If every teacher needs to be tested every 3 days, then do it. If every parent needs to be tested. Do it.
Okay, let's look at this proposal.
I'm going to pick the largest school district in my state, the Seattle school district.
They have 3,745 teachers.
So you're already doing almost 7,500 tests per week for just that district.
But hey, we can't just limit ourselves to one district, so let's look at Washington state at large.
Washington employs 67,362 teachers.
So, with a test every three days, we are looking at 134,724 tests per week.
That seems super reasonable and attainable!
That is completely reasonable and 100% attainable by the time schools should restart. By combining group testing (mix 10 samples, if positive, retest 5 mixed samples, repeat till individual case found) with follow up testing you can probably cut the actual number of tests by about 5x, but, even the "should do 134,724 tests a week" is completely doable. Thats 20k or so tests a day for Washington state, 874k for the country. About double our current capacity, even without group testing, even with more tests than you really need (testing every 7 days would almost certainly prevent spread through teachers in the schools).
This number takes us to the 'impossible and unatainable' level of testing reached in the imaginary and futuristic nation of Ireland. If we can reach the impossible heights of "Testing as much as Denmark" then we can have 875k tests for schools and 400k tests left over for other activities. And, as I said, you probably need 1/5 the number of tests you suggest in order to test every teacher every 3 days because its been clearly shown that PCR is more than sensitive enough to pick up very low levels of signal RNA even when mixed.
Okay but we're in the United States, so that isn't actually reasonable or 100% attainable.
Big props to Ireland and Denmark, but here in the land of the free we aren't going to be anywhere close to doing that come September.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
I am not an epidemiologist or an HVAC expert, but there was a page linked here recently that indicated, at least based on investigations of spreading events in restaurants, that being in proximity to infected people, and especially being downwind of them (via AC or other ventilation) was particularly hazardous. I wonder how hard it would be to set up rooms that pulled air away from the teacher. It would very pointedly not be *safe*, but it might be *safer*.
Oh I’m 100% expecting a lot of states to actually ramp down testing, if they haven’t already. The narrative has completely shifted towards re-opening, so they’re going to shift their response to accommodate this
All of this doesn't matter though if we don't have a vaccine or some vast, durable herd immunity.
You can't simply can't re-open schools because of the threat to the staff.
As a substitute teacher, the high school I primarily work at has at least two dozen teachers over fifty (and that's with us just replacing almost a dozen staff who retired in the last four years). The other substitutes I work with, who would fill in those positions when a teacher gets sick? At least 75% are retired teachers over fifty.
During a good year staff will joke that they hope they catch a weaker disease like the common cold over something like the flu or a stomach flu, because schools are just constantly flooded in diseases.
Unless you are going to have every adult wear an isolation suit with their own oxygen supply, you just can't re-open schools because it will kill the staff.
Why is this argument valid for teachers and not for water treatment plant workers, electrical line maintenance workers or farmers? School is an essential need for children and for the parents of those children. It’s not negotiable. A whole generation is being thrown onto the trash pile.
The question is not and cannot be “will schools open” is is and can only be “how will schools open”
If every teacher needs to be tested every 3 days, then do it. If every parent needs to be tested. Do it. If we need to have conscription where women between 20 and 35 (lowest viral risk) are enlisted as classroom helpers with the kids while the older teachers call in via zoom to big video walls then do it. If we need to commandeer private facilities to use as extra classrooms then do it. Even if all we can do is kids going to school 2 or 3 days a week in two groups then DO IT.
Parents set up secret schools to teach their daughters under the threat of death from the Taliban in Afghanistan. They will do the same here if there is no school.
I'm guessing line maintenance workers aren't trapped in an enclosed space with 30 germ spreadin' machines for several hours a day every day.
Nope, but cable technicians are going into peoples homes multiple times a day to repair damaged equipment, plumbers are in peoples homes fixing toilets, farmers (espescially pickers) are working side by side gathering fruit and packing it. Grocery store clerks are interacting with hundreds of people every day.
Responsible organizations are taking steps to minimize exposure and minimize risk, but, if the cable is broken to someones house, the cable guy is still going and fixing it. People fixing electrical wires are still working in teams to get the job done safely without electrocuting themselves and so on. Because all this stuff needs to still be done to facilitate public safety and continuation.
And we know that children are not 'germ spreadin' machines for this virus. They are at worst equally infectious as adults, but from investigation it seems far more likely they are less infectious.
Have you met a human child? Do you think they are capable of practicing social distancing and proper hygiene required to prevent the spread of a highly contagious disease? In the time it took you to read that I guarantee at least 1 million kids ate a booger.
Not all viruses spread in the same way. The jury is out on how much less infectious children with the disease are than adults, but they are either less infectious or equally infectious despite all the things you mention. There is no evidence that they cause a greater number of infections than an infected adult. Which is absolutely not true for flu or colds, because those are not the same virus and are not necessarily spread effectively by the same methods.
We can't even get enough tests going to test people who are already visibly sick. We are not going to test a hundred thousand people every four days that is ridiculous. And because the federal and many state government don't want to and there is no meaningful incentive for them to do so because we can't do anything about it, they don't need to try.
Testing can be done in groups. For instance, you can cluster people in groups of 30 and pool all their samples, and only test individually if you get a positive result within the group.
The size of the groups depends on the number of people you expect to be infected.
This practice makes even more sense for a highly infectious disease like COVID-19, since if it turns out that even one person is infected, then it basically means that everyone needs to be quarantined.
