861–870 of 954 posts
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This is what my nephew is doing, and it's 100% incompatible with working parents. How can they work around shifting 4 hour days with alternating weekly schedules?
The purpose is to safely achieve learning goals, not to provide daycare.
What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point. Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want thin…
> we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus Do you think an enforced national lockdown is feasible in the US? Given the size of the country, the culture of independence, the relatively loose union of 50 states and other factors, my answer is no.
We have powerless leadership, proclaiming half-assed and unenforced orders, more worried about saying the right things than doing the right things.
If we were actually serious about beating the virus, downtown would be totally empty and I wouldn’t hear constant traffic and human activity from my backyard.
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> Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who... Were all of these issues nonexistent under prior administrations? Or, as for turning it around, are you asserting that Clinton both could have and would have done so? If so, how do you know this?
You are getting downvoted for your political statement. I really wish the parent comment kept out the last bit because the conversation then devolves to red/blue, left/right, white/black. We, as a country, screwed the handling of this. It isn't just one person. It is the way our entire system works. How do we fix it?
Technically, I'm being downvoted for asking two questions that challenge someone else's political statement (that aligns quite nicely with the general politics of HN).
> I really wish the parent comment kept out the last bit because the conversation then devolves to red/blue, left/right, white/black.
Me too, I completely agreed with the first part. I have this thing about about people dropping dimensions of reality and pretending they are irrelevant, or predicting the outcome of events on parallel dimensions of our universe, and stating those predictions as if they are facts. I consider this sort of rhetoric as part of the problem, but most people seem to overwhelmingly prefer it nowadays, provided the proper claims are made of course.
> How do we fix it?
This seems like the important question to me as well. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be a very popular topic of discussion.
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While it's easy to blame Trump (and he deserves a heaping pile of blame), the corruption and destruction of a functional US government has long been the goal of those on the right. Since the 80s there has been a concerted movement to defund and destroy the effective ability of our government for ideological and personal reasons. Then, when the water treatment plants break down or the education system is a mess they c…
So the thing is, since WWII we've switched pretty evenly between the 'left' party and the 'right' party at the national level. All administrations/Congresses have been quick to sell us out to foreign and corporate interests, whether it's Bush going to war for oil or Obama forcing everyone to buy health insurance.
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Well if you take eradication off the table, then you have to assume the entire susceptible population will eventually get the virus. So I guess, I don't see the benefit of "stomping" the virus down to some small level. It was at a very small level back in February, and then grew. If we get it back down to that small level, it will just grow again. There's no benefit to locking down for 3 months to have it grow in Jul…
Stomping the virus down to a manageable level so it doesn't overwhelm hospitals was the main goal of "Flatten the curve". We actually succeeded in quite a few hot spots to do this - NYC being the biggest example. Covid still exists there and people are still dying but it's not out of control. If you stay on top of it, it doesn't just grow again. I'm not sure why you say there was no benefit to locking down. It clearl…
Suppose 30% of the population is susceptible to covid. If lockdown policy slows the spread of the virus to 1% of the population per month, it would take 30 months before the pandemic passes. That's a very long time to do lockdown, very damaging to the economy and people's livelihoods.
I've read a lot about overwhelmed hospitals. I'm not clear on if it's happened in any widespread fashion. The media coverage tends to emphasize the bad cases and ignore the boring cases. It doesn't seem like people are unable to get medical care. I have checked the Texas online dashboard now and then, and currently about 10,000 people in a state of 29,000,000 are hospitalized with covid.
Texas dashboard: https://txdshs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#...
The logical policy would be let the virus pass through the population as fast as possible without overwhelming hospitals, given the specifics of any geography.
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it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable As opposed to existing publicly subsidized public schools that are not effectively accountable?
Charters are explicitly reductions in institutional legal accountability, and unlike public (charter or not) schools, the chief decision makers so released from accountability with private schools are not accountable by election, either.
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At least 30 teachers have died of COVID in NYC alone. That seems significant for a viral outbreak that is nowhere near containment or exhaustion, and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually. But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismis…
> and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually. I'm not proposing schools open in an NYC/Houston/Miami type situation. But in lower infection area (e.g. the Bay Area), where about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly, you are not "almost certainly" going to get the virus. Obviously, school opening should be gate…
I don't know if your 0.1% number is accurate, but let's assume that it is. If somehow cases remain completely level for the rest of the school year (which is far from a given, but for the sake of argument ...) over the course of 40 weeks, a randomly-chosen person has roughly a 40 * 0.1% = 4% chance of getting infected. But that is a randomly-chosen person, whereas it's not hard to imagine that a teacher exposed for hours daily to multiple young kids who aren't good at keeping their germs to themselves is (ballpark) maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person [1]. So then we arrive at an estimate of perhaps 24% odds of a teacher getting infected during the 2020-2021 school year using my assumptions (which you are free to disagree with).
Is 24% "almost certain"? No, but by highlighting the tiny 0.1% number, I think you are potentially seriously misrepresenting the true risk to an individual teacher. Hopefully, all of the measures that school districts might put into place will make my 6x-elevated risk estimate incorrect, but it's really hard to know. It's also possible that kids just don't transmit the virus very often. There's some evidence that that's the case, but I don't think we have really solid data on the question.
[1] "Teachers had six times more germs in their workspace than accountants, the second-place finisher ..." https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/dirty-ten-germy...
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Over 800 healthcare workers have died since this began. https://khn.org/news/lost-on-the-frontline-health-care-worke... It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term. Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, t…
This is ridiculous fear mongering. There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals. https://datausa.io/profile/naics/hospitals 800/5100000 = .00016 They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population. Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open. Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID. Deat…
I’ve never understood this argument. Places in Europe are opening because they think they’ve got the virus under control. It’s an outcome, not a cause.
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This is ridiculous fear mongering. There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals. https://datausa.io/profile/naics/hospitals 800/5100000 = .00016 They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population. Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open. Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID. Deat…
You can't honestly be saying that we're overreacting to COVID? I would hope someone in full PPE everyday has a much lower rate of COVID deaths. The US alone has more than 25% of global cases - comparing Europe to the US doesn't really make sense. They largely beat covid, the US obviously hasn't (see 70k new cases yesterday) More people die in car crashes than the flu - doesn't mean we don't spend trillions on road sa…