sufficient."
Japan is a big country, and -- just as with masks -- there's a fair amount of "orientalism" going on in the west, in terms of overgeneralization and stereotyping of their response to the virus. My only overarching observation is that they've been much more relaxed than we are in the US.
Edit: actually, it doesn't even contradict it, per se. The articles are saying the same thing, but the WaPo story just tries to generalize from a single school, without admitting it. FTA:
> At Hoyonomori Gakuen, a school in Tokyo’s Shinagawa ward, the new rules, including temperature checks, are set down in a 28-point plan designed by the school to minimize risks.
So, again, the schools determine their response. This is also my understanding of the situation.
Knowledge source: I'm a professor at a University in Tokyo. Nobody can enter campus without a mask and temperature check (not even me, the door to my floor has a facial recognition /thermal check). Social distancing is also enforced by teachers and staff. There is a max student cap for each room (that his about 30 % of the maximum capacity).
For schools: several of my friends have kids attending elementary school in Tokyo.
Yes, there is a lot of orientalism going on hackernews. lol.
What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens.
Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hell are these people even getting paid for? They're a net negative value to education and society.
Other countries were able to come up with protocols and standards. Yet here we are flailing around like magikarps.
It's like any other collection of people, except maybe what's hard to remember if you're in tech is that in public bureaucracies there's no high pay, inherently "interesting problems," or prestige factor attracting the bright and ambitious; just job security and pensions attracting the risk averse and allowing anyone toxic who makes it in to remain.
The district my wife left had double digits percentage turnover in their senior administrative roles during the pandemic - that would be enough to keep most organizations from operating to their full potential.
Additionally, they really don't get to make their own decisions - not only is there a chain of command but there's a surprising number of things that have to wait for school board approval and quite a few sets of regulations to navigate. I've been in regulated tech like medical device, and my perception is that what the school admins deal with is a whole other level.
While agreeing with everyone that "raisin d'oatmeal" is genius, and while also agreeing that it's clear that the US has basically failed at running public schools, please don't claim the administrators are somehow the sole agents of this. Like many things in this country it's born of a complicated web of political power being wielded in both good and bad faith by people with varying opinions of what would be best across many decades and scales.
It's a pretty tricky job that is largely thankless and the pay is pretty mediocre. I just looked up what a local principal, whom i feel is actually a pretty excellent leader, makes. He's got a masters degree, has 15 years at this district, runs a building of 1200 students, has ~50 directs reporting to him and made $97k last year.
In general, things are never simple, never black and white, never simply good or bad. Things are never executed by just one person, or even one group of people, and are never executed in isolation. Everything is connected to everything else, every variable is dependent on every other variable, every action, good or bad, gets a reaction of some kind, and on and on. Social dynamics are complicated. Political dynamics are complicated. The economic incentives that often drive behavior are everywhere and aren't necessarily thoughtfully created, maintained, or even widely understood.
Its easy and it feels good to get on Twitter or on Hacker News and yell "Yea screw school administrators, they're the problem!" But it is too tidy of a worldview to even approximate being accurate and saying it doesn't help anybody get closer to solving the real problem.
If you want to help, go get involved in your local school system... if you don't... you don't need to have an opinion on every single little thing, just read the article and move along.
In our community, most of the parents in town are able to work from home. But its a very strange place, and I would expect worse outcomes most other places.
Even so, serious psychiatric illness is tearing the kids up. The child clinical psychologists and the one remaining psychiatrist in town are double-booked, at least.
It's been its own shade of awful.
I don't think that there could have been a better response from the schools here. It's been very difficult to plan for anything more than six weeks out, and the kids who have returned to school have needed more care. And who is caring for the teachers?
I don't know what the dropout rate would be for high schoolers, but many of these kids are just gone. Across all economic levels (the delicate proxy that we use, money lumped in with social status or prevalent parents' level of education and stuff).
Not at all. This is the fault of all the other societal damage done in the name of "stopping COVID", it's the fault of the "public health officials".
Schools are constrained by zero covid policies still clung to by anti-science public health, which mandate widespread testing followed by far reaching preventative isolation which bars health students from school.
Imagine you have a class of 20. Each kids in that class goes to 6 other classes of 20, largely different kids. Now one "tests positive". The school is then tasks by "public health" to find who sat near that kid in each and every class, and "quarantine" all of those kids. Rinse and repeat, ever. single. case.
Many schools have realized this is unsustainable absurdity and rightfully stopped complying, but the more "stay safe" they are, the more they comply. Consequently, the less those schools are able to stay open and effective.
The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling.
Just curious, what would you suggest ?
Because as far as I can tell there are no good solutions.
I suppose the difference between our countries is that until university, you get put into class with 30 people, and do all the classes together.
There are some cases when you can have different additional classes, but thats kind of limited to couple of hours a week, and would not be that hard to just leave off
- Students are generally compelled to be proximate to educational services for long stretches of time. Logistics of not coupling them would be inefficient.
- Students don't learn effectively when they are chronically hungry. Providing education to hungry students isn't maximizing society's investment in these comparatively expensive services.
- Bonus reason: for many students, school is the only institution they have significant contact with, and therefore nobody else is feeding them. Feeding kids is the Right and Moral thing to do.
The difference is there is no super cheap daily meal all students have to choose from. And also kids and public schools can get healthy food if their parents want to/ can afford it.
In my opinion the best case is a society where all kids have parents with the care and understanding to send them to school with nutritious, healthy food. And that students have healthy choices and that they have the means to purchase.
But the kicker, is that in the United States (and some other countries), this is not the case. In the United States, children in dysfunctional or impoverished homes or no home are common enough that it's more efficient to broadly provide support in this manner.
Side note: my wife, who previously was a teacher, and I lived in New Zealand for a few years. New Zealand didn't have a school nutrition program, but probably needed one. My wife did a fair amount of substitute ("relief") teaching in a poor area north of Wellington when we first arrived, and gave her lunch away to hungry students often enough that she knew to pack several sandwiches. So, even countries with comparably strong social supports can run into this issue.
It's not working. The additional strain on schools has turned the mission of public education into a series of brush fires in which staff and administrators just lurch from one crisis to another. The unequal way that education gets funded means that some districts see much more of this than others. But the problem is spreading.
Teachers are not trained to function as warehousers for youth. Nor are they given the resources to serve the role you and far too many parents want them to serve.
When the schools fail there is literally nothing behind them. They're the end of the line. This is the point where all the chickens come home to roost and society starts to fail, one kid at a time. The pandemic should be a wake up call. It doesn't look like it will be.
I completely agree. But we can't fix this in the next few weeks, so for now keeping schools open for those who need it is the thing to do.
It just seems like, regardless of our values, the sheer weight of the case rates and staff shortages is going to force closures in the near term if it hasn't already.
If you put a bunch of vulnerable kids in an auditorium together with minimal supervision because you've got an effective teacher:student ratio of 1:50 or worse, is that really better?
(Maybe it is. I'll admit to not having come from a dysfunctional or unsafe home as the author of the linked piece describes, so I may lack some perspective here.)
I previously didn't think about it this way, and thought closing schools was the more sensible choice. But we're failing a whole generation like this.
It more and more feels like we live in a society that sarcrifices their young, just to keep old people on their life support machines a little longer.
Yeah, that's hyperbole. I don't know what's the right path, tbh.
Then I wasn't so surprised any more. Just disappointed.
But this is normal. Public school workers are deep mediocre workers. Most of the time they skate by being mediocre. But this moment demanded that they do their job well. They, challenged to act outside mediocrity, found their skills wanting.
Warehousing students is wrong (especially so when creating a super spreader study hall), our school systems should not hold kids hostage with threats like charging a kid with truancy if the school is not fully staffed.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-w...
Unfortunately, "let COVID run rampant and kill olds and other at-risk people" isn't a great strategy. And are people in their 40s-50s "old people on life support machines"? Because COVID-19 was the leading cause of death for people ages 45-54 years as recently as October.¹
Yes, it's only the #2 leading cause of death for those 25-34 in that same time period, and lower still for children. But death isn't the only negative outcome. We now know that SARS-CoV-2 infection increases the odds of kids getting Type 1 diabetes, can worsen existing diabetes symptoms, and in turn, people with diabetes are at increased risk for severe COVID-19. There are long-term health and quality-of-life impacts that we don't yet understand.