In theory, this could help a lot with contact tracing if we could use this on students once a week -- since you would also be testing their families by proxy. Unfortunately, from what I hear, the testing process is incredibly unpleasant, and I assume that children would never agree to it on a regular basis.
I am not an epidemiologist or an HVAC expert, but there was a page linked here recently that indicated, at least based on investigations of spreading events in restaurants, that being in proximity to infected people, and especially being downwind of them (via AC or other ventilation) was particularly hazardous. I wonder how hard it would be to set up rooms that pulled air away from the teacher. It would very pointedly not be *safe*, but it might be *safer*.
This is really the core of half of this - the population is not going to spend holy lucre just to keep people alive, preventing the collapse of the economy, or otherwise ensuring the future.
I am not an epidemiologist or an HVAC expert, but there was a page linked here recently that indicated, at least based on investigations of spreading events in restaurants, that being in proximity to infected people, and especially being downwind of them (via AC or other ventilation) was particularly hazardous. I wonder how hard it would be to set up rooms that pulled air away from the teacher. It would very pointedly not be *safe*, but it might be *safer*.
I'm not. Or at least not intending to. I'm not expecting a biohazard level system, I was more thinking "what if, like, they just made sure the airflow was away from the teacher?"
Which may not help, as being stuck in the room for most of the day with a variety of students may make things untenable anyways, rather than the numbers seen in a dinner party that spent an hour or two upwind from an infectious person.
Just spitballing here.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I mean we could just treat caring for a child as a skill and role of value and not constantly provide incentive for the rich to fuck people raw for every penny by ever increasing cost of living disproportionate to earning potential.
Someone who stays minimally employed while raising a child is doing work. To our society it's not work reflected in short term dollars and a paycheck though.
I don't have kids. I don't like kids. I definitely acknowledge the importance of giving them an opportunity though and recognize it's a lot of work.
COVID-19 has our entire economic model willing to throw our elders and children into the wood chipper because stock market. It might be a good time to reflect on our priorities.
I absolutely agree. But.
Children cannot stay at home indefinitely. That needs to go off the table. Note that it doesn't mean re-open schools now! It means, we have to have a plan to re-open schools, just like we need to have a plan to open everywhere else
The economy is not going to be restructured to just pay for childcare. That's not going to happen.
We aren't going to get rid of this virus. Not on a timescale in which we can all stay inside and just wait it out
So we do, at some point, need to re-open schools and accept a level of risk, just like we are at some point going to have to do that with everything that people want to do. This virus is here to stay and short of becoming morlocks we at some point accept that we'll open up and see more cases.
The solution that I would typically suggest would be; massively increase the amount of capacity in the healthcare system. This is what could have been done, in the US, but hasn't. Massive Federal stimulus, and huge levels of investment in healthcare on a Federal level to ensure that capacity can be built up in lockdown and then maintained going forward.
People keep saying that things can't go back to how they were and yeah I guess in some ways that is true, but one way it is definitely true is that national healthcare needs to change. And I don't mean that in a "oh you guys in the US have a crazy stupid system" (although you do) but that the question of "if we have another pandemic, do we have sufficient ventilators/ICU beds/PPE stockpiles to give us the time to ramp up production to cover the demand?" needs to be a National Security concern.
The thing is, that is possible. That's doable, in the US. You have the money, you have the production capacity. You lack the political leadership but not the political will, as healthcare is a significant vote winner. I think that you need to realistically consider that the best chance to change this is get the Democrats to adopt a massive healthcare investment policy and then win later in the year.
Solar on
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
I am not an epidemiologist or an HVAC expert, but there was a page linked here recently that indicated, at least based on investigations of spreading events in restaurants, that being in proximity to infected people, and especially being downwind of them (via AC or other ventilation) was particularly hazardous. I wonder how hard it would be to set up rooms that pulled air away from the teacher. It would very pointedly not be *safe*, but it might be *safer*.
I'm not. Or at least not intending to. I'm not expecting a biohazard level system, I was more thinking "what if, like, they just made sure the airflow was away from the teacher?"
Which may not help, as being stuck in the room for most of the day with a variety of students may make things untenable anyways, rather than the numbers seen in a dinner party that spent an hour or two upwind from an infectious person.
Just spitballing here.
The article under discussion has been quoted in a couple of reports, but the primary report is here, on the CDC's site.
The interesting take away from the article is essentially that people who were sitting in the A/C stream downwind of the infected individual mostly wound up getting infected. People on the other side of the restaurant, not in that airflow stream, were not infected. (Note that some people upstream did get infected, and this is attributed to turbulent flow). This is why office environments and other enclosed indoor spaces are dangers, and why six to eight feet of distance will do nothing in those environments.
On the flip side, judicious management of airflow could be beneficial. It doesn't have to be negative pressure. Just opening the windows might be enough to make at least a little difference.
Kindercare payscale is $12-$16/hr and they charge $250+ a week per child excluding any fees or materials. The money isn't going to fair wages for staff. There's a wait list and during the shutdown daycares have been charging people just to "hold their spot" and provide no care because they know the parents are screwed otherwise when things start up again.
Some regulation should come out of this for several industries that definitely won't survive fair treatment of employees being a thing.
Not a resource to be exploited because someone doesn’t understand that death rates are correlated with lower education, not caused by it!
