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

I don't think poor plumbing is exactly what we're going for here.

> this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators.

Not at all. This is the fault of all the other societal damage done in the name of "stopping COVID", it's the fault of the "public health officials".

Schools are constrained by zero covid policies still clung to by anti-science public health, which mandate widespread testing followed by far reaching preventative isolation which bars health students from school.

Imagine you have a class of 20. Each kids in that class goes to 6 other classes of 20, largely different kids. Now one "tests positive". The school is then tasks by "public health" to find who sat near that kid in each and every class, and "quarantine" all of those kids. Rinse and repeat, ever. single. case.

Many schools have realized this is unsustainable absurdity and rightfully stopped complying, but the more "stay safe" they are, the more they comply. Consequently, the less those schools are able to stay open and effective.

The fact that "public health" has not been willing to reevaluate their policies and insist on sticking to policies that are literally damaging to the health of the public is telling.

You can catch omicron from walking into an elevator someone else coughed in.

Contrarian viewpoint: Everyone's eventually gonna catch COVID-19 and it can't be stopped.

All the travel restrictions, testing, school closures, quarantines, vaccine mandates, etc. are accomplishing is imposing costs and creating chaos.

People will be hospitalized. People will die. Hospitals will be overwhelmed.

It's unavoidable at this point, but no politician or policy maker has the courage to admit that.

COVID might have been containable with massive travel restrictions, testing, and contact tracing in the first couple months of 2020. Between the testing screwups, the factually challenged political posture adopted by a certain former POTUS in the early days of the pandemic, the WHO's general incompetence, China's questionable actions, the disease's ease of transmission, and the delay in travel restrictions, that scenario is long gone.

We're all going to take our X% roll of the dice against COVID. You can have a better roll if you get vaccinated, but then you have to consider: (1) The Y% chance the vaccine has a side effect that wasn't caught in trials and won't show up for years, and (2) The cost of meekly accepting that the government of a free country has the power to force people to get a medical treatment they don't want by taking away their ability to work or travel if they refuse, and also the privacy implications of allowing airlines and employers to ask for personal medical information, and the establishment of centralized databases for that information to deal with people who fake vaccination cards.

(I personally got vaccinated, but I'm not getting the booster; reason (2) above is a part of that calculus. Another part is that when I got the first vaccine, I justified that decision by reasoning that long-term side effects are unlikely as the MRNA, adjuvants, or other weird leftovers will wash out of the body within months. That justification goes out the window if the vaccine's not a one-and-done and you start accepting boosters.)

It's not a choice between (a) Massively disrupt these kids' lives, or (b) they catch COVID and some of them die. It's a choice between (a') Massively disrupt these kids' lives / educations, and some of them catch COVID and die, or (b') These kids have a reasonable education and some sense of normalcy, even though some of them will catch COVID and die.

It's the truth. Unfortunately, no one who has real authority to set policy is willing to admit it out loud.

Omicron is roughly as contagious as chicken pox. Remember what happened when a single child got chicken pox before the vaccine? There was never a question that everybody was about to get chicken pox--the only thing you could do was manage the timeframe.

Before the vaccine, people would have chicken pox parties so all the children were exposed simultaneously and everybody could get it over with. With Omicron, it's simply the reverse, it's blowing through everybody so fast that it will burn itself out in a couple months.

After that, it will simply have a constant endemic background level like chicken pox prior to the vaccine and the flu.

We are in the endgame. It isn't the endgame we wanted, but it is the endgame.