With this, it really does't matter if zero children 5-18 have died of covid - the school still can't operate correctly with half of its staff missing.
Solving "sending children to school" without solving "having teachers available" results in zero education, only free childcare. If that's the goal, sure, shove them all in study hall. If we actually plan to educate them, we need to figure out how to insulate the educators from the children.
Between vaccinations and the nature of the current variant, the mortality rate is essentially a non-issue. That's fantastic news. But it doesn't change that during a surge of cases, on-site schooling isn't really fit for purpose. "Probably won't die" isn't the only relevant metric.
The reason teachers are out is because of the absurd quarantine rules.
If you are fully vaccinated, but not boosted, you are required to quarantine for 5-10 days if you were exposed to someone with "confirmed or suspected COVID-19." At present the rate of boosters across the adult population is around 20%.
Can you imagine how often a teacher is exposed to someone with a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19? I'm not trashing on teachers specifically here. It's human nature.
TLDR... 40% of the teachers aren't out sick with COVID-19. The quarantine rules are taking a problem and turning it into a catastrophe.
It honestly seems as if our quarantine rules in NYC are based on best available data from April 2020.
(Well, we could - replace whiteboards with screens, have the students onsite but the teachers remote. Not sure this is entirely practical?)
You need some adult to supervise the classroom
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
You really need to use all the data for countries that are reasonably western/developed (to avoid Africa with a much younger population and less testing biasing everything). It's all available and there are no valid excuses not to. As I never tire of pointing out, Swedish people aren't aliens and nobody claimed they were before they inconveniently proved the countermeasures weren't warranted. If you use all the data (from developed countries), Sweden ends up way ahead, which is conclusive proof of many things.
If you're going to design a virus incubation factory, what you do is put 30 people in a room for 8 hours, turn on the heat, close the windows, try to keep them talking, singing and yelling, then at the end of the day put them on a bus to distribute to every household in town. Repeat for 22 days a month.
This is the case here in Canada in my sibling's hospital right now, and in my sibling's kid's school.
Omicron also has the ability to overflow hospitals even when they've pre-planned with a solid buffer of excess capacity. Most hospitals here in Canada didn't have any such buffer to begin with. For 2 years they've been run ragged, so today the backlog is worse than ever.
Omicron is a new problem we didn't have to deal with before.
With Flu, you can get away with letting some % of the population get it in any given flu season, because it won't deprive your hospital system (or your school) of 20% of its staff for weeks or months on end.
This is all independent of who does or doesn't end up dying from the virus.
* Work at any private company
* Work at any public company
* Work at a public school
* Visit a public school
* Attend a public school
* Go to a restaurant, bar, gym, etc
This is the law. The "30 people in a room for 8 hours" have a vaccination rate near 100%.
So... what are we worried about, again? Why do teachers need to quarantine just because they may have been exposed to someone who may (confirmed or not) have had COVID-19?
For all intents and purposes you must be vaccinated to live in NYC. Which is probably why 95% of all NY residents 12+ have at least one dose and 84% of NYC residents 12+ are fully vaccinated.
I don't know if reducing the contract would change anything anymore. But in terms of spread via kids, don't think of just the working / school / bar-going population.
So that aside, what did you mean exactly? When you said
> Much protection against infection or against hospitalization?
Did you mean to say: "Much protection against asymptomatic spread or against hospitalization?" Or maybe you meant to say something else?
Internal motivation is needed for success in learning no matter what delivery mechanism is utilized. Having a teacher in a box on a screen is not going to change whether a student has internal motivation.
Auto-didact is not the same as having an app teach and guide through levels of learning any different than having a teacher lead it.
I feel like your comment is a knee jerk, disingenuous reaction rather than honest consideration of alternatives to the false dichotomy of “in class school” and “zoom school”, but whatever floats your boat.
The most vast swathe of people in this country are not like this.
Schooling is not about learning. It's a mix of daycare, social development/grooming for the workforce, and the removal of the parent's influence on the child's development, in order to serve the state's goals.
Children that are motivated to learn something, will find a way to learn it.
Negative mental health outcomes for children don't fall neatly into regularly discussed statistics. Poor educational outcomes don't fall neatly into regularly discussed statistics.
Suicide attempts among young persons aged 12-25 have risen 30-50% during the pandemic. An order of magnitude more children aged 5-18 will attempt suicide or die from suicide than will have died from Covid-19.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
We’re seriously treating this like it’s the measles.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
It also has a far lower cumulative death rate than locked-down individual states like NY or Massachusetts.
