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.
Regarding 2, France is still not in lockdown despite having a much higher number of cases per capita than the US (400k cases for 66M people last monday), and schools are run to the ground in a similar manner than what is described in the reddit post, if not worse (they relaxed the isolation and testing rules very recently). edit: maybe you were referring to the "vaccine pass", but since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else).
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.
> since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else).
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.
This was a partial view, yes, the viral charge is lessened when the vaccine comes into play, which is a good thing, but it does not help much that much the several hundred thousand people for whom the vaccine is useless, nor the ones who got scammed with a fake vaccine pass (and are now in limbo since they can enter places where the pass is required but not get protected).
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.
The virus is not going away and will be able to mutate forever, yet sooner or later we'll have to go back to normality (though I hope that some degree of masking and remote working will remain).
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 believe it's hard to appreciate the frustration and costs that closing schools causes, at least for children to be too young to be left without supervision.
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.
> at least for children to be too young to be left without supervision
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.
The teachers might not want to move from the "Almost definitely not going to shit themselves" grades to the "Might still shit themselves" grades. The massive change in responsibilities between grades likely means that the schools can't just reallocate teachers without negotiation.
Slightly off-topic, but how are children dealing with non-fixed classes? Thinking about 7 year old children (or even adults), getting on time from one to another classroom according to an indvidual schedule would not be an easy task.
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?
> If you have to stay home and take care of children, your career will suffer even if you are compensated for lost income
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.
Has any country made noticeable progress in improving the situation for schooling (EDIT: during covid waves) compared to lets say 18 months ago? Here in Germany the mantra seems to be "keep the schools running at all costs!" - except if "costs" means spending anything or preparing anything. So we don't have meaningful improvements done to schools, still don't have universal setups for remote or hybrid schooling, any non-standard concepts to roll out... (well, I guess some more moodle installs. but that's really not the biggest thing that needs solving. and do testing at schools now, but even that's seems to have been winged quite a lot.)
Well... Most Asian countries seem to only fail your definition because the situation there was mostly okay 18 months ago, so they didn't have room to improve.
fair point, clarified with an edit. (i.e. the standard is not "what were you doing 18 months ago", but "how prepared are you for schooling in a covid wave now vs how prepared you were 18 months ago")
Italy is the same, "school must be in presence" is a kind of mantra, and though it is (IMHO) right in theory, it fails in practice (where/when teachers, janitors, bus drivers, and even pupils are COVID positive in more than a tiny fraction).
Schools (generally speaking) are due to reopen on monday the 10th, but very likely only a part of them will actually be able to.
I have two toddler granddaughters. Both their parents had COVID last year (presumably delta), so I guess the kids must have caught it too. Their mother teaches in primary school, and is tested daily.
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.
I’ve got a kindergartener doing remote learning. The school system has adopted Google Suite as their platform(1). Default setup is a Chromebook. Format is pretty standard (recorded morning message and various activities throughout the day). A couple of live sessions are planned, with the class broken up into two groups to reduce the hectic video calls.
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.
Honestly the fact that Google got entrenched even more (or Zoom) is kinda scary to me. A few years ago it was noted that Google was basically giving away tech for free to schools so that they could embed themselves and eventually start squeezing money out of the education system (this happens internationally).
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.
I've got a kid in grade 1, and I honestly don't know how contact tracing is supposed to work. Ten minutes after talking to grandma, if you ask him who he's spoken to today, he can't remember. If you ask him what he talked to grandma about, it's a mix of truth and fiction. He doesn't know the names of many classmates. Contact tracing depends on reliable narrators -- young children are far from that.
I do wish that we'd have something though. Our local government has just given up altogether.
School year in Northern Spain went on as normal with a class intermittently being sent home due to a positive case. Classes were kept in "independent bubbles" and did not mix to ensure better social distancing.
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.
Before the pandemic I had this uncomfortable sense that the people running the place were asleep at the wheel, and everyone was tacitly expecting someone else to do the actual hard work/thinking so they could go back to their phones/Netflix in peace.
Now I’ve had to acknowledge that for a lot of institutions this more or less is the case.
I wonder if decades of malinvestment in those institutions and routing our most educated people to editing spreadsheets with dollar signs on them or selling ads (Now With Code!) has had negative consequences for our society.
When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market." When a multilateral, societal disaster strikes and schools struggle with contradicting demands: "What an inept bunch we have running these schools"
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.
> When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market."
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.)
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.
The U.S. government allocated $190 billion dollars to schools for pandemic response[0][1]. Some school districts updated their athletic facilities.
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.
[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.
The money was given out as a lump sum with I believe a 3-year deadline to use it or lose it. With those restrictions it pretty much had to be spent on capital-intensive projects that could be done in 3 years.
Athletic facilities fit that requirement very nicely and would be useful for quite a long time in the future.
I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers. There aren’t enough subs to cover for the teachers. We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks. It’s a perfect time to pivot to remote to lower the strain our on failing healthcare system.
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.
People are afraid that if districts go remote it’ll be a repeat of 2020, where there was no consensus of when it was safe to go back to in-person schooling. There is distrust on both sides (the teachers and the school district/parents) and I can’t see them agreeing on a rubric at this point in time. Yet another way Covid is exposing the divisions in our society.
It not so much a lack of consensus; school officials burnt every scrap of goodwill they had by forcing parents to scramble and do multiple things at once, and they don't yet realize they're overplaying their hand. You're right that it reveals divisions, but one of those is that anybody who can opt out by homeschooling or using private/religious schools that aren't closing their doors is doing that.
> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school.
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.
Afaik, Amerika had super strong opposition to any lockdowns or measure from the start. There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions.
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.
Schools here were completely remote for 10 months (mid-March 2020 until the end of January 2021), then part time for the next few months, only going back to full time this past fall. Now they seem intent on being full time, even though cases now are much higher than when they had kept the schools closed or part time (hospitalizations are also close to the highest they've been).
> There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions.
"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.
Remote can be difficult if you have more members of the family than computers and rooms. That can seem absurd to you and me (I have five computers plus three smartphones and probably a tablet somewhere, for two people) but in many families, ressources are more scarce than that. Having my partner (medical doctor, so working out of the home most of the time) take a call during one of my meeting is frustrating, but it happens once a month. Eight hours a day can’t go smoothly.
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.).
In short, everyone needs kids in schools... (Not saying this is a good thing, just thinking it through as the situation is right now, assuming no changes)
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.
>Parents who are rejoining the workforce can't take 4-6 weeks of with no notice to babysit their kids again...
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.
> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable.
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.
> IMHO, reopening schools is more important for the nation than
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.)
Death rate peaks happen about three weeks after case load peaks. This has been very consistent through the pandemic (at least everywhere that has good test reporting), you can play with graphs at https://91-divoc.com/ or elsewhere to see the effect.
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).
Well "herd immunity" isn't really possible for respiratory diseases because our immunity wanes too fast. If we had "herd immunity" against cold/flu you wouldn't get it every year.
That's not correct. In fact we don't get influenza[1] every year, and the reason is most of us have had (or been immunized to, or both) most or all of the variants at some point in the past. Flu variants aren't pandemics, they're just endemic diseases.
"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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, nobody is suggesting going permanent remote, but when there isn’t enough staff to operate as normal, maybe it’s time to sit back for a few weeks, eh?
It perfectly illustrates how there are two types of quarantine lockdowns-- the kind enforced by the government or policy, and the defacto kind that happens organically when too many people are sick or afraid of getting sick.
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.