JFC
My apologies for a rather cruel and blunt summary of the situation here. It's being a nearly impossible morning, and a combination of endless screaming from the aforementioned children who need to go back to school with the emergence seemingly everywhere online that we're going to close all the schools until there is a vaccine (while letting literally every other activity go on, like, I have a friend who posted about how schools had to stay closed till there was a vaccine while she and her son were getting a haircut) has left me severely on edge.
My family finances are not on sufficiently sturdy ground considering where I live for me to be able to say, "One parent will quit their job and deal with this". If schools do not re-open, there is a very real prospect that my family will have to abandon the city where we live and try to return to live with my parents in Europe, effectively becoming coronavirus refugees to avoid potential homelessness. You may understand that this is not an easy thing for me to deal with.
Kindercare payscale is $12-$16/hr and they charge $250+ a week per child excluding any fees or materials. The money isn't going to fair wages for staff. There's a wait list and during the shutdown daycares have been charging people just to "hold their spot" and provide no care because they know the parents are screwed otherwise when things start up again.
Some regulation should come out of this for several industries that definitely won't survive fair treatment of employees being a thing.
Fixed costs and administrative costs and all those other issues are a thing.
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AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
All of this doesn't matter though if we don't have a vaccine or some vast, durable herd immunity.
You can't simply can't re-open schools because of the threat to the staff.
As a substitute teacher, the high school I primarily work at has at least two dozen teachers over fifty (and that's with us just replacing almost a dozen staff who retired in the last four years). The other substitutes I work with, who would fill in those positions when a teacher gets sick? At least 75% are retired teachers over fifty.
During a good year staff will joke that they hope they catch a weaker disease like the common cold over something like the flu or a stomach flu, because schools are just constantly flooded in diseases.
Unless you are going to have every adult wear an isolation suit with their own oxygen supply, you just can't re-open schools because it will kill the staff.
Why is this argument valid for teachers and not for water treatment plant workers, electrical line maintenance workers or farmers? School is an essential need for children and for the parents of those children. It’s not negotiable. A whole generation is being thrown onto the trash pile.
The question is not and cannot be “will schools open” is is and can only be “how will schools open”
If every teacher needs to be tested every 3 days, then do it. If every parent needs to be tested. Do it. If we need to have conscription where women between 20 and 35 (lowest viral risk) are enlisted as classroom helpers with the kids while the older teachers call in via zoom to big video walls then do it. If we need to commandeer private facilities to use as extra classrooms then do it. Even if all we can do is kids going to school 2 or 3 days a week in two groups then DO IT.
Parents set up secret schools to teach their daughters under the threat of death from the Taliban in Afghanistan. They will do the same here if there is no school.
I'm guessing line maintenance workers aren't trapped in an enclosed space with 30 germ spreadin' machines for several hours a day every day.
Nope, but cable technicians are going into peoples homes multiple times a day to repair damaged equipment, plumbers are in peoples homes fixing toilets, farmers (espescially pickers) are working side by side gathering fruit and packing it. Grocery store clerks are interacting with hundreds of people every day.
Responsible organizations are taking steps to minimize exposure and minimize risk, but, if the cable is broken to someones house, the cable guy is still going and fixing it. People fixing electrical wires are still working in teams to get the job done safely without electrocuting themselves and so on. Because all this stuff needs to still be done to facilitate public safety and continuation.
And we know that children are not 'germ spreadin' machines for this virus. They are at worst equally infectious as adults, but from investigation it seems far more likely they are less infectious.
Have you met a human child? Do you think they are capable of practicing social distancing and proper hygiene required to prevent the spread of a highly contagious disease? In the time it took you to read that I guarantee at least 1 million kids ate a booger.
Not all viruses spread in the same way. The jury is out on how much less infectious children with the disease are than adults, but they are either less infectious or equally infectious despite all the things you mention. There is no evidence that they cause a greater number of infections than an infected adult. Which is absolutely not true for flu or colds, because those are not the same virus and are not necessarily spread effectively by the same methods.
Kids may be exactly as infectious as I am, and I think that's a safe assumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary, since you know, kids are also humans. The difference is I'm not going to run up and blow my nose in your shirt. Kids will do shit like that. You're talking about bringing them together in large numbers for several hours a day. It's not the same ballgame as being a plumber, or line maintenance worker, etc. It's a bad idea right now.
I keep seeing people point out the lack of coherence and consistency in our manner of reopening things, and while I agree it's not terribly consistent, I do think it's fairly coherent.
Basically, we are reopening as little as possible to keep people from openly revolting. A lot of people are fortunate enough to be in a situation that is tenable for the long term. I, for example, still have a job where I can WFH indefinitely, my kids are old enough and reliable enough that they can distance learn and still get something out of it, my financial situation and emotional situation are stable. I could do this for months, and while I certainly miss a lot of things, and I wouldn't like it, I can do it.
But many people are in very stressful situations, or out of work, or have very young children, or health issues. These people can't just maintain for another six months without something breaking.
Many other people are just entitled assholes who don't give a shit about others or are too dumb to give a shit about themselves. These are the ones crying about the injustice of having to wear a mask and threatening to lick the floors of their churches or whatever stupid fucking thing. And they're increasingly going to say fuck it and just do whatever they want because they're garbage humans.
So we reopen the things we can where we can still be safe. And we reopen some other things to relieve just enough stress on that first group to let them function. And we reopen a few other things to keep the special snowflakes from assfucking us into a mass grave situation.