The real question is actually what's special about Norway and such. Sweden isn't an outlier here.
And btw not only did Sweden's strategy result in multiple times the death rate of its neighbours, it also resulted in a similar economic downturn. So it was all for very little.
Except for the fact that ICUs would overflow, it would be fantastic to just have a "once and done" event. Let (and encourage) COVID to sweep undeterred, and all the vaccinated adults get sick for a couple of days, some of the children get sick (and many will be asymptomatic), and all the stubbornly-unvaccinated meet whatever fate awaits them, all at the same time rather than spread out over the next five years.
The way that it spreads like wildfire is precisely the issue because there are multiple school systems where half or more of teachers are out or unable to teach due to being sick. If your solution is to force them to work then you're going to get poorly ran classrooms at best and at worst you're going to see the next 'Great Resignation' but this time among teachers.
I have multiple friends in the schooling system and this is exactly what's happening.
Half the staff isn’t out sick with Covid. The staff is out due to absurd contact tracing quarantine rules. The staff is also out due to extreme misplaced Covid fears.
…but if half the staff was truly out sick with Covid that would mean we are 1-2 days away from full herd immunity at the school. And so this “crisis” should permanently abate in 1-2 weeks.
I’d expect a full return to normal at these schools by the end of January if what you’re saying is true!
This will be a controversial comment, but after decades of teachers telling to public on how “essential” they are to society (a point in which I agree), I have watched teachers and their unions spend the last 2 years pushing how “non-essential” they are due to pandemic fears. If a bunch want to resign, so be it. I would rather have the ones who want to be there, realize how essential they are, and willing to risk a virus to provide that essential service.
> Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/briefing/american-childre...
The parents and family should go get vaccinated, no?
Don’t recall anyone in the thread suggesting criminalization (except you), so it’s pretty strange that you brought it up. Perhaps that is appealing to you, but it sure isn’t appealing to me. In fact it is so abhorrent an idea to me that I am pretty much open to anything that would prevent such totalitarianism from happening in my community.
And just for context, I’m vaccinated and boosted, so this is not some anti-vax position. I am just dead set against anything specifically designed to create class prejudices and creating a new group of “untouchables”. This is 2022, we should be way beyond such foolishness.
Go ahead and lock me up…
You could if watermelon seeds were the size of coronaviruses.
I simply disagree.
I don’t even want to present an argument, because considering that you think it’d be okay to criminalize unvaccinated people leaving their homes, you are beyond saving and I sincerely hope that you’ll never be put in a position of any authority whatsoever.
It’s quite absurd. I can understand hating Trump, but it’s actually time to move on. We’re going to be captive to this crap until people fully realize their reaction to the pandemic is mostly a product of their political opinion in 2020 rather than scientific fact.
What edge case are you trying to solve by remaining in a state of hysteria?
Are you in the "they've had enough time to get vaccinated, so if they haven't done so yet let them get COVID" camp?
There is no endpoint where SARS-CoV-2 is over. The strains will keep coming and Covid is endemic.
My personal experience is that each time you get COVID is more mild than the last, particularly if you are vaccinated, and this is borne out in the numbers.
Surprisingly the mutations are enough that getting it repeatedly is totally possible. Even an actual sterilizing vaccine that worked in the nasal passages might not have stopping this.
If not now, when? What’s your endpoint for when the extremely damaging and poverty inducing hysteria will stop?
Omicron looks like it has a good change to get us to that point.
Most people are vaccinated + vaccines don't work very well = most COVID hospitalizations are vaccinated.
Do you have a source for this? The math doesn’t add up (vaccinated are 10-15x less likely to be hospitalized, and around 60% of US is vaccinated, implies around 6/46 hospitalized people are vaccinated) and all the sources I could find show that unvaccinated people take up most hospitalizations and even more ICU beds, which is the limiting resource.
https://www.wndu.com/2022/01/06/covid-19-hospitalizations-ri...
