I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.
> If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning
In defense of the Karens (ew, I feel gross even typing that) remote learning absolutely was the disaster they say it was. It was really, really bad. It's hard to exaggerate how bad it was. And I mean specifically for the kids, not for the parents (it also sucked for them/us, obviously). We can probably recover well-enough from a semester or two of it, but without some top-down moonshot level effort to make it better fast, continuing it would have been an actual catastrophe. I doubt anyone else with school-side insight into how it went would claim otherwise. It was bad.
It was so bad in my school district. I think it was worse than no school for a year because of the chaos of teachers doing different things and no good monitoring or follow-up.
Classes ranged from some teachers sending out a single email a week with assignments and tests and grades to teachers taking attendance the minute class started and then disconnecting. For 10 year olds.
This means I would get silence for a long time, no posts in the classroom site or Teams and then an email saying “major test is tomorrow, make sure your kids study X,Y,Z” with X being chapters in a pdf, Y being a broken link, and Z being some slapdash PowerPoint posted minutes before the email. And there’s multiple subjects.
It was such a surreal experience with countless “we’re doing our best” emails from school leadership.
It was even more performative and useless than normal school.
I know my mileage may vary and it may be problems with my school district. But in the same district they didn’t suffer like this and my kids performed better.
And this is with me spending 1h+ every day helping, running around between telework. I can’t help but think how it fared for kids who didn’t have parents who could flex their work schedule to support digital school.
My wife is a teacher in Chicago Public Schools and there are classes in her school that have spent less than half of the school year in the classroom because of quarantine every time a kid gets COVID. Because the kids all eat lunch together, unmasked, and indoors, well they're all considered close contacts. So back to remote lessons they go again and again.
How exactly is this better than a consistent schedule from home?
No. It wasn't that bad. School still continued. Your children are at most slightly inconvenienced during a global pandemic that has killed MILLIONS of people.
All you have to do is keep your kid looking at a screen. They may need to repeat a year of school. At some point in their future your kids boss may say "oh right, you were a pandemic kid, here let me show you."
It's like someone in WW2 UK complaining that the Germans dropping bombs on their neighbors houses knocked some of the good dishes off the shelf.
“Slightly inconvenienced” is a term I can assure you would be only used by someone who doesn’t have kids.
Sure, the first six months, or even a year can be discounted as an aberration in the child development process and can be compensated for. This is year 3 with no end in sight. Do you even realize how much children develop in 3 years? A 6 year old and a 9 year old have a significant difference in cognitive capabilities and if you stop the learning process, the lifetime effect can be devastating. It doesn’t matter when you’re 30 and have to sit at home, but it absolutely does when you’re a child and your brain is developing.
And based on my long career on the corporate ladder, absolutely no one cares about whether you were a pandemic baby, a child growing up in poverty or pretty much any other non visible handicap in your life. You either know stuff or you don’t.
And since you mentioned World War 2, schools didn’t stop even in WW2, At a time when people didn’t even necessarily need to go to schools to eventually lead a comfortable life.
Louisiana schools closed in March of 2020 toward the end of the month. In August/September they were virtual learning only for a while, and it was not good, or so I was told.
Essentially, they got a "pass" for 2020 regardless of what their grades were, without ever stepping back into class or remote learning.
We also had a massive hurricane and two smaller ones that year, and that had more people at home in October than the SARS-CoV-2 virus did.
Either way, assuming other states allowed or encouraged remote learning and continue to this day, as of, say April of this year we enter year 3 of remote learning. I'm on mobile so I could be wrong, but I believe the original post said "going on/into 3 years at this point" - or at least that was how I interpreted it.
I cannot find evidence of a single US school district that did not have an in-person option this academic year. As another commenter mentioned, it now makes national headlines when a school district needs to take a 1 week pause.
Also the original commenter was talking about early childhood development, not beuracracy. Everything kids learned from 9/2019 through 2/2020 shouldn't disappear because of what happened that spring. If it does our school systems are even worse than I thought.
You wouldn't say you are going into 30 years 2 months before your 29th birthday. And "no end in sight" makes 0 sense in the context of in person schooling, because the end of remote school is already in the rear view mirror.
