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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

#611
post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think it would be fair to say that science failed us if this is due to a lab leak, which appears to be the case. science made by possible by public health funding, in fact.

It's not a lab leak. Seriously shut up with this conspiracy nonsense.

Playing devil's advocate...It could be a lab leak (I've seen conflicting stories, some seemingly reputable), but I agree it doesn't matter if it is or isn't...and it leans (more into conspiracy territory than not) what matters is there's this cat, and it's out of the bag, and vaccines protect against it, Ivermectin does jack shit and other 'cures' are bullshit unless sanctioned by the broader medical community (Pfizer's new pill as an example).

Just TRUST your doctors, there's not a conspiracy to make everyone baren or something crazy, the vaccines are safer than going to a bar and having a few drinks.

ironically Covid itself probably has a better chance of making one sterile than the vaccine as ACE receptors are in the testes, and other reproductive organs, so it could sterilize people who get bad infections.

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

#612

I think I'm getting something different from this than what the author intended. * They mention their study hall as a "super spreader event". This feels...hysterical to me. Not just because it worries me that this kid is thinking about this in the way they are, but also because it's wrong . The risk this person faces is much more likely from the HVAC system in the school, not the study hall. * The way they talk about…

It's minutiae to be concerned when someone who just tested positive for covid is talking to you with their mask down?

In the context of the school, yes it does.

If you're in a school: you're catching omicron, and unless all of the students are wearing at least PAPR hoods all the time, everybody is catching it. Allowing yourself to get worked up about seeing a kid with his mask down in the bathroom is insane.

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

#613
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no idea how people can ignore evidence they dislike so easily. Isn’t this the natural response to the unknown? Denial? I guess not everyone likes Bayes’ theorem!

Even with Bayes' theorem, if your prior is zero, you can ignore any evidence - no matter how strong - that doesn't absolutely require the hypothesis to be true.

That’s why they say Bayesians can’t be atheists by definition. At least that’s how all atheists in my stats 101 class starting calling themselves agnostic. Another way to put it I learnt in a finance class : financial models behave alright, the problem comes from our lack of imagination, i.e. assigning a null probability to a future event :/

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

#614
post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a lab leak. Seriously shut up with this conspiracy nonsense.

Playing devil's advocate...It could be a lab leak (I've seen conflicting stories, some seemingly reputable), but I agree it doesn't matter if it is or isn't...and it leans (more into conspiracy territory than not) what matters is there's this cat, and it's out of the bag, and vaccines protect against it, Ivermectin does jack shit and other 'cures' are bullshit unless sanctioned by the broader medical community (Pfize…

No post body was provided.

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

#615
post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nursing's a 2-4 year degree. Doctors take substantially more, and training both requires docs/nurses as professors and clinical instructors. I'm quite dubious that chucking money at the problem would've solved the staffing issue effectively.

Why would we require either a nursing or a doctor degree? I do not understand why we didn't just train a crop of "covid specialists" who could handle caring for covid positive people and recognizing when they needed help from the real medical staff. Doing something like this I feel we could have easily and quickly increased medical capacity as much as needed for covid.

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

#616
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…

I'll be honest, I do not expect creativity or outside the box thinking from administrators. Maybe this is the audience here but they are not creatives, they are bureaucrats -- think bogons from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you are on the right track.

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

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market." When a multilateral, societal disaster strikes and schools struggle with contradicting demands: "What an inept bunch we have running these schools" Very few are being honest on why the kids have to be in school (so it doesn't disrupt parents' labor), so it's framed as "think of the children" when TFA s…

> When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market." Are school budgets being cut? I keep hearing people saying they are, but the US Department of Education says the opposite [1]: that per-pupil spending (adjusted for inflation) has increased greatly over the past century or so, and its trajectory has almost always been upward. What's the deal? (My bes…

> Are school budgets being cut?

Absolutely! Sometimes it's explicitly sold as an education budget cut (like Texas in 2011, narrowly averted in 2021 but there was a whole campaign for it), and occasionally it's cloaked in carrot/stick incentives where district that "excel" get more money, and the underperfoming ones get less. The lately, there's an attempt in red states to go around Brown v. (IMO) by promoting tax-funded charter schools, which take money away from public schools - so, technically the budget hasn't been cut, but public school districts (and schools) are getting less money.

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

#618
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reducing in person meetings isn’t enough for omicron. This is about closing schools. Should we keep schools closed for 5 year? How long? For vaccinated folks omicron is very manageable.

It isn't manageable if health care systems are overloaded in a winter wave, that is why every small bit to reduce spread currently helps.

Nobody is arguing about the next 5 years, it is the first winter after we started a very successful vaccination campaign. Without Omicron, Covid would already be mostly over.

Also total school closures could be prevented if we adopt more nuanced methods (such as alternating days of attendance, air filtration, etc.)

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

#619
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll be honest, I do not expect creativity or outside the box thinking from administrators. Maybe this is the audience here but they are not creatives, they are bureaucrats -- think bogons from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you are on the right track.

I think we can demand more of our bureaucrats, if all we expect are Bogons - all we'll get are Bogons. Increasingly, the only thing US administrators can do is spend more money on problems without delivering any improved results. This pattern is common across Academia, Private, and Public institutions.

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

#620
It is what it is. People will get sick in school like they always have with colds and flus. The students (who are essentially at zero risk) are going to have to get over this fear eventually; we can only hope their young minds haven't been permanently warped by two years of fear mongering. The teachers should get vaccinated and ensure they aren't obese.
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