That's true, but we also shouldn't characterize this as a defacto one. Insane quarantine regulations basically prevent teachers from coming to school at all if they have even been in contact with anyone who later tested positive, whether or not they are sick, test negative, or have 3 shots. If we saw this same situation sans government regulations then we could conclude it was organically spawned, but that isn't the case here.
Public schools main function is subsidized day care since the vast majority of parents both work.
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.
It's not "acceptable" because average families can't deal with their kids being home. This pandemic has revealed that for a large swath of kids home is a toxic environment actively destroying their potential. Add to this the terrible online learning implementations that are basically "beg to show up for attendance and then hope they participate" ...
I guess this is my followup question is, would your opinion change if we replaced “remote learning” with “no school”? Remote learning largely doesn’t work, and I think the fact that it’s seen as an option is warping the conversation.
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?
No. I'm asking why the public schools are in this state while restaurants seem to be operating normally, and a lot of private schools seem to be operating normally. I can imagine some perfectly reasonable answers. If it's an unsolvable, we should close the schools, and maybe shorten next year's summer break or something.
But I do think having "remote learning" as a dangling option is warping the discussion. It's not a real fix.
> I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable.
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?
The way schools are run, if even 5% of a district is absent at a single time things start to get tight. If it's 10% then you'll experience serious disruption.
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.
I don't think it has much to do with "learning." School is basically a babysitting / daycare service. They need the kids in school so the parents can work. At least the ones not privileged enough to "work from home" on a permanent basis, like many of us are here.
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.
I think many were checked out already, Covid just accelerated it. The separation between home and work was blurred unexpectedly, during an extremely stressful time. People were forced into remote work. Many thought this to go on for a few months, not years.
I also feel there are more meetings now than pre pandemic.
"I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable."
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?
Have you had COVID? Good luck teaching a room full of 6 year olds with active symptoms. This is what people are essentially asking for right now, at least in certain districts where 10%+ of the teaching staff are out with symptomatic COVID.
I had covid. My kids had covid. My parents had covid. My neighbors had covid. My cat had covid (snotting - no test). You will get covid. The war is lost. Unless, you move to northern Alaska and do no visit shops - and use the land. But that is death.
I think you're missing my point. It's not about avoiding COVID right now. It's about the fact too many teachers have it simultaneously and do not feel well enough to teach.
How many students that got sick are experiencing symptoms more severe than the common cold? It seems like the chaos is caused by the attempted solutions to covid and not the actual symptoms?
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.
You are failing to consider the spread to vulnerable populations where the symptoms are fatal. Omicron is not mild, people with vaccines have mild symptoms due to its efficacy. All these kids come home to families with parents and grandparents. They also have young siblings.
I keep seeing this Boogeyman argument of "vulnerable populations". Vulnerable people are welcome to get vaccinated and isolate and take all the extra precautions they want for themselves; we're 2 years into the pandemic at this point and they should have figured out how to make it work by now. It's not a good argument for shutting schools because it's argument by hypothetical outlier.
Everyone is the center of their own universe. It's time to stop putting up with infringements on our freedom, which we've had two years to show they do nothing anyways.
There is no vaccine for children under five. As long as we've got children in our lives, we all need to go out of our way to protect them - even those of us with masks and vaccines are getting Omicron.
Why? It’s not really harmful to children. Note all the verbage in the news that says “hospitalized with covid” instead of “hospitalized because of covid”. They are going to the hospital mostly due to other reasons
I don't have the source available but was told that the concern was there is some kind of evidence that the vaccine had a low chance of causing long term heart issues in some children, which is why it hasn't been approved for children under 5 yet.
Risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation) in men under 40 years old is higher after 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine than from SARS-CoV-2 itself, particularly after Moderna where it's many times higher: https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...
Article is an overview of the most interesting findings; in particular I'm referencing the second image, which is copied directly from a study that's linked right above it.
That's just not true at all. Children have a 13% chance of getting long covid, for one. MIS-C is another (rare but) serious risk that comes along with covid. Children can and do end up on ventilators or dying. Why would you argue against that? Are you OK with families running that risk?
COVID deaths are recorded as "deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID test". Omicron has only been around since November, and only became huge in late December. Give people time to die.
I just got it along with family (both vaxxed and unvaxxed, there was no noticeable difference in symptoms). It was somewhere between a 'common cold' and the flu. Not fun, but definitely not something to panic about (understandably everyone will have a different reaction depending on their current state of health). However, I think we've reached the point of diminishing returns on any sort of intervention (they've all failed). Masking is ineffective, lockdowns and social-distancing are ineffective, and the vaccines are ineffective (at least w.r.t. to preventing transmission). We can continue to tear society apart aiming for a 0% safe zero-covid society (which we will never achieve), or get on with our lives and live with the risk.
All the interventions we've done have been too-little, too-late. Telling people they're safe with a cloth mask when the virus transmits via airborne respiratory particles is obviously insane. We should have used war time powers to mass produce N95s and rapid tests, and mailed them to everyone with instructions on fit-testing.
>vaccines are ineffective (at least w.r.t. to preventing transmission).
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).
My point was: Australia is the only non-asian country from which I still have heard voices of aiming for a ZeroCovid strategy. Everybody else has given that up (for now).
It isn't manageable if health care systems are overloaded in a winter wave, that is why every small bit to reduce spread currently helps.
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.)
> - Masking is highly effective and just a bit inconvenient.
- Lockdowns are extremely effective just very expensive.
- Vaccines are very effective even against transmission.
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…
I don't know where you got your information from, but Omicron doesn't change any of the physics of virus particle spreading.
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.
> Masking is highly effective and just a bit inconvenient.
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.
I am honestly amazed at the level of nonsense and fatalism from your post. As if common physics and virology doesn't apply to this virus.
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.
"Lockdowns" delay spread - well, actually they just force essential workers to get sick first - but what's the point of delaying it? You'll just get it once you open up again. (Somewhat good right now because we're waiting for more antivirals/clearing out winter flu cases, but still not worth the cost.)
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.
Your link doesn't lead to any data, I'm assuming you meant to link to something like this instead: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily Of course that says 44 deaths in the latest 7 day rolling average, not 38, and it loudly warns "Data from the most recent days are incomplete.", so presumably you meant to link to some other page...
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.
I have no real problems with imagining that omicron's IFR is around that, it's a reasonable number. I just have severe problems with the way you reached it, it's pure coincidence that you reached something likely in the right order of magnitude.
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
> “Omicron mortality is likely around 0.2%, roughly in line with seasonal flu."
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.
I think the fear was that teachers would get the virus and then have to duck out. Even worse, many of the sub teachers we had in school were semi-retired teachers who would be even more vulnerable.
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.
Most of the problems in the post are because the teachers are sick.
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.
The teachers are out sick. The workload falls on the remaining teachers because there are no subs. The job was already shitty and even worse now. Teachers quit. Public school has stricter credentialing requirements than private school so it’s hard to replace them, particularly in the middle of a school year. Doesn’t matter how sick the kids are getting or not getting when there is literally no one to run the school.
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.
I am very relaxed. We had mandatory vaccination against smallpox and measles, and it worked well. There weren't even any discussions. The doctor came to school, we formed a queue and each got their jab. Nobody whined or wrote home about it. And hopefully we'll do it again very soon whether anyone whines or not.
Legitimate reason number 1: based on your low effort reply, you’re unable to understand how not to pass on a highly communicable disease that causes misery, disruption, and death.
If you're afraid of the virus, get vaccinated yourself. That's literally the most you can do.
If you're still afraid of the virus, you should know that vaccinating people (even forcefully) won't stop transmission. The virus is endemic. The only thing that can change between now and "back to normal" future is, your mind.