The good news is that with 9.4B vaccine doses administered we know how to return to relative normalcy. We just aren't doing it, for reasons that have nothing to do with facts and reason.
¹https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid19-and-other-...
I would absolutely love to know what this plan you mention is. Because I absolutely do not know if any real path back to normalcy.
Unlike what politicians say the models and prior history simply say you got to vaccinate everyoe that can get vaccinated.
Also we need international soft real time cooperation and transparency. We are incapable of either.
It is just that COVID has the sweet spot of being transmissible but not causing grueling enough of deaths like measles or the plague so some people may ignore it or believe they can skip vaccination until it's their turn. And of course this is the perfect environment for a virus to mutate.
Also there is the misinformation that the virus has to become less deadly or has less long term impact as it mutates. I have no idea who had that bright idea and why it propagates. See the plague who as bubonic has the optimal close to 100% transmission and 100% fatality rate.
People are still in denial and we all pay the price. So the plan is just masses of people to get actually fed up and force things into other masses of people and slowly drag our economies to the ground, as pandemics do normally.
Even with high numbers of people vaccinated spread is only slowed. Even with boosters spread is only slowed. We tried vaccines and it has failed to bring a return to normalcy.
The question is if we still have that card to play correctly at all.
Maybe. The other thing I've been seeing is a lot of leaders not making hard choices and picking the perpetual compromise path that never leads anywhere.
* They mention their study hall as a "super spreader event". This feels...hysterical to me. Not just because it worries me that this kid is thinking about this in the way they are, but also because it's wrong. The risk this person faces is much more likely from the HVAC system in the school, not the study hall.
* The way they talk about the other kid asking questions "with their mask down". To be obsessed with this sort of minutiae as a kid is scary to me.
* Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school.
* Begin upset at kids for taking these tests in the bathroom instead of at home.
It just seems like there is a whole realm of paranoia that this kid is trying to fit on top of their life, and I don't think this sort of paranoia is in any way reasonable.
I think that teaching kids to think about their world with this framing, and at a formative age, is and already has done major damage to their development.
One major change there, I think, is that we need to change the messaging on masks to get a mask to protect yourself if you are vulnerable or will be near those who are. Cloth masks have shown themselves to be better at a population level than nothing in some studies, but that's hardly the same thing as a medical-grade mask, which are now much more widely available than they were a year ago.
That said, because hospitalizations lag case numbers, I assume they are trying to extrapolate from case numbers to future hospitalizations. Of course that changes depending upon the individual variant that is currently spreading.
This couldn't be more wrong.
Even if everyone eventually gets it, you'd much rather get it as late as possible and outside of an infection spike like this one where rescue medications are depleted and hospitals are overburdened.
The medical knowledge and treatment options available today are far, far better than what we had at the beginning of the pandemic. And they continue to improve. Availability of the best treatments is also scarce, but continues to improve. The virus itself also appears to be slowly mutating to less fatal versions.
Even if you think it's inevitable, you want to delay it as long as possible.
There's a substantial difference between "everyone will get it in a year or two" and "everyone will get it all within a couple of weeks", especially where hospital capacity is concerned. My city has one ICU bed available and hospitals have been diverting ambulances.
> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?
We've done it several times. After each spike flattens and then comes down, restrictions get progressively lifted. I'm in a blue state that took things quite seriously, and this summer still largely felt if the pandemic didn't exist.
It'd buy you an extra percent or two; the numbers have been vanishingly small. Mayo Clinic lost about a percent. Factor in the fact they're more likely to get sick and it's even closer to a net zero.
I'm not inclined to treat antivax beliefs as "professional", especially in the healthcare field.
That type of thinking is completely wrong.
Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.
If the workers have made it this far, either they have had it and have immunity or they are very good at keeping themselves safe. In either case we should want them working.
"Have immunity" turns out to be a flexible thing. If they're unboosted, they're more likely to be re-infected by Omicron.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/omicron-largely-evade...
"The new report (Report 49) from the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team estimates that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times greater than that of the Delta variant. This implies that the protection against reinfection by Omicron afforded by past infection may be as low as 19%."
"Depending on the estimates used for vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection from the Delta variant, this translates into vaccine effectiveness estimates against symptomatic Omicron infection of between 0% and 20% after two doses, and between 55% and 80% after a booster dose. Similar estimates were obtained using genotype data, albeit with greater uncertainty."
> Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.
All the more reason to have a vaccination mandate.
Who'd be doing a wide variety of nurse/doctor tasks?
Vented ICU patients are complicated. They need more than a babysitter.
No, it means that it tends to be maintained at some (whether very high or very low or other) stable baseline level in a region in the absence of external inputs or interventions.
> Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless
No, it doesn't, and wouldn't even if “endemic” did mean everyone would get it, since the control measures are not intended to prevent people from eventually getting COVID in the absence of a fundamental change in available countermeasures, but to reduce the speed of particular outbreaks and mitigate acute impacts to health systems (which affects ability to treat anyone needing the system) from caseload and to other essential social services from temporary incapacitation of key staff.
> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now
Rarely for more than a couple weeks in a row, on a local basis, in response to particular sharp outbreaks, and invariably with much weaker measures than were taken for the same purpose earlier on in the pandemic, despite outbreaks that are much worse by every measure (in part, because the ultimate goal is much more limited and temporary, and in part because the political faction that deliberately avoided fighting the pandemic in the hopes of blaming the effects on political opponents has turned avoiding control measures into a quasi-religious doctrine to avoid accountability for their earlier malfeasance.)
Are we reading the same post?
The kids are going to school. The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.
> And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with.
Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation? They have older parents at home. They have older teachers in the classroom. Many of them see even older grandparents and relatives frequently, perhaps also at home.
Where do kids go if they get sick? Home, where they are cared for by older parents.
Kids don't just live in isolated bubbles with other kids. It's dishonest to ignore the second-order effects of kids getting sick.
This depends on how you define "so sick". Tested positive? Yes. Hospitalized? I bet not all (or > 1.8% [1]) of them. I notice when verbiage sensationalizes COVID. The OP, I believe, is also sensitive to this.
> Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation?
This is the primary argument. Your two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. He can believe that the kids are overly scared based on the statistics because, well, they are not at that much risk while at the same time recognizing that individuals not at risk put other people who are at risk in danger.
This is why we fail to have beneficial conversation, we talk around each other.
[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/omicron-...
I was not hospitalized and I was not able to work due to some quite heavy symptoms that prevent me to talk or focus more than a few minutes on a task.
Either way, you focused on the minor point rather than the main purpose which is a "both and" scenario rather than a "either or" where the two arguments are debating different issues which are not mutually exclusive but for some reason are used to argue against each other as if it's an either/or scenario (risk to ones self vs risk to others - It can be low risk to the individual and high risk to others at the same time).
Bullshit.
Assuming that 20% of the teachers are sick (=coughing or not feeling well), which is a ridiculous overestimation, schools can still work perfectly well. That just means that 20% of the lessons will not happen. And if the schools' administration is not completely useless (I admit that may be a long shot), some of these lessons could be replaced by other lessons.
School administrators are extremely busy with all of the extra work they’ve been given, and if they’re babysitting students that work (often required by law) will not happen.
If you're in a school: you're catching omicron, and unless all of the students are wearing at least PAPR hoods all the time, everybody is catching it. Allowing yourself to get worked up about seeing a kid with his mask down in the bathroom is insane.
They may be teenagers, but they're not wrong to attend to the minutiae; whether for selfish or for social reasons, that awareness may be all that is keeping them and their loved ones alive. It is cruel and unjust and wrong that they alone are attending to the minutiae of masking, but here in the United States our social support systems often require them to bear that responsibility, as the adults responsible for them often do not.
Like their parents, who could end up hospitalized, or worse? Seems like a good reason to be concerned.
The kids were packed into an overcrowded auditorium so much that they completely ran out of seats and had cram even more people into the auditorium than it had seating. They did this for 3 hours, far longer than it takes to acquire COVID from someone sitting next to you. Kids were literally testing positive inside of the auditorium during this time.
> * The way they talk about the other kid asking questions "with their mask down". To be obsessed with this sort of minutiae as a kid is scary to me.
That kid with the mask down had literally just tested positive for COVID. That's not "minutiae". It's baffling that you think the problem in this scenario is that he's concerned about a COVID-positive person in close quarters having a mask down, as opposed to the fact that a COVID-positive person has their mask down. You must be harboring some major biases.
> * Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school.
Did you miss the part where so many of the faculty and staff were out sick that they were struggling to coordinate everything? I agree it's uncoordinated and wasteful, but the point is that they're being forced to try to run a school when a huge number of the faculty are too sick to do so.
You just said, a paragraph up, that they had all been in the auditorium for 3 hours, which (again, according to you) is "far longer than it takes" to get sick. Let's assume you're right -- we have an auditorium overcrowded with kids, many of whom are spewing aerosolized, highly transmissible virus into an enclosed space. For hours.
So yes, worrying about a silly mask on one kid, in that context, is more than a little hysterical. I'm going to wager that most of these kids weren't wearing rigorously fitted respirators anyway.
Even if you don't believe that (why wouldn't you?), the idea that a moment of "mask down" is going to present any sort of exceptional additional risk is clearly nonsense.
The more viral load you're exposed to, the higher the infection risk. Someone speaking directly to you in close quarters with an active infection is, indeed, a significant risk factor for acquiring the virus.
It doesn't make sense to argue that it doesn't matter because they were also possibly exposed to other students for 3 hours earlier.
No. Infectious dose may matter for severity of disease (this is a hypothesis; it has never been demonstrated). Concluding that it matters in this situation is clearly silly. You're talking about hours in a room, with hundreds of kids. You think they're all wearing perfectly fitted respirators? Come now. You honestly want to suggest that one kid pulling his mask down makes a big difference in the overall aerosol rave being described here?
Remember, we don't even know what kind of mask is being discussed. If the kid in question is wearing a cloth mask, it probably didn't matter either way, based on all current evidence.
Also remember: SARS-CoV2 shows a clear pattern of overdispersion. Most people don't spread to anyone. The chances that any particular encounter will lead to your infection are very low, regardless of masks. Put a hundred kids in a room, though, and those tiny probabilities start to multiply. Sitting for hours in a room full of hundreds of other people is dramatically higher risk than some guy pulling his mask down for a second (but the former doesn't let you blame your outcome on specific person, so it isn't nearly as satisfying, is it?)
This is the problem with Covid discussions on the internet. People get one fact half-right ("viral load matters"), and use that to generate the scariest possible hot-takes.
You've misunderstood - he's not blaming the students but the administration in these points.
Schools (generally speaking) are due to reopen on monday the 10th, but very likely only a part of them will actually be able to.
It's completely inadequate to rely on online schooling for small kids; a large part of what's important in their schooling is interacting with other kids. Over-12s: maybe not so much.
So I think it's inevitable that more-or-less all schools are going to be disease-ridden. Really, they always have been (i.e. not just COVID). It's similar with hospitals; the whole point of a hospital is that it's full of sick people. I hate hospital waiting rooms.
Return to school is planned in two weeks. Testing before attending school will be mandatory. I’m sure there will be hiccups as desperate parents looking to shed their children will lie about kids being positive. However, the public health department has accepted Omicron infection as inevitable and is taking measures to slow spread, rather than eliminate it.
(1) I should note that Google Suite being made available to schools is an amazing long-term strategy. It reminds me of Adobe’s policy of lax licensing security for Photoshop two decades ago, which basically assured their current market dominance now due to familiarity with their product.
With Covid, everything kind of got forced onto schools that weren't technically prepared. I'm afraid of what costs we'll pay when our education system is also owned (via tech) by private industry.
Children from age 5 upwards are being vaccinated as of today, and the main focus in school buildings is on getting adequate ventilation and HEPA filters into classrooms. Contact tracing in schools has been not been a priority, for better or for worse.
The will is there, and there's money available to spend, but the implementation has been a bit less than stellar.
Well I do actually, it was causing so much disruption that it made in person schooling almost impossible.
HEPA filters seem like an obvious win, but there's clearly a bunch of RCT extremists in NPHET ;)
I do wish that we'd have something though. Our local government has just given up altogether.
From a parental point of view I don't think there is much more you can do. They just relaxed the rules further to only send home classes for a week if 5 or more kids test positive.
Having the classes have been incredibly good for the kids to be allowed to socialise and keep everyone including parents sane. Considering how low their change of getting seriously ill and how the new variant is spreading I think it will be back to normality in less than two months.
Edit: 7 day rolling average of COVID cases according to https://www1.nyc.gov/ is 32k cases per day with 38 deaths. So there is a 0.1% mortality rate.
5075 new cases this week (2227 in New York City).
Anecdotally, I understand it can be pretty nasty - not "like a winter cold", more like bad 'flu (the anecdote relates to an antivaxx family).
From where I sit, anecdotally, vaccines have been highly effective. The messaging around them is weak. The choice and recentness of vaccines and boosters is having a big impact on severity of infection, and there's a world of difference between an asymptomatic never-tested-positive exposure and a 3-day flu. The CDC has a problem in their marketing department that has generated so much confusion.
- Masking is highly effective and just a bit inconvenient.
- Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive.
- Vaccines are very effective even against transmission.
- Nobody is aiming for 0 Covid anymore (except some Australians and China I guess), but getting through the winter wave without too many fellow citizens dead should be something we spend some effort on.
Covid isn't tearing societies apart if everybody just has a bit of compassion and does the right thing (get vaxxed, masks, reduce in-person meetings).
Australia has more new daily cases per capita than US right now, according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
This is about closing schools. Should we keep schools closed for 5 year? How long? For vaccinated folks omicron is very manageable.
Nobody is arguing about the next 5 years, it is the first winter after we started a very successful vaccination campaign. Without Omicron, Covid would already be mostly over.
Also total school closures could be prevented if we adopt more nuanced methods (such as alternating days of attendance, air filtration, etc.)
None of those appear to be true for Omicron, and we’re only sorta/kinda true for Delta. Vaccinated people are getting and spreading it at rates that are really quite shocking, and even pro-mask drs and scientists are admitting that cloth masks don’t seem to do much now…
Mask are absolutely working. Even cloth masks. But of course when we are talking masking nowadays we mean N95 for everyone which provides roughly a 25x reduce risk of contracting covid if both source and target are wearing it.
No, it's really not. It's made no difference in the overall spread. It's also a LOT more than "just a bit inconvenient". It prevents normal face to face human interaction in public.
> Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive.
Well the "extremely expensive" part is somewhat right, though it would be more accurate to call them "extremely damaging to society". However, they also are ineffective at at preventing an easily transmittable virus that is spread across ever corner of the globe. At most you just give up one day of your life at the beginning, when they are the most valuable, and trade it for an extra day at the end.
It's a harmful juggling of freedom NOBODY should be forced to be subjected to.
> Vaccines are very effective even against transmission.
Not these ones.
> Nobody is aiming for 0 Covid anymore (except some Australians and China I guess), but getting through the winter wave without too many fellow citizens dead should be something we spend some effort on.
Well all the measures being pushed only make sense in the context of "zero covid". It's time for people to wake up and reject the attacks on freedom that make no sense in the reality of a commonly occurred but rarely deadly coronavirus we will encounter for the rest of our lives.
Of course masking works. Why wouldn't it? It had a tremendous impact of making a virus that has a R0 of more than 3 spread rather slowly.
We don't have to argue about lockdowns anymore because we won't be getting another one. There are more nuanced tools available now. But of course lockdowns have worked to delay spread. It is just basic physics that you can't get infected if you don't spend time with somebody infected.
Last, your rejection of any measures does not make any sense. We are in the first winter after a tremendously successful vaccination campaign (over 10x risk reduction for those vaccinated). It is appropriate to keep some measures with high impact on spread and low impact on freedom (such as masks!) to slow the current wave to help the healthcare system.
China is still trying it but I expect that to fail in a few weeks. Australia has given up on it.
The real question is why Japan is yet again not having a breakout.
- More time to vaccinate.
- Better treatment in hospitals which aren't under stress
- More time to develop pharmaceutical treatments against severe cases.
(I am not advocating for a lockdown. There are much more nuanced options.)
Just wait for it. New case numbers have been multiplied by 10 in less than a week to reach over 8000 new cases yesterday.
In New York Cuomo killed many of these people early on.