And in practice, that means we open some malls but keep schools closed and open some beaches but close some parks. Because it's not about some carefully crafted spreadsheet establishing the ideal way to open things. It's thousands of leaders, some competent and some complete fucking idiots, trying to keep this unwieldy society nominally functional with spit and duct tape.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Work has started lying to us about COVID deaths, so that's fun.
(we're large enough that getting a death notice isn't TOO uncommon. Before, they always mentioned why. Now they don't citing "medical privacy laws" that mysteriously never stopped them before..)
I specifically asked my management about whether or not we would be notified if anyone on site was diagnosed with COVID. It makes sense, because if someone with it was walking around, it's absolutely a certainty that it was spread, and the people in proximity would deserve to know.
The answer I got was basically, "No, we won't tell you."
Have you considered organizing a union and going on strike because fuck.
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ceresWhen the last moon is cast over the last star of morningAnd the future has past without even a last desperate warningRegistered User, Moderatormod
edited May 2020
@tbloxham I appreciate that, but that's not the not the same thing as talking about lost generations. Your home situation is what is getting to you. That is an understandable problem. Say that instead of rattling off uncited weird nonsense. This thread is meant to be about how we're affected, just... talk about that, jfc
ceres on
And it seems like all is dying, and would leave the world to mourn
Not a resource to be exploited because someone doesn’t understand that death rates are correlated with lower education, not caused by it!
JFC
My apologies for a rather cruel and blunt summary of the situation here. It's being a nearly impossible morning, and a combination of endless screaming from the aforementioned children who need to go back to school with the emergence seemingly everywhere online that we're going to close all the schools until there is a vaccine (while letting literally every other activity go on, like, I have a friend who posted about how schools had to stay closed till there was a vaccine while she and her son were getting a haircut) has left me severely on edge.
My family finances are not on sufficiently sturdy ground considering where I live for me to be able to say, "One parent will quit their job and deal with this". If schools do not re-open, there is a very real prospect that my family will have to abandon the city where we live and try to return to live with my parents in Europe, effectively becoming coronavirus refugees to avoid potential homelessness. You may understand that this is not an easy thing for me to deal with.
I'm very sorry about your hard day, and yeah I get it, it's a tough situation for everybody
But it's kind of a big leap from "I'm having a hard time" to "we need to press gang women into doing the work for us"
And it wasn't even "this is something I think we should do", it was
If you care about peoples lives, then it's as simple as that.
Which is deeply, alarmingly ironic! "If you care about people's lives" -- what about the women whom you would impress into servitude? What about their lives?
You've gotta stop trying to look at stats in this aloof, detached way. Fuck it, just stop looking at the stats at all, leave that to the people who know how to interpret them in ways that don't send chills down the spine of anybody remotely aware of how the stuff you're proposing sounds.
Yeah, one thing we all need to do is recognise the difference between what our mind is telling us and what we are emotionally struggling with and would want
I would rationally definitely not just open everything tomorrow. Emotionally I am desperate for it. But I can't really say "oh yeah I've got evidence as to why it'd be a good idea." It's okay to be despondent and unhappy. It is fucking wank. You don't have to say "well everyone is in the same boat, nobody is happy about this," you are allowed to say "but I don't care, I'm just fucking miserable."
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
Not a resource to be exploited because someone doesn’t understand that death rates are correlated with lower education, not caused by it!
JFC
My apologies for a rather cruel and blunt summary of the situation here. It's being a nearly impossible morning, and a combination of endless screaming from the aforementioned children who need to go back to school with the emergence seemingly everywhere online that we're going to close all the schools until there is a vaccine (while letting literally every other activity go on, like, I have a friend who posted about how schools had to stay closed till there was a vaccine while she and her son were getting a haircut) has left me severely on edge.
My family finances are not on sufficiently sturdy ground considering where I live for me to be able to say, "One parent will quit their job and deal with this". If schools do not re-open, there is a very real prospect that my family will have to abandon the city where we live and try to return to live with my parents in Europe, effectively becoming coronavirus refugees to avoid potential homelessness. You may understand that this is not an easy thing for me to deal with.
I sympathize with your situation. We're all in this together. Please understand and realize that when you have a bad day and spasm that bad day onto the forums, it affects people here too.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Not a resource to be exploited because someone doesn’t understand that death rates are correlated with lower education, not caused by it!
JFC
My apologies for a rather cruel and blunt summary of the situation here. It's being a nearly impossible morning, and a combination of endless screaming from the aforementioned children who need to go back to school with the emergence seemingly everywhere online that we're going to close all the schools until there is a vaccine (while letting literally every other activity go on, like, I have a friend who posted about how schools had to stay closed till there was a vaccine while she and her son were getting a haircut) has left me severely on edge.
My family finances are not on sufficiently sturdy ground considering where I live for me to be able to say, "One parent will quit their job and deal with this". If schools do not re-open, there is a very real prospect that my family will have to abandon the city where we live and try to return to live with my parents in Europe, effectively becoming coronavirus refugees to avoid potential homelessness. You may understand that this is not an easy thing for me to deal with.
Its not a easy thing for any of us to deal with. At least 30% of the population are flirting with bankruptcy from this and many more are approaching that point. That doesn't mean the answer is to literally enslave women.
Check your goddamn ideas a bit before spewing that garbage on the internet. Having a hard time isn't an excuse for proposing 100% abhorrent ideas.
All of this doesn't matter though if we don't have a vaccine or some vast, durable herd immunity.
You can't simply can't re-open schools because of the threat to the staff.