I'm not afraid. I am triple-vaxxed not for myself but out of solidarity for those around me. I am simply at the end of my patience with people going to protests clogging my city and creating politicians using the greenpass and constant checks and testing to create a divide.
mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone. there can still be an exemption if a physician approves that a person can not be vaccinated for some strange reason.
that's the only way to go back to normal, the rest is silly greenpass rules or noisy discussions about "shall we pay un-vaccinated people less?", etc ...
Huh? You're leaving out some massive yet important parts of your argument here. It is a complete non-sequitur to go from you, personally, being perfectly safe and therefore mandatory vaccination is necessary to protect everyone.
Fact is that mandatory vaccination doesn't seem to do much to change the risk to society at large. Coronavirus is tearing through fully-vaccinated Australia at a rate which suggests vaccines do literally nothing to stop the spread. Since the vaccines don't protect bystanders, all the surveillance and mandating of medical treatments should be scrapped immediately.
We are in territory where if someone isn't vaccinated, they are bearing all the risk personally and that is acceptable.
There are plenty of countries where the vaccination rate is too low to effectively prevent the healthcare system from being overrun. In Austria, we were in another lockdown due to this just a month ago, with a vaccination rate of about 70% at the time (IIRC). This is in a country with a relatively high number of unoccupied ICU beds, and we still peaked at a level just short of where doctors would have to triage patients (and well where the quality of care could be kept at its usual level due to i.e. fewer nurses and doctors per patient.)
So no, the unvaccinated aren't solely at risk personally, they could also prevent vaccinated people from getting treated at the standard of care that they would normally expect. I'm not okay with that, so mandatory vaccination with fines for non-compliance seems like the lesser evil to me.
I mostly agree. I think it is certain that vaccinations slow the spread somewhat; probable that they're stopping medical services from becoming overwhelmed; and almost certain that they will not eliminate covid from circulating.
You'll probably catch covid, whether vaccinated or not. Your elderly relatives will probably catch covid, whether you and they are vaccinated or not.
They'll probably catch it even if everyone on the planet become vaccinated tomorrow.
Vaccination is simply one tool to moderate the effect. It's wonderful that we have them, but having 20% of the population stay unvaccinated is not going to drastically affect the spread of the disease.
> mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone.
Would you not still need a vax-proof when vaccination is mandatory? How does it differ then to the greenpass?
It would then be mandatory to be able to produce that proof. Failing to do so may result in fines or land you in jail.
How does that help with the greenpass situation you described?
> And what is more annoying is that the "greenpass" is actually (at least where I live in Europe) a way that allows cops to stop, frisk and harass anyone. It enables the busybodies to play "I aM an auThOrItY and will use my imaginary authority to exercise power over you ..."
> The "greenpass" assumes I am always carrying my phone. It gives me anxiety about my battery going flat.
Making it mandatory seems to only make this worse.
> mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone.
It is unbelievably naive to think that after investing in any surveillance/control infrastructure that governments will relinquish that power willingly.
Got it, so you want to get people submitted into a procedure they don't want, while at the same time claiming you are "triple-vaxxed not for myself but out of solidarity for those around me". Why pretend you care about anyone? just say, hey I want everyone to do this so I feel safer.
> so you want to get people submitted into a procedure they don't want
yes. peoples freedom stop where other peoples health begins. co-morbidity can not be solved but getting people vaccinated can. even it means it's "against their will", even they shout "fOrCeD mediCaL prOceDuRe". I don't care if it hurts their fragile egos and means they have to tone down the individualism. Either have a doctors exemption, pay a fine, or go to jail (condition upon entry into prison is mandatory vaccination). Boom. Problem solved.
> just say, hey I want everyone to do this so I feel safer.
it's not about me but the people around me. some of them I've already lost. I'm healthy enough not to care. I eat well and have done sports all my life. I survived several tropical diseases. I also lived my life to the fullest. So idgaf. The only thing I care about is people around me getting hurt that I love (my family, my kids, my friends). And don't worry they're some deluded anti-vaxxers among them. They can only be helped by force at this stage.
Ahh got it. Are you going to round up the people and get them into jail? You are talking about a threat of force, can you back this up? Would you volunteer to knock doors in Middle of Nowhere, AL to catch the people not paying the fine? or are you expecting someone else to do that for you?
Honestly you just sound like a troll, and you were called out on your previous comments. You are talking about some caricature "AntIVaXeR" that you don't even know in real life. After reading your other comments I don't even believe your story, but idk, maybe you do are that dissociated from reality that you believe it.
How lucky you are not having to worry about co-morbidity.
I'm sick and tired of people generalizing their own conditions to the entire population. You are not like everyone else. Stop telling other people they don't need to worry.
One of the ways I would personally prefer it done is not needing to send kids to super spreader spaces for no reason, since there is no learning happening as documented by the student in the reddit post, causing them to bring the virus home to their parents / grandparents suffering from co-morbidity or immune system issues.
>It offers anti-vaxxers a road out of their self-radicalization. They are able to tone down their conspiracy and blame the government for having been "chipped", and so it's not like they "betrayed their cult" but they were forced to.
I think that yours (and most people's) idea of the typical "anti-vaxxer" is a convenient caricature packaged and served to you by mass media and memes, that you've never actually listened to a real live one of these "anti-vaxxers", what they think and feel.
You don't seem to spend much time on anti-vaxx forums. I don't either but the stories my sister share with me are quite telling.
Not to mention every news channel covid-related videos on youtube is swarmed with comments from a minority of anti-vaxxer, regardless of the country of origin, regardless of the political stance of the channel.
> you've never actually listened to a real live one of these "anti-vaxxers"
don't think you know me but:
I lost my mother due to covid. she was an anti-vaxxer right until the last minute when she died just before Christmas. She was a vulnerable nutcase for years and easily gamed into any kind of MLM scheme.
I was forced to cut off one of my 2 best friends (of 40 years) because they could no longer be reasoned with. we ignored his alternative life-style and individualism because why wouldn't we. but it also put him into a risk-group of suckers that get brainwashed. the same guy now cut off relations to his mother who is battling cancer on the grounds that "she chose to be vaccinated".
These people are crazy, and it's their right to be crazy, but the cost of being crazy can not be exploited by media and politicians. That's why I am 100% for reducing their freedom and have them undergo a "forced medical procedure" (as they call it).
Ohhhh... I have. As a matter of fact, he's going to go to Walgreen's today to get his first "DNA changing" jab because his Dollar General store manager salary won't keep up with the tests needed to maintain employment at his employer.
He's also the dude who will go outside and take random pictures of the sky so that people are aware of the contrails being used to control people's minds.
Chiming in with the rest. Most, maybe all, anti-vaxxers I've interacted with (friends, family, acquaintances) have provided reasons such as 1) the vaccine changes my dna, 2) micro-chips (by an Amazon SWE!), 3) the vaccine only affects people with weak will power (this one was new to me, though it was also laced with God-protects the worthy or something like that). Luckily most of these people eventually were persuaded or to some extent bullied into getting a vaccine. So no, I don't think most anti-vaxxers have well reasoned beliefs that they are holding strong to, though I'm sure some of those do exist.
> highly vaccinated area COVID-19 cases are sharply rising
omnicron's effect on healthcare would be a lot worse without majority of people being vaccinated. everyone is anti-vaxx but it's always shocking how many of them clowns are not anti-respirator or anti-ICU.
This study[1] shows 70% effectiveness against hospitalization for the Pfizer vaccine (based on a two-dose regime; the level of protection would likely be significantly higher for boosted populations).
