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I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

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Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#41

Post by davidgrenier »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #26
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #14

[flagged]

>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 listene…

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.

I'd say the evidence is against you.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#42

Post by xattt »

detaro wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#43

Post by ldoughty »

brohoolio wrote: post #9

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 r…

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.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#44

Post by armchairhacker »

tomp wrote: post #16

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 . Basically new "security theatre…

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.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#45

Post by roenxi »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #25
tomp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're afraid of the virus, get vaccinated yourself. That's literally the most you can do. If you're still afraid of the virus, you should know that vaccinating people (even forcefully) won't stop transmission. The virus is endemic. The only thing that can change between now and "back to normal" future is, your mind.

I'm not afraid. I am triple-vaxxed not for myself but out of solidarity for those around me. I am simply at the end of my patience with people going to protests clogging my city and creating politicians using the greenpass and constant checks and testing to create a divide. mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone. there can still be an exemption i…

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.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#46

Post by II2II »

tomp wrote: post #16

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 . Basically new "security theatre…

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.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#48

Post by _bohm »

beardedwizard wrote: post #23
fourseventy wrote: post #13

How many students that got sick are experiencing symptoms more severe than the common cold? It seems like the chaos is caused by the attempted solutions to covid and not the actual symptoms? Edit: 7 day rolling average of COVID cases according to https://www1.nyc.gov/ is 32k cases per day with 38 deaths. So there is a 0.1% mortality rate.

You are failing to consider the spread to vulnerable populations where the symptoms are fatal. Omicron is not mild, people with vaccines have mild symptoms due to its efficacy. All these kids come home to families with parents and grandparents. They also have young siblings.

I encourage you to go compare the plots of cases and deaths in NYC over the past 3 weeks and reconsider this statement.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#49

Post by lordnacho »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #14

[flagged]

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.

Re: I am a New York City public high school student. The situation is beyond control

#50

Post by ethanbond »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #28
rini17 wrote: post #5

The pandemic is constantly reminding us how our institutions weeded out all agency and were running on inertia. Still are trying to, in fact.

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.
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