Your interpretation of the data is also just flat out wrong. You can't divide cases from today by deaths from today and get a case mortality rate, because deaths lag cases very significantly (2-8 weeks was a number studies were showing early on, not sure if there's a more accurate one since). A month prior to the latest day with a deaths number (01/04) the 7 day rolling average of cases in NYC was 2404 (data from my link above). That's also an inappropriate number to use, given that the recent giant spike in cases means that a disproportionate number of deaths will be from relatively recent cases, but it serves to demonstrate the point about your derivation being completely inappropriate.
A 0.1% mortality rate is also really bad if you're talking about students, but we're not, the data your citing is for the entire population... for the entire population it's just bad.
Pretty close to my back of the napkin calculations.
Your article is in the opinion section, not written by any sort of doctor but some sort sort of investor (and incidentally substantial republican donor), that's not a source I would take seriously... Author's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Arnott
Like Constable Bob, people underestimate influenza at their own peril.
More to the point, if the numbers indicate lethality comparable to a bad strain of influenza and transmissibility comparable to measles, we’re in a very bad situation.
Even before all the data is in, the number of hospitalizations we’re seeing alone signifies a bad situation.
You could make a case for putting up a plexiglass wall between students and teachers just to end this headache and I think you wouldn’t find as much opposition now as you would have in 2020.
That said, some kids have to be physically restrained/handled and you can’t very well do that behind plexiglass.
The kids are going to school. Teachers are out sick. Unless you have an infinite supply of teachers, it’s hard to keep schools running normally during a COVID outbreak.
Some of these problems can’t even be solved with funding. People just don’t want to be teachers, it’s a low-status profession in the US. Who’s going to go through a teaching program and a multi-year certification process for the privilege of working a job everyone shits on, when you could just go to a coding bootcamp?
Same goes for the medical profession. Everyone is quitting and the shambles we’re left with produces a lot of vindictive rhetoric towards the remaining doctors and nurses who haven’t quit, yet.
This applies both in the sense that "They will learn more effectively", and "They'll have a better shot at getting into universities".
I would simply not have had the self discipline or motivation to learn everything on my own, no matter how good the learning materials were. Oddly enough, even through college, there were subjects that I easily taught myself, such as electronics and programming, others that I needed to learn in a classroom, such as math and physics.
I would have had no parental supervision at home -- both of my parents worked.
The kids who succeed will succeed. That's not to say that everybody succeeds in school either.
The only thing I got from being in person was friends. But that can be achieved in other ways without having to be forced to sit on a class. Group studying is one, and helps a lot in learning.
If people choose a course and then don't have motivation for it that's a totally different problem. The problem lies not in tricks to make the person do it anyway, but on them reassessing why they chose that course in the first place. I always had motivation to do my course on my own because I chose it for a reason. And if kids are too young to see why they might want to do this specific course, then maybe the course itself needs to change to be a tiny bit more practical and fun.
IMO, the ability to self-study ahead of peers is a defining criteria for being in that top 10%. So, the system is working as designed.
This is very different from, say, perceiving school to be "so easy" that you are too advanced for it.
they should treat homerooms as the place students stay all day to attend classes semi-remotely. This allows teachers to work while quarantining and students to keep learning if at home temporarily. An issue with covid is it spreads so fast but symptoms may be nothing so I bet most students and teachers could continue at home while isolated and prevent as much disruption (its obviously still not ideal).
at the same time it gives students a place to go. it gives them technical and other support a school provides students.
To allow students to spread the virus and infect staff without intervention is negligent.
This isn't even accounting for unknown long term effects and recent studies suggesting kids with covid are more likely to be type 1/2 diabetic.
So something has to be done and what is being done is suboptimal. Students need support. They are, as you mention, unlikely to die but still not possible to allow known spread.
Covid is here for the rest of our lives. What you say we should do now, needs to be what you think we should do permanently. Any removals of freedom you advocate for, will not end.
I think when you frame it in that reality, most realize that we don't actually want to get rid of the freedom in the ways people push for.
The non vaccinated people are a life saver from the point of view of the organism and this people are purposely destroying the economy for everybody.
A virus' end "goal" is to be endemic in the population. Infecting and spreading but killing almost no one, just like the flu does.
Natural selection, -should- do those things, but we can't count on it, because we are humans, and natural selection in us works in a different way. We basically have stopped it as part of our own evolution. Nobody needs to run faster, develop claws or climb better than predators anymore
The biggest problem with Covid is that it spreads -before- people have symptoms. Flu spreads when and after, but not before. An Omicron "improved" to kill people in a few days would still travel perfectly.
If that happens then society as a whole would react to it more strongly and it would thus spread slower. That's a natural selective force.
Just today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/health/kids-covid-diabete...
“Does not cause much near-term mortality from acute disease” and “is not dangerous” are...not the same thing.
Provide a pre-2020 schooling environment to them, opened up completely like normal with no masks, "social distancing", etc. Do it _immediately_.
even had them in middle school, not elementary though.
A non-school example would be concert venues and sports — they just metal detect you and search your bag if it lights up.
This is really awful behavior.
CDC and US has full on PR every day on how bad COVID is and how we should get vaccine and wear masks. People who don't do those are ostracized.
People who don't think covid is a big deal is labeled anti-science and covid-denier.
With all this, of course, every normal reasonable person is scared of covid.
If a person next to me has covid, I sure as hell will run away as soon as possible.
Saving myself is way more important than saving your feeling.
I hope anyone would do the same. Don't worry about hurting my feeling. That is negligible. Save yourself first.
Masks, lockdowns, all of it is just modern day rain dances. We think we can somehow control and contain a highly infectious virus. Ha. Yeah right.
It has been two years and the high school teachers I talk to say it has not at all.
The big reason for older teachers retiring early is due to their network exploding due to stock market gains, fear of Covid, and hatred of remote teaching.
I think at this point - people are starting to learn that education wasn’t the primary goal of school. It was to be a daycare with the guise of learnings being done. Go with remote - no one wins.
Most of the public over-estimates the risk of COVID, by 10 to 100 times:
https://kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_o...
These over-reactions, and anxiety, along with all of the testing that is caused by, and contributed to the social obsession about it, does more damage to students than the COVID-19 virus.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
>I am much more concerned about long term effects of an infection
The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
>even if asymptomatic
COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
1) Those not at risk are a threat to those at risk (at home, at restaurants, etc). We should be concerned not because of their own safety, but because of the risk to others.
2) The author appears to be (or children in general) overly scared based on the risk COVID poses to them. They are relatively safe. I like to look at risk in terms of things I can relate to - safer than dying from a car accident this year. Parents should worry more about driving (1:10k per year [1]) than their child dying to COVID (1:500k [2]). The difference is even greater for injured in a car vs hospitalized by COVID (magnitudes of difference).
Can we stop talking around each other and recognize both are true?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
[2] https://www.ncmd.info/news/covid-deaths-children-rare/ (I could list others - most sources are children deaths / total deaths which is different than children tested positive / children deaths - and that discounts all asymptomatic / not tested children).
1. It'd be nice if they held classes outside, when it's not freezing/windy/snowing "bomb cyclones" and where it's not concrete Manhattan.
2. Forcing kids back to school during the middle of a 600k-1M+ infections/day national peak seems absurd. Heck, the FAANG company I'm interviewing for cancelled all in-person interviews for 2021-2022. If the teachers are too worried and/or are getting sick, it's insane to "power through it" by getting more people sick. As much as people want "normalcy" because they're pandemic fatigued, it's not worth killing another million people. Heck, if lockdowns were done strictly similar to authoritarian countries like China or even resembling France's new laws, this pandemic wouldn't have reached endemic community spread. But no: must have no-mask "mah freedumbs".
3. Positive-tested non-symptomatic teachers should be setup with the technical capabilities to teach from home to school.
Lockdown is not being implemented because "omicron is mild". We have a somewhat good vaccination rate despite the strong antivax movement, but that is still leaving millions at risk, not in small part thanks to our asinine so-called leadership.
This is a very partial view. Vaccinated people can have the virus and transmit it, but they will have it less, transmit it less, and anyway have lesser symptoms if they catch it from someone else.
The third is why a vaccine pass helps the healthcare system more than a "vaccine or test" pass, in a situation where vaccinated people can have or transmit the virus.
Instead of a stupid pass, make the vaccine mandatory and work on transmission (better ventilation everywhere, which will be beneficial in any case, N95 masks, good planning to avoid spreader events, adapted plannings, burn openspaces, etc). Not working on transmission means the virus is free to mutate in he humongous pool of contaminated people (which is, due to statistics, a large majority of vaccinated), or even recombine with the delta strain which is still peaking in cases at the same time.
