Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 793 posts

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

#201

Post by raydev »

tlogan wrote: post #151
rndgermandude wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others already pointed out, covid is not just a danger to the kid, it's a danger to anybody in contact with the kid, like the parents the kid lives with, the teachers and aux staff the kid interacts with, the people the kid passes on the way to school. >Edit: Please with the “but kids bring Covid home” hysteria. We have vaccines now. Vaccination greatly reduces the risk of severe covid and death, but it doesn't el…

At the beginning of all these craziness the reason for shutdowns is to flatten the curve. We did not have vaccines and hospitals were under stress. I think we did a right thing. I’m not sure what is the goal now? We have vaccines and ICUs are not getting filled. Yeah, Covid can be though for some but oh well… we also have alcholism, drug addiction, flu, mono, etc. We cannot solve all. I guess we all need to come to r…

Where are you that ICUs are not filling up right now? Here in Ontario we’ve more than doubled ICU occupancy since December 18 and the rate is currently accelerating

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

#202

Post by ryanbrunner »

parkingrift wrote: post #95
Glyptodon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

A parent could be immunocompromised. Unvaccinated isn't the only risk factor for COVID.

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

#203

Post by axby »

kcplate wrote: post #193
axby wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

TL;DR: I agree that the public thought vaccine = no more virus. But I'm not sure if traditional vaccines actually mean that you're incapable of spreading it, or even getting sick in some cases.

I agree that the public was misled as to how effective vaccines would be at preventing transmission. Especially when the CDC said that fully vaccinated people didn't need to wear masks.

But how much more effective are traditional vaccines at preventing spread of illnesses? Wikipedia pointed me to this CDC page:

> The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective. [0]

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/measles/index.html

I was always under the impression that traditional vaccines were really effective, enough that the virus stops spreading eventually, but not enough that you are almost totally incapable of spreading the virus or even getting sick. Like the outbreaks in disneyland, obviously they only happened because of people being unvaccinated, but my understanding is that vaccinated people can still get sick from it. I found this Washington Post article:

> A 2015 measles outbreak linked to Disneyland led to 147 cases in multiple states as well as in Mexico and Canada. Many of those who were sickened were unvaccinated or did not know their vaccine record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/08/24/tourist-inf...

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

#204

Post by axby »

eigenrick wrote: post #178
axby wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not a virologist, but I interpret "omicron has a likelihood of 88% to escape current vaccines" as being rather ineffective. I've not found similar stats for Delta or other, but the authors of this paper seem to indicate that current vaccines aren't great against omicron. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451#

Thanks for the source, I've been so curious about this information but it's hard to find.

I should have said "relatively effective", since I'm also under the impression that the vaccines weren't super effective at reducing transmission of the original variant (compared to vaccines against other infections). But I also haven't seen much data, I vaguely remember hearing something from the WHO like "60% effective at reducing transmission of original variant, 40% effective against Delta", but I don't remember.

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

#205

Post by dang »

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…

The problem with comments like this is that they do the thing they're complaining about, which makes it worse.

To help find our collective way out of this, we should each find it in ourselves to contribute in a different spirit.

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

#206

Post by eigenrick »

happytoexplain wrote: post #184
eigenrick wrote: post #141

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…

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.

  > it doesn't sound honest to call them "hysterical", as the favorite insult goes right now.
You're right. I don't blame the people for their excessive fear of the virus. I blame the media and politicians using the virus for leverage.

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

#207

Post by cthalupa »

parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

>Edit: Please with the “but kids bring Covid home” hysteria. We have vaccines now.

>Edit 2: People, it’s not April 2020 any longer. We have two vaccines and a booster now.

Is it hysteria to point out that the newest variant is extremely effective in escaping antibody response? T-cells are great, but the reduced severity is balanced out by just how much better it is at infecting people - hospitals being overwhelmed is a real issue and one we're seeing.

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

#208

Post by doktorhladnjak »

kcplate wrote: post #193
axby wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

The issue isn’t with mRNA vaccines. There are conventional vaccines for COVID used in other countries like China and they’re even less effective. It seems to have more to do with respiratory viruses or coronaviruses specifically.

I also don’t know of a time in history where a vaccine was developed for an emerging disease as opposed to one that was already endemic with a lot of natural immunity around.

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

#209

Post by native_samples »

soneil wrote: post #192
native_samples wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#210

Post by viraptor »

parkingrift wrote: post #183
newsbinator wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those children bring covid home. 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.

In NYC you must be vaccinated to... * Work at any private company * Work at any public company * Work at a public school * Visit a public school * Attend a public school * Go to a restaurant, bar, gym, etc This is the law. The "30 people in a room for 8 hours" have a vaccination rate near 100%. So... what are we worried about, again? Why do teachers need to quarantine just because they may have been exposed to someon…

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.

Post reply on HN