The quick takeaway is that school is that for the most vulnerable kids, school is about a lot more than education. Taking school away from those kids can be much more damaging than many people realize.
It seems to me like that right strategy would be to just say something like:
We encourage all kids to stay home, but if you can't, that's ok. You can come to school and have a warm, quiet place to spend the day, and we'll provide free lunch to everyone who comes.
Forget about the education piece for a while, just provide the (very important for some people) day care part.
It will be year 3 of covid and this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. There is no perfect way to open schools, that much is certain after looking at other countries. But looking at the state of things, it doesn’t even seem like people are trying.
Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capacity. Mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced strictly. Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Uruguay opened up schools early for its most vulnerable kids. The point being, there are different ways to solve the problem, but only in America, can we be stuck with the worst way to do it.
I don't fault any schools for struggling from March 2020 to June 2020, being thrown into the pandemic and remote learning with no warning. But I was absolutely astonished to see that most administrators took the summer of 2020 off, assuming that everybody would be back in school that fall and things would be normal. They wasted several months of time that could've been spent planning contingencies and how remote learning might work better than just pure zoom.
I always thought that schools should have considered something I saw done at a SANS training course once. While there were ~20 people in attendance, there were also several people attending virtually. Those virtual attendees had a surrogate in the room, whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor - as if they were there in person. This allowed the instructor to teach the course as he normally would, using a full projection screen, white board, and other materials.
This surrogate method would have allowed teachers to be in their classrooms drawing on blackboards, using charts, posters, and other instructional aids they've spent years building, instead of having to pivot completely to PowerPoint. It's a shame to see absolutely no creativity or thinking outside the box among school administrators.
Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.
Just. Stop. You’re hurting kids by spreading the myth that school funding is the problem, because it allows the real problems to continue festering. US public schools are among some of the best funded in the world: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15434/the-countries-spend...
I'm inclined to believe this. I was in a discussion about this yesterday with friends and a clear statistic would have helped. But the chart you've got there --- I know it's not the fulcrum of your whole argument, I'm not sniping --- doesn't really make the case you make in your comment. It says that we spend 0.1% more than the OECD average on primary/secondary schools, but are boosted in the overall rankings by spending way more than any other country on tertiary schools (unsurprising).
I usually take the G7 as the benchmark—what oil emirates like Norway or banking havens like Switzerland spend aren’t a relevant comparison to a big diversified economy like the US. We spend a bigger percentage of our economy on K-12 than all but one other G7 country. And since our GDP per capita is so high, that share of GDP represents 20%+ more purchasing power than other G7 countries. That should be more than enough. We need to stop acting like money is the problem in education.
Isn't money spent on education mostly teachers' salaries? So high GDP per capita just makes education more expensive, not less expensive. If education spending was mostly electronics, then higher GDP per capita would have been good for education.
Maybe you should stop. Let the system fail enough such that the pain that you're preventing will start to affect the people who can actually fix things. If you can't fix it, let the wheel squeak. You're not the parent or savior of those children, so don't allow your high levels of empathy and life choices to be exploited by bureacrats. They know exactly which buttons to push and how to manipulate the type of people teachers are.
Stop playing the game where you spend money to cover up incompetence or corruption. Don't be a reliable patsy. Some problems only get better if you force the ones responsible to fix it.
Use a classroom to audit their own supplies and needs, and see where money intended for education actually goes. The information should ask be public.
American teachers spend a lot of time, as my Asian mom would always complain, on “arts and crafts.” The volume of construction paper and pipe cleaners and other junk my kids bring home is truly astonishing.
These expenses are symptomatic of curricular problems—and the solution isn’t to allocate more money for craft supplies. It doesn’t cost that much to have kids drill their times tables.
Many teachers spend their money essentially replacing the role of 1) parents and 2) administrators.
I know a lot of teachers spending money on hygiene products:tampons, deodorant ect, because it is distracting if students are bleeding at their desks and smell like garbage.
2) they also spend money on basic supplies, pens pencils, as well as heaters and coolers for the room because the administration blew the funds on some bs like a marble facade for the school
Although I sympathize with the student's issues, it is not taxpayer's fault that these issues occur.
For (1) the government already gives housing assistance, food stamps and a bunch of other welfare programs, so the parents can easily afford basic hygiene products and they should be paying for it, not the school.
For (2) it is the administration's malice or incompetence that is burning away the money. We shouldn't increase the budget even more, we should hold the administration and the parents accountable.
I don't disagree, but this is the situation teachers are in. The parents should be buying the hygiene products, but aren't so teachers are trying to fill the gaps. It is a inefficient solution to a problem that should be addressed by someone else, but they are the ones that have to deal with it in order to do their regular job.
The comment you are replying to didn't even touch on "what are the appropriate ages to learn multiplication".
That level of discussion is really astonishingly low. You respond to something the parent comment didn't even touch on, and half of your comment is offenses to the parent commenter.
Sure schools are well funded in comparison to others. Doesn't mean most teachers aren't routinely spending their own money on supplies. The “Just. Stop.” attitude from anyone who hasn't spent time in the US public school system, and just looks at the numbers doesn't address this. The US is rapidly losing experienced teachers, something which has only accelerated in the last two years.
'Since March 2020, the federal government has provided $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools …'[0]
'There are 130,930 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S.'[1]
$190 billion divided by 130,930 is $1.45 million dollars per school. Now, I will readily grant that a million dollars just ain't what it used to be, but it is, even in 2021, still a heck of a lot of money, and it sure sounds from the raw numbers that public school teachers shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies.
There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.
Still find the difference in that so weird. rapid tests are a 2-3 € supermarket item here, if you'd be buying in bulk for a school system they'd be cheaper. And at least some schools/day cares have been doing pool testing.
Yes, I believe the main difference comes down to the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) being slow and hidebound about approving rapid tests, with the result that the few manufacturers who got through the whole arduous approval process have been able to reap near-monopoly profits.
You don’t need to rapid test every student every day for a year! $4,000 per kid is a ton of money for PPE, remote learning supplies, test kits, ventilation, etc. The money has mostly been set on fire.
Yep and now it’s gone. Schools are notoriously wasteful when it comes to large sums of money. Almost none of the allocations go to high ROI Items like hiring teachers or buying basic school supplies. Schools love buying tech though because it’s always a black hole for capital spending
At least in LA, its not the schools. Its, as an earlier poster said, administration. The mental association of "school" is usually a group of teachers and maybe a principal.
In multiple cities, political leadership at the mayoral level has been shown to be getting kickbacks and other favorable terms from our dear beloved employers to adopt that technology. In LAUSD it was Villaragosa and Apple.
When we say the money is "wasted", it's because there is corruption at levels higher than any individual school. Usually.
Yeah I think that’s true the corruption is either dictated down as in you must buy apple products or you get nothing. Happens at a district level where for example they they hire a consulting firm and pay millions of dollars
Rapid test will test negative when someone is already contagious.
It won’t be an effective means of stopping spread. Instead give out surgical masks or n95 to all kids. Cloth masks allow 90%+ of the virus to enter/leave. Add hepa filters. Add space heaters and leave the windows open. Maybe teach outside in parklet if possible.
I am probably being a smartass but if the purpose is to check whether there is at least one positive student (no matter who) you can do so with one single collective test a day.
>shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies
Not covid supplies, school supplies pre-covid (which they also shouldn't have needed to, but did need to nevertheless).
And hiring enough surrogates would eat up a huge chunk of that $1.45 million, given that you'd need, what, ~10 per school for nearly 2 years now? Actually, that's more doable than I expected.
I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.
I am a high school English teacher. I currently teach six sections of 30-35 students. I already spend my nights and weekends lesson planning/assessing writing, and you want to double my student load? Fuck off. I’d quit tomorrow.
The grading (and lesson planning/assignment & test writing, though those scale anyway) would be split between the teacher giving the lesson and the one acting as a surrogate, so they'd basically still have the same load each.
Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons
Edit2: Actually, for feedback-latency reasons it's probably better to split grading the other way. I wonder whether it's better to split each assignment randomly, or grade as two separate classes with shared lectures.
For tests and exams it’s common for teaching assistants to mark the same few questions on every test, usually on the same page. It helps catch cheating and plagiarism and keeps grading consistent.
When I was a TA we’d split the stack of paper tests evenly and rotate them every few days to grade them in parallel. It’s even easier to do the splitting if tests are submitted online.
Oh, yeah! My profs'd also post the list of which TA did each (sub-)question, so that if we had questions about why we lost marks we knew who direct them to (although all grading disputes had to go to the prof, to disincentivise people from arguing with the TAs)
And with two teachers, you'd also be able to have each write half the questions, and split the grading that way.
I'll be honest, I do not expect creativity or outside the box thinking from administrators. Maybe this is the audience here but they are not creatives, they are bureaucrats -- think bogons from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you are on the right track.
I think we can demand more of our bureaucrats, if all we expect are Bogons - all we'll get are Bogons. Increasingly, the only thing US administrators can do is spend more money on problems without delivering any improved results. This pattern is common across Academia, Private, and Public institutions.
>whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor
Seems like a human solution to a (mostly) technical problem. Basically you just need a way for students to mark a message as hand-raising (and maybe a way to point out another student's message), a chat filter for the teacher to read those messages, and a USB LED (or some such) to act as a raised hand until the messages are marked as read. Of course there are some edge cases, like temporarily ignoring a child who's repeatedly raising their hand to troll, but this still seems like it could've easily been usable by the start of fall 2020.
You'd likely still need a surrogate for young children and special ed students, but you could probably eliminate ~2/3rds of them (? I'm not sure how old children need to be before they can be expected to remember they need to mark their messages & how to do so)
The idea is that the teacher doesn't have to keep their eyes on a laptop screen and can mostly move about the classroom in the normal way that they would teach a lesson.