As a substitute teacher, the high school I primarily work at has at least two dozen teachers over fifty (and that's with us just replacing almost a dozen staff who retired in the last four years). The other substitutes I work with, who would fill in those positions when a teacher gets sick? At least 75% are retired teachers over fifty.
During a good year staff will joke that they hope they catch a weaker disease like the common cold over something like the flu or a stomach flu, because schools are just constantly flooded in diseases.
Unless you are going to have every adult wear an isolation suit with their own oxygen supply, you just can't re-open schools because it will kill the staff.
Why is this argument valid for teachers and not for water treatment plant workers, electrical line maintenance workers or farmers? School is an essential need for children and for the parents of those children. It’s not negotiable. A whole generation is being thrown onto the trash pile.
The question is not and cannot be “will schools open” is is and can only be “how will schools open”
If every teacher needs to be tested every 3 days, then do it. If every parent needs to be tested. Do it. If we need to have conscription where women between 20 and 35 (lowest viral risk) are enlisted as classroom helpers with the kids while the older teachers call in via zoom to big video walls then do it. If we need to commandeer private facilities to use as extra classrooms then do it. Even if all we can do is kids going to school 2 or 3 days a week in two groups then DO IT.
Parents set up secret schools to teach their daughters under the threat of death from the Taliban in Afghanistan. They will do the same here if there is no school.
I'm guessing line maintenance workers aren't trapped in an enclosed space with 30 germ spreadin' machines for several hours a day every day.
Nope, but cable technicians are going into peoples homes multiple times a day to repair damaged equipment, plumbers are in peoples homes fixing toilets, farmers (espescially pickers) are working side by side gathering fruit and packing it. Grocery store clerks are interacting with hundreds of people every day.
Responsible organizations are taking steps to minimize exposure and minimize risk, but, if the cable is broken to someones house, the cable guy is still going and fixing it. People fixing electrical wires are still working in teams to get the job done safely without electrocuting themselves and so on. Because all this stuff needs to still be done to facilitate public safety and continuation.
And we know that children are not 'germ spreadin' machines for this virus. They are at worst equally infectious as adults, but from investigation it seems far more likely they are less infectious.
Have you met a human child? Do you think they are capable of practicing social distancing and proper hygiene required to prevent the spread of a highly contagious disease? In the time it took you to read that I guarantee at least 1 million kids ate a booger.
Not all viruses spread in the same way. The jury is out on how much less infectious children with the disease are than adults, but they are either less infectious or equally infectious despite all the things you mention. There is no evidence that they cause a greater number of infections than an infected adult. Which is absolutely not true for flu or colds, because those are not the same virus and are not necessarily spread effectively by the same methods.
Kids may be exactly as infectious as I am, and I think that's a safe assumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary, since you know, kids are also humans. The difference is I'm not going to run up and blow my nose in your shirt. Kids will do shit like that. You're talking about bringing them together in large numbers for several hours a day. It's not the same ballgame as being a plumber, or line maintenance worker, etc. It's a bad idea right now.
This keeps getting brought up over and over, and the stats and examples get posted over and over. Kids just aren't as infectious as adults. They aren't. You don't have a kid with the flu visit three schools and no one catches anything. That happened with this.
Kids either need to go back to school, or the USAs entire work life balance expectations for the majority of workplaces need to change completely
It's that second one we should be doing.
You can't change work-life balance around to the point where "school doesn't exist" becomes viable.
I would say that you absolutely could, in a fair and just society that is more interested in the health and well being of it's members than our current capitalist dystopia
Wow this keeps happening almost like there is a reason we shouldn't be rushing to reopen things. Nah that can't be it.
Unless you live in Texas or one of these other red states that is throwing open the floodgates once more it is difficult to comprehend just how buck wild it is. Growing up I would never have expected for a virus that kills people to be politicized but here we are.
Kids either need to go back to school, or the USAs entire work life balance expectations for the majority of workplaces need to change completely
It's that second one we should be doing.
You can't change work-life balance around to the point where "school doesn't exist" becomes viable.
I would say that you absolutely could, in a fair and just society that is more interested in the health and well being of it's members than our current capitalist dystopia
Unless your plan is "only single income households if you have kids" or the like, no you really can't. Someone has to supervise and the teach the kids and there's no work-life balance that accommodates that beyond "this is your work now, you are a teacher".
IMO, numbers aren't going to matter to most people anyway. The only way this is going to be real to most of these geese is when they know, personally know, someone who's gotten it.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
Comic Con is officially on for July in Tampa because greed
Just when you think Florida can’t Florida any harder, they Florida even more
All of this doesn't matter though if we don't have a vaccine or some vast, durable herd immunity.
You can't simply can't re-open schools because of the threat to the staff.
As a substitute teacher, the high school I primarily work at has at least two dozen teachers over fifty (and that's with us just replacing almost a dozen staff who retired in the last four years). The other substitutes I work with, who would fill in those positions when a teacher gets sick? At least 75% are retired teachers over fifty.
During a good year staff will joke that they hope they catch a weaker disease like the common cold over something like the flu or a stomach flu, because schools are just constantly flooded in diseases.
Unless you are going to have every adult wear an isolation suit with their own oxygen supply, you just can't re-open schools because it will kill the staff.
Why is this argument valid for teachers and not for water treatment plant workers, electrical line maintenance workers or farmers? School is an essential need for children and for the parents of those children. It’s not negotiable. A whole generation is being thrown onto the trash pile.