I'll leave it to you to do the math on what this would mean for the healthcare system if we take current daily infections and remove that effect.
The vaccines are very protective against severe disease, not "useless". Of course that is more important for people over 40 or 50 where severe disease is more common.
For younger people, they don't completely stop transmission, but it's very likely that they slow it down (preventing some infections, lessening the severity of others, etc).
> Also, where in Europe are cops stopping you for vaccination on the street?
have seen it in Germany Austria and France. The worst is when you're also guilty of being a brown person, when you look poor, or belong to a specific group like the Roma.
How mandatory is mandatory though? Is it just gating everything with a vaccine passport, or strapping down people who don't want the vaccination and injecting them?
The real issue is once you decide to force people to do this, what else would you do? The slippery slope is a common argument that you'll need to defend against.
This exemplifies the worst part of this pandemic - the mind virus.
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.
I think they're saying that people have abandoned the number one effective policy (besides vaccines) - avoiding social visits and working from home - and trying to make up the difference with contact tracing, "being careful", masks, ventilation, lateral flow tests etc.
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.
It’s not even that the virus is not necessarily serious: all of these precautions are basically useless.
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.
After. And i do think it will slow the spread. But cases will increase as long as people go to essential jobs and use essential services.
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.
I love going into a restaurant, wearing my mask while the host walks me to my seat, surrounded by unmasked people talking loudly, then sitting down and removing my mask. And if I don't do this, I'm not allowed to enter the establishment. It's all big joke.
The virus is dangerous, albeit not in the way that most people think.
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.
Fair analysis. But why is this (truth) so far from the narrative? At some point there needs to be accountablity. I understand that might not be right now. But the list of names and institutions should start sooner rather than later.
The narrative has been changing continually during the pandemic, which is to be expected since we've gone from not understanding what it is and realizing that we were completely unprepared, to lulls where we thought we were getting over it, to spikes where we were largely willing to use what we learned earlier on, to the current spike where people are figuring out that this may be with us for the long run.
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.
> Our institutions, like health care and education, have been running so close to the edge
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.
> > 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.
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.
The ICU will never be "over capacity". At that level of occupation, there is permanent triage (oh no! bad word! the ethicists haven't written their op-eds yet!) as the "least likely to die" patients are moved out of the close observation in ICU. Make no mistake, when ICUs are full of COVID patients, it is a really bad time to be in a car crash or have any other kind of emergency.
The simpler explanation--they know the virus is most likely not dangerous to themselves. But they care about others, have empathy, and don't want to have anyone else's death on their conscience, and think we should all work together on this.
To those without empathy or conscience, these people seem to be doing something silly and theatrical and it mystifies them.
When we'll look back on the panic in 5-10 years, everyone will be mystified. Previous pandemics like the Russian Flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic) have stopped naturally without vaccines or major government intervention.
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.
The past goverments did actually responded to pandemics and sicknesses. Quarantine is not something novel. People with disease considered contagious could be banished away.
They were no vaccines tho. Those started to be used only after they were invented.
Hence "major government intervention" instead of "government intervention". Do you have a source that the Russian flu (conjectured to be Sars-Cov-0 by some) had any measures like we see now? Certainly not KN-95 masks.
Wow, it looks like this is the closest our schools have ever been at preparing students for life in the real working world. I could have written this myself about work (with a few changes noted below):
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.
Traditionally, a "class" where you study, do homework, etc., but which in practice is usually a lot of so nothing and goofing off. I think it's a way to get funding for educational minutes without actually having to have anything taught for a period.
OK thanks. Does it (despite the name) take place in a conventional class room? Just wanted to check that the implications wasn't that it was particularly bad for covid transmission, like a big crowded gymnasium or something.
In most circumstances (assuming it's during normal school hours and not an after-school program or something) it's in normal classrooms. I think there's some variation on whether students can't choose a classroom (IE "I need to work on or get help with Math") or it's always an assigned room (IE "my study period is always Ms. XYZ's room).
In this particular school it is just the name they use for the large auditorium when it is not being used as an auditorium. It is a large theater-like space with seating and a stage.
From the description it seems like a good problem to solve is "how do we get students the support they needed in 2020 while not creating a dangerous situation?"
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 put a bunch of students in a crowded auditorium and fears of a spreading virus as the student described... seems unnecessarily dangerous. Just purely from a crowd control perspective.
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.
So you believe that we should NEVER have ANY events in an auditorium ever again?
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.
Even if it is not dangerous to them, it gives really fertile grounds for spread to student’s families, friends, etc who may be in the vulnerable group.
Even if is not dangerous to them, it could be tomorrow. We are just giving the virus more and more time to kill us and golden opportunities to mutate again, maybe the next time for a sudden worse turn. And we call ourselves a smart species...
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.
Viruses don't mutate toward being more deadly. In fact they mutate away from it. There's active natural selection to spread faster, and be less deadly, and that's exactly what Omicron is. Why Covid was deadly in the first place was because it targeted some other animal with different defenses and had natural immunity toward it. Then it jumped species to humans and suddenly was quite deadly, but spread somewhat poorly as it wasn't catered to humans yet. Several mutations later it now spreads crazy rapidly but it's killing a lot fewer people.
A virus' end "goal" is to be endemic in the population. Infecting and spreading but killing almost no one, just like the flu does.
Mutation is a random process. It is neither god nor bad and does not have a purpose or direction.
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.
> 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.
At this point vaccinated people are getting it at rates that are just silly. I know a ton of people with COVID right now, and the vast majority are vaxed.
The NY Governor for a variety of reasons has call remote learning a "failed experiment." NYS probably more observations to work with on this matter than anywhere else. CA is not urban enough.
What about the ~25% of US adults that are not vaccinated? As far as I know they are at least as likely as vaccinated adults to have school age children. Even taking into account that they probably have a higher chance of homeschooling, that still leaves a lot of kids in public schools whose parents are not vaccinated.
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?
We’ve made the vaccine free, and widely available. If there were still people waiting weeks to get a vaccine they want to take then I can see an argument why we should all suffer serious injury (like what’s happening at this school) to try to give people more time.
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?
The endpoint is when enough of the people who refuse to get vaccinated have gotten it enough times that their hospitalization rates are as low as those of vaccinated people, so that those of us who are vaccinated can get decent treatment if we get a serious injury or non-COVID illness.
Omicron looks like it has a good change to get us to that point.
I hate to break it to you but most people hospitalized with COVID are already vaccinated in many health systems. That's true in the UK for instance. US data is often garbage so it's harder to say there but it's unlikely to be different.
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.
US data is unfortunately unusable. Hospitals routinely classify anyone they don't have data on as unvaccinated and they don't have data much of the time. Germany pulls the same trick, it was covered in a national newspaper and they didn't change it. Public health is utterly corrupt, you have to work very hard to find data that is slightly less corrupted than normal.
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.
Vaccines work very well. Vaccinated people have COVID hospitalization rates an order of magnitude lower than do unvaccinated people.
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.
Every bit of data in the US, from hospital reports to anecdotal stories told by nurses and doctors, tells the exact opposite. Hospitalized and ICU'd COVID patients are unvaccinated.
>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?
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.
In the nicest way possible, fuck those people. They’ve had plenty of time to get vaccinated. It’s not our responsibility to tip toe around irresponsibility.
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.
Immunocompromised people (as a group, many of whom can get vaccinated anyway) generously make up ~3% of the total population. What is the other 22% of the aforementioned 25% doing? There’s no need to point to exceptions when there is a much bigger unexplained group, it just gives them undue plausible deniability.