With the LED they'd only need to go look at the screen when there's a question. Actually, if you put the laptop in the middle of the front row, set the font size large, and used a clicker to go through them, the teacher could probably read the questions from anywhere at the front of the class. It'd still be an issue if you wanted to move about the back of the class while giving a lesson; but that's a hassle anyway, since the students' desks face the front, so IME it's rarely done.
I'd like to offer an alternative to the surrogate method... Many of the folks on our team have kids and, like so many people worldwide, were greatly disappointed by what happened in early 2020. We watched our kids suffer as this normally human-rich interaction was replaced with powerpoints and tiny talking heads. We decided to offer a solution of our own.
Our team developed https://sharetheboard.com - an app which digitizes handwritten content in real time. The practical application here is that any analog surface/content can be shared simultaneously online, in real time.
For teachers this is valuable for a number of reasons (direct feedback from educators):
- it allows them to teach "as they always have" - standing in front of a board or writing on a notebook, etc.
- they don't have to learn anything new
- they don't have to buy new equipment
- they can simultaneously address in-person and remote students (again, without "doing anything new")
- they can work (in the same way) from home, when needed
You'll note that many of the above points are of interest to school administrators as well.
- No hardware + no learning curve = high adoption.
- Mobile/scalable = fast deployment.
- Low cost = well, low cost.
For students (direct feedback from students):
- the biggest plus is that this is as close to "like in class" as it gets: they get to see their teacher's natural body language, maintain eye contact, see the explanations evolve on a familiar medium (whiteboard, chalkboard, etc.)
- they can do more than ask questions: the app facilitates direct interaction with digitized content
- they can focus on the lesson: the app allows you to easily save board contents any time
What was meant to be a quick response to a problem is beginning to turn into an actual product. For better or for worse, some form of remote interaction seems to be in the cards (not only in education) for quite some time. Our goal is to help make it a more real/physical experience, despite being shared remotely. Interested in feedback from teachers, parents, and students on this thread.
Everyone in June 2020 was too busy assuming the best case scenario to plan for disruption. I never really understood the human capacity for self-delusion until 2020. I knew we’d have two years of lockdowns in February 2020, unless we lucked into a drug that treated it (despite not having a drug for SARS-CoV-1). Even the logistics for distributing a vaccine is hard, and takes months to set up. I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily.
Even with Bayes' theorem, if your prior is zero, you can ignore any evidence - no matter how strong - that doesn't absolutely require the hypothesis to be true.
That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/
Bayesians are atheists, they just happen to believe in Roko's Basilisk, which obviously is nothing like a reinvention of the devil. Remember not to think of it since we can't prove it won't torture an infinite number of clones of you forever!
The other thing is the FDA intentionally delayed approving vaccines for 5-11 year olds till well after the school year start. At the same time the CDC was pushing hopium that vaccines alone would solve the problem. Trying to dangle normalcy in front of people to entice the nimrods to get vaxed. Same time conservative political leaders are using the issue as a political football.
Vaccines do get pretty close to solving it, ie it doesn't appear there are any other humanly possible solutions more effective than vaccines.
(It is impossible to avoid being exposed to omicron or to get rid of it. Social distancing, lockdowns, etc, won't help this one. Vaccinating yourself/N95s/Pavloxid will help exposure not /matter/ though.)
What throws me about all this is that their entire job, the reason they draw a paycheck in the first place, their raisin d'oatmeal, is to keep things running smoothly when the unexpected happens.
Now going into year three and they've managed to do fuck all to create solutions. Which is, y'know, their JOB. Generally they've just made problems worse by sticking their noses into things. What the hell are these people even getting paid for? They're a net negative value to education and society.
Other countries were able to come up with protocols and standards. Yet here we are flailing around like magikarps.
I had a spouse in public school administration (until she burned out during the pandemic) and a parent who is still a public school teacher, so I have a little extra empathy - these people are just people. Some of them have just started a new role and didn't get to learn the basics before plunging into a pandemic. Some of them were a couple years from retirement and had been hoping to coast without any big changes. Some of them are great. Some of them are miserable.
It's like any other collection of people, except maybe what's hard to remember if you're in tech is that in public bureaucracies there's no high pay, inherently "interesting problems," or prestige factor attracting the bright and ambitious; just job security and pensions attracting the risk averse and allowing anyone toxic who makes it in to remain.
The district my wife left had double digits percentage turnover in their senior administrative roles during the pandemic - that would be enough to keep most organizations from operating to their full potential.
Additionally, they really don't get to make their own decisions - not only is there a chain of command but there's a surprising number of things that have to wait for school board approval and quite a few sets of regulations to navigate. I've been in regulated tech like medical device, and my perception is that what the school admins deal with is a whole other level.
While agreeing with everyone that "raisin d'oatmeal" is genius, and while also agreeing that it's clear that the US has basically failed at running public schools, please don't claim the administrators are somehow the sole agents of this. Like many things in this country it's born of a complicated web of political power being wielded in both good and bad faith by people with varying opinions of what would be best across many decades and scales.
I think folks that work in the corporate world, particularly those in tech, engineering, manufacturing, etc, can easily underestimate how different and challenging it is to run a school in the current era of American public education. You have vocal and powerful groups and sub-groups of parents, students, teachers, unions, higher ed and the state all pulling in different directions. The feedback loops are long, the data is extremely noisy, there are very few factors you can control for and the cost of fucking it up is very high.
It's a pretty tricky job that is largely thankless and the pay is pretty mediocre. I just looked up what a local principal, whom i feel is actually a pretty excellent leader, makes. He's got a masters degree, has 15 years at this district, runs a building of 1200 students, has ~50 directs reporting to him and made $97k last year.
I'm willing to cop to being unfair about this whole thing. My own views are colored by my own experience with administrators in my school district growing up, and the school district my wife's siblings grew up in.
Measured, realistic, and unexciting takes like this are so rare in these kinds of discussions. Thanks for contributing yours.
In general, things are never simple, never black and white, never simply good or bad. Things are never executed by just one person, or even one group of people, and are never executed in isolation. Everything is connected to everything else, every variable is dependent on every other variable, every action, good or bad, gets a reaction of some kind, and on and on. Social dynamics are complicated. Political dynamics are complicated. The economic incentives that often drive behavior are everywhere and aren't necessarily thoughtfully created, maintained, or even widely understood.
Its easy and it feels good to get on Twitter or on Hacker News and yell "Yea screw school administrators, they're the problem!" But it is too tidy of a worldview to even approximate being accurate and saying it doesn't help anybody get closer to solving the real problem.
If you want to help, go get involved in your local school system... if you don't... you don't need to have an opinion on every single little thing, just read the article and move along.
K-12 education in the U.S. is a perpetual blame game between admins, teachers, unions, and parents/guardians.
Take this parent comment and substitute “academic progress”, “student engagement”, “socio-emotional”, “school safety”, etc for “covid” and you’ve entered the Ed reform debate of the last 20-30 years.
Overcoming COVID in schools requires a collective problem-solving approach that is incompatible with the individualist (e.g. I’m just worried about my kid), class-segregated public school system that we’ve built.
Administrators are culpable but I think their role is akin to an engineer building questionable technology. Why should they buck the system that puts food on their families table, especially when there is no guarantee that doing things differently will lead to a different ultimate outcome?
Anecdotally this plays out in the increase of violence and violent threats toward principals, superintendents and school boards who are trying to institute science-backed rules for dealing with the virus.
If students only come in every other day, schools will only receive 50% funding in the US. In Japan, schools are often privately funded, but a solution that cuts public funding of education by half in the US is a non-starter. It would likely take a constitutional amendment in California to change the school budget formula.
But we’re not going to have a third year of COVID anyway. Nearly everyone is going to catch the omicron in the next couple months, and by April we’ll have enough herd immunity to reopen everything.
I’m not aware of this funding logic but how does this even work? Like in COVID, all students were remote, but finding never stopped. And last I checked, if my kid doesn’t go to school for a week, school funding doesn’t get impacted. I mean coming in on alternate days doesn’t mean you’re not learning, you can still do online classes on that day.
California school funding formulae are a big complicated mess, but student attendance does play a role in budgets during regular times. Every day of school your kid misses costs the district about $50. Some districts even nag parents for donations after absences[1]
However for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, they set a baseline so that schools received funding based off of their 2019-2020 (preCOVID, normalized) average daily attendance. This was good for big schools that had lower enrollment but caused issues for suburban/rural districts that saw a lot of growth.
In most states funding is related to attendance somehow, I think the details vary. At one time I think there was a thought that districts would take truancy and absences more seriously instead of ignore it if there was an impact to the bottom line.
There are also a multitude of programs throughout k-12, particularly in high school, where the student spends part of their day outside of the district. I think this just helps ensure that the state isn't paying twice for the same student when the external program is also state funded. (It also helps to remove any weird financial incentives to get the kids out of the building)
In my area I think this is where the vast majority of the district income variance comes from, and it is known about and largely planned for before the year even starts.
Dumb question and I realize it may be. I've seen that said before, "Nearly everyone is going to catch omicron within the next 2 to 6 months"; the range changes both the quote is similar. I haven't really seen a why, it just seems to be a given. I know it's more virulent, but why is everyone going to have it so soon?
R is between 2 and 3 infections per infected. That’s exponential growth, and omicron’s life cycle is faster than delta or alpha by a couple days. Health care facilities and airlines can’t keep fully staffed despite them taking the most precautions and requiring vaccinations. There was an outbreak in Antarctica where more than half the research station got it despite strict isolation and testing before arrival. How can we possibly stop that?