I get your overall point, but you're greatly exaggerating the length of time here. The entire pandemic has been going on for less than 2 years. I also don't know any district that wasn't in person this entire school year. Every family I know in my area (a pretty liberal area of the US) had a packed summer involving camps, friends, and road trips. Kids truly sat at home for about 1 year.
Now envision:
You are a parent who HAS to work to make ends meet. Your work has to be in person (nurse, meat packing plant etc). You have two kids 3 years apart, say 7 and 10. One you just were able to adjust to school after years of sensory and social issues. The school is closed. The kids cant go in but bars are open.
Certainly my circle is wealthier, but it is a major city and any mandates would apply city-wide. Rural areas have even fewer COVID restrictions. Please point me to a school district in the United States that has had no in-person option this school year.
I live in a large U.S. city. For this discussion I'll include the metropolitan area which has a total population of roughly 2.5 million. The schools closed in the Spring of 2020 - just as the disease was first spreading. In the Fall of 2020 they were partially open - kids would go to school 2-3 days per week. By Spring of 2021 they were completely back at school though there was a mask requirement. That's the state we've been in since. So in total we had 3-4 months of no in-person school. Certainly not the 3 years the commenter you're replying to has claimed - as you pointed out this pandemic hasn't even hit the two year mark yet!
It's been the norm for some time to have in-person classes. School districts make the headlines when they cancel in-person classes and even then that situation only lasts a couple of weeks. Look at the most recent case in Chicago - it lasted one week. Since I live across the street from a large park I can tell you the kids are in school, they're playing outside, they're doing after school activities, and they're playing sports. I don't know what these people are getting on about acting like kids have been locked in their homes for two years.
The argument is that we make this trade off in order to minimize the maximum terribleness, not just because it's convenient.
Fwiw, we name this trade-off all the time. If you think your kid is getting the best possible experience for their development at school then you are pretty naive. School is largely about improving worst case educational outcomes, not fostering maximum growth.
Kids have had long holidays as long as the school system has existed, and they never regressed enough for the general public to raise the alarm.
My own children just repurposed the tools used for remote learning, and now interact more with their peers than they did before the pandemic (and its not just video games either: there's a fair amount of creative activity that happens). Kids are incredibly resilient.
Poor education practices like chaining them to Zoon for hours at a time to attend class, on the other hand, would damage anyone, and show there's a long way to go in the remote learning space. You'd have expected some high profile projects to shine, but I haven't heard a lot from them.
You are wrong. Deeply wrong. I respect HN's rules, so I won't reply as I really want to.
There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year. Have others had it worse in history? Sure. But that's like saying if you get run over by a Prius, it doesn't matter because people that got hit by a truck had it worse.
And for all that keeping kids at home, we really didn't gain anything. If you look at places and regions that kept kids in school and compare them to places that shut schools down, there's no discernable difference in outcomes. Because people intermingled anyway. So we could've at least had kids socializing and developing normally for that cost.
Here's the thing - my wife works for the school system, I have 3 kids, and I'm involved in kids activities. The "shutdown" happened in the Spring of 2020. In the Fall of 2020 all the sports leagues resumed as normal and all the kid activities resumed as normal. The schools were partially open and they went to fully open in the Spring of 2021. In total there were 3-4 months where the kids were "locked up" in their homes. I don't know where this narrative is coming from that kids have been "locked up" for the past two years, but they have not. At least not for the overwhelming majority of kids in the U.S.
There have been cases where a school system makes headline news by cancelling in-person classes as the infection peaks in their area. These shutdowns have only been for 1-2 weeks. The kids are in school. The kids are doing activities. The kids are alright.
My son had a total of 6 days of in-person school for the '20-'21 school year. All after, in-person school activities were canceled the entire year. Almost all sports were canceled as well. The summer of 2020 all summer camps were canceled except for a handful of virtual camps. This past summer, there were a handful of camps available, fortunately.
School is in person this school year, although there have been about 10 virtual days so far for his school, all have been in 2022 because of Omicron making staffing really tough. There are a handful of after school activities, but many are canceled. Sports are largely back to normal.
That's awful - especially at the start of 2021 when we fully understood the vectors and how to manage the transmission of the virus. Summer Camps in 2020 really struggled with sick staff. Even camps that did open had to close due to high rates of infection. Summer 2021 was a completely different story thanks to the vaccine. It's been really frustrating to see the people clamoring for a return to normalcy are taking action to prolong that return to normalcy.