In the UK data quality is better than normal for some reason, perhaps due to the nationalized healthcare system making it easier to set consistent standards. And there the majority of COVID patients in hospital are vaccinated according to the ICNARC audits. It's not a big majority but it's there, and this is not confounder/game-playing free data either. They keep classifying people as unvaccinated for quite some time after their first shot for example, which is problematic because there's some evidence people are more likely to get infected immediately after their first dose. But that gets added to the unvaccinated side of the ledger. There are other problems e.g. people have to go to hospital to be hospitalized, but they tell vaccinated people they're protected from hospitalization, then declare victory when those people don't turn up. Given how marginal many cases are (they may or may not really need to be there but you can't know what would have happened in the alternative case), this is a form of circular reasoning.
Nonetheless it'd be weird if the USA and Germany were radically different to the UK in this regard.
In the US we have about 25% of adults unvaccinated, but it varies greatly from region to region. We've got plenty of counties where over 50% of adults are unvaccinated.
How is this even a question? Of course they've had enough time, and they've made their choice to face COVID with their natural immune system. I'm talking here about people who still purposely refuse the vaccine, and I'm not talking about people who are unable to get it for medical reason.
As a society, we are not obligated to take measures to prevent COVID from reaching people who refuse the main act that will truly protect themselves.
That's a harsh way of putting it, but yes. Fundamentally, the argument seems to be that kids will bring it home to vulnerable populations. Those vulnerable populations have had a year to get vaccinated and boosted. It is difficult to live in NYC without being vaccinated. I don't think it is wise or prudent to make policy decisions to protect some extreme minority of people who outright refuse preventative medical treatment.
A friend of mine can't because she's immunocompromised. Their family has done their part by staying home and finding new activities for their kids to accomplish in the house (which, fortunately for them, is pretty easy because they're huge nerds and aren't hurting for money). They're lucky because her husband is a self-employed remote contractor and she is a remote special education teacher.
Given how the reality of it has unfolded, it's fascinating (horrifying) to see the continued hysteria: one _must_ take the vaccine invented less than 2 years ago, that has been available for only a year, whose makers are immune from litigation re: unforeseen effects, is far less effective than it was first promised to be, and where even triple-dosed people catch Covid, regardless. It's super bizarre to see the desire/demand to vaccinate children with the brand-new drug...as young as 5!?!
As the virus evolves, our experience with it increases, the reality of the vaccines becoming clearer (they help, but not as much as we hoped for), and therapeutics become more available -- mandates that require vaccines seem less valid. It's appropriate to reconsider them, like _all emergency powers_. I'm actually hoping the SCOTUS knocks down the OSHA mandates. It's bad precedent to grant an agency such powers via fiat (executive order); and, what's being mandated is not at all what we thought it was.
It’s even worse, these are kids that died with COVID, not of COVID. So if a child tests positive and then gets killed in a car crash, it’s in this statistic.
Here's the CDC site with that data: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
Here's the site with information about how a death is counted: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
In short, for a death to be counted as COVID, it needs to be listed on the death certificate (which only lists diagnoses directly related to the death).
For example, when I write a death certificate (which is a standardized form), it sounds something like this: Cause of Death: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome as a Consequence of COVID-19 pneumonia
Guidance from my state (SC) specifically says: "The Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. The preferred term to use in the cause of death is COVID-19." So I can see possibilities where we don't know if it was the MRSA pneumonia superimposed on the COVID-19 or the COVID-19 itself, and we are supposed to report COVID on there, but the idea that a car crash victim would be counted in the statistics seems unlikely.
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/fox-35-investigates-questi...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/hochul-asks-hospita...
Even Fauci acknowledges it:
https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-children-hospital-covid-omicr...
(yes, this is about hospital admissions and not death certificates, but imo it's not unreasonable to assume this type of reporting has spilled over into everything.)
Of course the conditions are pretty vague but it’s not people who were in a car crash.
The standard line on the far-right is that the millions of COVID deaths were actually attributed to the co-morbidities. They pretend that people died of obesity and not COVID, because COVID hits the obese worse.
>Edit 2: People, it’s not April 2020 any longer. We have two vaccines and a booster now.
Is it hysteria to point out that the newest variant is extremely effective in escaping antibody response? T-cells are great, but the reduced severity is balanced out by just how much better it is at infecting people - hospitals being overwhelmed is a real issue and one we're seeing.
This sounds reasonable, but aren't fully vaccinated people ending up in the hospital pretty regularly too [2]? Using the 94% effective figure from the early trials, say fully vaccinated people are 20 times less likely to be hospitalized.
I don't know much about virology but I understand exponential growth. It looks like the cases are doubling every 2 weeks (edit: I guess this might even be a few days? See [0]). In a few months, almost everyone will get it. In the last two week period, won't half the population catch it? In that case, even with 100% vaccination, hospitalizations would still be 1/20 of half the maximum due to COVID. Right?