Virulence refers to the ability of a pathogen to cause disease. Omicron is not more virulent. If anything it is likely to be much less virulent as it lacks the ability to infect lung tissue.
On the other hand because the infection is now concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, patients are much more likely to exhale and spread the virus. On top of that, the virus has sufficiently mutated thus existing vaccines and prior infections have very limited protection. Combined with the lack of ventilation and increased time spent indoors in winter, this translates to more infections.
I don't know whether "everyone" is going to get it eventually. However I have heard anecdotes that multiple insular communities in the US that have largely avoided the previous Covid strains are now badly afflicted by omicron. That is how infectious the virus is.
Omicron is roughly as contagious as chicken pox. Remember what happened when a single child got chicken pox before the vaccine? There was never a question that everybody was about to get chicken pox--the only thing you could do was manage the timeframe.
Before the vaccine, people would have chicken pox parties so all the children were exposed simultaneously and everybody could get it over with. With Omicron, it's simply the reverse, it's blowing through everybody so fast that it will burn itself out in a couple months.
After that, it will simply have a constant endemic background level like chicken pox prior to the vaccine and the flu.
We are in the endgame. It isn't the endgame we wanted, but it is the endgame.
New variants have followed Omicron. And that will continue to happen. They may be more benign or less benign than what we’ve seen so far. But I keep hearing the assumption of “definitely mild”. I’m not sure the science is so definitive on that point.
That will not necessarily continue to happen, at least not soon. Once you've been exposed to omicron (+ vaxed or exposed to original/delta) a new variant has to be very different from both omicron and delta. And this isn't the flu; it only has so far it can mutate.
However, it's impossible to get rid of it because it infects animals and we're not going to vaccinate them.
Agreed, I can't see anything stopping it mutating further if the opportunity arises.
I believe the understanding is that the omicron variant may have evolved further in an immuno-compromised person (e.g. with AIDS, or undergoing chemotherapy), since it got to stay in the host longer without being killed by the immune system, it racked up more mutations until it got to its current virulent form and started infecting other people.
And there's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening again I guess.
Before Omicron, we had a hope of creating an R0 < 1 and stamping Covid out. Omicron spreads so well in so many different mammals that it simply wipes that option off the map.
Omicron, irrespective of whether it is mild or not, is simply going to blow through the population no matter what we do. Afterward everybody will have been infected with Covid, vaccinated, or both.
At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the new world.
The way around it is students "Went" to school 5 days a week. somedays they were on campus, and some days they were remote learning. I know of several schools in my immediate area that implemented such a system.
Our school district (in the USA) used much the same method as you describe for Japan: alternating days, 50% capacity, etc. Then the State Borad of Education mandated all schools closed.
In our community, most of the parents in town are able to work from home. But its a very strange place, and I would expect worse outcomes most other places.
Even so, serious psychiatric illness is tearing the kids up. The child clinical psychologists and the one remaining psychiatrist in town are double-booked, at least.
It's been its own shade of awful.
I don't think that there could have been a better response from the schools here. It's been very difficult to plan for anything more than six weeks out, and the kids who have returned to school have needed more care. And who is caring for the teachers?
I don't know what the dropout rate would be for high schoolers, but many of these kids are just gone. Across all economic levels (the delicate proxy that we use, money lumped in with social status or prevalent parents' level of education and stuff).
> Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capacity. Mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced strictly.
Citation? I am familiar with Japan's national Covid policies, and I have heard nothing of this. In general, Japan allows the prefectures to make their own decisions, and for issues like this, prefectures issue requests, not mandates. This paper suggests that even at the outset of the pandemic, the range of NPIs imposed by Japanese schools was quite variable:
This news story from September 2020 explicitly says the exact opposite of what you're implying -- school districts operating at maximum capacity, and interventions varying based on what (for example) the PTA decided to pay for:
"Typical classrooms in Japan would seem to flunk the 3C test, however. In Ms. Katayama's classroom, desks were spaced just enough to walk between. Regulations allow up to 40 children per classroom."
"Last month, a panel of scholars and education researchers in Tokyo launched a petition to urge rapid adoption of smaller classes. Class size "should be reduced to 30 right now, and quickly, to 20," the panel said."
"Japan's Riken research institute, working with Kobe University, argues that even large classes can be held safely — provided ventilation is sufficient."
Japan is a big country, and -- just as with masks -- there's a fair amount of "orientalism" going on in the west, in terms of overgeneralization and stereotyping of their response to the virus. My only overarching observation is that they've been much more relaxed than we are in the US.
It's common practice in the schools and universities in Japan to operate on 50 % capacity if the infection rate is high. There are strict mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced.
Knowledge source: I'm a professor at a University in Tokyo. Nobody can enter campus without a mask and temperature check (not even me, the door to my floor has a facial recognition /thermal check).
Social distancing is also enforced by teachers and staff. There is a max student cap for each room (that his about 30 % of the maximum capacity).
For schools: several of my friends have kids attending elementary school in Tokyo.
Yes, there is a lot of orientalism going on hackernews. lol.
So a link from June 2020. The CBS news link I posted post-dates it, and contradicts it.
Edit: actually, it doesn't even contradict it, per se. The articles are saying the same thing, but the WaPo story just tries to generalize from a single school, without admitting it. FTA:
> At Hoyonomori Gakuen, a school in Tokyo’s Shinagawa ward, the new rules, including temperature checks, are set down in a 28-point plan designed by the school to minimize risks.
So, again, the schools determine their response. This is also my understanding of the situation.
> this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators.
Not at all. This is the fault of all the other societal damage done in the name of "stopping COVID", it's the fault of the "public health officials".
Schools are constrained by zero covid policies still clung to by anti-science public health, which mandate widespread testing followed by far reaching preventative isolation which bars health students from school.
Imagine you have a class of 20. Each kids in that class goes to 6 other classes of 20, largely different kids. Now one "tests positive". The school is then tasks by "public health" to find who sat near that kid in each and every class, and "quarantine" all of those kids. Rinse and repeat, ever. single. case.
Many schools have realized this is unsustainable absurdity and rightfully stopped complying, but the more "stay safe" they are, the more they comply. Consequently, the less those schools are able to stay open and effective.
The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling.
> The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling.
Just curious, what would you suggest ?
Because as far as I can tell there are no good solutions.
I suppose the difference between our countries is that until university, you get put into class with 30 people, and do all the classes together.
There are some cases when you can have different additional classes, but thats kind of limited to couple of hours a week, and would not be that hard to just leave off
I didn't know school kids lived in a vacuum, I'd have thought most go home to their families after school, where, you may have guessed it, there are other people to be infected.
Agreed. And potentially the age and health of the population going into the pandemic. There's a study comparing Sweden and Norways mortality over the pandemic and the four years proceeding it, which concluded:
> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper. [0]
So apparently Sweden did a better job than Norway of keeping people alive longer before the pandemic, therefore having a larger per-capita population vulnerable to covid.
(It is my understanding that Sweden also fumbled early on protecting those in nursing homes, as many others did. Lots of factors I'm sure, more than just lockdown vs no lockdown.)
I'm not sure about Finland. It is possible the same applies.
The problem is there is no competition for the admins jobs. This is why voucher for charters would improve these. You need somekind of feedback mechanism to exterminate bad admins from their job. Unfortunately most people people deserve these kind of admins when they constantly vote in the "wrong" rep. I moved to other states now that remote jobs are very conducive to coders.
Look folks, yes I know I flunked out of BS Molecular degree but..
It will be a pandemic of 5 to ten years in total.
In short words like you were 5, two factors converged to make this a
reality:
1. World for the most part failed to lead like China an stop it cold fast and yes places like the USA gets fair blame for that.
2. Speed of mutations.
Only have one of those factors then it would be far less years of a pandemic.
That is not to say that there is not hope on the near future where we take either a booster or one pill per year to contain it however.
But, 30 years ago a lady wrote a very famous book called.. the Coming Plaque..
She pointed out that it was not Science failing us towards facing the next pandemic but governments putting public health on a diet.
> 1. World for the most part failed to lead like China an stop it cold fast and yes places like the USA gets fair blame for that.
The virus had spread too widely for that to be possible. If you blame the USA, you also have to blame China for suppressing and destroying early information about the contagion.
I would prefer to blame nobody, since everyone’s systems played a part in the outcome.
i think it would be fair to say that science failed us if this is due to a lab leak, which appears to be the case. science made by possible by public health funding, in fact.
Playing devil's advocate...It could be a lab leak (I've seen conflicting stories, some seemingly reputable), but I agree it doesn't matter if it is or isn't...and it leans (more into conspiracy territory than not) what matters is there's this cat, and it's out of the bag, and vaccines protect against it, Ivermectin does jack shit and other 'cures' are bullshit unless sanctioned by the broader medical community (Pfizer's new pill as an example).
Just TRUST your doctors, there's not a conspiracy to make everyone baren or something crazy, the vaccines are safer than going to a bar and having a few drinks.
ironically Covid itself probably has a better chance of making one sterile than the vaccine as ACE receptors are in the testes, and other reproductive organs, so it could sterilize people who get bad infections.
Ivermectin, being very effective against worms, is helpful if you have both worms and covid - that's the reason some studies saw it working and some didn't.
That said the definition of "homeless" in this count is extremely broad.
For example if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless. Even if someone stays temporarily in a hotel or motel, for example because of a fire or flood, will be counted as homeless. Even wider scope, a child who "qualified moved" within the last 36 months is considered migratory i.e. homeless.
The better word is false. You’re spreading outright falsehoods, and you’ve created a thread of people who now share the same misconception.
Start at the top of the definition -- the statute concerns “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence”.
Key word is fixed.
Then you have to be familiar with the difference between a trailer -- as in RV, or motor home -- that is not fixed, and one that is fixed to a foundation (sometimes called a manufactured home, or a single/double wide.)
