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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

#561

Post by ceejayoz »

starkd wrote: post #518
kixiQu wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing high school students never live in multigenerational households, right? Or otherwise have family members at high risk?

When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?

> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it.

There's a substantial difference between "everyone will get it in a year or two" and "everyone will get it all within a couple of weeks", especially where hospital capacity is concerned. My city has one ICU bed available and hospitals have been diverting ambulances.

> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?

We've done it several times. After each spike flattens and then comes down, restrictions get progressively lifted. I'm in a blue state that took things quite seriously, and this summer still largely felt if the pandemic didn't exist.

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

#562

Post by elcritch »

barry-cotter wrote: post #431
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in West Virginia. A LOT of people lived in a trailer - as in they actually owned the trailer and in many cases the land, too (my parents). Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless? And even if you're renting... Why count someone who rents a trailer as homeless but not someone who rents an apartment?

> Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless? It's a social class thing. It's not about having a reliable, warm, dry, safe place to sleep. It's about whether a middle class university graduate's friends would have considered them to have failed at life. Living in a coffin sized apartment with cockroaches everywhere in New York is something they could see themselves doing at some point in their life for…

Not sure why you're getting so downvoted. You might be stating it a bit dramatically, but I've personally seen this attitude in people when living (by choice) in an RV. Many people seem to abhor the idea that someone doesn't live like them. There's broad discrimination against people living in RV parks and trailers in most municipalities.

Many cities ban you putting an RV on your own plot of land, regardless of the purpose. They often ban trailer parks, severely restrict them, etc to the detriment of many economically vulnerable people. There's often a component of racism too as some trailer parks home lots of immigrants or hispanic folks, marking them doubly undesirables.

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

#563

Post by redisman »

jakeinspace wrote: post #394
another_story wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.

I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.

This just seems like a very naive idea in a very confident HN manner. Have you met teenagers?

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

#564

Post by mbg721 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #561
starkd wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?

> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. There's a substantial difference between "everyone will get it in a year or two" and "everyone will get it all within a couple of weeks", especially where hospital capacity is concerned. My city has one ICU bed available and hospitals have been diverting ambulances. > But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now? We've done it several times. After…

We sort of expected that when you spend a trillion or two of our federal tax dollars, the hospitals might get better at dealing with it. This does not appear to have been the case.

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

#565

Post by Diesel555 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #539
starkd wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's truly sad. It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses. From his comments, I wonder if he actually thinks he will be dead from standing next to someone who just tested positive. The preliminary results from UK and SA indicate that this recent wave could be a blessing in that it serves as an innoculation rather than severe illness. And children his age are no…

> It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses. Are we reading the same post? The kids are going to school. The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school. > And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with. Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation? They have older parents at home. They have older teachers in the cl…

> The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.

This depends on how you define "so sick". Tested positive? Yes. Hospitalized? I bet not all (or > 1.8% [1]) of them. I notice when verbiage sensationalizes COVID. The OP, I believe, is also sensitive to this.

> Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation?

This is the primary argument. Your two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. He can believe that the kids are overly scared based on the statistics because, well, they are not at that much risk while at the same time recognizing that individuals not at risk put other people who are at risk in danger.

This is why we fail to have beneficial conversation, we talk around each other.

[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/omicron-...

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

#566

Post by starkd »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #548
starkd wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?

> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - This couldn't be more wrong. Even if everyone eventually gets it, you'd much rather get it as late as possible and outside of an infection spike like this one where rescue medications are depleted and hospitals are overburdened. The medical knowledge and treatment options available today are far,…

That was true at the beginning of the pandemic, but we're long past that now. The recent variant is literally popping up all over the place. Despite the masks and the testing. And this latest variant seems to be extremely mild as in a three day cold - just like you said. So why are we making scaring the kids like this? Protect the kids with existing conditions, we know which ones are at the most risk, which are very few in that age group.

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

#567

Post by objectivetruth »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #314
caddemon wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the OP? What they are doing in school right now is also a joke!

I did. Here's the line that stuck out to me: > One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. I suggest fixing the ludicrously miscalibrated risk assessment of omicron as a better route. How many of these legions of absent teachers even have symptoms?

No post body was provided.

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

#568

Post by dude187 »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #335
Invictus0 wrote: post #37

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]

Everyone is the center of their own universe. It's time to stop putting up with infringements on our freedom, which we've had two years to show they do nothing anyways.

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

#569

Post by dragonwriter »

starkd wrote: post #518
kixiQu wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing high school students never live in multigenerational households, right? Or otherwise have family members at high risk?

When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?

> When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it

No, it means that it tends to be maintained at some (whether very high or very low or other) stable baseline level in a region in the absence of external inputs or interventions.

> Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless

No, it doesn't, and wouldn't even if “endemic” did mean everyone would get it, since the control measures are not intended to prevent people from eventually getting COVID in the absence of a fundamental change in available countermeasures, but to reduce the speed of particular outbreaks and mitigate acute impacts to health systems (which affects ability to treat anyone needing the system) from caseload and to other essential social services from temporary incapacitation of key staff.

> But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now

Rarely for more than a couple weeks in a row, on a local basis, in response to particular sharp outbreaks, and invariably with much weaker measures than were taken for the same purpose earlier on in the pandemic, despite outbreaks that are much worse by every measure (in part, because the ultimate goal is much more limited and temporary, and in part because the political faction that deliberately avoided fighting the pandemic in the hopes of blaming the effects on political opponents has turned avoiding control measures into a quasi-religious doctrine to avoid accountability for their earlier malfeasance.)

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