That's something I've never understood about the pandemic. Is reducing hospitalizations by a factor of 20 enough that having everyone get the virus is no longer a concern? Or was it expected that the vaccines reduce transmission enough that everyone wouldn't get it anymore? Canada has like 75% [1] (edit: oops, originally I said 85% here, but I guess that's in people 12 years and older) or higher vaccination and is still seeing record case numbers everywhere.
This isn't really an argument for or against kids in schools. I am just surprised that people are so quick to say "we have a vaccine so there's no need to worry about COVID in anyone vaccinated now". Certainly it seems like many health officials say something similar, so I must have missed something. (Or are they just trying to encourage everyone to get vaccinated? I know that many people don't really understand the details and would (erroneously) just say "it's not 100% effective so why bother")
Sources:
* "The spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus appears to be doubling every two to three days" [0]
* "The cumulative percent of people fully vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine in Canada was 76.83% as of January 1, 2022." [1]
* "Fifty per cent of hospitalizations now, in Quebec, are due to people not having been vaccinated," [2]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/08/omicron-covid-...
[1]: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccination-cover...
[2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/duclos-mandatory-vaccinatio...
1. The vaccines will become decreasingly relevant, unless we can provide technology to update vaccines as quickly as they mutate. Even then, it'll be like flu vaccines. They'll help, but won't stop the spread.
2. Barring some technological breakthrough, Covid will never go away. We'll all contract it. Then it will mutate and well contact it again in the next year, and the next, forever
As such, our current policies are ineffective, and lockdown is by no means sustainable forever.
At this point we've got well established indications of omicron being an unserious infection (sparing the lungs entirely, being no more than a bad cold for the vast majority of those who contract it). Not 1000% confirmed, of course ongoing study is warranted, but it would be shocking if omicron turns out to be a serious driver of illness and death.
But policy makers and media commentators are allergic to optimism on what this implies long term, so we are stuck in a state of alarm.
Interesting, I haven't been following the pandemic as closely as I used to, but I was under the impression that the existing mRNA vaccines still work fairly well against new variants (including omicron), but that effectiveness goes down after 6 months (hence boosters). I'm not really sure if "effectiveness" is in preventing severe illness or transmission.
I should have said "relatively effective", since I'm also under the impression that the vaccines weren't super effective at reducing transmission of the original variant (compared to vaccines against other infections). But I also haven't seen much data, I vaguely remember hearing something from the WHO like "60% effective at reducing transmission of original variant, 40% effective against Delta", but I don't remember.
Prior to this pandemic the layman understanding of a vaccine was that they generally prevented you from “contracting” the disease. You get the shot, you don’t get the disease. We were basically sold this notion for the mRNA vaccines early in 2021. However, the reality was different. Whether by way of mutation, or simply by the way the mRNA vaccines only work against a specific portion of the virus, mRNA tech seems to not be as effective at the prevention of infection but better at the prevention of severe infection. In essence, it’s not a “vaccine” as the public understood the word. However, it is a tool, and still a relevant one in diminishing the severity of the pandemic, it’s just a shame that the expectations that were set were way off.
I also don’t know of a time in history where a vaccine was developed for an emerging disease as opposed to one that was already endemic with a lot of natural immunity around.
I agree that the public was misled as to how effective vaccines would be at preventing transmission. Especially when the CDC said that fully vaccinated people didn't need to wear masks.
But how much more effective are traditional vaccines at preventing spread of illnesses? Wikipedia pointed me to this CDC page:
> The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective. [0]
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/measles/index.html
I was always under the impression that traditional vaccines were really effective, enough that the virus stops spreading eventually, but not enough that you are almost totally incapable of spreading the virus or even getting sick. Like the outbreaks in disneyland, obviously they only happened because of people being unvaccinated, but my understanding is that vaccinated people can still get sick from it. I found this Washington Post article:
> A 2015 measles outbreak linked to Disneyland led to 147 cases in multiple states as well as in Mexico and Canada. Many of those who were sickened were unvaccinated or did not know their vaccine record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/08/24/tourist-inf...
At this stage, despite being fully vaccinated and boosted, I absolutely expect to be exposed to and symptomatic from Omicron in the next 45 days.