Living out of an RV is homeless, living in a trailer on a pad is not.
Most facts are incomplete, it's almost impossible to give all the context to any given data point unless you just give people a URL and tell people to read for themselves.
For example, it's an incomplete fact to say that "if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless", but thankfully you provided the link to the complete fact!
From your source, a little more completeness for your fact:
"living in ...trailer parks... due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations"
Thankfully, it is not true that everyone whose permanent residence is a trailer park is counted as homeless.
To clarify the clarification... I think this refers to people who are housed in "emergency housing" by some agency like FEMA because their regular home is no longer viable (e.g.: burned in a wildfire), and they have not been moved into something more permanent.
This does not refer to people who's only economic choice generally is trailer parks.
>Even wider scope, a child who "qualified moved" within the last 36 months is considered migratory i.e. homeless.
This is what the definition of migratory child is.
(3) MIGRATORY CHILD.—The term ‘‘migratory child’’ means a child or youth who made a qualifying move in the preceding 36 months—
(A) as a migratory agricultural worker or a migratory fisher; or
(B) with, or to join, a parent or spouse who is a migratory agricultural worker or a migratory fisher.
It's not just that they moved (which is what I read from your comment) but they are a child who's parents are migratory workers and moved within 36 months.
>For example if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless.
This seems to check out. It's odd in the rest of the definition.
>(i) children and youths who are sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason; are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations; are living in emergency or transitional shelters; or are abandoned in hospitals;*
>are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations
To me it reads the following aren't adequate accommodations if they are by themselves (i.e. no other housing): motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds.
I personally don't think a trailer in a trailer park with an address should be categorized as homeless, I'm just trying to interpret the law as a layperson. Maybe trailer parks were different back in 1965 (i.e. no address).
Living in a hotel does qualify as homeless in my opinion. Same as trailer or anything that is not a fixed home. The definition of homeless doesn not equate to just to simply sleeping under the stars.
> Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless?
It's a social class thing. It's not about having a reliable, warm, dry, safe place to sleep. It's about whether a middle class university graduate's friends would have considered them to have failed at life. Living in a coffin sized apartment with cockroaches everywhere in New York is something they could see themselves doing at some point in their life for career goals or because of bad luck. A trailer is not the kind of place a university graduate lives in.
Not sure why you're getting so downvoted. You might be stating it a bit dramatically, but I've personally seen this attitude in people when living (by choice) in an RV. Many people seem to abhor the idea that someone doesn't live like them. There's broad discrimination against people living in RV parks and trailers in most municipalities.
Many cities ban you putting an RV on your own plot of land, regardless of the purpose. They often ban trailer parks, severely restrict them, etc to the detriment of many economically vulnerable people. There's often a component of racism too as some trailer parks home lots of immigrants or hispanic folks, marking them doubly undesirables.
A decent trailer can be a more pleasant living experience than a tiny manhattan studio, I fail to see why that should qualify as homeless. Maybe using an in-between category would be helpful.
There is no in between category. They're classed as homeless because the people doing the classification are of a social class that don't consider trailers acceptable. It's not about material living conditions. It's about social class considerations.
Yes, unless you consider a trailer a home but then where do you draw the line? One could go as far as considering a tent as a home but come on, we all know what we mean by home. A trailer is just a trailer.
Consider how people who live in those trailers feel about people like you. If you need an intuition pump consider that most Europeans live in houses that are solid masonry, not plywood and plaster. Your houses are basically tissue paper, trashwood and mud. Hardly a permanent structure.
Your public contempt is reciprocated by the people you do not respect.
I think it's more about the overall situation than just the physical structure. If you have a place you can legally stay indefinitely, and you have access to water/sewer/power, then I think a trailer could absolutely be considered a home.
A trailer is a permanent structure with bedrooms, living room and kitchen, bathroom, which can receive mail. Yes, they’re small. No, they’re probably not anyone’s preferred option. But they’re still homes.
> even given homeless might not be "living on street", that is a horrific statistic
It would be a horrific statistic, if it were even remotely close to being accurate.
The US had 580,000 total homeless in 2020. [1] That's up from the recent lows before the pandemic when it was ~50,000 lower (and it's dramatically lower than prior to the start of the federal Housing First program).
If the NSBA is claiming 1.4 million, they're knowingly lying and it's despicable.
The US national homelessness rate is comparable to France and Canada.
This attitude is a major reason why public education is so utterly messed up in the US. All of the social and mental work that should be done elsewhere is simply not done. Time after time, the schools (and police) are called on as the last line of defense for a failing society.
It's not working. The additional strain on schools has turned the mission of public education into a series of brush fires in which staff and administrators just lurch from one crisis to another. The unequal way that education gets funded means that some districts see much more of this than others. But the problem is spreading.
Teachers are not trained to function as warehousers for youth. Nor are they given the resources to serve the role you and far too many parents want them to serve.
When the schools fail there is literally nothing behind them. They're the end of the line. This is the point where all the chickens come home to roost and society starts to fail, one kid at a time. The pandemic should be a wake up call. It doesn't look like it will be.
> This attitude is a major reason why public education is so utterly messed up in the US. All of the social and mental work that should be done elsewhere is simply not done. Time after time, the schools (and police) are called on as the last line of defense for a failing society.
I completely agree. But we can't fix this in the next few weeks, so for now keeping schools open for those who need it is the thing to do.
Books have been remote learning for hundreds of years, whats wrong with remote learning especially now pupils can ask questions straight away from a pool of teachers online?
Simply because technology was slow back then, if the technology existed for faster than horseback/carrier pigeon communication and costs were not prohibitive would the world of teaching/knowledge acquisition have evolved a different form of society?
The biggest problem is that a huge component of school is socialization. Interacting with other kids in an low-control setting.
Much like conferences the "hallway class" is a huge component.
Ass onto that that many kids are bad at focusing on online classes and the whole situation is not up to the standard of in-persin schooling (with current systems).
The problem is that a major part of the value of universal education is that it provides a means to provision social welfare without stigma – telling only children who need this support to come in undoes this.
I sympathize with this, but how can you even effectively operate a school to provide the day care part if half the staff are absent? (Either directly because they are sick with covid, or caring for a family member who is, or they lack childcare for their own kids, or simply because they're not being paid enough to deal with the bullshit and risk ...)
It just seems like, regardless of our values, the sheer weight of the case rates and staff shortages is going to force closures in the near term if it hasn't already.
If you put a bunch of vulnerable kids in an auditorium together with minimal supervision because you've got an effective teacher:student ratio of 1:50 or worse, is that really better?
(Maybe it is. I'll admit to not having come from a dysfunctional or unsafe home as the author of the linked piece describes, so I may lack some perspective here.)
I 100% agree. My high school in the US was a shit show. It was basically like the redditor described but there was no COVID. Going to school is still valuable.
Yes it is. School, along with the other things it does, is a public daycare service for children aged 5-18. That's one of the main reasons public school is good.
- Students are generally compelled to be proximate to educational services for long stretches of time. Logistics of not coupling them would be inefficient.
- Students don't learn effectively when they are chronically hungry. Providing education to hungry students isn't maximizing society's investment in these comparatively expensive services.
- Bonus reason: for many students, school is the only institution they have significant contact with, and therefore nobody else is feeding them. Feeding kids is the Right and Moral thing to do.
Students here eat too, the different is they eat what they, or their parents want them to. And when they want to. Most schools also sell food. Nobody has to be hungry.
The difference is there is no super cheap daily meal all students have to choose from. And also kids and public schools can get healthy food if their parents want to/ can afford it.
Based on your description, I gather you are not in the United States :-)
In my opinion the best case is a society where all kids have parents with the care and understanding to send them to school with nutritious, healthy food. And that students have healthy choices and that they have the means to purchase.
But the kicker, is that in the United States (and some other countries), this is not the case. In the United States, children in dysfunctional or impoverished homes or no home are common enough that it's more efficient to broadly provide support in this manner.
Side note: my wife, who previously was a teacher, and I lived in New Zealand for a few years. New Zealand didn't have a school nutrition program, but probably needed one. My wife did a fair amount of substitute ("relief") teaching in a poor area north of Wellington when we first arrived, and gave her lunch away to hungry students often enough that she knew to pack several sandwiches. So, even countries with comparably strong social supports can run into this issue.
The thing is that school acts as child care for 60-70% of the work day and it makes it not very viable to offer alternative services for the other 30% as there are not enough hours remaining to offer full time work.
give kids the chance to choose to go to school or not ... most won't go and then outside of learning the biggest benefit of socializing/making freinds/fully enjoy being human which to me is with others is lost. People at my job have given the same choose and really no one goes in.
COVID is scourge to the world ... whose is to blame for it? Does any one country benefit from it? What's going on with Covid in China ... when will they rank as the number superpower in the world ... last i saw in the next five to ten years.
If you downvote me do you think the Chinese govt. is one to trust ... good for societies around the world? The world is now living like they were in the 2000s to present... with a mask on!
I’m wondering what has changed in the human nature (if any) that we need day care for ppl older than 18-19 years now. What did such ppl do 100 (or 1000) years ago to overcome all that.
I'm not following. The vast majority of people in school are younger than 18. I agree with you that it should be fine for most parents to leave an older kid (say 14+?) at home alone.
But again, some kids just want to go to school to get some damn food, regardless of age!
I’m mostly curious about why the maturity period was prolonged by 5-10 years from what the human race had 100 or 1000 years ago. I’m not talking about education but the transition from youths to adulthood.
Because we continue to gain a better understanding of how people mature. We now recognize that the period of adolescence is a long one, and that life outcomes are typically better when you do not push people directly into adult roles in society immediately after they reach puberty.
