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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

#131

Post by bagacrap »

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.

and ~everyone has had the opportunity to get a vaccine so...

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

#132

Post by gabxla »

lozenge wrote: post #110
parkingrift wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because of the absurd hyperbole and hysterics associated with Covid. It’s pandemonium precisely because of the hysterics, overreacting, and absurd rules and procedures. We’re seriously treating this like it’s the measles.

If you are saying "just have positive people attend school and don't bother testing contacts", then you're not just advocating to give all the kids COVID at the same time, but also all their parents and their parents' contacts - in a very short space of time. So basically the entire population? Why then are you only looking at the number of children that have died of COVID?

That is what Sweden has done. It now has a slightly lower cumulative death rate than locked-down Austria. It has a far lower cumulative death rate than the U.S.:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

It also has a far lower cumulative death rate than locked-down individual states like NY or Massachusetts.

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

#133

Post by analogdreams »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #31
fbmlk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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.

where is your proof of this statement. this is an assumption, not a fact.

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

#134

Post by ploika »

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…

Ireland is similarly keen to keep schools open.

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.

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

#135

Post by zaroth »

tzs wrote: post #128
parkingrift wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they’ll go home to their vaccinated parents. What edge case are you trying to solve by remaining in a state of hysteria?

What about the ~25% of US adults that are not vaccinated? As far as I know they are at least as likely as vaccinated adults to have school age children. Even taking into account that they probably have a higher chance of homeschooling, that still leaves a lot of kids in public schools whose parents are not vaccinated. Are you in the "they've had enough time to get vaccinated, so if they haven't done so yet let them g…

We’ve made the vaccine free, and widely available. If there were still people waiting weeks to get a vaccine they want to take then I can see an argument why we should all suffer serious injury (like what’s happening at this school) to try to give people more time.

There is no endpoint where SARS-CoV-2 is over. The strains will keep coming and Covid is endemic.

My personal experience is that each time you get COVID is more mild than the last, particularly if you are vaccinated, and this is borne out in the numbers.

Surprisingly the mutations are enough that getting it repeatedly is totally possible. Even an actual sterilizing vaccine that worked in the nasal passages might not have stopping this.

If not now, when? What’s your endpoint for when the extremely damaging and poverty inducing hysteria will stop?

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

#136

Post by tzs »

ajross wrote: post #71
michaelt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> 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…

> 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.

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

#137

Post by danielvaughn »

voisin wrote: post #130
parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

Death is only one outcome. Other consequences (e.g. scarred lung tissue) also exist, and don’t fall neatly in the stats that are regularly discussed.

Another long term (and equally hidden) consequence is the loss of critical educational development in children. We adults can toss off 2 years because it's just a drop in the bucket to us, but 2 years for a child represents a potentially staggering setback in their mental development.

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

#138

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

sovietmudkipz wrote: post #79

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…

A+ sarcasm

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

#139

Post by axby »

parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitalizations, it can? Or was it expected that the vaccine would reduce transmission to the point where it wouldn't spread so much?

This sounds reasonable, but aren't fully vaccinated people ending up in the hospital pretty regularly too [2]? Using the 94% effective figure from the early trials, say fully vaccinated people are 20 times less likely to be hospitalized.

I don't know much about virology but I understand exponential growth. It looks like the cases are doubling every 2 weeks (edit: I guess this might even be a few days? See [0]). In a few months, almost everyone will get it. In the last two week period, won't half the population catch it? In that case, even with 100% vaccination, hospitalizations would still be 1/20 of half the maximum due to COVID. Right?

That's something I've never understood about the pandemic. Is reducing hospitalizations by a factor of 20 enough that having everyone get the virus is no longer a concern? Or was it expected that the vaccines reduce transmission enough that everyone wouldn't get it anymore? Canada has like 75% [1] (edit: oops, originally I said 85% here, but I guess that's in people 12 years and older) or higher vaccination and is still seeing record case numbers everywhere.

This isn't really an argument for or against kids in schools. I am just surprised that people are so quick to say "we have a vaccine so there's no need to worry about COVID in anyone vaccinated now". Certainly it seems like many health officials say something similar, so I must have missed something. (Or are they just trying to encourage everyone to get vaccinated? I know that many people don't really understand the details and would (erroneously) just say "it's not 100% effective so why bother")

Sources:

* "The spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus appears to be doubling every two to three days" [0]

* "The cumulative percent of people fully vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine in Canada was 76.83% as of January 1, 2022." [1]

* "Fifty per cent of hospitalizations now, in Quebec, are due to people not having been vaccinated," [2]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/08/omicron-covid-...

[1]: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccination-cover...

[2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/duclos-mandatory-vaccinatio...

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

#140

Post by denton-scratch »

jaclaz wrote: post #22
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…

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.

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