If we compare these vaccines to non-existent ones that we believe should be better, then we are disappointed. If we compare them to the possibility of having developed worse vaccines, then we would be elated.
That makes people skeptical.
Right now I know probably 5-6x the number of vaccinated people who have had Covid post vaccination than people who had it prior to the vaccine being available. I know unvaccinated people who have never had Covid, and vaccinated people who have had it twice…post vaccination.
Am I vaccinated, yes. Am I skeptical of the existing vaccines to prevent me from getting Covid and ending the pandemic, yes.
Maybe we have different sources of information. I've never heard anyone claim that the vaccine will end the disease or prevent them from catching it. I've heard that the vaccines will decrease the likelihood of becoming sick which it does.
> Then the reality is discovered to be that it doesn’t do any of those things, but it does provide a milder experience…and oh by the way, and that efficacy only lasts a few months, so go get another booster dose ASAP.
I assume by "provide a milder experience" you mean "decrease the likelihood of becoming seriously ill". That's been the sales pitch that I heard for vaccines since the beginning. Similarly, it was never known how long the vaccines would remain effective.
> Right now I know probably 5-6x the number of vaccinated people who have had Covid post vaccination than people who had it prior to the vaccine being available. I know unvaccinated people who have never had Covid, and vaccinated people who have had it twice…post vaccination.
So what? Had those people not been vaccinated, then they probably would have been _more_ likely to develop serious disease.
I honestly just don't understand your point. The vaccines are not doing as well as many had hoped. Personally I had hoped that the entire pandemic would have gone away once vaccines became available, but that hope was clearly misplaced. But that just means that I was mistaken and that I need to change my perception of what this pandemic will mean going forward. I think you should do so as well.
Where did you get that hope from? You said the information you were getting did not provide that hope, that it set expectations to what they are. If you didn’t get that idea from the authorities touting the vaccine…where did you get it? Likely it was the assumption that these vaccines would work like all the others.
That is my point.
It was optimism. I was hoping that the strains wouldn't evolve so quickly. My optimism was misplaced.
> Likely it was the assumption that these vaccines would work like all the others.
Ignoring the methods (e.g. mrna), this vaccine _does_ work like all the others. It increases the likelihood that your body will be able to successfully fight off an infection without it progressing to serious/dangerous illness. What vaccine doesn't work this way? All viruses/bacteria roughly do the following:
1. They infect some percentage of people. 2. After some period of time they eventually make those people contagious (so spread is possible). 2. They mutate at a certain rate.
If viruses mutate very quickly, vaccines have trouble dealing with them. If they are highly contagious they have a lot of opportunity to spread and mutate. If they are able to quickly make hosts highly contagious then they have even more opportunity to spread an mutate.
You seem to imagine a "vaccine" to be something that is able to entirely protect a host from the disease and entirely protect a host from spreading it. This just isn't the case. The fact that there are vaccines for diseases which mutate/spread/etc. slowly enough so that you can _incorrectly_ believe this is a success of modern science. But the fact is that it never was and never will be true. Covid is a bitch and it will clearly take some time (if ever) to get it under control.
No, I simply trusted in the advertised protection against Covid infection by the mRNA vaccines would exceed 90%, I was hopeful that if I was one of the unlucky 10% to contract it, that the case would be mild. I was trusting what we were being told. When the reality set in, so did skepticism. Optimism to realism.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
“Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.”
I guess I don’t understand someone who claims they knew that the vaccines would not be effective in stopping the spread of the virus, but were still optimistic and hopeful that the vaccines would end the pandemic. You generally don’t go from realism to optimism. It’s usually the other way around.
afaik the flu vaccine has for decades been advertised as:
"might not always prevent, but will usually lessen symptoms"
So I'm not sure why people think this is a new thing.
Vaccines like MMR and others are understood to be generally preventative and rarely need booster if after initial doses.
Think about things that generally require boosters…they are almost always referred to by the laymen as “shots”. Nobody calls the tetnus shot a tetnus “vaccine”.
And coronavirus is also understood to be seasonal.
However, in spite of all that, I agree that the official messaging throughout this pandemic has been so inconsistent - from masking to "two weeks to flatten the curve" to "boosters" - that the public does have a right to be skeptical and exhausted.
As people become infected and gain immunity (in reality not always perfectly and not necessarily until the end of times, but on average they'll definitively do, and right now we're only talking about a simplified thought model anyway), they drop out of the pool of people available for further infections and therefore slow down the growth rate.