The question is not and cannot be “will schools open” is is and can only be “how will schools open”
If every teacher needs to be tested every 3 days, then do it. If every parent needs to be tested. Do it. If we need to have conscription where women between 20 and 35 (lowest viral risk) are enlisted as classroom helpers with the kids while the older teachers call in via zoom to big video walls then do it. If we need to commandeer private facilities to use as extra classrooms then do it. Even if all we can do is kids going to school 2 or 3 days a week in two groups then DO IT.
Parents set up secret schools to teach their daughters under the threat of death from the Taliban in Afghanistan. They will do the same here if there is no school.
I'm guessing line maintenance workers aren't trapped in an enclosed space with 30 germ spreadin' machines for several hours a day every day.
Nope, but cable technicians are going into peoples homes multiple times a day to repair damaged equipment, plumbers are in peoples homes fixing toilets, farmers (espescially pickers) are working side by side gathering fruit and packing it. Grocery store clerks are interacting with hundreds of people every day.
Responsible organizations are taking steps to minimize exposure and minimize risk, but, if the cable is broken to someones house, the cable guy is still going and fixing it. People fixing electrical wires are still working in teams to get the job done safely without electrocuting themselves and so on. Because all this stuff needs to still be done to facilitate public safety and continuation.
And we know that children are not 'germ spreadin' machines for this virus. They are at worst equally infectious as adults, but from investigation it seems far more likely they are less infectious.
Have you met a human child? Do you think they are capable of practicing social distancing and proper hygiene required to prevent the spread of a highly contagious disease? In the time it took you to read that I guarantee at least 1 million kids ate a booger.
Not all viruses spread in the same way. The jury is out on how much less infectious children with the disease are than adults, but they are either less infectious or equally infectious despite all the things you mention. There is no evidence that they cause a greater number of infections than an infected adult. Which is absolutely not true for flu or colds, because those are not the same virus and are not necessarily spread effectively by the same methods.
Kids may be exactly as infectious as I am, and I think that's a safe assumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary, since you know, kids are also humans. The difference is I'm not going to run up and blow my nose in your shirt. Kids will do shit like that. You're talking about bringing them together in large numbers for several hours a day. It's not the same ballgame as being a plumber, or line maintenance worker, etc. It's a bad idea right now.
Thats not what 'infectious' means here. What it means is that with nominal behavior for both groups, doing their stuff without knowledge of the virus or special behavior, children infect other people less than or equally frequently than you do. If you didn't know you had the virus, and noone else modified their behaviour, you might infect about 3 people during your period of having active virus. Everything we know about the epidemiology of this virus says that despite differences in baseline behavior, kids infect either the same number of people or fewer. We do not know enough to say 'fewer' for certain, but there is no evidence to say that the number is more than it is for adults.
We also know that in the early stages of this virus spread, schools were not the local sources of the outbreak, offices, churches and large social gatherings of adults were. Places where large numbers of adults gathered without social distancing, or, where large numbers of adults were singing or shouting inside despite some level of social distancing. This has remained the same through the virus growth. We see reports of adults infecting each other in large numbers in meat packing plants for example, but not examples of mass outbreaks triggered at the daycares which have remained open for some essential workers.
Now it may be the case that a child on their best behavior (who doesn't really understand social distancing or masks) is more infectious than an adult on their best behavior (who is dilligent with mask usage and hand washing), but, thats an unknown.
Comic Con is officially on for July in Tampa because greed
Just when you think Florida can’t Florida any harder, they Florida even more
Really have to wonder how many of scheduled guests/panelists still plan to attend.
"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."
including antibody tests in the test numbers but not as a confirmed case.
HMMM
Based on what Gov. Northam had said, I suspect there must be some official unofficial scoreboard in of Trump's various committees using these numbers as a cudgel
I keep seeing people point out the lack of coherence and consistency in our manner of reopening things, and while I agree it's not terribly consistent, I do think it's fairly coherent.
Basically, we are reopening as little as possible to keep people from openly revolting. A lot of people are fortunate enough to be in a situation that is tenable for the long term. I, for example, still have a job where I can WFH indefinitely, my kids are old enough and reliable enough that they can distance learn and still get something out of it, my financial situation and emotional situation are stable. I could do this for months, and while I certainly miss a lot of things, and I wouldn't like it, I can do it.
But many people are in very stressful situations, or out of work, or have very young children, or health issues. These people can't just maintain for another six months without something breaking.
Many other people are just entitled assholes who don't give a shit about others or are too dumb to give a shit about themselves. These are the ones crying about the injustice of having to wear a mask and threatening to lick the floors of their churches or whatever stupid fucking thing. And they're increasingly going to say fuck it and just do whatever they want because they're garbage humans.
So we reopen the things we can where we can still be safe. And we reopen some other things to relieve just enough stress on that first group to let them function. And we reopen a few other things to keep the special snowflakes from assfucking us into a mass grave situation.
And in practice, that means we open some malls but keep schools closed and open some beaches but close some parks. Because it's not about some carefully crafted spreadsheet establishing the ideal way to open things. It's thousands of leaders, some competent and some complete fucking idiots, trying to keep this unwieldy society nominally functional with spit and duct tape.
For California and here in Illinois and some other States, sure. Phased reopening even when the data doesn't really support going to the next stage is shitty but at least you can understand that politics is overruling caution. But that doesn't really describe what's happening in Florida, or Georgia, or Texas, or Oklahoma. Hell, Wisconsin's Supreme Court just overrode the Emergency Orders and said tough shit about that whole Pandemic thing. Iowa never really went into lockdown to begin with to be reopened. We're living in a Failed State, with varying actual States having varying degrees of functionality.
