I’m a public school teacher – the kids aren’t alright
bariweiss.substack.com
bariweiss.substack.com
A shortage of truck drivers means the legal age for commercial truck drivers is being lowered from 21 to 18, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/business/apprentice-progr...
There is no getting back to the way things were right now and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional
A shortage of trucking companies willing to pay the market rate for labor, rather.
https://money.cnn.com/2010/06/09/news/economy/truck_driver_s...
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6769594 - "A 1997 study by the American Trucking Association concluded that 82,000 new truckers were needed ... This shortage is making it more difficult for trucking companies to grow and contributing to higher costs for shippers."
Maybe it's not about trucker supply.
The industry does not have to be structured this way. Most obviously, trucker pay could increase, but this would increase rates. Or, working conditions could improve. For example, have drivers work a fixed route and ferry trailers back and forth. Indeed a lot of less-than-truckload travels this way. This would dramatically improve working conditions, but increase costs and transit time.
So I’ve concluded the trucking industry is just fine. There is no trucker shortage. Shippers want shipping on the cheap, and this is the marketplace that results. Shippers who want to, and can, fix this, do so by setting up their own in-house shipping or otherwise set up their business to not rely on rock-bottom shipping practices. Shippers who cannot or will not fix this for themselves, as well as trucking companies that make their business in this marketplace, sit around and whine about the “trucker shortage” they have created.
The level of disconnect among Ms. Lance & commenters here is astounding - as if this pandemic was an exercise in to see how they were damaged in their lifestyles. Not because COVID and pandemics in general really suck for everyone.
We're well past the first vaccine shot, this is as good as it gets.
It's time to realize that.
But back then we didn't have many tests, which meant hospital personnel would work even when they were a little sick.
Not having those people around, means that capacity has to be increased, which is very hard when almost everybody gets infected with Omicron.
In other words, for the 100th time, COVID ain't the flu.
Yes, this was covered in the documentary South Park, The Pandemic Special (season 24, episode 1).
Who are we making these sacrifices for?
A mostly online minority who comes out of the woodwork to shout down the idea of any risk acceptance as equivalent to murder, or any restrictions as no big deal (see the replies to your comment). These people don't even exist in real life, but somehow they are now setting the tone of public discourse and policy. It is literally like if policymakers started reading through the unmoderated comments on news sites in 2005 and started using them as a basis for what we all need to do. We really just need to ignore these people.
She has chosen to make this sacrifice for herself. Perhaps this is an artifact of how we discuss science and risk.
Impact for the immunocompromised is high, as it is for people who have lived full lives. Social distancing works for them. I do not think it works for children, despite being told by the proverbial “science” that it would have no impact on kids.
I’m not going to continue asking my child to make sacrifices for a minority of people who can adapt and respond better than he can. As a two year old, he has missed out on enough.
Who is forcing your wife to shut down her day care, and how? If a subset of parents are uncomfortable sending their kids to day care for the foreseeable future, just tell them to come back when they're comfortable. Did your wife forget that it's her daycare?
You mean like, they did not wanted to get sick themselves and that is somehow horrible from them?
Open daycare is less work for parents.
> My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease.
According to all of my friends who are teachers and don't have a Substack, this was actually the case every winter. Anyone who was teaching would get sick for several days a year, and then either soldier on, or call in sick as a last resort. Calling in sick was shamed by most school administrations, and none of them seemed to have the health of teachers as a priority. To me as an outside, the entire focus seemed to be basically, "Can someone keep the kids occupied for today until their parents come get them?"
Maybe these are the kind of conversations that the author could also be having with her students? How teaching and childcare seem to be pretty much conflated in North America, and how most schools seem to cater to the whims of paranoid helicopter parents who like to think of "learning" as just another job that they can offload to a teacher, just like they offload their groceries to Instacart.
Also, for older kids, the teacher could introduce them to how tests work, and how they can in theory play just fine with their friends if everyone gets tested daily. She could also go into the governmental and financial factors that make such tests widely available in Europe, but not North America.
I understand that we're likely not going to continue with the current restrictions forever, but having a healthy understanding of germ theory and epidemiology among schoolchildren doesn't seem to be a total downside to me. The optimist in me says that overall this will lead to fewer kids coming in when they are sick (or at least masking when they do), fewer kids wiping their noses and then playing with their friends without handwashing, and a reduction in the spread of various infections.
And it has zero to do why there is not enough substitute teachers.
No discussion on impacts to staff, teachers or parents if their suggested course of action was followed during the pandemic.
Another article wanting to push "Think of the children!" without the exercise of seeing what having allowed schools to operate without any restrictions would have been.
My guess? We'd see what we're seeing in the Omicron wave but with much worse impacts.
No masking of young children. Minimal masking of older children, or teachers. No quadmesters. No banning of assemblies, or proms, or extra curriculars.