Science seems to be pointed hard towards 25 being the age of majority rather than 18. We are unlikely to see the age move in our lifetimes due to the military needing its recruits but it probably should. Do you really think the average 14-15 year old should be considered in the same maturity bracket as the average 35 or 45 year old? I was incapable of making good decisions at that age. The things I thought were cool, the way I thought things worked, the rational for the actions I took, all of it was cringe inducing now as an adult when I think back on it. When I think back on my 30's, I wish I had more information but overall see no fault in the way that I made my decisions.
Fluid intelligence is already in decline by 25. If between the credentialist impulse and the infantilizing impulse we push career starts inexorably towards 30 the human race is going to miss out on a lot of contributions that we need to help solve our many problems across many fields of endeavor.
I mostly agree with the maturity argument and because of that all the attempts to push more decision making (like voting) on younger people seem strange to me.
But the most curious topic for me at the moment is why we are lowering our expectations for 18-25 years old. We used to see them as young but fully capable adults (granted that is a shift from 14-16 years from 100-1000 years ago).
I understand the educational part of the argument as well but some of the trends seems very strange to me. For example: as far as I understand there is no strong expectation that ppl after high school know what they want to do and it’s normal to take 1-2 years break between school and college. Is it a new thing? I don’t really know. But I can’t find comparable breaks in history or other (less wealthy) societies.
Health insurance cut off dates are 21 (25?) years old. University system seems more and more similar to a nice place to spend time (better dorms before better classes) than to the place to efficiently receive your education.
Playing devil's advocate: If we are considering maturity as a pre-requisite to vote, perhaps we should test for that? Some 15 years olds are very mature, and some 30+ years olds are not.
Also, maybe it is wrong to disenfranchise immature people. They are people, too.
In 1922, a 14-year-old in the US could expect to live maybe another 40 years; in 2022, that number is likely to be at least 70. As a fraction of life expectancy, adolescence is actually relatively short right now.
Quality of life over quantity should be a metric somehow. Sure the internet and access for more people should raise the bar, but I am not sure about that. A lot of noise out there. Yes, an average life expectancy of 78 years in the US, sounds like a lot compared to around 60 in the 1920s, but with a current obesity prevalence of over 40% (obesity and severe obesity) in the US, I am not sure we can gauge a year-for-a-year in this comparison. And people wonder why an advanced country such as the US can get hit so bad by COVID, and blame it on each other, when over 70% of deaths and serious hospitalizations are linked to obesity. I think we can allow children to mature as early as they seem to be able to take it on, and not over pressure them while doing this; isn't that what being a parent is all about - assessing and nurturing together? I certainly had to grow up quick living below or at the poverty line in a bad neighborhood in my childhood and all that entailed, along with my relatives sent at age 18 to 22 to Korea, Vietnam, and other wars that followed. Children who grew/grow up on farms with chores and responsibilities and with similar corollaries in cities at an early age sounds better to me than coddling them into their mid-twenties, but that is my opinion from the various young people I have interviewed and worked with in white-collar and blue-collar jobs (construction, diving, ropework, machining, welding, etc...) as well as to the older and younger children I have raised in my family.
Do you have a citation for that? I’m not sure it’s correct (although I don’t have any links of my own handy either, sorry!)
My impression was that infant mortality was a great deal higher back then, but there wasn’t as big a disparity after that as people tend to assume. People didn’t hit old age in their 50s and 60s, they often lived into their 80s and beyond, just like today.
Children can be raised as people who serve a purpose, not as a burden to serve. And just like adults, children thrive knowing they are wanted, and their actions make a difference. Children can have real chores as early as 3 or 4 years old, and by 18 can be expected to have developed the character and know how to be completely on their own.
That’s not to say they wouldn’t continue to benefit, for the rest of their lives, from a nurturing, supportive, diverse community. But they can be a completely productive member of that community.
I don't understand. This is what you took away from this? I thought this post shows that keeping schools open is an absolute fantasy. This is one of the best funded schools in NYC; it's going to be absolute shambles in the rest of them.
At some point we have to face the facts: NYC’s school admins aren’t good enough. Private schools have been open in California for ages.
But this is normal. Public school workers are deep mediocre workers. Most of the time they skate by being mediocre. But this moment demanded that they do their job well. They, challenged to act outside mediocrity, found their skills wanting.
It seemed to me like remote schooling leads to students not paying attention at all (in particular younger students who need guidance), and just minimizing the stream while doing other stuff, based on other posts I read. Hence it seems like a lose-lose.
What I took away is that at some point we have to return to normal. Give up. Let it spread. Do away with testing. Tell students and teachers to come in if they have mild, cold-like symptoms.
You think a school being basically worthless when open because large numbers of teachers have become ill from infection spread, is some how a criticism of closing schools to prevent infection spread?
Are large numbers of teachers ill or large numbers of teachers too fearful/cautious to come in? If the former... in my own experience almost everyone fully recovers from covid without hospitalization in less than 2 weeks. So if dozens of teachers got sick... most or all should be back next week.
Great, close the school till there is adequate staffing to teach the curriculum.
Warehousing students is wrong (especially so when creating a super spreader study hall), our school systems should not hold kids hostage with threats like charging a kid with truancy if the school is not fully staffed.
I found it shocking at first. Then I thought about the shitshow that is any kind of organization in high schools. Then I thought about the utter confusion that my own school had trying to set up a simple website.
Then I wasn't so surprised any more. Just disappointed.
> we live in a society that sarcrifices their young...
Maybe. The other thing I've been seeing is a lot of leaders not making hard choices and picking the perpetual compromise path that never leads anywhere.
> It more and more feels like we live in a society that sarcrifices their young, just to keep old people on their life support machines a little longer.
Unfortunately, "let COVID run rampant and kill olds and other at-risk people" isn't a great strategy. And are people in their 40s-50s "old people on life support machines"? Because COVID-19 was the leading cause of death for people ages 45-54 years as recently as October.¹
Yes, it's only the #2 leading cause of death for those 25-34 in that same time period, and lower still for children. But death isn't the only negative outcome. We now know that SARS-CoV-2 infection increases the odds of kids getting Type 1 diabetes, can worsen existing diabetes symptoms, and in turn, people with diabetes are at increased risk for severe COVID-19. There are long-term health and quality-of-life impacts that we don't yet understand.
The good news is that with 9.4B vaccine doses administered we know how to return to relative normalcy. We just aren't doing it, for reasons that have nothing to do with facts and reason.
Well the tools we have are vaccination and avoiding human contact. We don't do either.
Unlike what politicians say the models and prior history simply say you got to vaccinate everyoe that can get vaccinated.
Also we need international soft real time cooperation and transparency. We are incapable of either.
It is just that COVID has the sweet spot of being transmissible but not causing grueling enough of deaths like measles or the plague so some people may ignore it or believe they can skip vaccination until it's their turn. And of course this is the perfect environment for a virus to mutate.
Also there is the misinformation that the virus has to become less deadly or has less long term impact as it mutates. I have no idea who had that bright idea and why it propagates. See the plague who as bubonic has the optimal close to 100% transmission and 100% fatality rate.
People are still in denial and we all pay the price. So the plan is just masses of people to get actually fed up and force things into other masses of people and slowly drag our economies to the ground, as pandemics do normally.
> The good news is that with 9.4B vaccine doses administered we know how to return to relative normalcy.
Even with high numbers of people vaccinated spread is only slowed. Even with boosters spread is only slowed. We tried vaccines and it has failed to bring a return to normalcy.
I think I'm getting something different from this than what the author intended.
* They mention their study hall as a "super spreader event". This feels...hysterical to me. Not just because it worries me that this kid is thinking about this in the way they are, but also because it's wrong. The risk this person faces is much more likely from the HVAC system in the school, not the study hall.
* The way they talk about the other kid asking questions "with their mask down". To be obsessed with this sort of minutiae as a kid is scary to me.
* Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school.
* Begin upset at kids for taking these tests in the bathroom instead of at home.
It just seems like there is a whole realm of paranoia that this kid is trying to fit on top of their life, and I don't think this sort of paranoia is in any way reasonable.
I think that teaching kids to think about their world with this framing, and at a formative age, is and already has done major damage to their development.
Yes, because for schoolkids, Omicron is literally a cold, if that. The other variants, call it a bad cold. The only reason to stop them catching it is to stop them spreading it. Had someone three years ago been that concerned about someone with a cold, yes, that would be minutiae.
There are many cultures that strongly value parents, elders and extended family, and Covid is 'a cold' that could kill random loved ones in their extended family, such as their favorite grandmother or their aunt's best friend. For a teenager, being the vector of infection that leads to such a death would result in critical emotional trauma and lead to a much higher risk of suicide — a fact they are well aware of, given the significant uptick in suicides within their age group since Covid began.
They may be teenagers, but they're not wrong to attend to the minutiae; whether for selfish or for social reasons, that awareness may be all that is keeping them and their loved ones alive. It is cruel and unjust and wrong that they alone are attending to the minutiae of masking, but here in the United States our social support systems often require them to bear that responsibility, as the adults responsible for them often do not.
School kids live with their parents/guardians, and if they get it it will most likely mean that those guardians also will. That can be very serious for a kid who literally depends on them for everything including food, clothing, housing, essentials to life, etc. This is especially so if those guardians are older and at higher risk of death. A child is absolutely right to be more worried about it than they would be about a cold, because if it spreads to their family (and it likely will), that could well be a life ruining event.
If you're in a school: you're catching omicron, and unless all of the students are wearing at least PAPR hoods all the time, everybody is catching it. Allowing yourself to get worked up about seeing a kid with his mask down in the bathroom is insane.