While still only a simplified approximation, logistic growth is therefore a better model than naive unchecked exponential growth, and the maximum case rate will be somewhat lower than "half the population gets infected in the last doubling step".
Specifically I'm wondering what the maximum number of cases in a short period is likely. I ask because I was shocked to hear that the number of ICU beds in a major city of 1M people in Canada was only a few hundred (or maybe that was total hospital beds? I can't remember). So it seems like you need to keep your "hospitalizations per population" number down to less than the ratio of "hospital beds per population".
Certainly I was wrong in saying "everyone will get it" in a few months because of the logistic growth curve, but it looks like a significant portion of the population could still be infected within the same period, even if you remove the 6% (Canada) to 20% (USA) people who have already been infected? And even if everyone is fully vaccinated, can the number of them that end up in hospital come close to the total capacity? It seems like we're already getting close to capacity.
As for your original question – I've been wondering about the same thing.
My personal back-of-the-envelope calculation was more along the lines of "If the vaccine is 90 % effective (the numbers given for Germany during the Delta wave and before the start of the third round of vaccinations were closer to 90 than to 95 %) in preventing hospitalisation and 75 % (for example) of the population are vaccinated, it means that case numbers in hospitals are 75 % x 1 + 25 % x 10 = 3.25 times higher than they would be with full vaccinations.", though I suppose there are enough holes that could be poked into that calculation, too.
A three-fold reduction in case numbers is nothing to be sneezed at, but on the other hand as long as the spread is still behaving mostly exponentially instead of turning into logistic growth and slowing down again that's only one-and-a-half doubling periods, so not that much of a buffer, either. Of course the vaccines are also somewhat (if not as well as was originally hoped) preventing some spread, so with full vaccination growth rates themselves would also be lower and hospital cases be reduced by more than threefold, but whether that's then enough, who knows?
In the end I decided there's no point in worrying myself further here, because there are too many unknown factors in getting a reasonable result that I can't easily answer and ultimately I have no desire in becoming a full-time epidemiologist.
- it might be that two shots 6 months apart are more effective. i.e. skipping the 2nd shot in the 3 shot series would be fine.
- it might be that a nasal vaccine would be more effective than an injected one. We just don't have one of those yet.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1007-covid-19-orpha...
Human beings aren't numbers on a table or statistics in a study.
And when it comes to making policy decisions on a scale of millions of people, humans are statistics.
Those Covid deaths are tragic, but children losing a parent or caregiver is common. 20% of children will experience the death of a parent or caregiver before the age of 29.
As you can see it’s not a zero sum game. The precautions you are implying must be taken to protect a hypothetical outlier is essentially shutting down all learning at this school, and likely many others like it.
I would suggest on balance, and particularly in light of how virulent and mild Omicron is, it’s time for the “protect grandpa” pleaders to update their mental model - what you’re saying is sacrifice everyone’s quality of life and freedom and ability to live, learn, and play, for a hypothetical outlier who has plenty of tools already to protect themselves.
Also, there are several promising therapies that should help this population. Even a few months for them to ramp up availability will help a lot.
It seems like the vast majority agree that keeping restrictions forever is too extreme, but many of the covid-conservative arguments I see imply keeping restrictions forever, because they are based on factors that are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future (like immunosuppressed people + endemic covid).
The same goes for logic that also implies we should also be masking, social distancing, closing schools, etc. for influenza (which, again, I believe the vast majority of people would reject as too extreme).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/switzerland-covid-19-week...
>Edit: Please with the “but kids bring Covid home” hysteria. We have vaccines now.
Vaccination greatly reduces the risk of severe covid and death, but it doesn't eliminate it. I know people who despite full vaccination contracted covid and are now fighting with long covid symptoms, to the point where they are unable to work for months (but chances are they would be a lot worse off if they hadn't been vaccinated). In a society such as the US with very limited social safety there is a serious risk of loss of job due to the inability to work thanks to long covid or bankruptcy thanks to the inability to pay medical bills. Kids contracting covid in school (or anywhere else) and passing it to their parents may well result in the family becoming a lot poorer or even homeless in the extreme.