Posts
Okay but we're in the United States, so that isn't actually reasonable or 100% attainable.
Big props to Ireland and Denmark, but here in the land of the free we aren't going to be anywhere close to doing that come September.
You're talking about building negative pressure rooms. Good luck on a school budget.
Not all viruses spread in the same way. The jury is out on how much less infectious children with the disease are than adults, but they are either less infectious or equally infectious despite all the things you mention. There is no evidence that they cause a greater number of infections than an infected adult. Which is absolutely not true for flu or colds, because those are not the same virus and are not necessarily spread effectively by the same methods.
Testing can be done in groups. For instance, you can cluster people in groups of 30 and pool all their samples, and only test individually if you get a positive result within the group.
The size of the groups depends on the number of people you expect to be infected.
This practice makes even more sense for a highly infectious disease like COVID-19, since if it turns out that even one person is infected, then it basically means that everyone needs to be quarantined.
In theory, this could help a lot with contact tracing if we could use this on students once a week -- since you would also be testing their families by proxy. Unfortunately, from what I hear, the testing process is incredibly unpleasant, and I assume that children would never agree to it on a regular basis.
This is really the core of half of this - the population is not going to spend holy lucre just to keep people alive, preventing the collapse of the economy, or otherwise ensuring the future.
I'm not. Or at least not intending to. I'm not expecting a biohazard level system, I was more thinking "what if, like, they just made sure the airflow was away from the teacher?"
Which may not help, as being stuck in the room for most of the day with a variety of students may make things untenable anyways, rather than the numbers seen in a dinner party that spent an hour or two upwind from an infectious person.
Just spitballing here.
I absolutely agree. But.
Children cannot stay at home indefinitely. That needs to go off the table. Note that it doesn't mean re-open schools now! It means, we have to have a plan to re-open schools, just like we need to have a plan to open everywhere else
The economy is not going to be restructured to just pay for childcare. That's not going to happen.
We aren't going to get rid of this virus. Not on a timescale in which we can all stay inside and just wait it out
So we do, at some point, need to re-open schools and accept a level of risk, just like we are at some point going to have to do that with everything that people want to do. This virus is here to stay and short of becoming morlocks we at some point accept that we'll open up and see more cases.
The solution that I would typically suggest would be; massively increase the amount of capacity in the healthcare system. This is what could have been done, in the US, but hasn't. Massive Federal stimulus, and huge levels of investment in healthcare on a Federal level to ensure that capacity can be built up in lockdown and then maintained going forward.
People keep saying that things can't go back to how they were and yeah I guess in some ways that is true, but one way it is definitely true is that national healthcare needs to change. And I don't mean that in a "oh you guys in the US have a crazy stupid system" (although you do) but that the question of "if we have another pandemic, do we have sufficient ventilators/ICU beds/PPE stockpiles to give us the time to ramp up production to cover the demand?" needs to be a National Security concern.
The thing is, that is possible. That's doable, in the US. You have the money, you have the production capacity. You lack the political leadership but not the political will, as healthcare is a significant vote winner. I think that you need to realistically consider that the best chance to change this is get the Democrats to adopt a massive healthcare investment policy and then win later in the year.
The article under discussion has been quoted in a couple of reports, but the primary report is here, on the CDC's site.
The interesting take away from the article is essentially that people who were sitting in the A/C stream downwind of the infected individual mostly wound up getting infected. People on the other side of the restaurant, not in that airflow stream, were not infected. (Note that some people upstream did get infected, and this is attributed to turbulent flow). This is why office environments and other enclosed indoor spaces are dangers, and why six to eight feet of distance will do nothing in those environments.
On the flip side, judicious management of airflow could be beneficial. It doesn't have to be negative pressure. Just opening the windows might be enough to make at least a little difference.
Just don't hotbox viral particles.
Some regulation should come out of this for several industries that definitely won't survive fair treatment of employees being a thing.
My apologies for a rather cruel and blunt summary of the situation here. It's being a nearly impossible morning, and a combination of endless screaming from the aforementioned children who need to go back to school with the emergence seemingly everywhere online that we're going to close all the schools until there is a vaccine (while letting literally every other activity go on, like, I have a friend who posted about how schools had to stay closed till there was a vaccine while she and her son were getting a haircut) has left me severely on edge.
My family finances are not on sufficiently sturdy ground considering where I live for me to be able to say, "One parent will quit their job and deal with this". If schools do not re-open, there is a very real prospect that my family will have to abandon the city where we live and try to return to live with my parents in Europe, effectively becoming coronavirus refugees to avoid potential homelessness. You may understand that this is not an easy thing for me to deal with.
Fixed costs and administrative costs and all those other issues are a thing.
Kids may be exactly as infectious as I am, and I think that's a safe assumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary, since you know, kids are also humans. The difference is I'm not going to run up and blow my nose in your shirt. Kids will do shit like that. You're talking about bringing them together in large numbers for several hours a day. It's not the same ballgame as being a plumber, or line maintenance worker, etc. It's a bad idea right now.
Basically, we are reopening as little as possible to keep people from openly revolting. A lot of people are fortunate enough to be in a situation that is tenable for the long term. I, for example, still have a job where I can WFH indefinitely, my kids are old enough and reliable enough that they can distance learn and still get something out of it, my financial situation and emotional situation are stable. I could do this for months, and while I certainly miss a lot of things, and I wouldn't like it, I can do it.