Your guess is not grounded in the data we are seeing from dozens of other countries.
Note: this is not an endorsement or counter to the opinion on Bari Weiss, not familiar enough to comment. Only that blacklisting people and ideas is often not the best solution. It can feel justified and be expedient, but will emphatically lead to worse outcomes for society.
In general, there's too many hard lines drawn politically, and I'd rather see a return to some level of discourse, negotiation and compromise. IMO that's when the system is working at its' best. Not when anyone gets everything they want, but when opposing views work together to come up with solutions in compromise that lead to better.
Being tasked to reckon with the absurd and the deliberate muddling of issues is not, in my opinion, going to help much.
You keep acting like you can just make these statements and they’re self-evidently true. If you want anyone to consider what you’re talking about you have to, you know actually make a case and present an argument and evidence, not just declare things like everyone is supposed to automatically agree with you.
The government chose the hardest covid policies in the country from the beginning which lead to division in the population. You had people that wouldn't accept the hard measures and you had people that championed them.
The result was a state were covid was rampant and everyone was fighting over how selfish others were. Kids got it pretty bad - no playgrounds, no schools and you could only leave your home in a 5km radius for food and exercise. This went on for over a year.
This is ridiculous. I have a four-year old and even she understands that masks are for her own protection and not because she is a "vector of disease". If her students feel that way, then they've been made to do so by their parents, teachers, friends, or somebody else.
Our son had a lot of questions concerning COVID,as it influenced what he's allowed to visit from one week to another. We gave answers as good as we could. He understands the basics about how diseases can spread by air, and masking is not a big leap from that point. He sometimes decides to wear a mask, even if he doesn't have to, which is cute.
He did try to stab his fork in water droplets to try kill virusses, so there are limits, but a 'logical' initiative like this shows he gets the basic idea.
Hah, this comment dropped 6 points in less than a second. This article will be flagged soon.
I'm sure bargaining with covid will work.
Schools should teach that already because it's exactly accurate. Pandemic or not.
We would be way better off now if current adults were tought that as kids and made it part of their social intuition.
> A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story
> about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian
> foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was
> one of the best days that I can remember.
Unfortunately the effort and coordination required turned out to be beyond our current social setup.
Every time anyone wants to get on an airplane,they're forced to take a nude selfie. And if there's a blip, a government employee will...well, let's just say any private business would get sued six ways to Sunday for sexual harassment.
Osama bin Laden's been dead for years, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over.
Everybody just accepts it.
A high price to pay, in both (1) the TSA's budget, and (2) the fact that Americans just don't care about this infringement on freedom and privacy. When was the last time you saw disbanding the TSA suggested in any political debate from a candidate of either party?
So all the stuff about mask mandates, vaccine passports, and so on -- that stuff, once implemented, will never go away.
The September 11 response has taught me that the government will take your freedom in a crisis, but they'll never give it back.
It's when the compulsion to have government to fix the crisis seems most reasonable that we should be most unreasonably insistent on keeping our freedom.
That said, most polls show a majority of Americans support mask mandates. [1]
I don't think the future is necessarily an analogy of post-9/11 security theater.
1. Fox, Gallup, others generally agree: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/fox-news-poll-mask-vacc...
There has been a myopic focus on vaccines and they have performed by any estimation terribly. Any questioning this no matter how qualified are instantly demonized as anti-science. How many lives could have been saved if all options were on the table? Instead we see censorship on a level most of us never even thought possible.
https://www.pmda.go.jp/english/about-pmda/0002.html
If you imply ivermectin has some part in japans strategy, I encourage you to read this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2021/11/27/no-ivermect...
Why are you not upset at the other group members who are not carrying their part of the workload? Unless we can remove them from society, the decisions have to be made including their behaviors and risk factors.
This is definitely different than my view of what society should be. Other people don't know my priorities, and should not be able to dictate them to me. A representative government (not experts) is some proxy for people's overall priorities, and strong constitutional limits on government power should ensure that democracy doesn't devolve to "two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner". "Experts" should be a data point, and have no direct control over what people can do
Do you really want to round up and kill anyone that doesn't comply with what you deem to be what they should do?
And no, obviously I don't think people should be rounded up and killed for not complying. But you are also aware your comment was not in good faith and not intended to advance the conversation, so the less said about your second paragraph the better.
And no, it doesn't compare to drunk driving... Why, because the vaccinated still carry and transmit COVID, so that effectively means that everyone who goes outside is in your mind doing the same thing as drunk driving.
The risks from C19 go beyond infecting other people. The only way to claim individuality would be if the unvaccinated were willing to bear the cost of hospitalization as well as accept lowest priority for health care. And if optional surgeries, like knee replacements, weren’t put aside to give care to someone unvaccinated.
That’s the problem with saying we all make our own choices and are “independent”. The reality is we are so interconnected that sometimes people can’t get their own way when required to protect the broader group.