Immediate covid risks aren't just limited to death either. Covid is known to cause issues with blood clotting, which can result in all kinds of things like permanent brain damage, permanent heart damage or amputations of limbs. Severe covid is also treated with severe medications and procedures, like steroids which can cause permanent (partial) blindness, ECMO which causes loss of (some) mobility in the legs far more often than not. Just regular ventilation isn't free of side effects either, in particular because of the drugs to sedate such patients. Survivors of severe covid experience PTSD and/or suicidal thoughts at very high rates.
Immediate death and other immediate primary or secondary effects aren't the only risk to covid. Long covid is a thing. Other long term effects due to covid infections are not only possible, but according to preliminary results seem likely, even after covid infections with only mild symptoms or in asymptomatic cases. This includes damage to organs, in particular the lungs, the brain, the heart and the kidneys, which may well significantly lower the life expectancy and (later life) quality of life of people affected by it, be it the kids or their parents, family or teachers.
Looking only at the immediate fatality rate in kids is dangerously shortsighted and missing most of the picture. Pointing to vaccines like they are magic isn't exactly helpful either, as they are risk reduction at best, not risk avoidance.
I’m not sure what is the goal now? We have vaccines and ICUs are not getting filled. Yeah, Covid can be though for some but oh well… we also have alcholism, drug addiction, flu, mono, etc. We cannot solve all.
I guess we all need to come to realization that COVID is here to stay and everyone will be eventually exposed to it. Vaccinated or not.
Flatten the curve is still a thing, and hospitals are still under stress. While the fatality rate is lower, hospital care and especially ICU care is still running on fumes, largely thanks to a lack of health care workers, especially ICU trained nursing staff, at least here in Germany, and of course thanks to a higher infection rates which counteract the reduction of severe cases thanks to vaccines; we used to have more severe cases in fewer total infections but now we have fewer severe cases in more infections, which almost balances out at the moment here.
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations#hospitaliz...
Over those same 4 days, a significantly increasing number of the folks in those beds are testing positive with Covid, but it's not clear to me whether that is the reason they're in the ICU. The hospitals need to provide better data about the reason these patients were admitted.
The total occupied due to COVID is now 412 compared to 150 just a few weeks ago, where that old number had been the average for months.
edit: and more directly to your point
> the number of ICU beds in use in Ontario has been trending down over the last 4 days
The total number of occupied ICU beds has gone down because the number of non-COVID patients decreased. Not sure how that is relevant to our discussion.
Also:
""In ICU” numbers include people testing positive for COVID-19 and people who are in ICU for a COVID-19-related illness but have since tested negative."
It's not clear from the text that they are excluding people in the ICU with a positive test but are there for another reason.
Your expectations may be met soon enough. We're 800% higher in admits than we were 3 weeks ago. The total number of beds reducing up to 2 days ago looks more like a fluke than anything, a slight relief before the wave.
For what it's worth, I've been trying to find evidence of hospitals running out of ICU beds due to Omicron, but I'm not seeing it anywhere in North America, even in places that appear to have peaked. Staffing shortages due to quarantine policy seem to be a much bigger problem.
The vaccines really do seem to be working, and Ontario has a lot of vaccinated high risk folks compared to most US states.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/COVID-San-Francisco-s...
1) Omicron, although less deadly than Delta, is significantly more spreadable.
2) Omicron can infect and be transmitted through vaccinated people--although they do suffer even milder symptoms.
3) The logic behind restrictions is to flatten the hospitalisations curve. Because of how infectious Omicron is, even if there is a lower likelihood that a COVID patient will need ICU, if the number of COVID patients is huge, then ICUs will still be overwhelmed.
This is why it matters if students spread Omicron unchecked to their families. To clarify, this doesn't disprove your conclusion, but if your argument doesn't take into account these facts then it's "facts losing the information war" just as much as everything else.
(1) "A growing body of evidence indicates that the Omicron Covid variant is more likely to infect the throat than the lungs, which scientists believe may explain why it appears to be more infectious but less deadly than other versions of the virus." 2 Jan 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/new-studies-re...
(2) "The Omicron variant largely evades immunity from past infection or two vaccine doses according to the latest Imperial modelling." 17 Dec 2021. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/omicron-largely-evade...
(3) "Even if the disease is milder, rapid onslaught of the virus could overwhelm health care systems (doubling time of 2.5 days means 50X increase in 2 weeks)" 18 Dec 2021. WHO. https://youtu.be/ltXkJTSBeaE?t=675
- Also: Canada's patients in hospital is the highest its been ever. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Dr. John Campbell's videos in general provide good, well-cited references of omicron progression: https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching/videos