But many people are in very stressful situations, or out of work, or have very young children, or health issues. These people can't just maintain for another six months without something breaking.
Many other people are just entitled assholes who don't give a shit about others or are too dumb to give a shit about themselves. These are the ones crying about the injustice of having to wear a mask and threatening to lick the floors of their churches or whatever stupid fucking thing. And they're increasingly going to say fuck it and just do whatever they want because they're garbage humans.
So we reopen the things we can where we can still be safe. And we reopen some other things to relieve just enough stress on that first group to let them function. And we reopen a few other things to keep the special snowflakes from assfucking us into a mass grave situation.
And in practice, that means we open some malls but keep schools closed and open some beaches but close some parks. Because it's not about some carefully crafted spreadsheet establishing the ideal way to open things. It's thousands of leaders, some competent and some complete fucking idiots, trying to keep this unwieldy society nominally functional with spit and duct tape.
Have you considered organizing a union and going on strike because fuck.
I'm very sorry about your hard day, and yeah I get it, it's a tough situation for everybody
But it's kind of a big leap from "I'm having a hard time" to "we need to press gang women into doing the work for us"
And it wasn't even "this is something I think we should do", it was
Which is deeply, alarmingly ironic! "If you care about people's lives" -- what about the women whom you would impress into servitude? What about their lives?
You've gotta stop trying to look at stats in this aloof, detached way. Fuck it, just stop looking at the stats at all, leave that to the people who know how to interpret them in ways that don't send chills down the spine of anybody remotely aware of how the stuff you're proposing sounds.
Childcare costs aren’t a conspiracy or monopoly, it’s, I think, one of the more transparent expenses out there
We need to help parents cover the cost vs a race to the bottom with quality or child care workers’ wages
I would rationally definitely not just open everything tomorrow. Emotionally I am desperate for it. But I can't really say "oh yeah I've got evidence as to why it'd be a good idea." It's okay to be despondent and unhappy. It is fucking wank. You don't have to say "well everyone is in the same boat, nobody is happy about this," you are allowed to say "but I don't care, I'm just fucking miserable."
I sympathize with your situation. We're all in this together. Please understand and realize that when you have a bad day and spasm that bad day onto the forums, it affects people here too.
Its not a easy thing for any of us to deal with. At least 30% of the population are flirting with bankruptcy from this and many more are approaching that point. That doesn't mean the answer is to literally enslave women.
Check your goddamn ideas a bit before spewing that garbage on the internet. Having a hard time isn't an excuse for proposing 100% abhorrent ideas.
This keeps getting brought up over and over, and the stats and examples get posted over and over. Kids just aren't as infectious as adults. They aren't. You don't have a kid with the flu visit three schools and no one catches anything. That happened with this.
(Obviously for this thread, ignore all of the horse race stuff)
It's that second one we should be doing.
You can't change work-life balance around to the point where "school doesn't exist" becomes viable.
I would say that you absolutely could, in a fair and just society that is more interested in the health and well being of it's members than our current capitalist dystopia
Wow this keeps happening almost like there is a reason we shouldn't be rushing to reopen things. Nah that can't be it.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Unless you live in Texas or one of these other red states that is throwing open the floodgates once more it is difficult to comprehend just how buck wild it is. Growing up I would never have expected for a virus that kills people to be politicized but here we are.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Apparently Georgia's juking their numbers too
Unless your plan is "only single income households if you have kids" or the like, no you really can't. Someone has to supervise and the teach the kids and there's no work-life balance that accommodates that beyond "this is your work now, you are a teacher".
Its not surprising the GOP is literally lying to get people to kill themselves, but its still despicable.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Just when you think Florida can’t Florida any harder, they Florida even more
Thats not what 'infectious' means here. What it means is that with nominal behavior for both groups, doing their stuff without knowledge of the virus or special behavior, children infect other people less than or equally frequently than you do. If you didn't know you had the virus, and noone else modified their behaviour, you might infect about 3 people during your period of having active virus. Everything we know about the epidemiology of this virus says that despite differences in baseline behavior, kids infect either the same number of people or fewer. We do not know enough to say 'fewer' for certain, but there is no evidence to say that the number is more than it is for adults.
We also know that in the early stages of this virus spread, schools were not the local sources of the outbreak, offices, churches and large social gatherings of adults were. Places where large numbers of adults gathered without social distancing, or, where large numbers of adults were singing or shouting inside despite some level of social distancing. This has remained the same through the virus growth. We see reports of adults infecting each other in large numbers in meat packing plants for example, but not examples of mass outbreaks triggered at the daycares which have remained open for some essential workers.
Now it may be the case that a child on their best behavior (who doesn't really understand social distancing or masks) is more infectious than an adult on their best behavior (who is dilligent with mask usage and hand washing), but, thats an unknown.
Really have to wonder how many of scheduled guests/panelists still plan to attend.
Based on what Gov. Northam had said, I suspect there must be some official unofficial scoreboard in of Trump's various committees using these numbers as a cudgel
For California and here in Illinois and some other States, sure. Phased reopening even when the data doesn't really support going to the next stage is shitty but at least you can understand that politics is overruling caution. But that doesn't really describe what's happening in Florida, or Georgia, or Texas, or Oklahoma. Hell, Wisconsin's Supreme Court just overrode the Emergency Orders and said tough shit about that whole Pandemic thing. Iowa never really went into lockdown to begin with to be reopened. We're living in a Failed State, with varying actual States having varying degrees of functionality.