Also, if you are breathing, you can be a carrier for COVID. Are you saying you don't go outside among other people?
Beyond this, you specifically a few reptiles back are calling for mass incarceration. It's not okay, the drunk driving analogy is a false equivalence that applies to the vaccinated as well as unvaccinated.
UK is already completely dropping all restrictions. CDC finally recognizes natural immunity. Nearly everyone in the US has either been vaccinated or has COVID. All further restrictions, vaccine mandates or vaccine passports are FUD and anti science.
I don't think any of the theater politicians will pay. Pelosi got more flack for presumed insider trading recently than ever saw for the mask theater.
> She told me that she didn’t want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying.
> What am I supposed to say? That 23 children have died from Covid in Canada during the whole of the pandemic and she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? That kids in Scandinavia, Sweden, and the Netherlands largely haven’t had to wear masks at school and haven’t seen outbreaks because of it? That masks are not a magic shield against the virus, and that even if she were to pass it along to a classmate, the risk of them getting seriously sick is minuscule?
> I want to tell her that she can remove her mask, and socialize with her friends without being worried.
> But I am expected to enforce the rules.
While I can sympathize with how the student is feeling, the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument) that having a conversation with a student isn't breaking the rules. That explaining the facts to a young woman, nearly an adult, is what is expected of a teacher.
> At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends.
Who was shaming children? local parents? government officials? I didn't see any of this shaming. In fact, where I live, more children were at the parks.
I think what's really missing in most situations is honest conversations about the way the world is right now, the fact that many people are afraid, others are dying and many more will die as a result of this virus.
Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering.
I wouldn't be so sure. I would definitely be worried about being seen as a covid denier or similar. People feel really strongly about this and has strangely turned political, and its best not to discuss politics with your students so that you don't draw the ire of parents that could label you as something you're not
> Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering.
I just want my children to have a relatively care-free existence in their formative years, much like I had. Children and young people are not without their own low-stake drama but they should not have this weight of forced upon them at that age.
Kids read newspapers. They know what's happening. Even high school kids are depressed by things like climate change, income inequality and the broken Canadian real estate market. I don't think encouraging the spread of disease is likely to cheer them up much.
Describing socialization and face to face interaction in these terms is incredibly callous.
I'm sorry, but I can't engage in good faith when this is your opening statement. Facial cues are an essential part of socialization. Meeting in large groups is one form of socialization, one that's incredibly common among teenagers and children.
Vaccines were the only plausible way out of restrictions. Since they turned out not to be, it is clear that restrictions are forever.
Oh yes. The "it isn't abusive if they still remember what human contact is" school of thought.
This strain of rationalization for mass punishment is morally abhorrent.
This is intellectually dishonest. No one pushing for mask mandates is attempting to punish people. You can argue that masks are a poor tradeoff or ineffective without willfully casting those on the opposite side as evil or malicious.
This unwillingness to acknowledge each others’ humanity and points of view is precisely why every issue is so unbearably partisan now. It’s not sufficient that we disagree. It’s but sufficient that the other side it’s just wrong. They must be actively evil for being wrong.
Whining about masks in public during a viral epidemic is telling the youth that their personal whims come before the collective health. Which some of you may believe, I'm not here to argue with you if you do. Should masks and vaccines have been the only solution? No. Should families and small businesses have to deal with inconsistent public information and almost no financial support? No.
But given the reality in which we find ourselves the bare minimum would be to not act like a mask is some particular burden. If you want to talk about mass punishment we could get on the topic of what nurses, doctors, and med techs are dealing with. Or all the "essential workers" that were treated like disposable refuse.
It's especially funny when you take into account billions of people around the world regularly wear masks in public during flu season, but apparently North Americans can't handle it.
They masked 6+ year olds and did not mask anyone under 6 in school.
You'd expect higher rates of Covid in the 5 year olds than the 6 year olds.
In fact, it was the exact opposite - rate of spread was perfectly correlated with age. Masks showed no impact.
There's also interesting data from North Dakota (https://twitter.com/TracyBethHoeg/status/1470072066380419072).
This is a great dataset because it controls for a lot of variables - it's two school districts in the same county; one optional and one mandatory. The mandatory masking county consistently has had higher rates of Covid.
"it's realistic" it's realistic to face the fact that kids are unlikely to die from COVID so living in fear and spreading that fear is absolutely callous.
They are stastically more likely to die from tripping on a sidewalk than dying of Covid.
Telling them they are "spreading disease" when it's literally a cold/flu is irresponsible...
The problem is the fear of COVID has reached religious status and only heathens talk against the Church. The COVID Crusaders will burn witches at the stake no matter if they are spreading fear not based in facts or reality.
You can’t appeal to facts and reality and then also falsely claim COVID is literally a cold/flu. A cold and a flu aren’t even the same thing as each other. And COVID is certainly neither of those with over 5 million deaths worldwide. Even if you think the numbers are inflated, COVID has still killed something like an order of magnitude more people than the flu would in the same timespan.