Vaccination is the only way to get there as fast as possible, but even if you make it mandatory you would have to check it somewhere for people to actually get the vaccine. Even if you add a 100 euro/month fine, there are plenty of people that have been spending more than that in tests to go to work.
I can't think of any other measure that gets even close. The effects of restaurant closures can be mitigated by throwing money at the problem. If you have to stay home and take care of children, your career will suffer even if you are compensated for lost income.
There really isn't an easy solution to it. Maybe getting creative on the local level would help: taking turns among a (small) group of parents, or hiring a single person to take care of maybe 5 or 6 kids. Maybe getting the older children to watch the younger ones, etc. But everything comes with its own drawbacks, usually by reintroducing pathways to spread.
One measure that seems to be missing, and that I cannot find fault with right now, is changing structures to keep classes fixed, possibly with only a single teacher (per week?). For younger children, it's quite possible for, say an English teacher to also teach biology. Having fixed classes is also common in many countries. It means you can't accomodate electives, of course.
Maybe school openings should just focus on that age group instead of being all-or-nothing? They could give extra focus to preschool & kindergarten, reallocate teachers from higher grades to decrease student-teacher ratios and help spread the infection risk thinner.
But I agree, it should be perfectly possible to close higher grades and leave lower grades open.
Are there provided with extra help, like single-purpose classrooms according to subject? Do teachers announce where the next lessons take place? Are students split into sub-groups sharing the entire schedule, so they can team up and not lose track of it?
Not that big of a deal. Most people don't even have careers really, having children is already a career disadvantage, careers are mostly zero-sum competition so it balances out, etc.
"It is what it is" but as of now staff can't work because they're out sick.
It is a dramatically higher cost that gets paid in loss of life for those who choose not to be vaccinated and those who can't, and in staff shortages and basic infrastructure weakness for everybody else.
We are, just not in the way you'd prefer. Plagues much worse than this one happen regularly, and humanity gets through it.
> It is a dramatically higher cost
A dramatically higher cost than what we're currently doing to our youth? That's an opinion. So some teachers die, and the profession becomes temporarily younger and more male than before due to self-selected risk profiles. Sounds like how any "dangerous" job already works. This doesn't constitute a crisis worth sequestering our children, to me.
Heck even if you have enough teachers the people who make things happen like bus drivers, aides, helpers, food prep are going to be knocked out too.
My district had two hundred cases of covid in staff alone this week. That’s 10% of the staff. And we were remote.
I agree that this would be a great time for temporary remote schooling. I think the problem is that months and months of unnecessary school closures have broken parents (and kids), as well as burned a lot of trust that this will be handled with a modicum of competence or compassion. I don't personally have kids, but the parents I know are very reasonably at their breaking points over how poorly-managed and dogmatic school closures have been. That excludes those whose kids attend or started to attend private schools, whose immunity to the cacophony of Discourse means that they've handled the risk of Covid sanely and compassionately.
I'm as annoyed as anyone at Covid denialists, but in my urban coastal context, the neurotic hysterics of restrictionist fanatics has been a lot more salient. There's been a faction of the conversation that insists that making any space to discuss the costs of restrictions is denialism, and the excess restrictions driven by those people are exactly why there's zero capacity left for NPIs like lockdown or school closures during a period where they would actually be helpful.
It is not backslash to any real policy, it is people who are against those having exact same opinions as they had the whole time.
"America" is 300 million people and 50 separate states in a federal system. The reflexive urge to treat it as a single entity is central to the problem I'm discussing. On the more functional side, the lack of border controls between states in a federal system made tamping cases down to minimal levels a big challenge.
The entire world settled into an equilibrium of calibrating restrictions (both via policy and individual behavior) based on case numbers. In the US, national numbers drove much of this conversation, treating a continent-spanning nation as if it was epidemiologically equivalent to Belgium.
> There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions.
just a couple of examples that I'm personally familiar with:
- California was under a statewide stay-at-home order from March 2020 to January 2021 (by contrast, France lifted their lockdown from May to October)
- San Francisco public schools were closed for over a year, and much of the US has been extreme about school closures. UK schools have never entirely shut down, and across Europe schools have been dramatically more open than across the US.
You're not wrong that American restrictions have generally been lighter, but this elides the many individual pockets with unnecessary NPIs based on case rates in irrelevant parts of the country. Schools are the most dramatic example of this, but things like spring 2020 lockdowns based on a pandemic that was limited to the Northeast at the time set us up for the heavy resistance to restrictions we saw in many states when they were actually hit in the summer (helped along by El Presidente's abuse of the bully pulpit).
Not really. Attendance in person was about 15%, being limited to key workers' children who couldn't arrange other childcare, and children with special educational needs. Teachers focused on remote teaching, while in person learning was neglected. In person teaching resumed fully Sep 2020-Dec 2020, and was interrupted again Jan-Mar 2021.
There are more issues with younger kids who need supervision on this side of the screen, might fight with their siblings, etc. My sister has three boys (8, 10 and 12 y.o.) and she just can’t cope with the cabin fever. The lack of structured exercise seems a problem too.
Finally, in some cases, school offers free meals to families who need it. I feel like that could be substituted with a more universal service, but no one knows who can do that (has the time, budget, PPE, etc.).
Parents who are rejoining the workforce can't take 4-6 weeks of with no notice to babysit their kids again... But they also can't afford to stop working.
Businesses can't afford to lose workers, it continues the strain on the system which raises wages and threatens the small (and medium) businesses going under...
It's a crappy situation that society isn't willing to actually address because the political theater is in the middle of a power struggle... A business-minded politician would see that vaccination (or mandatory masks and testing) is the key to business returning to normal... but the politics of this is a huge driver of power shifts that hit a larger cross section of society than most topics...
If you can't afford your kid to be home, because you need your job to pay bills... Then you don't want schools closed, and there's one political party that promises that right now.
Why do you need a babysitter for a school-aged child? OK, maybe if the kid is below 7, but 7 and up should be more than capable of being alone at home. Entire nations do exactly that. In Estonia 7 year olds are expected to go to school on their own and come back home. At home they will likely be alone (or with their siblings) until their parents get home from work.
As I understand it, students can minimise their online class and play computer games or browse the web instead.
And young children aren't exactly known for their self-control, even if some of us had good self-control at that age.
A teacher who finds 5% of students don't respond when called upon might be able to focus on them; but if 95% of students don't respond, their powers are very limited.
IMHO, reopening schools is more important for the nation than reopening restaurants, office buildings, universities, hairdressers or gyms.
Uh... schools are open. No one has closed schools in this nation. The debate here is whether or not having open schools this month, during the omicron wave, is helping or hurting.
The evidence in the linked article is that schools in NYC have organizationally broken down and that no meaningful education is happening anyway. Because it's very difficult to run a school when 5-10% of the population is actively sick.
(Though the silver lining here is that we're clearly getting to a true "pan" pandemic with omicron, and still not seeing evidence of significant health care overload or increased death rates. It remains possible that we've dodged a giant bullet with this variant.)
Certainly if omicron had the same behavior as previous variants, we'd know by now. Continued worries aren't about severity lag, but about whether or not there's something else different about omicron. It's worth being safe and cautious. But nonetheless the best evidence we have says that this is probably a very safe variant and a near-best-case outcome (i.e. everyone gets sick rapidly and we reach herd immunity rapidly with minimal severe cases, vs. everyone "eventually" getting delta with much worse outcomes).
"Herd immunity" isn't a synonym for eradication. It just means that we reach a stage where disease spread is effectively controlled by existing immune systems and most outbreaks remain limited and local.
[1] We do get colds, which are any of a zillion different endemic diseases all subject to the same math.
With omicron the chances that a given case ends up in the hospital is significantly lower than it was with previous variants, but because the case count is so much higher (7-day average of new cases per day over the last week in the US went from 387k to 648k) the number of people hospitalized for COVID is now higher than it has been during even the peaks of the worst prior waves.
Heck, I'm in a state that has always been in the bottom 10 for cases and deaths (and often in the bottom 5) and I'm in a county in that state that has been mostly been in the bottom 10% within the state, and our hospitals are hitting their limits for the first time since COVID started.