There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year.
My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.
My son would totally be in to that, and I figured he'd have an ok time in the pandemic because of that. Unfortunately, his friends (were 6th grade, now 7th grade) turn out to be complete cyberbullies online. They just get hyper aggressive with each other and every other week during the pandemic my son would be in tears because his friends were so toxic. Once back in person at school, they are totally fine (well, within standards for middle schoolers!) and have a great time, but even now there are several he can't be around online because they just want to find a target and gang up on them. Sometimes it is my son, sometimes some other kid.
Plus a lot of parents are paranoid about online interaction to a crazy degree and will hardly let kids interact online - it makes no sense, but they consider it to be the great bogey man of the 21st century and think that pedophiles are ready to instantly jump on their kids, even if they are in a private discord room just chatting.
It’s hard to measure this systematically and I’m glad that your experiences were positive. My kids had marked drop in grades and really suffered. It wasn’t so much the social aspect as teachers and schools not being to adapt to new methods.
I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
I've got decent insight into several local school districts. From less-close information I've picked up from around the country, our city doesn't seem to be an outlier.
For both fully-remote and alternating-day in-person, if schools still failed kids, they'd have had to fail over half of most classes. Percentages of engaged-enough-to-be-OK kids in online schools tended to sit in the 10-20% range. It wasn't unusual for half or more of kids to effectively be absent for an entire semester. [EDIT] The alternating-day half-in-half-out in-person schedule kids, in the one district that I have insight into that did that for fall 2020/spring 2021, seemed to fare even worse than the online cohort, incidentally.
> I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
Any places that did them, they'll be awful, guaranteed. IIRC at least some states skipped them in Spring 2020 since it'd have been nearly impossible to proctor them and everyone knew they'd be "tainted" anyway. The main point of them is to compare year-over-year progress to see what needs to be adjusted and whether progress is being made, for which a during-remote-learning standardized test would be worthless, since you already know it'll be bad and why it's bad and won't be able to get any actionable info out of comparing it to prior or future years. It'll probably be another couple years before we have something like a new baseline and the tests start to be useful for their intended purpose again.
You're wrong. Deeply wrong. There is no deep psychological damage. Children are not fragile snowflakes - they're adaptable, resilient little humans. That's why as a species we continue to thrive.
Stop inventing new problems that don't exist - there's already enough to go around.
My wife used to teach reading to elementary aged children with reading comprehension issues. And she found that you cannot teach children how to make letter sounds via Zoom. They cannot see, hear, and experience the inflections and mouth/tongue movements required.
The result is these children don't learn how to read. And studies have shown for ages that if a child is not a proficient reader by grade 3, they will likely never be proficient, ever.
That's just one of many costs. We're leaving these children behind.
They are resilient, my son will (probably) be fine - but that doesn't mean there wasn't damage done. I ask all his teachers what the effect has on the kids in comparison, and without an exception, they all point out that nearly all kids aren't as far along as they normally would be: emotionally, socially and academically. Most of them will mostly catch up. Some won't, and all will have an imprint of the pandemic on them in many ways.
Minimizing this does nothing for them. And remember, a depressed kid doesn't always look sad, but can seem happy go lucky as they are trying to be what their parents want them to be.
Seeing as I have 2 kids and plenty of kids live in my neighborhood, none of them are walking around like damaged zombies - it's hard to take you seriously.
I have family that teach in poorer districts here in California. Distance learning (for middle school in these areas that I have heard about) was and is an unmitigated disaster. A lot of the families served don't have reliable internet. Many have nowhere in their homes where a child can be in class without massive distractions of siblings/people/noise/etc making it essentially impossible for the students to pay attention. Often the laptops/chromebooks sent home with them don't last long due to external actions from others in the household.
The teachers are trying their best, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome the nature of these problems, and the effects are absolutely compounding over the past couple of years. It's really, really bad.
Actually, it didn’t go well. Nowadays we’ve got a bunch of 6th graders still at a 4th grade education level. Remote learning for children is substantially less effective for many of them.
Think about it, what are the reasons making close supervision of school-aged children desirable? Their brains are still growing and developing! They often aren’t mature enough to be academically successful when they’re physically isolated and stuck on a shitty google hangout.