You don’t convince others by listening by spreading your own lies. Rational thought is not built on misinformation.
COVID is in effect a bad flu...
"5 million deaths" 5 million deaths FROM covid or WITH COVID?
Hint: You don't know because we don't know... those numbers are mixed, conflated and confused.
"Order of magnitude" In places like the US where hospitals get 30% more money for stamping "something" as "covid"? Hard to take numbers seriously... especially when you admit that "FROM" COVID and "WITH" COVID are different things and haven't been tracked properly.
If I have a heart attack... but I had COVID... Am I a COVID death or not? Currently, it's yes... you're a COVID death no matter what kills you. No matter that you're really not a COVID death.
"rational thought is not built on misinformation" but the fear around COVID is.
That's why kids who are statistically more likely to die tripping on a sidewalk are getting pushed to get vaccines that don't block transmition, don't stop covid and won't end the pandemic.
People aren't getting vaccinated for "rational though" because if they were then the people getting the vaccines would be the people who need the extra protection - as they also get that extra protection. Not kids or people in their 20's and younger who are proven a LONG time ago to not need to live in fear.
It's not rational thought that's driving COVID at this point. It's fear, misinformation, lies and the Holy Religion of The Vaccine.
No, it’s not. It is literally a different disease and the impact is well outsized relative to the flu.
> "5 million deaths" 5 million deaths FROM covid or WITH COVID? > Hint: You don't know because we don't know... those numbers are mixed, conflated and confused.
This “but numbers are inflated” stuff is FUD. There is zero evidence that the real impact of COVID is lower than the reported numbers. (If you have any, please do share.) Excess deaths indicate that the official COVID death tallies are actually significant undercounting.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8
It’s utterly crazy that people can legitimately hold the view that COVID is no worse than the flu in the face of mass cremations happening in India or refrigerator trucks filled with corpses outside New York hospitals. This doesn’t happen in a typical flu season.
> That's why kids who are statistically more likely to die tripping on a sidewalk
This seems like an easy claim for you to provide a citation for. Where is it?
I’m totally on board with the fact that the risk to children of COVID is very low. But I’m relatively certain that sidewalks being more deadly is bullshit.
> fear, misinformation, lies and the Holy Religion of The Vaccine.
This coming from someone spreading misinformation. Why do you expect people to engage in real discussion with you when you’re spreading misinformation? Your righteous outrage is unjustified when you’re as guilty of lying to yourself as those you’re arguing with.
I don’t know about you but I watched people on television jump to their deaths from the burning twin towers my freshman year of high school.
But if you hear modern day discourse, you'd think that the 'collective traumas' have never been so great for folks in their early-mid 20's.
If someone acts like antivax they are placed in a wacko conspiracy theory box immediately. It will take effort on their part to be not view through only that prism.
So its a tight rope walking situation.
Personally I changed my mind about children masks after argument that children need social cues (including facial clues) to properly respond and develop. It makes sense and I feel bit silly not to think about it in the first place.
There is a discussion to be had about how we deal with covid, and there are always trade offs, sadly as you mentioned making public safety a political issue is moving away from facts and statistics into emotional warfare
How do you think that that happened?
Otherwise, you get two more massive, unaccountable bureaucracies laying down and enforcing their own regulations.
> the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument)
I agreed with many of the arguments in the article when I red it, but checking out the other submissions on that blog, I think there are a lot of suspicious omissions like this.
E.g. There is another post [1] about a transwoman and a transman both competing in the women's swimming team. Sounds weird and at first glance seems to confirm all the usual "trans agenda" accusations. Except, the linked original article [2] clears it up:
> Henig is eligible to compete on the women’s team as a trans man because he’s chosen not to receive gender-affirming hormones, also known as hormone replacement therapy, such as testosterone.
Any mention of that in the blog? Nope - on the contrary, she doubles down on the confusion and emphasizes it to push the "trans agenda" narrative:
> Can you ask any questions about this and whether it makes sense for women’s sports to become a free-for-all for all that leads to a man winning? Do you want to keep your job? Because by the definitions of the movement, Iszac is a male who cannot compete on a women’s team, right? This whole thing is becoming increasingly absurd.
So in closing, I think the source is heavily biased to push certain outrage-generating narratives and cannot really be taken serious - even though I absolutely empathize with a lot of her observations in the OP article.
[1] https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/tgif-the-pope-is-with-us
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/trans-athlete-debat...
I'm sorry to say it, but Eric Topol is no longer a reliable source of information. He routinely mis-represents "science" in the scariest way possible, and as exemplified here, nuance and and measured communication are essential to prevent panic.
