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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

#401

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".

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.

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

#402
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 n…

> > 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.

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

#403
post #360

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...

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 ign…

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).

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

#404
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% capa…

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 lear…

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.

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

#405
post #65
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.

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…

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.

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% capa…

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…

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?

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

#407
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of what you say is just plain wrong. - 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. Co…

> except for some Australians

Australia has more new daily cases per capita than US right now, according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

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

#408
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Ok. this is from wsj.com "Omicron mortality is likely around 0.2%, roughly in line with seasonal flu." https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-variant-may-end-up-savi... Pretty close to my back of the napkin calculations.

> “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.

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

#409

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…

> 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 a…

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.

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Well to be fair vulnerable populations are not the center of the universe either.
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