The remainder is split into two groups: those who are politically aligned in a way that they will thump their chests and proclaim their superiority over COVID like it's some sort of candidate they can defeat, and those who have an anxiety issue over doctors and needles or are afraid that perhaps the ones who are anti-vaxx might be right due to some personal educational deficiency.
They're basically saying the same words in response. I think those who wish to be vaccinated have already done so.
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.
> What about the ~25% of US adults that are not vaccinated? 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?
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.
The hysteria is a function of how much people hated Trump. Orange man bad => orange man responsible for covid => I must act like covid is the worst, most dangerous pandemic of all time as a signal about how much I hated when Cheetoh Mussolini was president.
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.
Yes, because of the absurd hyperbole and hysterics associated with Covid. It’s pandemonium precisely because of the hysterics, overreacting, and absurd rules and procedures.
We’re seriously treating this like it’s the measles.
If you are saying "just have positive people attend school and don't bother testing contacts", then you're not just advocating to give all the kids COVID at the same time, but also all their parents and their parents' contacts - in a very short space of time. So basically the entire population? Why then are you only looking at the number of children that have died of COVID?
TBH the thought has crossed my mind many times lately. At this point, I strongly believe we're all going to get Omicron (and the next variant) eventually, and it's just a matter of time. So, more and more I just want to get it over with.
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.
Not only does the antivaxxers prefer this approach, it's the approach they are already actively taking. In Florida, for example (but pick whatever southern-US state you prefer): people actively refuse the vaccine and violently refuse all other accommodations (no masks, no distancing, no reduced capacity at bars).
That is what Sweden has done. It now has a slightly lower cumulative death rate than locked-down Austria. It has a far lower cumulative death rate than the U.S.:
You should compare apples to apples. Not all societies are alike, and there are huge variances in population density, temperatures, style of living, etc. between different countries ( e.g. places where people share food and ear with their hands vs places where most people live alone in houses vs places where whole extended families share the same house, etc. etc.). Sweden fared drastically worse than its neighbours which are IMHO the most apt comparisons. It has 7 times the death rate of Norway.
The "neighbour" argument is DOA and has been from the start. There are no meaningful differences between Sweden and other countries except in its government response - Scandinavians aren't aliens and thus nobody was claiming they were incomparable back at the start. Instead it was headlines like "Sweden is a cautionary tale to the world". The idea that you aren't allowed to compare them only appeared once Sweden proved that COVID mitigations were a terrible failure.
The real question is actually what's special about Norway and such. Sweden isn't an outlier here.
There are definitely meaningful differences between countries. As an example, Sweden has a much higher percentage of people who care about protecting the rest of the populous; that is, if they’re sick, they tend to stay home on average much more than someone working in the US. (Even pre-COVID). Italy has a higher percentage of older people. Countries have differences. Comparing Sweden to its neighbors is, in fact, the right approach imho.
Of course there are differences. Do you know that in France used to kiss on the cheek when meeting, including strangers? And many continued well into the pandemic because "it's just the Chinese and Italians, we're better than them". Population density, age distribution, patterns of living matter. Ignoring then all to fit your preconceived notion that all countries were equally at risk from Covid is just.. wrong.
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.
This is objectively wrong. It's not 'hyperbole and hysterics', it's the fact that people simply cannot work when sick. Every discussion around covid, about returning to work, about trying to return to normalcy ignores that even among people that are vaccinated covid can and does still hit you hard and can prevent you from working anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Especially if it spreads to other family members that you then also have to take care of.
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.
> at worst you're going to see the next 'Great Resignation' but this time among teachers
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.
>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.
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!
Those people can vaccinate and do any number of measures to protect themselves as they see fit.
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.
Considering there are immunosuppressed people who can’t get vaccinated, and that covid is unlikely to ever go away, are you saying that we should continue with covid restrictions forever?
Ok, that is understandable. When making arguments like this, I think it would be good for people to say what their criteria for completely ending restrictions are (if any).
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).
Sure. Look, the seasonal flu is dangerous for this population. But they manage, when the health care system is working well, you can get antiviral meds, etc.
Not moving the goal post. I agree that criminalization of leaving home for the unvaccinated gets more appealing by the day. But I also don't know that vaccines actually end it at this point.
> I agree that criminalization of leaving home for the unvaccinated gets more appealing by the day.
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.
Obviously it's too late for it to matter and that was a bit of hyperbole. But I also think it's fair to say that anyone who insists on doing nothing and acting like COVID is a complete scam, vaccines are a complete scam, masks are complete scam, etc., is basically behaving pretty much criminally.
I’m thrice vaccinated and think masks are the biggest scam out there. It’s a worthless political virtue signal that gives people a false sense of security.
Agree that folks can sometimes treat masks more as tchotchke talismans than considerate tools, but I also think it's real obvious that you can't win a watermelon spitting contest with a mask on. And a lot of people are splattery speakers.
Why - they aren't a threat to anyone. There's no real difference in transmissibility. Unless you think the vaccines don't work, in which case, why do you even care.
I've seen /r/HermanCainAward/ - of course they're a threat, they'll post "own the lib" memes on your Facebook page. And it's a bummer when you have to support their widow.
I don’t have enough karma to downvote you, so this is my expression of disagreement with your comment.
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.
The evidence that child activity affects the spread of covid among adults is thin.
> 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.
The evidence is always nice and comfortable as long as YOU aren't the one being affected by it. I contracted COVID from my kid, who got it from another kid in her class who went to school for 3 days after a positive test because that kid wasn't showing symptoms and their parents had nobody to watch them.
It's not a terribly anecdotal revelation. What's reported from public schools and what's actually going on on the ground are different universes. I'm close to many folks working in the district I reside in. The district desperately needs money which comes from maximizing attendance, hell or high water. Many students and families refuse to get tested even when showing symptom or do things like send a positive kid to school while the rest of the family is crazy sick because "the test must be wrong since they aren't showing symptoms." Teachers are constantly getting sick, the numbers the district reports are basically willfully negligent under-counts, and there's no doubt that parents and teachers are getting it from kids. Now maybe it's less likely in an equal contact situation to get it from kids (I've been reading that the latest strains are more likely to sicken kids, but obviously just news reports), but I don't think that's an antidote to crazy, it just means that it could be much worse if any of the new mutations we are helping to shepherd into being happen to get good footholds in children. (I also don't mean to suggest that some of what schools do isn't just security theater style stuff as applied to a pandemic.)
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.
I wonder how many parents/family members would still support the lockdowns if you told them that they were for their safety, not their children's. "We're shutting down the entire school system for your safety, even after you've had many chances to get vaccinated"
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.
With omicron 2 doses still don't give you much protection. (25% effective) One booster is good, but still ~55% effective. (UK stats) Then you get immunocompromised people and older population where breakthrough infections are still very dangerous.
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.
No vaccines protect against infection. Maybe you mean does it protect against asymptomatic infection? Or asymptomatic transmission? (I don't know how effective it is for either.)
I think the problem is that you imagine "infection" to mean "disease" or something similar. Infection means that the pathogen gets in your body and starts to grow. There is no vaccine that can prevent that. What a vaccine can do is to cause your body to respond to an infection more quickly and more effectively. If you're lucky, the response comes so quickly that you never knew you were infected.
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?
No, I meant symptomatic spread. I don't care much about getting sick. I worry about winding up in the hospital. As far as I know, the 3rd dose of Moderna and Pfizer are both effective at keeping me out of the hospital. I don't know the exact rates, but I've met plenty of people who had mild illness recently.
"Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic diseases". I got the data from the UK's "Technical briefing: Update on
hospitalisation and vaccine effectiveness
for Omicron VOC-21NOV-01 (B.1.1.529)
31 December 2021" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-...
If it's true that kids being together in a room is such a biohazard then all schools, music venues, churches, mosques, and gyms should be shut down immediately and never opened again. The buildings would be either demolished or converted into single-bedroom housing. After all, there will be more infectious diseases in the future.
Omicron is the second most contagious virus in the world. It has the ability to poof out of the labor pool 10% ~ 20% of teachers, aux staff, nurses and doctors for somewhere between a week and a year (long covid), in any given week.
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.
We have vaccines and boosters now. Historical statistics are unimportant and meaningless for making policy decisions today.
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.
> The CDC estimates that 573 kids between the ages of 5-18 have died of Covid
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.
I decided to look into this, because I hear this bandied about frequently (i.e. "these death numbers aren't real because they count even if they incidentally had COVID-19"). Turns out, this isn't correct.
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.
But it has happened, and several times I recall early in the pandemic when some of the reporting rules were perhaps not as clear. Whether it’s frequent now…not sure, there was certainly enough media scrutiny generated then to force a greater degree of care for accuracy now.
Of course it has happened and probably will continue to happen. The key is that this isn't a systemic error, but rather providers going against the government's reporting rules (either mistakenly or intentionally). One could imagine mistakes erring in the opposite direction, though nobody is looking for that (nor would it be an easy thing to discover).
(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.)
That is the reason why I posted that but if you read this specific one really closely it actually turns out this exact data point really is about people being in hospital for a condition associated with COVID.
Of course the conditions are pretty vague but it’s not people who were in a car crash.
Another long term (and equally hidden) consequence is the loss of critical educational development in children. We adults can toss off 2 years because it's just a drop in the bucket to us, but 2 years for a child represents a potentially staggering setback in their mental development.
I agree with you, but I think it overstated the value of schooling as the only source of this development. There are so many free online education sources it is truly amazing, and yet for some reason our society’s answer to the pandemic was to have Zoom school at home which no one is happy with, rather than embrace different delivery methods that are actually engaging. Khan Academy, Duolingo, etc etc. I don’t think my kids are behind at all as a result of utilizing these technologies.
Yes, thankfully 100% of kids have access to their own computer, sufficient internet access, an environment free of stress or distractions, and the focus and internal motivation to be an successful auto-didact in the absence of adult supervision… /s
Almost all of your concerns are the same in the scenario of Zoom home school.
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.
You (and by virtue, your children) are an outlier.
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.
I did a few years of entirely self-directed home school (single parent who worked) for late middle school/early high school. My learning outcomes were fine, but I still feel like I'm dealing with the effects of not being immersed in a normal social scene during my teens: a decade and a half later.
Many people who went through the traditional school experience would assure you that they too are still dealing with the negative effects! Being in school is not a panacea of positive experiences for a lot of people.
If we want to have this discussion, we should have it holistically.
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.
Good thing omicron appears to not be effecting the lungs as much. Death is only one outcome but improvements in death rates require an underlying mechanism which can impact those other consequences too. To your point, you shouldn't look at one piece of data in isolation but you also don't have to assume the worst case either; it is possible that things are getting better.
TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitalizations, it can? Or was it expected that the vaccine would reduce transmission to the point where it wouldn't spread so much?
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]
Other ideas as I struggle to understand the current state of affairs: maybe the vaccine is really effective at preventing transmission, but only for some period, say 1 month to 6 months after vaccination? Maybe people in Canada received their vaccines between January and June of 2021, so maybe with boosters every 6 months, transmission would be under control?
I think the issue is that public policy is based around two flawed notions that omicron has brought to light:
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.
> 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.
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'm not a virologist, but I interpret "omicron has a likelihood of 88% to escape current vaccines" as being rather ineffective. I've not found similar stats for Delta or other, but the authors of this paper seem to indicate that current vaccines aren't great against omicron.
Thanks for the source, I've been so curious about this information but it's hard to find.
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.
The real problem is the word “vaccine”. The mRNA vaccines do not really work in a way that other vaccines do, and more importantly how we understand other vaccines to work.
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.
TL;DR: I agree that the public thought vaccine = no more virus. But I'm not sure if traditional vaccines actually mean that you're incapable of spreading it, or even getting sick in some cases.
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]
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.
I think if the covid vaccines managed to have a MMR level (90%+) preventive effect against symptomatic infection rather than 20% (I can’t find where I read that stat, it might be wrong, but I don’t think by much) against symptomatic infection, you would find less skepticism in the existing covid vaccines.
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.
What do you mean by "skepticism in the existing covid vaccines"? Are you saying that people are disapointed that the vaccines aren't better at preventing disease and spread? I'm pretty sure that everyone falls into that category. But is there anything better available? Is there any better strategy than trying to continue to improve the vaccines and do more research hoping to someday get a handle on this?
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.
I mean that when you advertise that something is going to do a thing (end the disease; prevent them from catching it), encouraging people to get the vaccine because of those benefits. 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.
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.
> I mean that when you advertise that something is going to do a thing (end the disease; prevent them from catching it), encouraging people to get the vaccine because of those benefits.
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.
> Personally I had hoped that the entire pandemic would have gone away once vaccines became available, but that hope was clearly misplaced
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.
> If you didn’t get that idea from the authorities touting the vaccine…where did you get it?
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.
> 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.
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.
“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.
The issue isn’t with mRNA vaccines. There are conventional vaccines for COVID used in other countries like China and they’re even less effective. It seems to have more to do with respiratory viruses or coronaviruses specifically.
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.
> 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.
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.
The flu is understood to be different, seasonal, yearly variants. It’s also why at least in the US it’s characterized as the “flu shot” as opposed to the flu “vaccine”.
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”.
I get what you're saying, and it makes sense, but people also often say "shots" when referring to childhood vaccines (ex: "did they get their shots yet?") They also say things like "rabies shots" and "diptet shot."
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.
I would add a 3rd flawed notion: that COVID is COVID, all variants are to be avoided at all costs.
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.
> 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?
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".
Thanks, I actually hadn't heard of a logistic growth curve before (it looks like something I somewhat remember from high school chemistry). Can you recommend anything to read about this that apply it to the pandemic? I guess I'm beyond my math skills here. Reading normal news articles, they warn of increasing cases, but I'd like to see some raw numbers. The report they refer to is too complicated for me to understand :(
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.
Sorry – while I do remember the existence of logistic growth from school, my knowledge doesn't go much beyond that, either, so I can't be of any help there.
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.
As others already pointed out, covid is not just a danger to the kid, it's a danger to anybody in contact with the kid, like the parents the kid lives with, the teachers and aux staff the kid interacts with, the people the kid passes on the way to school.
>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.
At the beginning of all these craziness the reason for shutdowns is to flatten the curve. We did not have vaccines and hospitals were under stress. I think we did a right thing.
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.
I agree, covid is here to stay, and it's rather unlikely that anybody of us can avoid contracting it at some point. Right now, we're buying time with measures, time we need to understand more about covid and it's secondary effects and how to treat or avoid these.
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.
Where are you that ICUs are not filling up right now? Here in Ontario we’ve more than doubled ICU occupancy since December 18 and the rate is currently accelerating
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 chart explicitly says "due to COVID-19". That is the number which has doubled in a matter of weeks, and today we reported another 27 due to COVID.
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.
It does say that, but I'm still skeptical. Shouldn't the total number of beds in use also be skyrocketing along with the Covid number?
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.
> Shouldn't the total number of beds in use also be skyrocketing along with the Covid number?