> Using SARS-CoV-2 serology and IFN-γ ELISPOT, we found evidence of a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection in 50% (15/30) of patients
See also this large (N=26k) study from France, where the only "long Covid" symptom correlated with confirmed infection was loss of smell. Nearly every other symptom was associated with belief of prior infection, but not infection itself:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
But we're now locked in cycle of speculation about speculation -- these papers on long Covid are usually stunningly bad, and dispense with basic things like controls, or even separating the subjects by age and severity of primary illness. So you get review articles postulating complex theories of biological mechanisms for "illnesses" where the primary evidence base consists of a web survey. It's madness, and it's almost impossible to properly debunk it all, given how quickly its being churned out.
I wouldn't even take the step to psychosomatic.
Viruses period, Covid or not, apparently do a lot more damage and require a lot longer to recover from than we expected.
People dismissing "Long Covid" in non-Covid patients are being blind to the fact that we had a LOT of people who had "weird" symptoms even before Covid that we allocated to "hysteria", "psychosomatic", "chronic", "Lyme disease", etc. that are going to turn out to be "Long General Virus Recovery".
Epstein-Barr has some huge correlation to multiple sclerosis. HPV vaccines have almost eliminated certain cervical cancers. Chicken pox necessitates a shingles vaccine because its so horrible.
Viruses are a lot worse than we realized, and the medical system is going to be coming to grips with this for decades.
No, this is not supported by the evidence. So far, even the worst of the long Covid papers suggests that a minority of people suffer from lingering illness. And most of those papers are bad, defining "long Covid" arbitrarily, and mixing together "cough after three weeks" with far more serious symptoms experienced by a tiny set of people.
When people say "we need more research on long Covid", this is what is meant. We literally have no idea what "it" is, other than an arbitrary container into which people are dumping their worst fears and speculations.
Going from this to "viruses are much worse than we ever knew!" is both wrong (post-viral syndrome is a known thing, affecting a small fraction of people) and overgeneralization.
At 1 million people before the vaccine (5% of 20 million), that would make "Long Covid" one of the most common medical conditions.
That 5% number is probably close for Covid prior to vaccines. Look at the sheer number of people who had anosmia and how long it is taking them to recover. How many people would even have mentioned anosmia after having a cold or flu? That sure goes into the "Long Covid" bucket in my book and we're not even discussing the panoply of other damage that Covid does.
Post-vaccine, the "Long Covid" percentage certainly drops by quite a bit.
> post-viral syndrome is a known thing, affecting a small fraction of people
The number of people who got cervical cancer from HPV is small, and yet, before the vaccine, it was one of the more common and fatal of cancers.
"Small fraction" != "unimportant"
In addition, things pile up. Carcinogenesis takes a long time with key mutations as far back as the womb and early childhood. Viruses are part of the landscape that causes those mutations.
You have provided no evidence to counteract my statement so I still stand by it: Viruses period, Covid or not, apparently do a lot more damage and require a lot longer to recover from than we expected.
...and yet, we're not seeing these waves and waves of disabled people. This should give you pause, and make you doubt the claims of prevalence, the claims of severity, or both.
By the way: "reported" infections vastly underestimate the true prevalence of disease. Up until the Omicron wave (which has tremendously increased the number) the CDC estimated that almost 150 million US citizens have had it:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Again, this should make you doubt the claims of prevalence. If even 5% of cases have this "long Covid", we're talking about 8 million cases. If claims of 20% prevalence are true, boost that number to 30 million people. The burden on the medical system would be immense; you would not be able to get appointments for even basic care. Chronically disabled people should be swamping medical clinics everywhere.
It's simply obvious nonsense. Only by conflating minor symptoms with pathology do you get to an estimate anywhere near these kinds of numbers.
> Look at the sheer number of people who had anosmia and how long it is taking them to recover.
I'm one of them. Took about a week.
> That sure goes into the "Long Covid" bucket in my book and we're not even discussing the panoply of other damage that Covid does.
We're discussing it right now. What we're not discussing is the evidence for this "panoply of other damage"...because for the vast majority of "long Covid" symptoms, the evidence simply doesn't exist. We leap from self-reports of "symptoms" directly to "panoply of damage", based on little more than speculation and quotes from doctors.
https://health.ucdavis.edu/newsroom/news/headlines/studies-s...
> Presenting symptoms included palpitations, chronic rhinitis, dysgeusia, chills, insomnia, hyperhidrosis, anxiety, sore throat, and headache among others.
Literally anyone reporting sweating, headache, anxeity or insomnia is counted as "long Covid", if they hadn't reported it before their Covid diagnosis. Completely ridiculous. This is not research.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.03.21252086v...
> Initial reports of neurologic syndromes accompanying COVID-19 described changes in level of consciousness or cognitive dysfunction, weakness, and headache in hospitalized patients...
> A UK-wide study of hospitalized patients identified the most common neurologic conditions...
> Direct examination of autopsy brain tissue has caveats—those who died with acute COVID-19 had severe disease that may not be representative of the majority of those infected with SARS-CoV-2.