There's a false belief out there in this debate that if we don't have an enforced lockdown, we won't get a defacto one.
Kids hate remote learning. Its awful looking at a screen, bored, for hours day after day. They dont perform well.
Kids need other kids interactions.
Many substitute teachers are not being allowed to work because they dont want the never ending vaccine regime. I know 3 who did it full time and no longer because of it.
Omnicron being so weak is the perfect time to end the lockdowns and security theater. Get everyone exposed so we can develop nation wide natural immunity, which actually works, and move on with life. Its been close to two years of this madness. Teen suicide is at an all time high, enough is enough.
If teachers don't want to teach, quit, there are many people who would love their position waiting in the sidelines.
Now, maybe schools really should close even if remote learning was off the table, because the situation described in the link is quite dire. But see, then I look around, and I see that indoor dining is still open, movie theaters are still open, and a significant portion of Broadway is still open. Schools seem more important than all of that stuff. Maybe we should figure out whatever it is the restaurants are doing?
But I do think having "remote learning" as a dangling option is warping the discussion. It's not a real fix.
Because "remote learning" is a joke.
I volunteered a bit in a virtual high school classroom. The teacher running it is making a frankly heroic effort to keep her students in the school system at all.
But no one was engaged, cameras were off, students regularly don't show up at all or drop off in the middle of class.
These are comparatively adults compared to younger grades.
> One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him.
I suggest fixing the ludicrously miscalibrated risk assessment of omicron as a better route. How many of these legions of absent teachers even have symptoms?
Teachers in the US usually have 80% of their time spent spent teaching with 20% prep and duties (lunchroom or recess). Now you get a few people out with no subs available and you have teachers combining classes or covering others, leaving no prep time or unmanageable classroom sizes. Add to that a room of kids preoccupied with covid concerns and unable to concentrate.
Remote work is often a joke, too. Many, many people are completely checked out, burnt out after having to endure too many mentally draining and often pointless zoom meetings. I know several folks planning to drop out of the work force for a while, when (if?) we return to a semblance of normality. That'll push salaries even higher for the ones who remain.
so how come they are able to function pre-pandemic, having the same meetings in the office?
I also feel there are more meetings now than pre pandemic.
What about kindergarten? Teaching 20+ students 5-6 years olds through zoom??? - seems like a fools errand. This could be their most important years for learning.
"The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers."
Everyone will get covid. Period. Just get it. You might get it once per year - but that is true for the entire human race. Give up on logistics the war is lost.
"We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks."
Maybe for this variant? What about the next? Just keep children on zoom?
The whole economy feels like a first-in-best-dressed pyramid scheme. If I had been born 5 years earlier, I'm sure I would have been very well off now. Still, it wasn't a complete failure for me, I did manage to benefit from some small opportunities which were presented to me...
But when I look at the people entering the workforce today, it's much worse. Unless you're the child of a rich person, you have 0 opportunities. Social mobility is 0. The message I'm getting from society nowadays is that the game of capitalism is over so instead of wasting your time with education, you may as well emotionally prepare yourself to flip hamburgers for the next 65 years.
I'd be surprised if developed countries are still capitalist in 20 years... But who knows, maybe the elites will find a way to break the next generation's morale even further to make them feel even more hopeless so that the idea of system change wouldn't even enter their heads.
All the travel restrictions, testing, school closures, quarantines, vaccine mandates, etc. are accomplishing is imposing costs and creating chaos.
People will be hospitalized. People will die. Hospitals will be overwhelmed.
It's unavoidable at this point, but no politician or policy maker has the courage to admit that.
COVID might have been containable with massive travel restrictions, testing, and contact tracing in the first couple months of 2020. Between the testing screwups, the factually challenged political posture adopted by a certain former POTUS in the early days of the pandemic, the WHO's general incompetence, China's questionable actions, the disease's ease of transmission, and the delay in travel restrictions, that scenario is long gone.
We're all going to take our X% roll of the dice against COVID. You can have a better roll if you get vaccinated, but then you have to consider: (1) The Y% chance the vaccine has a side effect that wasn't caught in trials and won't show up for years, and (2) The cost of meekly accepting that the government of a free country has the power to force people to get a medical treatment they don't want by taking away their ability to work or travel if they refuse, and also the privacy implications of allowing airlines and employers to ask for personal medical information, and the establishment of centralized databases for that information to deal with people who fake vaccination cards.
(I personally got vaccinated, but I'm not getting the booster; reason (2) above is a part of that calculus. Another part is that when I got the first vaccine, I justified that decision by reasoning that long-term side effects are unlikely as the MRNA, adjuvants, or other weird leftovers will wash out of the body within months. That justification goes out the window if the vaccine's not a one-and-done and you start accepting boosters.)
It's not a choice between (a) Massively disrupt these kids' lives, or (b) they catch COVID and some of them die. It's a choice between (a') Massively disrupt these kids' lives / educations, and some of them catch COVID and die, or (b') These kids have a reasonable education and some sense of normalcy, even though some of them will catch COVID and die.
It's the truth. Unfortunately, no one who has real authority to set policy is willing to admit it out loud.
Imagine if you stepped on a nail. Guess what, it's gonna be painful no matter what you do. It's better to pull the nail out in 1 go and endure a large amount of pain in a short amount of time, than to pull the nail out 1cm a day and endure a moderate amount of pain over a long period of time. Right now, almost every human society has decided to do the latter and implement lockdown after lockdown; going into total mania over new variants and semi-mandating vaccines and pumping 3 shots (more to come!) of rushed, insufficiently tested vaccines within a single year. I say semi-mandating because if you are faced with a choice of losing your livelihood or getting a jab, do you really have a choice?
Here in Toronto, the government just started another 3-week lockdown. I believe this is the 3rd lockdown we've had.
In some weird way, I'm strangely at peace with everything that's happened. I think I have adopted somewhat of a fatalistic attitude, not towards COVID but rather towards human nature and our ape-like herd-like nature.
So, no, nothing similar. Stop pretending it is.
No, it would not have been possible. The simple fact that animals can catch it prevents that.
> I justified that decision by reasoning that long-term side effects are unlikely as the MRNA, adjuvants, or other weird leftovers will wash out of the body within months.
Vaccines don't have long-term side effects. They have side effects, but it's immediate or nothing.
It's also quite likely the 3rd shot is not a "booster", and skipping the 2nd shot in the series would be effective too. i.e. the actual problem is the first two shots were too close together.
But lets try:
Shifting average graduation age to 18-19
* Drop out rate: TO THE MOON!
* Shit pay "high school" jobs no one wants: Now for adults!
* Wages don't just stagnate by age groups: Stagnant wages for everyone!
* Entering the work force a year later? Great reason to raise retirement age!
Don't be ridiculous. The amount of parents that do this is practically non-existent.
> Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital.
I disagree. I've worked in a top 5 largest school district for over 22 years. Under normal circumstances a handful of kids graduate high school with trigonometry under their belt, some with only algebra, and some in between (its the same for science). There's plenty of wiggle room in there. Colleges already offer remedial classes for kids that need it and its unfair to the students that managed to succeed even in this environment.
> You seem very concerned about the economy.
I shouldn't have used the word economy (as that tends to translate directly to "the stock market"). I really meant its bad for labor (but good for the companies that exploit labor).
Let me re-iterate my most important point: If everyone is held back, the dropout rate will be catastrophic for years to come.
Either you believe Omicron is contagious enough that you have to go back to 100% remote learning, or it is generally harmless enough (especially if you’re vaccinated) that you don’t have such strict standards in place (I am for the latter but that’s just my opinion.)
But the situation described in the Reddit post seems like the worst of all worlds.
If it was say a pretty stable 50/50 or even 75/25 ratio of Omicron to Delta, that might favor shutting down in-person schools. But this current explosion in cases and resulting chaos is almost all Omicron.
If we want to apply about "let's think of the kids" mentality, then let's think of the kids.What will we do now or in the upcoming years when suicide rates, cognitive development problems, and a lot of other issues from subfields of psychiatry are >bound< to rise due to the measures imposed on these kids? We think of protecting others but we don't think of protecting kids who require more care: in the sense of them becoming self-reliant and developing themselves.