> * They mention their study hall as a "super spreader event". This feels...hysterical to me. Not just because it worries me that this kid is thinking about this in the way they are, but also because it's wrong. The risk this person faces is much more likely from the HVAC system in the school, not the study hall.
The kids were packed into an overcrowded auditorium so much that they completely ran out of seats and had cram even more people into the auditorium than it had seating. They did this for 3 hours, far longer than it takes to acquire COVID from someone sitting next to you. Kids were literally testing positive inside of the auditorium during this time.
> * The way they talk about the other kid asking questions "with their mask down". To be obsessed with this sort of minutiae as a kid is scary to me.
That kid with the mask down had literally just tested positive for COVID. That's not "minutiae". It's baffling that you think the problem in this scenario is that he's concerned about a COVID-positive person in close quarters having a mask down, as opposed to the fact that a COVID-positive person has their mask down. You must be harboring some major biases.
> * Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school.
Did you miss the part where so many of the faculty and staff were out sick that they were struggling to coordinate everything? I agree it's uncoordinated and wasteful, but the point is that they're being forced to try to run a school when a huge number of the faculty are too sick to do so.
> That kid with the mask down had literally just tested positive for COVID. That's not "minutiae".
You just said, a paragraph up, that they had all been in the auditorium for 3 hours, which (again, according to you) is "far longer than it takes" to get sick. Let's assume you're right -- we have an auditorium overcrowded with kids, many of whom are spewing aerosolized, highly transmissible virus into an enclosed space. For hours.
So yes, worrying about a silly mask on one kid, in that context, is more than a little hysterical. I'm going to wager that most of these kids weren't wearing rigorously fitted respirators anyway.
Even if you don't believe that (why wouldn't you?), the idea that a moment of "mask down" is going to present any sort of exceptional additional risk is clearly nonsense.
Infection isn't a binary yes/no switch that occurs after a specific interval. This should be obvious.
The more viral load you're exposed to, the higher the infection risk. Someone speaking directly to you in close quarters with an active infection is, indeed, a significant risk factor for acquiring the virus.
It doesn't make sense to argue that it doesn't matter because they were also possibly exposed to other students for 3 hours earlier.
> The more viral load you're exposed to, the higher the infection risk. Someone speaking directly to you in close quarters with an active infection is, indeed, a significant risk factor for acquiring the virus.
No. Infectious dose may matter for severity of disease (this is a hypothesis; it has never been demonstrated). Concluding that it matters in this situation is clearly silly. You're talking about hours in a room, with hundreds of kids. You think they're all wearing perfectly fitted respirators? Come now. You honestly want to suggest that one kid pulling his mask down makes a big difference in the overall aerosol rave being described here?
Remember, we don't even know what kind of mask is being discussed. If the kid in question is wearing a cloth mask, it probably didn't matter either way, based on all current evidence.
Also remember: SARS-CoV2 shows a clear pattern of overdispersion. Most people don't spread to anyone. The chances that any particular encounter will lead to your infection are very low, regardless of masks. Put a hundred kids in a room, though, and those tiny probabilities start to multiply. Sitting for hours in a room full of hundreds of other people is dramatically higher risk than some guy pulling his mask down for a second (but the former doesn't let you blame your outcome on specific person, so it isn't nearly as satisfying, is it?)
This is the problem with Covid discussions on the internet. People get one fact half-right ("viral load matters"), and use that to generate the scariest possible hot-takes.
Indeed, it's truly sad. It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses. From his comments, I wonder if he actually thinks he will be dead from standing next to someone who just tested positive. The preliminary results from UK and SA indicate that this recent wave could be a blessing in that it serves as an innoculation rather than severe illness. And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with.
> It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses.
Are we reading the same post?
The kids are going to school. The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.
> And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with.
Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation? They have older parents at home. They have older teachers in the classroom. Many of them see even older grandparents and relatives frequently, perhaps also at home.
Where do kids go if they get sick? Home, where they are cared for by older parents.
Kids don't just live in isolated bubbles with other kids. It's dishonest to ignore the second-order effects of kids getting sick.
> The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.
This depends on how you define "so sick". Tested positive? Yes. Hospitalized? I bet not all (or > 1.8% [1]) of them. I notice when verbiage sensationalizes COVID. The OP, I believe, is also sensitive to this.
> Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation?
This is the primary argument. Your two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. He can believe that the kids are overly scared based on the statistics because, well, they are not at that much risk while at the same time recognizing that individuals not at risk put other people who are at risk in danger.
This is why we fail to have beneficial conversation, we talk around each other.
I am 25 years old, vaccinated two times (we are only eligible to 2 vaccines in Québec, Canada), had contact with a COVID positive case on sunday last week (January 2th) and I got sick enough to not be able to work from January 4th to January 9th.
I was not hospitalized and I was not able to work due to some quite heavy symptoms that prevent me to talk or focus more than a few minutes on a task.
You and the commenter above you miss the point. If you change "Hospitalized" to "unable to work" the point is still valid. I just do not have statistics on "unable to work" and I do not like to state things without evidence. However, it is very likely that 100% of those cases are not "unable to work" and that some percentage >0 is asymptomatic. The point stands.
Either way, you focused on the minor point rather than the main purpose which is a "both and" scenario rather than a "either or" where the two arguments are debating different issues which are not mutually exclusive but for some reason are used to argue against each other as if it's an either/or scenario (risk to ones self vs risk to others - It can be low risk to the individual and high risk to others at the same time).
> The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.
Bullshit.
Assuming that 20% of the teachers are sick (=coughing or not feeling well), which is a ridiculous overestimation, schools can still work perfectly well.
That just means that 20% of the lessons will not happen. And if the schools' administration is not completely useless (I admit that may be a long shot), some of these lessons could be replaced by other lessons.
“Just” doesn’t mean what you seem to think it does. Schools have very little margin for soaking up absence at that scale. If one out of five teachers are out, the kids will not be doing the learning which is the stated justification for not keeping them safe at home. Teaching is hard work, not hitting play on a video, and it requires time to prepare in addition to classroom time – teachers don’t call in sick for fun, it actually creates more work for them since they still need to create the lessons and deal with the impact on their work when they’re back, and in many districts a decline in test scores will cost them money (in some, so does taking a sick day).
School administrators are extremely busy with all of the extra work they’ve been given, and if they’re babysitting students that work (often required by law) will not happen.
But, at this point, they are pretty much babysitting them, at least according to the account from the reddit poster. Everyone's talking more about the testing than anything else with little added benefit.
Yes, note the large number of absences — that was basically the point: schools which have been resource-starved for many years don’t have anywhere near that much slack capacity, especially since one of the sources of substitutes are retired teachers who are at higher risk.
When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?
> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it
No, it means that it tends to be maintained at some (whether very high or very low or other) stable baseline level in a region in the absence of external inputs or interventions.
> Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless
No, it doesn't, and wouldn't even if “endemic” did mean everyone would get it, since the control measures are not intended to prevent people from eventually getting COVID in the absence of a fundamental change in available countermeasures, but to reduce the speed of particular outbreaks and mitigate acute impacts to health systems (which affects ability to treat anyone needing the system) from caseload and to other essential social services from temporary incapacitation of key staff.
> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now
Rarely for more than a couple weeks in a row, on a local basis, in response to particular sharp outbreaks, and invariably with much weaker measures than were taken for the same purpose earlier on in the pandemic, despite outbreaks that are much worse by every measure (in part, because the ultimate goal is much more limited and temporary, and in part because the political faction that deliberately avoided fighting the pandemic in the hopes of blaming the effects on political opponents has turned avoiding control measures into a quasi-religious doctrine to avoid accountability for their earlier malfeasance.)
> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it.
There's a substantial difference between "everyone will get it in a year or two" and "everyone will get it all within a couple of weeks", especially where hospital capacity is concerned. My city has one ICU bed available and hospitals have been diverting ambulances.
> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?
We've done it several times. After each spike flattens and then comes down, restrictions get progressively lifted. I'm in a blue state that took things quite seriously, and this summer still largely felt if the pandemic didn't exist.
We sort of expected that when you spend a trillion or two of our federal tax dollars, the hospitals might get better at dealing with it. This does not appear to have been the case.
Nursing's a 2-4 year degree. Doctors take substantially more, and training both requires docs/nurses as professors and clinical instructors. I'm quite dubious that chucking money at the problem would've solved the staffing issue effectively.
Why would we require either a nursing or a doctor degree? I do not understand why we didn't just train a crop of "covid specialists" who could handle caring for covid positive people and recognizing when they needed help from the real medical staff. Doing something like this I feel we could have easily and quickly increased medical capacity as much as needed for covid.
Most COVID patients even in hospitals aren't vented ICU ones, are they? While I get that you can't just throw money and catch doctors, is a fully credentialed doctor or nurse really necessary for every single task that could save a life in this kind of emergency situation?
It'd buy you an extra percent or two; the numbers have been vanishingly small. Mayo Clinic lost about a percent. Factor in the fact they're more likely to get sick and it's even closer to a net zero.
I'm not inclined to treat antivax beliefs as "professional", especially in the healthcare field.
Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.
If the workers have made it this far, either they have had it and have immunity or they are very good at keeping themselves safe. In either case we should want them working.
"The new report (Report 49) from the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team estimates that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times greater than that of the Delta variant. This implies that the protection against reinfection by Omicron afforded by past infection may be as low as 19%."
"Depending on the estimates used for vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection from the Delta variant, this translates into vaccine effectiveness estimates against symptomatic Omicron infection of between 0% and 20% after two doses, and between 55% and 80% after a booster dose. Similar estimates were obtained using genotype data, albeit with greater uncertainty."
> Hospitals are already working at or over capacity, they don't have 1 or 2 % to loose.
All the more reason to have a vaccination mandate.