About 800 drowning deaths / year (https://www.safekids.org/press-release/almost-800-kids-drown....)
Roughly 850 deaths from/with Covid in two years - the bulk of which are likely with Covid rather than explicitly because of Covid (https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...)
Unless your world view is that we should all teach our children to be maximally selfish and to not care when grandma dies then thinking only of your own direct mortality during a highly contagious pandemic is a bit silly.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1146/6024998
> Children are Infrequently Identified as the Index Case of Household SARS-CoV-2 Clusters
> In analysis of the cluster index cases, we included 43 articles, in which there were 213 SARS-CoV-2 transmission clusters; only 3.8% (8/213) were identified as having a pediatric index case (Table 1 and Supplementary Tables 1 and 3). Of 611 individuals in the 213 clusters, there were 102 children. These pediatric cases only caused 4.0% (16/398) of all secondary cases, compared with the 97.8% of secondary cases that occurred when an adult was identified as the index case in the cluster (Table 1).
It’s not about “selfishness” it’s about making realistic trade offs between different segments of society and different aspects of life.
Is this really necessary? You started by saying that COVID is multiple orders of magnitude more deadly than drowning. You were shown to be wrong, so you retreated to the “gotta protect grandma” stance (which is unrelated to your original claim, and also very possibly wrong), and then for good measure you knocked down a straw man and cast wrycoder as basically just evil for disagreeing with you.
The reality is that children seem to have extremely low risk from COVID. And it appears that they aren’t particularly likely to pass it to vulnerable populations. And those vulnerable populations should be vaccinated already (as should everyone eligible).
Maybe unmasking children would increase the danger to at-risk populations. Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe it’s selfish to keep demanding children wear masks for 8 hours/day out of fear when the evidence that it’s doing anything useful seems lacking. What I know is that COVID isn’t going anywhere and “everyone wear a mask all the time until the end of time” is not an end game strategy.
As an aside, the most frustrating thing about arguments (“discussions”) is that even when people are wrong and proven so, they rarely accept it or change they claims. They go right out saying the same stuff again. Most of the people spouting misinformation on both sides of the COVID debate are pretty well informed about the reality at this point. They just willfully ignore information that didn’t fit their narrative.
This teenager has been telling me on a monthly basis since last year that "food still tastes like garbage to me." It is some kind of strange side-effect she has from holding her breath at the bottom of the deep end of the pool.
Oops, did I write, "holding her breath at the bottom of the deep end of the pool?" I meant to write "a mild case of covid."
Has anyone bothered to investigate what the cause actually is?
Here in Santa Clara County, our public health department demanded that play structures close down during the first lockdown order and many parks closed. It is the one part of the response that I thought was really stupid and lambasted at the time.
Afterwards, many parents were still anxious and didn't let their kids out.
It's related to an overall value on "Purity" as a moral virtue.
I think what happens is that people like the author are very influenced by shame and therefore project the intent to shame on situations when they FEEL shame.
If I do something and someone tells me not to, I don't feel "shame", regardless of whether I agree with the direction or not.
That's not the case with some people.
I believe it's also associated with narcissism. If you are powerfully negatively impacted by shame you will do everything possible not to feel it including intense denial gaslighting and narcissism.
- Shame and social pressures from other parents' judgments about us.
- Desire to instill rule-following behavior within my kids.
At that point, since you didn't know any more about the epidemiology of covid than the experts, I should hope you had another reason to stay away not just arbitrary rule following or social pressure.
BTW, if you start tracking the current spread of Omicron, there is strong evidence that Omicron is contageous enough through close proximity even outdoors for short periods of time: Benches, ski chair lifts, playgrounds, hiking trail bottlenecks.
The original COVID variants weren't that contagious, but if they were equally threatening and as infectious as Omicron, it would have been a completely correct policy.
A weakly justifiable perspective that was away from the consensus view at the time and caused harm (probably reduced compliance with the reasonable measures, in addition to all the secondary harms).
I had cops threaten to give me a massive ticket for standing in the middle of a field with a telescope by myself. Said cops were 100% of my human contact outside my household in March. This probably wasn't our best enforcement bet.
> there is strong evidence that Omicron is contageous enough through close proximity even outdoors for short periods of time
I don't buy this. I'm in a test-100%-weekly environment and this happening any more than rarely isn't compatible with our observations.
> The original COVID variants weren't that contagious, but if they were equally threatening and as infectious as Omicron, it would have been a completely correct policy.
We already had a decent estimate of R0 as 2.0-3.5 even in dense environs, and consensus was already forming around a 2.4 "best guess". We also knew that indoor was the vast majority of that 2.4.
But we're in a mountainous region and it's winter, and we all ski. I know 3 people that got Omicron and the only close proximity to people they had in the time period was chair lift lineup and the chair lift itself.