The people getting hit hardest by remote learning are the poor kids, who have few enough opportunities as it is. (I can tell you from experience, these remote learning systems are horrible on a low-end device, yet almost tolerable on a high-end one. Parents with both the time and knowledge to assist with school-work aren't distributed evenly. etc, etc.)
Universal education is supposed to be the great equaliser. I can't imagine the current state of remote learning achieves that, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people who push for schools to re-open in-person. I don't think it's worth people dying over, though, especially given that the qualifications are more important than the stuff you learn in school.
If you think it wasn't that bad, you must be from a privileged household, and haven't paid attention to the data. Children, especially low-income children, have been devastated by remote learning.
Remote learning was a disaster for my family, and we have great internet with many computers, and a father who could troubleshoot all the problems, and tutor them some of the time. I cannot imagine what it was like for low income families.
Closing schools was never necessary or even helpful. Some countries like Sweden kept primary schools open for in-person learning throughout the pandemic. They did fine.
That's what I don't understand. Massive world wide problem.. but we have to keep cranking the kids through the meatgrinder (public school->college->first entry job) on time. God forbid, they stop, think about how things run, try to adjust accordingly.
This is yet another problem that's ignored, swept under the run and "averaged out" as a solution.
1. If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem.
2. The idea that anyone who wants in person learning is a "screaming Karen" is fucking stupid. There is lots of evidence that remote learning has all kinds of negative outcomes for kids, and your (frankly sexist) dismissiveness is the reason this conversation never goes anywhere.
Isn't the point way up that nurses are quitting. This creates a burden at the hospital. Why are they quitting? Because they are treated like cattle instead of employed human beings. See the court case on the hospital suing the nurses in an at will employment state for quitting and going to another hospital for higher pay. There are even some who are fired for not getting a vaccine regardless of any special circumstance the individual may have.
True, but thats a % of a % of a % (ie Masks could prevent some % of COVID transmission at school, of some % of which would have be transmitted to other individuals in the home, of which some % of which would have required hospitalization), which makes it seem likely to be a high cost for not much reward.
Should insurance companies also drop low income Americans with diets that trivially lead to heart disease? Shouldn't we, as a society, take care of those who don't know better?
Just record license plates at all fast food restaurants, probably most restaurants, really, average meal runs over 3/4ths of what an average adult male needs to maintain weight.
Liquor stores and bars, too. Ethanol is at least as bad for your body as straight sucrose/fructose.
Log time spent on Facebook, steam, Reddit, etc. Statistically inactivities.
Hell, we could probably reject 75% of Americans in the first three months without any sort of death panels being necessary, just let Google, Target, and walmart machine learn AI the rejection criteria and alert the insurers.
> If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem.
Sure thing. Can we get the Grandpa's to sign documents saying they're going unvaccinated by choice and would like to opt-out from any hospital care related to COVID if their resources are needed for any other patient?
Sure and while we’re at it, let’s not treat aids patients because they engaged in high risk activity and not treat heart attacks of the overweight either.
Are the hospitals collapsing because of aids patients or so many people getting heart attacks? If so then maybe we should start using carrots/sticks to limit peoples risky behavior or make them absorb more of the cost.
If they’re not collapsing the hospitals then why bring them up?
The US medical system is financially untenable due to the massive percentage of adults drinking sugary sodas with every meal, getting fat, and developing Type II diabetes. Guess we should let them die too, right?
You are making an argument with no limiting principle, because it's poorly thought out and shallow, and it shows.
Was it untenable before covid? There were twos of needing more nurses before every boomer was in a nursing home, but I don’t remember reading reports of elective surgeries being cancelled or hospitals going to extremely understaffed.
> You are making an argument with no limiting principle, because it's poorly thought out and shallow, and it shows.
It wasn’t poorly thought out. Our system sucked but was sustainable before the unvaxxed group decided to eschew medical prevention for this disease. Now it sucks _and_ is unsustainable.
Any argument you bring out that doesn’t recognize that the situation has changed due to covid, that also points out other health problems as a reason to not react to the change caused by covid, is poorly thought out.
If any self inflicted problem causes our healthcare system to tip over we should react to it.
People refusing the covid vaccination have tipped over the system. People getting type II diabetes have not
The way you talk about the unvaccinated is telling.
