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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

#161

Post by sovietmudkipz »

totetsu wrote: post #160
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…

say that's quite a rhetorical technique you've got going there, you got a name for it?

Laying it on pretty thick ;)

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

#162

Post by eigenrick »

axby wrote: post #139
parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitaliza…

I think the issue is that public policy is based around two flawed notions that omicron has brought to light:

1. 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.

2. Barring some technological breakthrough, Covid will never go away. We'll all contract it. Then it will mutate and well contact it again in the next year, and the next, forever

As such, our current policies are ineffective, and lockdown is by no means sustainable forever.

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

#163

Post by voisin »

danielvaughn wrote: post #137
voisin wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death is only one outcome. Other consequences (e.g. scarred lung tissue) also exist, and don’t fall neatly in the stats that are regularly discussed.

Another long term (and equally hidden) consequence is the loss of critical educational development in children. We adults can toss off 2 years because it's just a drop in the bucket to us, but 2 years for a child represents a potentially staggering setback in their mental development.

I agree with you, but I think it overstated the value of schooling as the only source of this development. There are so many free online education sources it is truly amazing, and yet for some reason our society’s answer to the pandemic was to have Zoom school at home which no one is happy with, rather than embrace different delivery methods that are actually engaging. Khan Academy, Duolingo, etc etc. I don’t think my kids are behind at all as a result of utilizing these technologies.

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

#164

Post by phaedrus441 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #106
parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

> The CDC estimates that 573 kids between the ages of 5-18 have died of Covid It’s even worse, these are kids that died with COVID, not of COVID. So if a child tests positive and then gets killed in a car crash, it’s in this statistic.

I decided to look into this, because I hear this bandied about frequently (i.e. "these death numbers aren't real because they count even if they incidentally had COVID-19"). Turns out, this isn't correct.

Here's the CDC site with that data: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...

Here's the site with information about how a death is counted: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

In short, for a death to be counted as COVID, it needs to be listed on the death certificate (which only lists diagnoses directly related to the death).

For example, when I write a death certificate (which is a standardized form), it sounds something like this: Cause of Death: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome as a Consequence of COVID-19 pneumonia

Guidance from my state (SC) specifically says: "The Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. The preferred term to use in the cause of death is COVID-19." So I can see possibilities where we don't know if it was the MRSA pneumonia superimposed on the COVID-19 or the COVID-19 itself, and we are supposed to report COVID on there, but the idea that a car crash victim would be counted in the statistics seems unlikely.

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

#165

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

ploika wrote: post #134
detaro wrote: post #3

Has any country made noticeable progress in improving the situation for schooling (EDIT: during covid waves) compared to lets say 18 months ago? Here in Germany the mantra seems to be "keep the schools running at all costs!" - except if "costs" means spending anything or preparing anything. So we don't have meaningful improvements done to schools, still don't have universal setups for remote or hybrid schooling, any…

Ireland is similarly keen to keep schools open. Children from age 5 upwards are being vaccinated as of today, and the main focus in school buildings is on getting adequate ventilation and HEPA filters into classrooms. Contact tracing in schools has been not been a priority, for better or for worse. The will is there, and there's money available to spend, but the implementation has been a bit less than stellar.

Yeah,I just don't get why we stopped contact tracing schools.

Well I do actually, it was causing so much disruption that it made in person schooling almost impossible.

HEPA filters seem like an obvious win, but there's clearly a bunch of RCT extremists in NPHET ;)

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

#166

Post by gus_massa »

voisin wrote: post #130
parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

Death is only one outcome. Other consequences (e.g. scarred lung tissue) also exist, and don’t fall neatly in the stats that are regularly discussed.

The flu has a lot of possible not deadly complications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Prognosis

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

#167

Post by walkhour »

Around half a million cases of child abuse are reported in USA [0]. It hard/impossible to find data post 2019 (if you have it, please share), but there are estimates that the number of reported cases lowered by between 20 to 40%, mainly due to kids not going to school and teachers not being able to report it [1][2]. Less than a 1000 kids ages of 5-18 have died of Covid [3].

Tentatively tens/hundreds of thousands of kids are being silently abused in their homes, and they have been prevented to go to school, where teachers can find out. I can't find a way to justify the policy of keeping children at home, which is effectively a transfer of health from kids to adults after we have vaccines, it's simply immoral.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/639375/number-of-child-a... [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/has-child-abuse-s... [2] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/child-abuse-cases-got-more... [3] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...

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

#168

Post by soneil »

parkingrift wrote: post #74

Quoted post unavailable.

The single biggest issue I'm seeing in the original post is 40% of teachers being out. All the talk of being corralled into study hall is the fallout from this 40% figure.

With this, it really does't matter if zero children 5-18 have died of covid - the school still can't operate correctly with half of its staff missing.

Solving "sending children to school" without solving "having teachers available" results in zero education, only free childcare. If that's the goal, sure, shove them all in study hall. If we actually plan to educate them, we need to figure out how to insulate the educators from the children.

Between vaccinations and the nature of the current variant, the mortality rate is essentially a non-issue. That's fantastic news. But it doesn't change that during a surge of cases, on-site schooling isn't really fit for purpose. "Probably won't die" isn't the only relevant metric.

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

#169

Post by axby »

eigenrick wrote: post #162
axby wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: How did a vaccine with a reduction of hospitalizations by a factor of 20 (94%) take us from "shut everything down" to "cases no longer matter"? (Caveat: maybe for omicron it's even less severe?) Edit: specifically, from what I understand the healthcare system can't handle everyone being unvaccinated and getting the virus, it would be overwhelmed by hospitalizations. But with a 20 times reduction in hospitaliza…

I think the issue is that public policy is based around two flawed notions that omicron has brought to light: 1. 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. 2. Barring some technological breakthrough, Covid will never go away. We'll all contract it. Then it…

> 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 that effectiveness goes down after 6 months (hence boosters). I'm not really sure if "effectiveness" is in preventing severe illness or transmission.

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

#170

Post by Jiejeing »

bonzini wrote: post #120
Jiejeing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 2, France is still not in lockdown despite having a much higher number of cases per capita than the US (400k cases for 66M people last monday), and schools are run to the ground in a similar manner than what is described in the reddit post, if not worse (they relaxed the isolation and testing rules very recently). edit: maybe you were referring to the "vaccine pass", but since vaccinated people can have and…

> since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else). This is a very partial view. Vaccinated people can have the virus and transmit it, but they will have it less, transmit it less, and anyway have lesser symptoms if they catch it from someone else. The third is why a vaccine pass helps the healthcare syst…

This was a partial view, yes, the viral charge is lessened when the vaccine comes into play, which is a good thing, but it does not help much that much the several hundred thousand people for whom the vaccine is useless, nor the ones who got scammed with a fake vaccine pass (and are now in limbo since they can enter places where the pass is required but not get protected).

Instead of a stupid pass, make the vaccine mandatory and work on transmission (better ventilation everywhere, which will be beneficial in any case, N95 masks, good planning to avoid spreader events, adapted plannings, burn openspaces, etc). Not working on transmission means the virus is free to mutate in he humongous pool of contaminated people (which is, due to statistics, a large majority of vaccinated), or even recombine with the delta strain which is still peaking in cases at the same time.

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