They are somewhere in Canada. Regulations and attitudes differ depending on the location and phase of the pandemic.
>The City of Ottawa said Tuesday that an Orléans man confronted by a bylaw officer while kicking a soccer ball with his four-year-old autistic son in an empty field was given a warning, but not fined $700.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/orleans-man-stung-...
Seems like parks being closed happened in the US too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/closing-p...
I hope people aren't forgetting what we went through and how the public and officials reacted to it. It would be hard to improve unless we remember what happened.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ncc-path-closed-open-c...
Tell that to BLM
IMO, as a teacher: The kids are alright. For elementary kids, the rules are no big deal. For middle school, where I mostly teach... the rules are OK, but the unpredictability of what they're looking forward to happening (sports, dances, get-togethers, travel) is not great. Two years of indefinite uncertainty about everything good happening, with no end in sight, is crushing to adults, let alone kids with 13 years of experience in life.
In high school, it's a source of anxiety for some students. They don't want to bring a dangerous virus home or to their grandparents. Others refuse to comply with restrictions in normal adolescent defiance. Asking for the courtesy of wearing a mask is often a very "OK boomer" moment.
All of these things suck. But the students I work with are resilient and are working through it and making the best of it all.
I do think we should "call our shot" -- name some endpoints and acceptable levels of risk a priori, rather than making judgments heavily influenced by feelings and sentiments of the moment. This isn't enough to make the restrictions predictable, but they'll be more predictable than they are now-- right now we have to predict both the virus and how most other people will react to it to know what we'll be allowed to do.
You can get it more than once.
>> You can get it more than once.
We were lucky that Omicron was relatively mild, the virus can mutate and become more deadly. The more people get infected the mutation risk increases.
Assuming that the protection of a previous infection is approximately equivalent to vaccination, then the GP’s question is spot on - after Omicron burns it’s way through the population, we will effectively be at “full vaccination”. At that point, what are we trying to contain?
Right now we are dealing with the fact that omicron hits hard, and fills hospitals. Here in Maine we did okay through previous waves, so we have plenty of people with no "natural" exposure to covid. Our hospitals are pretty much over capacity. So what happens if you get into a car crash and need medical attention if there's no room for you? It's somewhat unanswered.
Either option, thousands more will die and everything will be open in a year or two.
I'm very glad that not all places on Earth have taken this destructive and defeatist view.
Containing an extremely contagious airborne pathogen is not the same as not simply assuming that "everyone will get infected" (which suggests that any activity to contain or restrict the spread of infection is 100% wasteful).
Mutations. An increased infections means increased chance of evolution of this virus. If the virus changes in the right way, current vaccinations wont work anymore. Another problem is if it becomes more mutable, we could have waves of seasonal covid that like a cold doesn't care if you had another variant.
It's in our best interest to try to stop the spread as much as possible.
Like other biological entities, viruses evolve to survive and replicate more efficiently. If the hosts die off, survival and replication is stunted.
We’re not out of the woods yet w/r/t dangerous variants, but health risks will likely wane over time, and we’re obviously well past the point of meaningfully controlling transmission. We will absolutely experience seasonal waves and variance similar to the cold.
All of that said, we need to do some realistic cost benefit analysis at this point. We have a new cold-like virus on the planet, and we’re implementing new ways to protect ourselves and treat it (if we’re smart). At this point, are the mental health and quality of life sacrifices we’re making worth it in the face of an inevitable endemic?
Say there's a group of 100... like my county 42 of them are vaccinated. Say 10 die.... now you have 90... 42 vaccinated... that's now 46%...
More deadly strain comes along, hitting the unvaxxed, and maybe 10 more die.. vaccinated rate is now 52.5%..
Eventually anti-science people will just fall victim to evolution and we'll trend towards 100% vaccinated, and then less vector for mutation.
I think it'll always be w/ us....just maybe w/ less load via updated vaccines, we can continually keep it below high mortality thresholds for the general public, and lower viral load is lower chances for spread, and for mutations.
I'm at the point of not much caring anymore, esp as far as anti-vax people come, though it'd be nice if we could triage them better where all other people come first in the hierarchy of needs and then --and only then if there are available beds can they receive one.
I mean for decades we've done the same thing, except it was rich > poor... not it's people who trust doctors and are health responsible like organ donors are expected to be, who would receive first dibs at care.
My biggest worry is the plummeting health of the healthcare workers themselves. Their mental health, their mass exodus. You can't just replace them. It takes years to encourage people to go into and then graduate from medical fields.
I'm also worries about Cancer, i have lots of friends/family who've dealt w/ Cancer scares and most of them can't get even the littlest bit of pre-emptive care. My wife's mom died of Cancer last year and maybe she wouldn't have --had they not been throttling assesments and other doctor appointments.