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.
The single biggest issue I'm seeing in the original post is 40% of teachers being out. All the talk of being corralled into study hall is the fallout from this 40% figure.
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 single biggest issue I'm seeing in the original post is 40% of teachers being out. All the talk of being corralled into study hall is the fallout from this 40% figure.
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.
That's a tough nut to solve, because by time you find out if quarantine was necessary or not, it's too late. So do we err towards spreading less, or err towards teaching more. It seems difficult to have both.
(Well, we could - replace whiteboards with screens, have the students onsite but the teachers remote. Not sure this is entirely practical?)
It's endemic dude. It doesn't matter if teachers quarantine or not. Social distancing, lockdowns and quarantines have achieved nothing at any point in any of this and Omicron isn't severe enough to justify it anyway. Consider: Sweden is beating the European average for COVID deaths big time and they were always the least into intense countermeasures:
Sweden really does just turn into a "choose your own data" adventure. They have double their neighbours' excess deaths - you really can use them to demonstrate any point you like by picking which data tells the story you want to tell.
No, you cannot, even though people constantly try.
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.
>Edit: Please with the “but kids bring Covid home” hysteria. We have vaccines now.
>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.
It's unfortunately that the "with" vs "of" question has been politicized and corrupted.
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.
There are a few important facts missing from your analysis.
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.
Gonna take a leap and say I'm getting down-voted due to lack of references? So here are some references:
(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...
(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
If they cut teacher pay whenever they are "sick" or told children they would have to make up missed days during summer or after the normal graduation date, I'm sure the Covid cases would mysteriously drop, and fast.
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.
The best thing about people talking about Covid is how civil and understanding everyone is about everyone else’s perspective. It restores my faith in our society (USA) when I see or overhear a conversation about Covid and our nation’s response to it. I think all people have very high emotional intelligence and have willingness to understand, and not fight. I’m glad that 99% of conversations don’t devolve into tribal affiliation signaling and wishes for bad outcomes for anyone not in their tribe.
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.
It's sad. COVID discussion has ruined multiple online forums I (used to) participate in. Well-moderated forums that I used to love and respect, all turn into the YouTube Comment Section whenever the topic comes up. Something about the COVID, even moreso than politics, draws the trolls like a lightning rod and is astonishingly resistant to effective site moderation. I think mods (not just here) have gotten really good at nuking obvious flamewars, spam, and left-vs-right political threads, but for whatever reason hesitate when it comes to misinformation. HN has a guideline about "political or ideological battles" but what do you do when the entire topic has become ideological?
This sounds like some kind of incarceration or at best day care program, rather than actual learning. Unclear if that is the baseline for schools vs something specific to a Covid surge. I don’t have children but if I were to do so I don’t think I would put them in a schoool like this for 12+ years.
I wanted to tell people to take zinc as well (it has a small positive effect only if taken ahead of time) but unfortunately many brands aren't actually bioavailable and just give you the worst nausea you've ever had.
As I type this, I'm infected with Covid. I have a wife and three kids, all tested positive.
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.
> Omicron is likely a much more effective inoculation against covid than the vaccines
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.
I agree about the vaccines. I misstated. I should have said "vaccines don't stop (or apparently slow) the spread of the omicron strain".
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.
Your conclusion may be broadly correct (of course some of these things help a non-zero amount, but maybe are futile long-term). However, if you want to convince people that a different solution to the shared problem is better, it doesn't sound honest to call them "hysterical", as the favorite insult goes right now.
> 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.
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.
Around half a million cases of child abuse are reported in USA [0]. It hard/impossible to find data post 2019 (if you have it, please share), but there are estimates that the number of reported cases lowered by between 20 to 40%, mainly due to kids not going to school and teachers not being able to report it [1][2]. Less than a 1000 kids ages of 5-18 have died of Covid [3].
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.
I think the main question is how much are we willing to sacrifice of our lifestyle? People die every day of various reasons alcohol, drugs, strokes, car accidents etc. COVID is imminent danger to the people with underlying conditions and they should practice maximum precautions(distance, masks etc. plus Vitamin D intake). Other people should carry on living. COVID is coming to endemic soon.
I said >COVID is imminent danger to the people with underlying conditions and they should practice maximum precautions(distance, masks etc. plus Vitamin D intake).
So what is alternative? Let kids down the drain with their education and childhood.
The bottom of the slippery slope is what's going on in China right now. Worldwide, the non-ivermectin early treatment block of governments seems to want to slowly push everyone there.
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.
> One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. There was now a lack of available seats given there was a COVID-positive student within the middle of the auditorium.
No, it's not normal and it's not natural. I remember being treated like this by the same people I heard spread fear and misinformation about COVID throughout the year before I got COVID. It's incredibly dehumanizing, isolating, and fractures any sense of community. My relationship with those people will never be the same.
It seems to me that one essential function of high school is being served here: to teach that in the realm of human behavior, “horrible” and “normal” are not mutually exclusive.
Within 200 years, the madness we are living through will find its place in the history book next to the Salem witch trials and the War of the Worlds, that is, assuming we live through it.
I'm so glad to see someone else saying this. It absolutely will be remembered as a Mass Hysteria. It also has overtones of the worst that state religion has to offer. Ironically, W. Bernstein published a book in 2021 called "The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups" that completely ignored our response to Covid (except to toe the party line). Even more ironically, Bernstein had harsh words for Mackay, author of the 1841 classic "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", in which Mackay ignored the ongoing British Railway Bubble.
I speculate that students who spend time learning from internet resources like Khan Academy will get a significant leg up over their colleagues in this case; even more so than usual.
This applies both in the sense that "They will learn more effectively", and "They'll have a better shot at getting into universities".
This has always been true in a way. A lot of schools have nothing to offer the top 10% of students, so the students/parents of the students who broke away from the pack were finding ways to learn on their own/have their kids learn on their own.
Top 10% of what? I was technically in the top 10% of my high school class, GPA wise. I also got a national merit scholarship, and had learned computer programming.
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.
I was in the top 1% both in highschool and college and for me going in person, in terms of learning, was (and still is) a waste of time. I would learn MUCH faster outside of classes. I much prefer a recording of a class which i can watch, rewatch, play at 2x, take notes without stress and note down all my questions, than a regular in person class.
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.
But to succeed in the educational system, you have to self study in a way that the system appreciates. That usually requires at least some external guidance. A student who studies the wrong subjects in chemistry gets no credit for that on the exam.
And I doubt that the private and charter schools are chaotic like this. So, the students who attend those get yet another leg up over those who attend our failed public school system.
For people in highly competitive situations (like highschool) this is a selection event for those that can adapt to remote-first while being highly productive. In 5 years the people that did the best remote-first studying for the ACT/SAT/AP will be graduating from the top colleges and begin claiming the top jobs. The people getting promotions in knowledge work now are the people that have been performing well over the last two years of remote-first. The longer this stays the greater long-term impact it will have, as those that are doing well in this environment move to situations where they lead and create policy.
What this little pretentious kid doesn’t get is that public school has always been like this and the majority of kids wing it through K-12 (many even wing it through a bullshit degree in college). There has never been serious learning going on, and kids love any and all disruptions to class.
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.
Agree with a lot of this but there's something to be said about 1. daily routine and morale, having a normal routine is a good thing for everyone, even kids who don't "succeed" in academic measures at all, and 2. losing years of time of socializing in-person where you make lifelong friends or have experiences that form your place in the world.
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!
