> There was no period in which it had super strong lockdowns or super excessive restrictions. "America" is 300 million people and 50 separate states in a federal system. The reflexive urge to treat it as a single entity is central to the problem I'm discussing. On the more functional side, the lack of border controls between states in a federal system made tamping cases down to minimal levels a big challenge. The ent…
"UK schools have never entirely shut down" Not really. Attendance in person was about 15%, being limited to key workers' children who couldn't arrange other childcare, and children with special educational needs. Teachers focused on remote teaching, while in person learning was neglected. In person teaching resumed fully Sep 2020-Dec 2020, and was interrupted again Jan-Mar 2021.
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…
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.
Just. Stop. You’re hurting kids by spreading the myth that school funding is the problem, because it allows the real problems to continue festering. US public schools are among some of the best funded in the world: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15434/the-countries-spend...
'Since March 2020, the federal government has provided $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools …'[0] 'There are 130,930 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S.'[1] $190 billion divided by 130,930 is $1.45 million dollars per school. Now, I will readily grant that a million dollars just ain't what it used to be, but it is, even in 2021, still a heck of a lot of money, and it sure sounds from the raw numbers that p…
There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.
You don’t need to rapid test every student every day for a year! $4,000 per kid is a ton of money for PPE, remote learning supplies, test kits, ventilation, etc. The money has mostly been set on fire.
Death rate peaks happen about three weeks after case load peaks. This has been very consistent through the pandemic (at least everywhere that has good test reporting), you can play with graphs at https://91-divoc.com/ or elsewhere to see the effect. Certainly if omicron had the same behavior as previous variants, we'd know by now. Continued worries aren't about severity lag, but about whether or not there's something…
Well "herd immunity" isn't really possible for respiratory diseases because our immunity wanes too fast. If we had "herd immunity" against cold/flu you wouldn't get it every year.
That's not correct. In fact we don't get influenza[1] every year, and the reason is most of us have had (or been immunized to, or both) most or all of the variants at some point in the past. Flu variants aren't pandemics, they're just endemic diseases.
"Herd immunity" isn't a synonym for eradication. It just means that we reach a stage where disease spread is effectively controlled by existing immune systems and most outbreaks remain limited and local.
[1] We do get colds, which are any of a zillion different endemic diseases all subject to the same math.
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.
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.
And they should ensure they're not diabetic, above 60, and just be perfectly healthy, right? "It is what it is" but as of now staff can't work because they're out sick.
Let the natural immunity develop quickly rather than dragging it out. Everyone is getting this disease.
I’m mostly curious about why the maturity period was prolonged by 5-10 years from what the human race had 100 or 1000 years ago. I’m not talking about education but the transition from youths to adulthood.
In 1922, a 14-year-old in the US could expect to live maybe another 40 years; in 2022, that number is likely to be at least 70. As a fraction of life expectancy, adolescence is actually relatively short right now.
Quality of life over quantity should be a metric somehow. Sure the internet and access for more people should raise the bar, but I am not sure about that. A lot of noise out there. Yes, an average life expectancy of 78 years in the US, sounds like a lot compared to around 60 in the 1920s, but with a current obesity prevalence of over 40% (obesity and severe obesity) in the US, I am not sure we can gauge a year-for-a-year in this comparison. And people wonder why an advanced country such as the US can get hit so bad by COVID, and blame it on each other, when over 70% of deaths and serious hospitalizations are linked to obesity. I think we can allow children to mature as early as they seem to be able to take it on, and not over pressure them while doing this; isn't that what being a parent is all about - assessing and nurturing together? I certainly had to grow up quick living below or at the poverty line in a bad neighborhood in my childhood and all that entailed, along with my relatives sent at age 18 to 22 to Korea, Vietnam, and other wars that followed. Children who grew/grow up on farms with chores and responsibilities and with similar corollaries in cities at an early age sounds better to me than coddling them into their mid-twenties, but that is my opinion from the various young people I have interviewed and worked with in white-collar and blue-collar jobs (construction, diving, ropework, machining, welding, etc...) as well as to the older and younger children I have raised in my family.
There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.
You don’t need to rapid test every student every day for a year! $4,000 per kid is a ton of money for PPE, remote learning supplies, test kits, ventilation, etc. The money has mostly been set on fire.
Yep and now it’s gone. Schools are notoriously wasteful when it comes to large sums of money. Almost none of the allocations go to high ROI Items like hiring teachers or buying basic school supplies. Schools love buying tech though because it’s always a black hole for capital spending
I have preschool aged kids in Long Island. They have been to class for 3 days in the past 5 weeks. Every time they return to school there’s another student or teacher who tests positive and the class is closed for 10 days. Last year they missed 8 weeks of school. The impact is detrimental to the children and incredibly challenging for parents.
I'm super worried about all this. We all grew up hearing the stories about the country mobilizing to take on WWII and such. Whether those stories are fully accurate or applicable or not, I feel dismayed we can't even mobilize against a virus. We're going to have multiple generations who basically missed out on several years of education and will have an even greater distrust of institutions due to living in the wake…