I have toddlers in preschool, but at this point I just accept we're all going to get it... so not worth worrying about.. As virulent as this version is, I just can't fathom a 4 year old not catching it somehow...I just hope they have mild cases and no lingering after-effects, I think I might have it now, as I've been super lethargic past 3 days and just exhausted... I'm triple vaxxed and still if this is it, it's not pleasant.
TLDR: Delirious rambling re: I agree mutations are bad, dwindling healthcare worker health and resources is more bad, but also feel helpless, and kinda have given up, and just hope we can hurry up and get through all the unvaccinated people asap so we can fight this better. I'm a humanist, and usually compassionate, and care about human rights but I'm a bit jaded by the selfishness lately, and honestly the people who wouldn't wear a mask to protect others last year, I could care less if they end up winning a Herman Cain/Darwin Award this year. They provide so little value to society, they wouldn't have even been missed during the Thanos 'blip'. "Oh were you blipped? Huh...didn't evne notice...weird....awkward!".
Omicron is spreading rapidly for a wide variety of reasons, but not least among them is the fact that it significantly escapes any prior immunity gained via vaccination or infection with a prior strain of the virus.
It’s not at all clear to me why we’d assume that this will mark “the end” - if anything this seems like a good indication that we’ll see future strains with this measles-like contagiousness that significantly escapes any prior immunity gained from Omicron. And this is on top of the fact that immunity to coronaviruses in general does not seem to be particularly long-lasting.
At which point, unless we have significantly invested in hiring a lot more nurses and creating a lot more hospital beds (which I see no signs of), we will be looking at bringing back at least some restrictions in many jurisdictions to avoid having to cancel many medical procedures that have spent the last 2 years getting canceled repeatedly.
a lot of us don't believe in eugenics and condemning our friends and families to die.
Rinse and repeat.
That said, they are correct. Assuming that at some point lockdowns just stop, everyone will be either recovered or dead.
Vaccinated people will be almost completely recovered, with unvaccinated numbering the most death.
This is not sarcasm, it's not selfish, it's a simple fact. Vaccinations are available to the general public and there are very few that are not capable of receiving the vaccine, many that choose not to.
Those that choose not to will have a higher risk of death, due to a decision they made.
This makes it sound like you think the consequences of their actions are limited to them; if that were true, then I think the debate would be a lot less interesting.
I for one don't believe that the decision only affects the individual in this case.
We have not betrayed our children. We have betrayed the ides of human rights.
The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. have already had covid, or have been vaccinated, or both. The socioeconomic affects of current restrictions are like a smog of cigarette smoke across the country. It won't kill you as fast as the very few people covid now will, but it will kill you later. We aren't looking at the carcinogenic effects of policies. If we were we would see a skyrocket in homelessness, unemployment, evaporation of jobs, and a market that overall will not take the same risks knowing the government(s) can shut their operations down at any moment.
The policy makers for covid restrictions act like this is all a bandaid that will fall off eventually, but as far as I have seen they lied and the bandaid is actually a whole roll of duct tape.
No real epidemiologists is going to tell you that this is a bandaid that will fall off eventually. The people in the know will say "We don't have enough information."
If you're talking about politicians, there are plenty red states that are not enforcing any restrictions. So is your complaint just that you disagree with some politicians?
Yes, that's because there's a pandemic going on that has killed 32,000 Canadians and significantly impacted a much larger number. It's pretty upsetting. The notion that people are only upset because of government restrictions is pretty silly.
"she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? "
Yeah, we should tell high school students a lot more forcefully that cars kill people. Making cars the backbone of Canadian society is terrible.
"Our children need life on the highest volume. And they need it now."
Wear a mask in school to try to minimize the transmission of the disease, take it off outside, get tested if you have symptoms and then isolate if you're infected. Get vaccinated. This is not difficult. I'm not sure why we need a hand-wringing essay.
Amateur hockey teams are still playing hockey in Canada. Most sports are fine, just without spectators. Prom wearing a mask isn't exactly a burden.
Again, kids are depressed because the disease exists, not because they're being asked to deal with it. Telling kids to go wild isn't going to make covid less depressing. That would probably kill a few teachers in outbreaks.
Yes, it sucks. Spreading an extremely virulent disease also sucks. Schools have a responsibility to not encourage the spread of covid.
My point, such as it is, is that there seem to be a lot of people who think that kids are stressed out by disease control measures. My belief is that the kids are stressed out by the disease itself and they're actually pretty happy to try to help in controlling the spread of the disease. Of course not everyone is the same, etc.
My brother tells his young son this is all an overblown liberal hoax and the vaccine does nothing. Didn't stop the little guy from losing his sense of taste and smell.
These kind of things always sound like people thinking they can hide money trouble from their kids. You basically can't hide stressors from kids. They'll feel it. Hell, you can't hide stressful situations from a damn dog!
TFA has a great line about many rites of passage being effectively stolen from a generation. That's something they'll never get back, and the fallout is something we'll be observing for decades to come.