Where do you get these ideas from? Simply not having to commit to class work is fun. You can literally play a video game if you are remote too. It’s a dream come true for these kids.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 370 ms ] thread1. 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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Article is an overview of the most interesting findings; in particular I'm referencing the second image, which is copied directly from a study that's linked right above it.
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.
There is no legitimate reason to force people to undergo any medical procedure.
Don’t post that anymore.
If you're still afraid of the virus, you should know that vaccinating people (even forcefully) won't stop transmission. The virus is endemic. The only thing that can change between now and "back to normal" future is, your mind.
mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone. there can still be an exemption if a physician approves that a person can not be vaccinated for some strange reason.
that's the only way to go back to normal, the rest is silly greenpass rules or noisy discussions about "shall we pay un-vaccinated people less?", etc ...
Fact is that mandatory vaccination doesn't seem to do much to change the risk to society at large. Coronavirus is tearing through fully-vaccinated Australia at a rate which suggests vaccines do literally nothing to stop the spread. Since the vaccines don't protect bystanders, all the surveillance and mandating of medical treatments should be scrapped immediately.
We are in territory where if someone isn't vaccinated, they are bearing all the risk personally and that is acceptable.
So no, the unvaccinated aren't solely at risk personally, they could also prevent vaccinated people from getting treated at the standard of care that they would normally expect. I'm not okay with that, so mandatory vaccination with fines for non-compliance seems like the lesser evil to me.
You'll probably catch covid, whether vaccinated or not. Your elderly relatives will probably catch covid, whether you and they are vaccinated or not.
They'll probably catch it even if everyone on the planet become vaccinated tomorrow.
Vaccination is simply one tool to moderate the effect. It's wonderful that we have them, but having 20% of the population stay unvaccinated is not going to drastically affect the spread of the disease.
Would you not still need a vax-proof when vaccination is mandatory? How does it differ then to the greenpass? It would then be mandatory to be able to produce that proof. Failing to do so may result in fines or land you in jail.
How does that help with the greenpass situation you described?
> And what is more annoying is that the "greenpass" is actually (at least where I live in Europe) a way that allows cops to stop, frisk and harass anyone. It enables the busybodies to play "I aM an auThOrItY and will use my imaginary authority to exercise power over you ..."
> The "greenpass" assumes I am always carrying my phone. It gives me anxiety about my battery going flat.
Making it mandatory seems to only make this worse.
It is unbelievably naive to think that after investing in any surveillance/control infrastructure that governments will relinquish that power willingly.
yes. peoples freedom stop where other peoples health begins. co-morbidity can not be solved but getting people vaccinated can. even it means it's "against their will", even they shout "fOrCeD mediCaL prOceDuRe". I don't care if it hurts their fragile egos and means they have to tone down the individualism. Either have a doctors exemption, pay a fine, or go to jail (condition upon entry into prison is mandatory vaccination). Boom. Problem solved.
> just say, hey I want everyone to do this so I feel safer.
it's not about me but the people around me. some of them I've already lost. I'm healthy enough not to care. I eat well and have done sports all my life. I survived several tropical diseases. I also lived my life to the fullest. So idgaf. The only thing I care about is people around me getting hurt that I love (my family, my kids, my friends). And don't worry they're some deluded anti-vaxxers among them. They can only be helped by force at this stage.
Honestly you just sound like a troll, and you were called out on your previous comments. You are talking about some caricature "AntIVaXeR" that you don't even know in real life. After reading your other comments I don't even believe your story, but idk, maybe you do are that dissociated from reality that you believe it.
I'm sick and tired of people generalizing their own conditions to the entire population. You are not like everyone else. Stop telling other people they don't need to worry.
If _you_ have comorbidities _you_ need to protect yourself.
One of the ways I would personally prefer it done is not needing to send kids to super spreader spaces for no reason, since there is no learning happening as documented by the student in the reddit post, causing them to bring the virus home to their parents / grandparents suffering from co-morbidity or immune system issues.
I think that yours (and most people's) idea of the typical "anti-vaxxer" is a convenient caricature packaged and served to you by mass media and memes, that you've never actually listened to a real live one of these "anti-vaxxers", what they think and feel.
Not to mention every news channel covid-related videos on youtube is swarmed with comments from a minority of anti-vaxxer, regardless of the country of origin, regardless of the political stance of the channel.
I'd say the evidence is against you.
don't think you know me but:
I lost my mother due to covid. she was an anti-vaxxer right until the last minute when she died just before Christmas. She was a vulnerable nutcase for years and easily gamed into any kind of MLM scheme.
I was forced to cut off one of my 2 best friends (of 40 years) because they could no longer be reasoned with. we ignored his alternative life-style and individualism because why wouldn't we. but it also put him into a risk-group of suckers that get brainwashed. the same guy now cut off relations to his mother who is battling cancer on the grounds that "she chose to be vaccinated".
These people are crazy, and it's their right to be crazy, but the cost of being crazy can not be exploited by media and politicians. That's why I am 100% for reducing their freedom and have them undergo a "forced medical procedure" (as they call it).
He's also the dude who will go outside and take random pictures of the sky so that people are aware of the contrails being used to control people's minds.
omnicron's effect on healthcare would be a lot worse without majority of people being vaccinated. everyone is anti-vaxx but it's always shocking how many of them clowns are not anti-respirator or anti-ICU.
I'll leave it to you to do the math on what this would mean for the healthcare system if we take current daily infections and remove that effect.
[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270
For younger people, they don't completely stop transmission, but it's very likely that they slow it down (preventing some infections, lessening the severity of others, etc).
> You are spreading health misinformation. Please stop it.
Chile sees Covid surge despite vaccination success https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56731801
World's Most Vaccinated Nation Is Spooked by Covid Spike https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/business/economy/covid-se...
Vermont sees the biggest surge in COVID cases despite having the country's highest vaccination rate https://fortune.com/2021/08/12/vermont-covid-cases-vaccinati...
Iceland has been a vaccination success. Why is it seeing a coronavirus surge? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-su...
99.7% of Waterford adults fully vaccinated against Covid-19 https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40704104.html
Waterford Now Has Highest Incidence of Covid in Ireland https://waterford-news.ie/2021/10/11/waterford-now-has-highe...
Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
76% of September Covid-19 deaths are vax breakthroughs https://vermontdailychronicle.com/2021/09/30/76-of-september...
Covid cases hit records in South Korea and Singapore despite widespread vaccinations. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/world/covid-cases-hit-rec...
Virus surge hits New England despite high vaccination rates https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pande...
Most vaccinated place on Earth told to cancel holiday plans amid 'exponential' rise in Covid cases https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/most-vaccin...
Portugal returns to COVID restrictions despite high jab rate https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-he...
COVID Cases Are Surging in the Five Most Vacc...
Also, where in Europe are cops stopping you for vaccination on the street?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/austria-covid-lockdown-polic...
It also has a higher cumulative death rate than Sweden, so all of this is virus-theater and authoritarianism.
have seen it in Germany Austria and France. The worst is when you're also guilty of being a brown person, when you look poor, or belong to a specific group like the Roma.
The real issue is once you decide to force people to do this, what else would you do? The slippery slope is a common argument that you'll need to defend against.
doctors exemption offers a way out. otherwise a hefty fine (unable to pay means prison time like it is done in Austria)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re seriously treating this like it’s the measles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
> 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...
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.
* 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?
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1007-covid-19-orpha...
Human beings aren't numbers on a table or statistics in a study.
“Wow, you’re a sociopath.”
Okay
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.
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.
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...
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1211792/v1
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...
- 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.
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.
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.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451#
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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...
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?)
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.
You need some adult to supervise the classroom
>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.
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.
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
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=379oevm2fho
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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!