This is fair in that there's a lot we'll need to learn about how our system works and fails under pressure from this all. Maximizing efficiency in peacetime leaves you ill-prepared for war, as it were.
> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless -
This couldn't be more wrong.
Even if everyone eventually gets it, you'd much rather get it as late as possible and outside of an infection spike like this one where rescue medications are depleted and hospitals are overburdened.
The medical knowledge and treatment options available today are far, far better than what we had at the beginning of the pandemic. And they continue to improve. Availability of the best treatments is also scarce, but continues to improve. The virus itself also appears to be slowly mutating to less fatal versions.
Even if you think it's inevitable, you want to delay it as long as possible.
That was true at the beginning of the pandemic, but we're long past that now. The recent variant is literally popping up all over the place. Despite the masks and the testing. And this latest variant seems to be extremely mild as in a three day cold - just like you said. So why are we making scaring the kids like this? Protect the kids with existing conditions, we know which ones are at the most risk, which are very few in that age group.
Hospitals tend to be most burdened in the winter anyway, which is unfortunate given transmission patterns, but I definitely think we're moving to a world of "only base policy on hospitalizations, not on raw case numbers" - and believe public health officials are largely moving in this direction too. In this world, once this surge is on the downswing, a lot more things look reasonable to relax.
One major change there, I think, is that we need to change the messaging on masks to get a mask to protect yourself if you are vulnerable or will be near those who are. Cloth masks have shown themselves to be better at a population level than nothing in some studies, but that's hardly the same thing as a medical-grade mask, which are now much more widely available than they were a year ago.
Where I live that has been the policy from the beginning. Keep the hospital system running.
That said, because hospitalizations lag case numbers, I assume they are trying to extrapolate from case numbers to future hospitalizations. Of course that changes depending upon the individual variant that is currently spreading.
> Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school.
> Begin upset at kids for taking these tests in the bathroom instead of at home.
You've misunderstood - he's not blaming the students but the administration in these points.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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.
> “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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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).
> - 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.
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.)
>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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 have preschool aged kids in Long Island. They have been to class for 3 days in the past 5 weeks. Every time they return to school there’s another student or teacher who tests positive and the class is closed for 10 days. Last year they missed 8 weeks of school. The impact is detrimental to the children and incredibly challenging for parents.
I'm super worried about all this. We all grew up hearing the stories about the country mobilizing to take on WWII and such. Whether those stories are fully accurate or applicable or not, I feel dismayed we can't even mobilize against a virus. We're going to have multiple generations who basically missed out on several years of education and will have an even greater distrust of institutions due to living in the wake of those institutions failing. These generations are growing up in a time of community disarray. It feels like nothing is working in this country and the world at large. Meanwhile, the capitalist machine is eating the country and world alive.
> 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.
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.
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.
It’s almost entirely due to cultural barriers. Teachers don’t want to do remote and neither do students. A lot of students want to socialize in person and a lot of teachers are extroverts. Put both in a very anti-social environment (remote) and they tend to be quite upset.
The big reason for older teachers retiring early is due to their network exploding due to stock market gains, fear of Covid, and hatred of remote teaching.
I think at this point - people are starting to learn that education wasn’t the primary goal of school. It was to be a daycare with the guise of learnings being done. Go with remote - no one wins.
These over-reactions, and anxiety, along with all of the testing that is caused by, and contributed to
the social obsession about it, does more damage to students than the COVID-19 virus.
All I see in the survey is that people have largely overestimated the impact of the pandemic, how many people have been infected and how many have died. In other words, they overestimated the current progression of the pandemic at the scale of society. That doesn't indicate people misunderstand the risk of the disease at personal scale.
This only holds if hospitalization is the only thing to be concerned about and in my opinion is just as misleading as focusing solely on death rate. I am much more concerned about long term effects of an infection, even if asymptomatic (which by definition doesn't lead to hospitalization), specifically on stamina/concentration.
Perceptions of hospitalization are a pretty reliable proxy for perceptions of overall risk, and it's clear from the data that most of the public is massively over-estimating the risk posed by COVID.
>I am much more concerned about long term effects of an infection
The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
This is a heart breaking read and very eye opening. I knew that it was bad but actually reading this from the perspective of a student really clarifies how poorly handled the pandemic has been within the school system and the type of stress that the students themselves are under just trying to survive.
I just want to point out that I see two common arguments here which are not mutually exclusive and are for some reason used to debate one another.
1) Those not at risk are a threat to those at risk (at home, at restaurants, etc). We should be concerned not because of their own safety, but because of the risk to others.
2) The author appears to be (or children in general) overly scared based on the risk COVID poses to them. They are relatively safe. I like to look at risk in terms of things I can relate to - safer than dying from a car accident this year. Parents should worry more about driving (1:10k per year [1]) than their child dying to COVID (1:500k [2]). The difference is even greater for injured in a car vs hospitalized by COVID (magnitudes of difference).
Can we stop talking around each other and recognize both are true?
[2] https://www.ncmd.info/news/covid-deaths-children-rare/ (I could list others - most sources are children deaths / total deaths which is different than children tested positive / children deaths - and that discounts all asymptomatic / not tested children).
1. It'd be nice if they held classes outside, when it's not freezing/windy/snowing "bomb cyclones" and where it's not concrete Manhattan.
2. Forcing kids back to school during the middle of a 600k-1M+ infections/day national peak seems absurd. Heck, the FAANG company I'm interviewing for cancelled all in-person interviews for 2021-2022. If the teachers are too worried and/or are getting sick, it's insane to "power through it" by getting more people sick. As much as people want "normalcy" because they're pandemic fatigued, it's not worth killing another million people. Heck, if lockdowns were done strictly similar to authoritarian countries like China or even resembling France's new laws, this pandemic wouldn't have reached endemic community spread. But no: must have no-mask "mah freedumbs".
3. Positive-tested non-symptomatic teachers should be setup with the technical capabilities to teach from home to school.
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.
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.
This is very sad to see at the Bronx High School of Science, a school I attended in the 70’s. Many of these kids will travel 1 1/2 hours each way to get there, hoping to get a world class educational opportunity.
It is what it is. People will get sick in school like they always have with colds and flus. The students (who are essentially at zero risk) are going to have to get over this fear eventually; we can only hope their young minds haven't been permanently warped by two years of fear mongering. The teachers should get vaccinated and ensure they aren't obese.
We're not "getting through the situation". The more spread the higher the likelyhood of new variants appearing, the more people that die of completely unrelated causes due to there being no available hospital care, and the greater the economic chaos.
It is a dramatically higher cost that gets paid in loss of life for those who choose not to be vaccinated and those who can't, and in staff shortages and basic infrastructure weakness for everybody else.
We are, just not in the way you'd prefer. Plagues much worse than this one happen regularly, and humanity gets through it.
> It is a dramatically higher cost
A dramatically higher cost than what we're currently doing to our youth? That's an opinion. So some teachers die, and the profession becomes temporarily younger and more male than before due to self-selected risk profiles. Sounds like how any "dangerous" job already works. This doesn't constitute a crisis worth sequestering our children, to me.
In one sentence you literally admit that plagues much worse come with a human cost of life that it just astounding, and then on the next sentence you complain about children having to lose a couple months of class? Are you dense??
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.
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.).
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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" ...
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 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.
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.
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.
I feel so bad for the next generation. Society is already acting as if it's pointless to educate them because all the opportunities to extract value from the economy have (apparently) already been monopolized by earlier generations.
The whole economy feels like a first-in-best-dressed pyramid scheme. If I had been born 5 years earlier, I'm sure I would have been very well off now. Still, it wasn't a complete failure for me, I did manage to benefit from some small opportunities which were presented to me...
But when I look at the people entering the workforce today, it's much worse. Unless you're the child of a rich person, you have 0 opportunities. Social mobility is 0. The message I'm getting from society nowadays is that the game of capitalism is over so instead of wasting your time with education, you may as well emotionally prepare yourself to flip hamburgers for the next 65 years.
I'd be surprised if developed countries are still capitalist in 20 years... But who knows, maybe the elites will find a way to break the next generation's morale even further to make them feel even more hopeless so that the idea of system change wouldn't even enter their heads.
Contrarian viewpoint: Everyone's eventually gonna catch COVID-19 and it can't be stopped.
All the travel restrictions, testing, school closures, quarantines, vaccine mandates, etc. are accomplishing is imposing costs and creating chaos.
People will be hospitalized. People will die. Hospitals will be overwhelmed.
It's unavoidable at this point, but no politician or policy maker has the courage to admit that.
COVID might have been containable with massive travel restrictions, testing, and contact tracing in the first couple months of 2020. Between the testing screwups, the factually challenged political posture adopted by a certain former POTUS in the early days of the pandemic, the WHO's general incompetence, China's questionable actions, the disease's ease of transmission, and the delay in travel restrictions, that scenario is long gone.
We're all going to take our X% roll of the dice against COVID. You can have a better roll if you get vaccinated, but then you have to consider: (1) The Y% chance the vaccine has a side effect that wasn't caught in trials and won't show up for years, and (2) The cost of meekly accepting that the government of a free country has the power to force people to get a medical treatment they don't want by taking away their ability to work or travel if they refuse, and also the privacy implications of allowing airlines and employers to ask for personal medical information, and the establishment of centralized databases for that information to deal with people who fake vaccination cards.
(I personally got vaccinated, but I'm not getting the booster; reason (2) above is a part of that calculus. Another part is that when I got the first vaccine, I justified that decision by reasoning that long-term side effects are unlikely as the MRNA, adjuvants, or other weird leftovers will wash out of the body within months. That justification goes out the window if the vaccine's not a one-and-done and you start accepting boosters.)