To me this is the biggest hypocrisy and bullsh#t indicator of this whole mentality of "protecting others".We don't need >restrictive< measures to protect kids themselves, the best thing we can do to protect them is to let them develop, which is the exact opposite kind of measure we take to protect adults and elderly people.
this is what the powers that be want to happen. they want you to live in a state of panic and fear.
when i was in school (i am 30 now), i had many severe illnesses like pneumonia twice, shingles, mono, staph. nobody ever gave a shit, and nobody died.
All indications are that omicron is more often than not a cold… how many of the teachers would have normally come to work with a cold?
I like to think back to Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown telling everybody to come on down in 2019/early 2020 and wonder if all the panic wasn’t incited on a near daily basis, would this would be as big of a problem?
Do you think this is a conscious desire?
Is it something that our leaders developed after attaining power, or is it a preexisting desire that led them to seek power in the first place?
Why do they want people to live in a state of panic and fear?
Let us not forget that the roaring 20s and laissez faire capitalism, all of which were voted for, came after an era of pandemic flu, a world war, and increased government control of things under Wilson.
While these sicknesses ARE deadly, nobody stopped their lives in considering them. And 100% of people did not die from it, though they could have.
Sure the teens might be fine with Omicron (earlier variants had much higher chances of lasting health impact it appears), but not necessarily their parents or family back home.
Sure some fears and actions are overblown, but not to the degree being implied here.
One would like to believe they, at a minimum, responsibly dispose of the remains of the departed.
They ignore COVID there - and are there more deaths as a result or not? Should be easy to find out.
Are COVID deaths higher in the places that ignore? Not that I could see.
There's going to be such a divide as these kids grow up.
Personally? It's time to move on. Get vaccinated (no boosters), and then ignore COVID. Every time you get exposed is like another booster to the immune system. By getting vaccinated first you cut disk of death to almost nothing.
It's time for the world to move on.
I would even bet most anti-mandate folks in the US are in fact vaccinated, because the vast majority of US adults are vaccinated, including in states like Florida that are particularly anti-mandate.
Stats on how much mandates help given a vaccination rate would be very interesting.
Get vaccinated and move on - the data shows that you are safe after being vaccinated. Masks and lockdowns are no longer accomplishing anything.
They are trying to ignore COVID and carry on as usual. The issues come from having so many teachers out sick.
Can’t run a school without teachers. Doesn’t make sense to force kids to come in just to pack them into overcrowded auditoriums because so many teachers are sick.
I don’t understand how people think schools are only a place for kids, who never interact with teachers or go home to their older adult parents.
Seems like aren't really ignoring it at all. Everyone is freaked out and their behavior doesn't match the state of "ignoring" at all.
A lot of people in the society are LARPing (pretending) that the virus is serious - staying home, testing constantly, "close contact notifications", "running away from a positive student" - yet at the same time, acting as if it's obviously not a dangerous virus - if it were, they'd all be staying away from each other.
Basically new "security theatre" like after 9/11.
The difficulty is, nobody wants to Zoom with me any more, so I have to meet them in person or not at all. When it was illegal to meet, people were happy to Zoom 90% of the time, but now they are not.
Many people are spreading covid but are completely asymptomatic, and tests are limited so they aren’t getting tested. Omicron is also extremely contagious, spreading despite masks and other sanitation protocols.
It’s too late and too contagious: if you’re not 100% isolating in your home you will get Omicron. Masking / testing / precautions like these only give false security, and maybe slow the spread a bit. But the virus is still spreading ridiculously fast. Look at Quebec - lockdown and cases are still increasing.
Idk, I don’t see the point in these guidelines. Maybe it will reduce viral load? A key point governments can do is hire more nurses and substantially increase nurse pay, that would reduce the strain on hospitals and ultimately increase capacity and treatment outcomes. But governments don’t seem to be doing this. It seems like people are doing things without really understanding the justification, or doing them just for publicity.
Omicron is one of the most contagious viruses known to man. It managed to spread everywhere despite countries initially closing their borders to SA, to the point where most people know relatives who are positive ~1 month in, whereas the original strain took much longer even in regions with few precautions. It has spread to a base in Antarctic despite extremely strict containment protocols. The only country I know of which has still managed to quarantine the virus is China, and even they are having some issues in the Xi’An province.
Our institutions, like health care and education, have been running so close to the edge for so long that the added pressure is pushing them over the edge. Before the pandemic, teachers would show up to work sick since they knew there may not be a substitute to take their place (and certainly not a substitute who would ensure continuity in teaching). Before the pandemic, nurses would work marathon shifts since there was a staffing shortage even before taking sick days into consideration.
Now we are in a situation where we have to slow the spread of the virus to protect our institutions. I cannot speak to whether the measures are genuinely effective or a manifestation of security theatre, since that is not my domain. What I can say is it is putting more pressure on the limited amount of staff available. This is more than missing work because of a close contact. It is because of people missing work because they are genuinely sick or people being unable to keep up with the added responsibilities (such as teaching when they are supposed to be prepping).
Unfortunately, we cannot solve the resource shortage overnight. Even if we could magically train the people to fill the role overnight, we don't have the infrastructure to support them. So now we are paying the price.
As for holding people accountable, where would we even begin? I saw politicians closing beds and physically demolishing hospitals 30 years ago. Politicians of varying stripes did little to rebuild the system after that. While there was a push to hire more people at the start of the pandemic (both in health care and education), the interest seems to have dwindled off since no one wants to deal with the long term costs. Even if they were willing to live with the costs, few sensible people are willing to take on those roles because the involve continual sacrifice. There is also no guarantee that months or years of training will be rewarded with a career since the demand is likely to be short-term. There are so many people who can be blamed, so many people who should be blamed, but it won't address the problem since the decisions were either made in the distant past or are a consequence of inaction rather than of action.
Do you have some hard numbers about this? Here in Buenos Aires we had a big wave in July 2021, and we had a daily report of the ICU occupation rate and at the peak it was like 95%. We delayed some medical procedures to keep the number under 100% and there was a huge discussion about increasing the lockdown. Lucky, we keep the number under 100%. Now we have a new big omicron wave, but the ICU occupation rate is still low, finger crossed.
> Before the pandemic, nurses would work marathon shifts
We have the same problem here. I don't understand how it's consider to be sane.
>
> We have the same problem here. I don't understand how it's consider to be sane.
I don't know anything about nursing, but I've read elsewhere that the 12 hour shifts are to reduce the number of nurses a patient goes through in a single hospital visit.
Speculation: A patient in a hospital is like a software project -- better not to change ownership before release, if you can avoid it.
To those without empathy or conscience, these people seem to be doing something silly and theatrical and it mystifies them.
Classes that I did attend were quiet and empty.
would be:
Meetings that I did attend were meaningless and pointless.
I arrived at school and promptly went to Study Hall...Second period I had another absent teacher...Third period I had a normal class period.
would be:
I arrived at work and promptly went to the break room...Second meeting I had another absent manager...Third meeting I had a normal standup, but no one was prepared and no one cared.
90% of the conversations spoken by students concern COVID. It has completely taken over any function of daily school life.
would be:
90% of the conversations spoken by I.T. workers concern AGILE. It has completely taken over any function of getting any real work done.
One teacher flat out left his class 5 mins into the lesson and didn't return because he was developing symptoms and didn't believe it safe to spread to his class.
would be:
One manager flat out left his team 5 mins into the meeting and didn't return because he had no idea what we were talking about.
I’ve removed the name of my school as it made me uncomfortable sharing such information, but I’ll say that it’s a specialized high school. This is occurring everywhere.
would be:
I’ve removed the name of my company as it made me uncomfortable sharing such information, but I’ll say that it’s a Fortune 500 company. This is occurring everywhere.
This is around 10% of my school. As of Monday, only 30 of whom were reported to the DOE ... which just seems like negligence to me.
would be:
This is around 10% of our transactions. As of Monday, only 30 of which were reported to the auditors ... which just seems like negligence to me.
I spent about 3 hours sitting around today doing nothing.
(Didn't have to change a word.)
Congratulations OP! You are officially ready to join our I.T. department at Megacorp.
OP is complaining about inconveniences that are standard everywhere I've worked for years.
I noticed it immediately and pointed it out.
Open your mind a little and you too may notice interesting parallels between the lines of code.
It's way better that your reptilian "Most Snarky of the Year" response.
So what is alternative? Let kids down the drain with their education and childhood.
