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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

#191

Post by native_samples »

soneil wrote: post #187
parkingrift wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

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

#192

Post by soneil »

native_samples wrote: post #191
soneil wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

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.

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

#193

Post by kcplate »

axby wrote: post #169
eigenrick wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that public policy is based around two flawed notions that omicron has brought to light: 1. The vaccines will become decreasingly relevant, unless we can provide technology to update vaccines as quickly as they mutate. Even then, it'll be like flu vaccines. They'll help, but won't stop the spread. 2. Barring some technological breakthrough, Covid will never go away. We'll all contract it. Then it…

> The vaccines will become decreasingly relevant, unless we can provide technology to update vaccines as quickly as they mutate. Even then, it'll be like flu vaccines. They'll help, but won't stop the spread. Interesting, I haven't been following the pandemic as closely as I used to, but I was under the impression that the existing mRNA vaccines still work fairly well against new variants (including omicron), but tha…

The real problem is the word “vaccine”. The mRNA vaccines do not really work in a way that other vaccines do, and more importantly how we understand other vaccines to work.

Prior to this pandemic the layman understanding of a vaccine was that they generally prevented you from “contracting” the disease. You get the shot, you don’t get the disease. We were basically sold this notion for the mRNA vaccines early in 2021. However, the reality was different. Whether by way of mutation, or simply by the way the mRNA vaccines only work against a specific portion of the virus, mRNA tech seems to not be as effective at the prevention of infection but better at the prevention of severe infection. In essence, it’s not a “vaccine” as the public understood the word. However, it is a tool, and still a relevant one in diminishing the severity of the pandemic, it’s just a shame that the expectations that were set were way off.

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

#194

Post by kcplate »

phaedrus441 wrote: post #164
tinus_hn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The CDC estimates that 573 kids between the ages of 5-18 have died of Covid It’s even worse, these are kids that died with COVID, not of COVID. So if a child tests positive and then gets killed in a car crash, it’s in this statistic.

I decided to look into this, because I hear this bandied about frequently (i.e. "these death numbers aren't real because they count even if they incidentally had COVID-19"). Turns out, this isn't correct. Here's the CDC site with that data: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-... Here's the site with information about how a death is counted: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm…

But it has happened, and several times I recall early in the pandemic when some of the reporting rules were perhaps not as clear. Whether it’s frequent now…not sure, there was certainly enough media scrutiny generated then to force a greater degree of care for accuracy now.

https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/fox-35-investigates-questi...

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

#195

Post by disambiguation »

Glyptodon wrote: post #90
parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

Ah, yes because spreading to parents and family who might well die is irrelevant if the students are likely to not die...

The evidence that child activity affects the spread of covid among adults is thin.

> Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/briefing/american-childre...

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

#196

Post by kmos17 »

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…

remote is fine for parents who can work from home, but what about others with young children?

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

#197

Post by phaedrus441 »

kcplate wrote: post #194
phaedrus441 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided to look into this, because I hear this bandied about frequently (i.e. "these death numbers aren't real because they count even if they incidentally had COVID-19"). Turns out, this isn't correct. Here's the CDC site with that data: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-... Here's the site with information about how a death is counted: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm…

But it has happened, and several times I recall early in the pandemic when some of the reporting rules were perhaps not as clear. Whether it’s frequent now…not sure, there was certainly enough media scrutiny generated then to force a greater degree of care for accuracy now. https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/fox-35-investigates-questi...

Of course it has happened and probably will continue to happen. The key is that this isn't a systemic error, but rather providers going against the government's reporting rules (either mistakenly or intentionally). One could imagine mistakes erring in the opposite direction, though nobody is looking for that (nor would it be an easy thing to discover).

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

#198

Post by native_samples »

Glyptodon wrote: post #109
parkingrift wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we go. Move the goalpost. The parents and family should go get vaccinated, no?

Not moving the goal post. I agree that criminalization of leaving home for the unvaccinated gets more appealing by the day. But I also don't know that vaccines actually end it at this point.

Why - they aren't a threat to anyone. There's no real difference in transmissibility. Unless you think the vaccines don't work, in which case, why do you even care.

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

#199

Post by native_samples »

sofixa wrote: post #176
gabxla wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should compare apples to apples. Not all societies are alike, and there are huge variances in population density, temperatures, style of living, etc. between different countries ( e.g. places where people share food and ear with their hands vs places where most people live alone in houses vs places where whole extended families share the same house, etc. etc.). Sweden fared drastically worse than its neighbours w…

The "neighbour" argument is DOA and has been from the start. There are no meaningful differences between Sweden and other countries except in its government response - Scandinavians aren't aliens and thus nobody was claiming they were incomparable back at the start. Instead it was headlines like "Sweden is a cautionary tale to the world". The idea that you aren't allowed to compare them only appeared once Sweden proved that COVID mitigations were a terrible failure.

The real question is actually what's special about Norway and such. Sweden isn't an outlier here.

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

#200

Post by native_samples »

tzs wrote: post #177
zaroth wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The endpoint is when enough of the people who refuse to get vaccinated have gotten it enough times that their hospitalization rates are as low as those of vaccinated people, so that those of us who are vaccinated can get decent treatment if we get a serious injury or non-COVID illness. Omicron looks like it has a good change to get us to that point.

I hate to break it to you but most people hospitalized with COVID are already vaccinated in many health systems. That's true in the UK for instance. US data is often garbage so it's harder to say there but it's unlikely to be different.

Most people are vaccinated + vaccines don't work very well = most COVID hospitalizations are vaccinated.

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