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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

#711
post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, because for schoolkids, Omicron is literally a cold, if that. The other variants, call it a bad cold. The only reason to stop them catching it is to stop them spreading it. Had someone three years ago been that concerned about someone with a cold, yes, that would be minutiae.

> The only reason to stop them catching it is to stop them spreading it

Like their parents, who could end up hospitalized, or worse? Seems like a good reason to be concerned.

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

#712
post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: the number of ICU beds in use in Ontario has been trending down over the last 4 days: https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations#hospitaliz... Over those same 4 days, a significantly increasing number of the folks in those beds are testing positive with Covid, but it's not clear to me whether that is the reason they're in the ICU. The hospitals need to provide better data about the reason these patients w…

The chart explicitly says "due to COVID-19". That is the number which has doubled in a matter of weeks, and today we reported another 27 due to COVID. The total occupied due to COVID is now 412 compared to 150 just a few weeks ago, where that old number had been the average for months. edit: and more directly to your point > the number of ICU beds in use in Ontario has been trending down over the last 4 days The tota…

It does say that, but I'm still skeptical. Shouldn't the total number of beds in use also be skyrocketing along with the Covid number?

Also:

""In ICU” numbers include people testing positive for COVID-19 and people who are in ICU for a COVID-19-related illness but have since tested negative."

It's not clear from the text that they are excluding people in the ICU with a positive test but are there for another reason.

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

#713

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.

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... Plus, schools have tons of unused covid relief money: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/politics/school-federal-covid...

I'm inclined to believe this. I was in a discussion about this yesterday with friends and a clear statistic would have helped. But the chart you've got there --- I know it's not the fulcrum of your whole argument, I'm not sniping --- doesn't really make the case you make in your comment. It says that we spend 0.1% more than the OECD average on primary/secondary schools, but are boosted in the overall rankings by spending way more than any other country on tertiary schools (unsurprising).

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

#714
post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

give kids the chance to choose to go to school or not ... most won't go and then outside of learning the biggest benefit of socializing/making freinds/fully enjoy being human which to me is with others is lost. People at my job have given the same choose and really no one goes in. COVID is scourge to the world ... whose is to blame for it? Does any one country benefit from it? What's going on with Covid in China ...…

Does it really matter who is to blame? What difference does it make?

Yeah it does especially if was created to hurt all other countries ... especially if they know more then we do re: how to best treat it.

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

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ivermectin, being very effective against worms, is helpful if you have both worms and covid - that's the reason some studies saw it working and some didn't.

[deleted]

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

#716
post #630
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New variants have followed Omicron. And that will continue to happen. They may be more benign or less benign than what we’ve seen so far. But I keep hearing the assumption of “definitely mild”. I’m not sure the science is so definitive on that point.

I said nothing about mild. I said "contagious". Before Omicron, we had a hope of creating an R0 Omicron, irrespective of whether it is mild or not, is simply going to blow through the population no matter what we do. Afterward everybody will have been infected with Covid, vaccinated, or both. At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the n…

> At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the new world.

I agree. Just like we do for RSV, other common cold variants, etc. We'll get used to it.

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

#717

Freddie de Boer just wrote something on his Substack about this - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-w... The quick takeaway is that school is that for the most vulnerable kids, school is about a lot more than education. Taking school away from those kids can be much more damaging than many people realize. It seems to me like that right strategy would be to just say something like: We encourag…

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…

The problem is there is no competition for the admins jobs. This is why voucher for charters would improve these. You need somekind of feedback mechanism to exterminate bad admins from their job. Unfortunately most people people deserve these kind of admins when they constantly vote in the "wrong" rep. I moved to other states now that remote jobs are very conducive to coders.

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

#718
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Sweden suffered 1,504 deaths per million, while Finland had 295. To call them "similar" is disinformative, at best.

The end point matters, we can’t be sure what the final death toll per Million will be in Finnland or Sweden.

Agreed. And potentially the age and health of the population going into the pandemic. There's a study comparing Sweden and Norways mortality over the pandemic and the four years proceeding it, which concluded:

> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper. [0]

So apparently Sweden did a better job than Norway of keeping people alive longer before the pandemic, therefore having a larger per-capita population vulnerable to covid.

(It is my understanding that Sweden also fumbled early on protecting those in nursing homes, as many others did. Lots of factors I'm sure, more than just lockdown vs no lockdown.)

I'm not sure about Finland. It is possible the same applies.

[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...

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

#719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Science seems to be pointed hard towards 25 being the age of majority rather than 18. We are unlikely to see the age move in our lifetimes due to the military needing its recruits but it probably should. Do you really think the average 14-15 year old should be considered in the same maturity bracket as the average 35 or 45 year old? I was incapable of making good decisions at that age. The things I thought were cool,…

Playing devil's advocate: If we are considering maturity as a pre-requisite to vote, perhaps we should test for that? Some 15 years olds are very mature, and some 30+ years olds are not.

Also, maybe it is wrong to disenfranchise immature people. They are people, too.

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

#720
post #703
post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At least in LA, its not the schools. Its, as an earlier poster said, administration. The mental association of "school" is usually a group of teachers and maybe a principal. In multiple cities, political leadership at the mayoral level has been shown to be getting kickbacks and other favorable terms from our dear beloved employers to adopt that technology. In LAUSD it was Villaragosa and Apple. When we say the money…

Yeah I think that’s true the corruption is either dictated down as in you must buy apple products or you get nothing. Happens at a district level where for example they they hire a consulting firm and pay millions of dollars
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