In China, they have an app that ties to your social credit score that you need to show everywhere to do anything. It tells you you are ok, or you are banned from society until you test, or you have to go to quarantine camp indefinitely.
Ivermectin seems to be the big red line in the sand. Governments that promote it as a treatment don't want to go full China. Those that forbid it do.
The oldest complained of a sore throat for one day, the others were "a bit tired" for two days. I've had it the worst. I had intestinal issues for 3 says and now have a mild sore throat and fatigue. Overall, I skipped about 2 half days of work because I felt tired. (I work from home)
Omicron has swept through pretty much every family we interact with.
1. We and most people we interact with are very responsible wrt stopping the spread. Vaccines, Masks, social distancing. Both my wife and I work from home.
We got infected anyway.
2. For people under 65 with no comorbidities, Covid, in general, is nothing to be afraid of. My in-laws (both over 70) got it just before us. They basically had nasty head cold symptoms for 3 days.
3. Omicron is far more mild than prior strains.
4. For people with comorbidities, even the flu is something to be afraid of. Before covid, the flu was the cause of most cardiac and pnemonia related mortality. Prior strains of Covid are worse, for sure, but deaths due to influenza should be enough to make people panic. We just never assigned flu as the underlying cause of death. *[0]
5. I think the last data I saw on the Pfizer vaccine said it was 24% effective against omicron. I don't know what this means exactly. But current evidence says that was too optimistic. *[1] 3 shots of it wasn't enough to stop the contagion, though maybe it made my symptoms milder. Who knows.
5. Omicron is likely a much more effective inoculation against covid than the vaccines which all now appear to be outdated. *[2]
My takeaway from all of this: Vaccines aren't helping. Masks and social distancing aren't helping. Omicron itself might be the biggest help we have. It's time to work to stop the hysteria, and also update our covid policies, because they're no longer relevant.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5158013/
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451#
[2] https://www.ahri.org/omicron-infection-enhances-neutralising...
That is my supposition too, based more on hope than facts.
> Omicron itself might be the biggest help we have.
I have come to that conclusion as well.
> Vaccines aren't helping. Masks and social distancing aren't helping.
This I don't agree with. Vaccines reduce the severity of an infection, and so the risk of hospitalisation, whether you are vulnerable or not. I'm confident that wearing a mask reduces the risk of transmitting the virus. And keeping your distance really can't hurt - the closer you get to someone who's transmitting, the more likely you are to catch it. That seems obvious. Maskless wonders going into supermarkets with clear signage on the door saying "MASKS MUST BE WORN" piss me off.
Vaccines do help reduce the severity of symptoms, though.
I guess my issue is that a lot of public policy was created when we thought we could eliminate the virus. Then it switched to "everyone is going to get it (once?) We just need to slow the spread."
Barring some technological breakthrough, we're going to get it. Then get it again, and again. It is a new influenza. That's our reality. Let's base our public policy on that.
> it doesn't sound honest to call them "hysterical", as the favorite insult goes right now.
Vaccines, masks and social distancing helped lessen the impact of the previous variants, in particular with Delta. They got us to Omicron.
However, hospitalizations are the highest they've been of the pandemic in some places and cases are still rising fast. Taking measures to prevent an overwhelmed health system is not hysteria. My uneducated guess is that after this wave burns out we'll be in a place where such measures won't be necessary.
Now I’ve had to acknowledge that for a lot of institutions this more or less is the case.
Very few are being honest on why the kids have to be in school (so it doesn't disrupt parents' labor), so it's framed as "think of the children" when TFA shows that little education happens at school when teachers are sick. Zoom class is terrible, but its better than the shitshow described in the fine article. Worse, if students get into dangerous situations while at school/playing hooky because there isn't adequate adult supervision, the same people will have the gall to blame the schools.
Are school budgets being cut? I keep hearing people saying they are, but the US Department of Education says the opposite [1]: that per-pupil spending (adjusted for inflation) has increased greatly over the past century or so, and its trajectory has almost always been upward. What's the deal?
(My best shot at a steelman is that either (a) the money has been disappearing down a mysterious rabbit hole and so teacher pay hasn't risen as much as the raw budget numbers would lead you to think, or that (b) teachers are underpaid relative to what they could get in other occupations that have seen more per-worker productivity growth, i.e. the Baumol effect.)
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_236.55.a...
Absolutely! Sometimes it's explicitly sold as an education budget cut (like Texas in 2011, narrowly averted in 2021 but there was a whole campaign for it), and occasionally it's cloaked in carrot/stick incentives where district that "excel" get more money, and the underperfoming ones get less. The lately, there's an attempt in red states to go around Brown v. (IMO) by promoting tax-funded charter schools, which take money away from public schools - so, technically the budget hasn't been cut, but public school districts (and schools) are getting less money.
There is no single solution to the current problem. Remote learning is a heavy burden on families with two working parents or single parent families that are not afforded the ability to work remotely (and even remote work is challenging -- my teammate can really only work from 8pm-2am without distraction because his two young kids are home and his wife has to go to the office). Yet, because of the current surge, many, many teachers are sick. Administrators are put into awful positions because nothing is going to work at the moment.
[0] https://theweek.com/us/1008705/how-america-could-have-kept-s...
[1] NB: I don't agree whole cloth with the opinions in the article, but it does a nice job outlining that the Federal government handed out large sums of money to local school districts with almost no oversight for how that money was spent.
Athletic facilities fit that requirement very nicely and would be useful for quite a long time in the future.
What is so difficult about this ?
It help fight every respiratory infection
Source: medcram, Dr in pulmonary diseases
We introverts are staying inside even _more_ than usual so it's probably a very good thing to do
I think usually yes, otherwise you call it something like a "spare" (i.e. a period where you don't have a class and aren't monitored).
I suppose "hall" probably traditionally refers to something like a "great hall" or "meeting hall" not a "hallway", i.e. a relatively large room.
When my local social networks (friends, family, coworkers) talk about COVID I internally jump for joy because I know I will hear everyone’s heavily considered thoughts and opinions on the subject, and not ones assigned to them by their own curated bubble of influencers. Yay.
although this is obvious enough to be just satire
To help find our collective way out of this, we should each find it in ourselves to contribute in a different spirit.
How has humanity survived without $BigGov? In Austria (highly locked down, fascist vaccine policy) the cumulative death rate now surpasses Sweden's. This means that you cannot avoid deaths, and if you allow them sooner, the pandemic will be over sooner.
They were no vaccines tho. Those started to be used only after they were invented.
They did not treat it like tuberculosis.
Tentatively tens/hundreds of thousands of kids are being silently abused in their homes, and they have been prevented to go to school, where teachers can find out. I can't find a way to justify the policy of keeping children at home, which is effectively a transfer of health from kids to adults after we have vaccines, it's simply immoral.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/639375/number-of-child-a... [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/has-child-abuse-s... [2] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/child-abuse-cases-got-more... [3] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
There is a definite "Cartman" component to this whole thing, and if I was 11 I damn well know I'd have the same BS attitude.
I will absolutely hate interacting with these COVID kids once they start entering the workforce. The US already has a massive maturity and tribalism problem, and I only see the lack of school and any sort of discipline and structure here reinforce it several-fold. Thankfully, so far I haven't had to manage anyone just out of school.
Add missing 2 years of education (essentially) on top of this and you get a recipe for disaster. I doubt most parents are compensating for these atrocious school conditions in any way.
The only slight positive I can think of that will come of this, is that it may normalize staying home when you are sick and not coming to work. The current generation cares too little about spreading disease at work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: could you please also stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments generally? You've been doing that repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Bomb threats is one that kids in my school used to call in as pranks daily when I was in school. For weeks everyone missed the first 3 periods of the day. Everyone loved the disruption. I can absolutely promise you nothing is bringing more joy to the kids than this COVID fiasco.
Now, is education really being missed here? Not really. The kids that were going to excel anyways have somewhat involved parents that will expect them to prep and score respectable grades in standard tests/classes (your ap classes, SATs). Those kids already know they have to study more than whatever bullshit goes on in school. The parents/kids relying on the school system to help them achieve were never going to achieve just due to that reliance (it’s always been the case in public school).
So what is this stupid post about? It sounds like business as usual to me.
I had no friends in school until 10th grade when I joined a club that somewhat let me be myself and have fun with other weird kids. If that was taken away from me soon after I joined it would have been pretty terrible!