It's not a choice between (a) Massively disrupt these kids' lives, or (b) they catch COVID and some of them die. It's a choice between (a') Massively disrupt these kids' lives / educations, and some of them catch COVID and die, or (b') These kids have a reasonable education and some sense of normalcy, even though some of them will catch COVID and die.
It's the truth. Unfortunately, no one who has real authority to set policy is willing to admit it out loud.
Yeah what you said is pretty much it. And not only will everyone catch COVID at some point, but they will catch it many times over the course of their lives as the virus mutates; you'll get sick but it won't kill you (unless you are really unlucky). Sounds similar... oh right, just like the flu.
Imagine if you stepped on a nail. Guess what, it's gonna be painful no matter what you do. It's better to pull the nail out in 1 go and endure a large amount of pain in a short amount of time, than to pull the nail out 1cm a day and endure a moderate amount of pain over a long period of time. Right now, almost every human society has decided to do the latter and implement lockdown after lockdown; going into total mania over new variants and semi-mandating vaccines and pumping 3 shots (more to come!) of rushed, insufficiently tested vaccines within a single year. I say semi-mandating because if you are faced with a choice of losing your livelihood or getting a jab, do you really have a choice?
Here in Toronto, the government just started another 3-week lockdown. I believe this is the 3rd lockdown we've had.
In some weird way, I'm strangely at peace with everything that's happened. I think I have adopted somewhat of a fatalistic attitude, not towards COVID but rather towards human nature and our ape-like herd-like nature.
40 hospitals in the state of New York had to suspend elective surgeries due to COVID. The flu wasn't doing that. Flights are getting canceled like never before due to staff shortages. Restaurants in my home town are opening on half of the shifts due to COVID.
> COVID might have been containable with massive travel restrictions, testing, and contact tracing in the first couple months of 2020. Between the testing screwups, the factually challenged political posture adopted by a certain former POTUS in the early days of the pandemic, the WHO's general incompetence, China's questionable actions, the disease's ease of transmission, and the delay in travel restrictions, that scenario is long gone.
No, it would not have been possible. The simple fact that animals can catch it prevents that.
> I justified that decision by reasoning that long-term side effects are unlikely as the MRNA, adjuvants, or other weird leftovers will wash out of the body within months.
Vaccines don't have long-term side effects. They have side effects, but it's immediate or nothing.
It's also quite likely the 3rd shot is not a "booster", and skipping the 2nd shot in the series would be effective too. i.e. the actual problem is the first two shots were too close together.
These kids have been getting robbed of a proper education since well before the pandemic arrived. Holding them back a year is just going to create a generation of delayed adults that will ripple through the economy in ways we can't even imagine.
But lets try:
Shifting average graduation age to 18-19
* Drop out rate: TO THE MOON!
* Shit pay "high school" jobs no one wants: Now for adults!
* Wages don't just stagnate by age groups: Stagnant wages for everyone!
* Entering the work force a year later? Great reason to raise retirement age!
Grades are arbitrary. Plenty of kids start a year late sometimes on purpose by parents to give them a leg up. Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital. You seem very concerned about the economy.
> Plenty of kids start a year late sometimes on purpose by parents to give them a leg up
Don't be ridiculous. The amount of parents that do this is practically non-existent.
> Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital.
I disagree. I've worked in a top 5 largest school district for over 22 years. Under normal circumstances a handful of kids graduate high school with trigonometry under their belt, some with only algebra, and some in between (its the same for science). There's plenty of wiggle room in there. Colleges already offer remedial classes for kids that need it and its unfair to the students that managed to succeed even in this environment.
> You seem very concerned about the economy.
I shouldn't have used the word economy (as that tends to translate directly to "the stock market"). I really meant its bad for labor (but good for the companies that exploit labor).
Let me re-iterate my most important point: If everyone is held back, the dropout rate will be catastrophic for years to come.
"The economy" is whatever anyone does for work; it's right to be concerned about it. It doesn't mean "stock market numbers" - although retirees sure care about those.
The current procedures in place were for a Delta pandemic. If schools are to remain open now, the rules need to reflect Omicron.
Either you believe Omicron is contagious enough that you have to go back to 100% remote learning, or it is generally harmless enough (especially if you’re vaccinated) that you don’t have such strict standards in place (I am for the latter but that’s just my opinion.)
But the situation described in the Reddit post seems like the worst of all worlds.
That is a good point. But I have read (famous last words) Omicron is now 95% of tested cases, it’s staggering how fast it has overtaken previous strains.
If it was say a pretty stable 50/50 or even 75/25 ratio of Omicron to Delta, that might favor shutting down in-person schools. But this current explosion in cases and resulting chaos is almost all Omicron.
Forget myocarditis, forget the f#cking covid for a second.
If we want to apply about "let's think of the kids" mentality, then let's think of the kids.What will we do now or in the upcoming years when suicide rates, cognitive development problems, and a lot of other issues from subfields of psychiatry are >bound< to rise due to the measures imposed on these kids? We think of protecting others but we don't think of protecting kids who require more care: in the sense of them becoming self-reliant and developing themselves.
To me this is the biggest hypocrisy and bullsh#t indicator of this whole mentality of "protecting others".We don't need >restrictive< measures to protect kids themselves, the best thing we can do to protect them is to let them develop, which is the exact opposite kind of measure we take to protect adults and elderly people.
When people fear, they accept authority. Fearmongering is as old as first societies. An ancient priest sold a lie that unless people did sacrificies in his name, they'd be eaten by the demon. So the priest spreaded rumors about dangers of the demon and took down anyone who spreaded a counter-narrative. Today, "covid" is that omnipresent demon, and once people stop believing the lie, those "priests" will rebrand the demon into something else.
I would argue that panic and fear gives them the legitimacy to maintain physical control over some things that would have normally resulted in them being voted out of office or impeached.
Let us not forget that the roaring 20s and laissez faire capitalism, all of which were voted for, came after an era of pandemic flu, a world war, and increased government control of things under Wilson.
I mean, the top careers for psychopaths are: CEO, Politician, and Journalist. Remember the last time someone of them said "I'm not in this position because I want to have power, it's my duty to X that drives me"?
While people do die from pneumonia and staph, I am giving you the anecdotal evidence that nobody in our school (or myself) died from it, which you cannot refute, because it is true.
While these sicknesses ARE deadly, nobody stopped their lives in considering them. And 100% of people did not die from it, though they could have.
I was thinking along the same lines. My coworkers get tested all the time, mostly for no real reason. Ironically one guy was out with covid for a few days after being vaccinated and boosted.
All indications are that omicron is more often than not a cold… how many of the teachers would have normally come to work with a cold?
I like to think back to Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown telling everybody to come on down in 2019/early 2020 and wonder if all the panic wasn’t incited on a near daily basis, would this would be as big of a problem?
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.
Interestingly, the prevailing belief seems to be that parents, teachers, and students, all want to keep in-person school going. Yet when you actually hear from each of those groups, it's a mixed picture. Here's a HS student with boots on the ground describing the situation in what seems to be a fairly objective way. Elsewhere, teachers unions are voting to suspend school. This seems to be what a lot of people want, though of course I can't say that it's a consensus or how prevalent the view is.
Interestingly, the 'boots on the ground' that you've lent credence to is in agreement with what you assume is the teacher's union 'non-objective' stance.
Seems to me that the school is unnecessarily scaring kids more than doing anything else. These teens have almost nothing to fear from covid. Most of the rest of the country (outside major cities) almost ignores covid exists. Good article on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/where-i-li...
They are trying to ignore COVID and carry on as usual. The issues come from having so many teachers out sick.
Can’t run a school without teachers. Doesn’t make sense to force kids to come in just to pack them into overcrowded auditoriums because so many teachers are sick.
I don’t understand how people think schools are only a place for kids, who never interact with teachers or go home to their older adult parents.
Hate to tell you this, but this is not a good article on the subject. It was as performative as the mask wearing it complains about, and is oddly disconnected from reality considering how many deaths of people the author's age have happened in Michigan (Where he lives).
Sure the teens might be fine with Omicron (earlier variants had much higher chances of lasting health impact it appears), but not necessarily their parents or family back home.
Sure some fears and actions are overblown, but not to the degree being implied here.
My parents are from Michigan and I'm visiting them here. People get covid all over the place but people just don't care about it. That's really how it is here.
The divide in this country is just getting larger and lager. You have those who just no longer care about COVID, and those (like the kid in the article) who treat COVID as the most important control in their life.
Are COVID deaths higher in the places that ignore? Not that I could see.
There's going to be such a divide as these kids grow up.
Personally? It's time to move on. Get vaccinated (no boosters), and then ignore COVID. Every time you get exposed is like another booster to the immune system. By getting vaccinated first you cut disk of death to almost nothing.
If you control for population density and age then yes, death rates are higher in places with lower vaccination rates (which I presume qualifies as a form of not caring).
No longer caring about Covid isn't the same as being against vaccines. Many people no longer care about it because vaccines are widely available to anyone who wants the - except for young kids, who are much lower risk from Covid anyway.
I would even bet most anti-mandate folks in the US are in fact vaccinated, because the vast majority of US adults are vaccinated, including in states like Florida that are particularly anti-mandate.
Stats on how much mandates help given a vaccination rate would be very interesting.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> > 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I’m hearing a very similar thing from my high school aged nephews from the inner suburbs of NYC. I work for a NYC university and they are making some serious mistakes as well
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.
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 land of the free, home of the brave. Never expected this land would have a lot of problems. I thought only 3rd world countries have a lot of problems.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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).
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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-...
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.
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"
The quick takeaway is that school is that for the most vulnerable kids, school is about a lot more than education. Taking school away from those kids can be much more damaging than many people realize.
It seems to me like that right strategy would be to just say something like:
Forget about the education piece for a while, just provide the (very important for some people) day care part.