I'd like to propose a solution that I think you would really prefer:
Let's make it really obvious who the unvaccinated are. I'm thinking we could maybe have some kind of article of clothing that could be worn over top of normal clothes. Perhaps an armband would suffice? Would that make you feel comfortable? It would also make it easier for you to mistreat them and shame them at will. Perhaps we could have a different armband for people that are unvaccinated but have a record of a positive test and recovery. They could be subject to shaming as well for not going along with your sacrament.
59% of Democratic party voters surveyed support a policy of confining unvaccinated people to their homes. We should go ahead and do that right? I'm taking this to its logical end because you don't dare do so.
I voted Democrat my entire life. People have no idea what it was like campaigning for Barack Obama in southwestern Virginia. I literally had a man brandish a shotgun at me in his driveway. It's coal country. I was a die-hard supporter and they betrayed me and other people like me.
This coercion was the last straw and I'm never voting for the party again. Congratulations you and your ilk have created a monster.
> Let's make it really obvious who the unvaccinated are. I'm thinking we could maybe have some kind of article of clothing that could be worn over top of normal clothes. Perhaps an armband would suffice? Would that make you feel comfortable? It would also make it easier for you to mistreat them and shame them at will. Perhaps we could have a different armband for people that are unvaccinated but have a record of a positive test and recovery. They could be subject to shaming as well for not going along with your sacrament.
I’m not going to accept you trying to make comparisons between the unvaxxed and Jews. Being unvaccinated is a _choice_. If you make choices you deal with the consequence. I’m never going to be behind treating people different for aspects of their life they had no choice in, but I am 100% behind treating people differently based on their choices.
> 59% of Democratic party voters surveyed support a policy of confining unvaccinated people to their homes. We should go ahead and do that right? I'm taking this to its logical end because you don't dare do so.
You didn’t ask. I’m completely fine taking this to the logical end. Not a democrat but I’d be in the 59%. If you want to be unvaxxed and not enter society, that’s fine. You’ve kept your externalities to yourself. If you want to have access to public areas and not take steps to stop breaking down public systems, then you’re pushing your problems on us and that’s where I have a problem with it
> I literally had a man brandish a shotgun at me in his driveway
And? It’s America, who grew up here and hasn’t had someone threaten to kill them for coming on their land?
> This coercion was the last straw and I'm never voting for the party again. Congratulations you and your ilk have created a monster.
I didn’t talk about being democrat at all, but if I was in the Democratic Party and you were threatening to leave over not being getting vaccinated then I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop you. It’s not a threat when I already don’t want the unvaccinated associated with me. Go ahead, take your ball, and go home.
I fully admit I've been harsh in this thread, and frankly I'm unhappy with myself for letting my emotions get the best of me.
I appreciate your honesty and candor on your feelings on this subject.
What I will state bluntly is this:
You have stated, implicitly, that you support the policy of confining the unvaccinated to their homes.
Unfortunately, I don't see a path forward for me to ever forgive, or be willing to be decent to, people who hold that opinion, because I view it as absolutely and unequivocally tyrannical, to a degree that I view is a betrayal to the constitution. My ancestors settled in southern Appalachia in the early 1700s, and I would have a far larger number of relatives if not for so many of them dying in the Revolutionary War for the right to never again have their fundamental rights violated by inevitably corrupt, morally certain and powerful rulers in distant cities. They too, fled Ulster, where oppressive policies could have been avoided if they had made the CHOICE to convert to the Anglican church. Just a CHOICE. They CHOSE to not join the Anglican church, so they deserved the oppression that was visited on them in the eyes of the British monarchy. "Those stupid Scots-Irish Presbyterians. If they'd just convert, they'd be fine! Let's take their shit." The English KNEW that THEY were RIGHT. It was all justified.
I strongly suspect that, had you been born in 1914, you would have been fully supportive of the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Most Americans were, because violating the sovereign rights of fellow citizens made them feel safer. It reduced the risk imposed by some of them being spies. You have applied the same logic here. I know you view that as an unfair characterization. I don't fault you for that. Most people think that, if push came to shove, they would not have been one of the majoritarian oppressors they read about in history books. They think they are one of the small percentage of people who would have taken a stand, and sacrificed to do so. I see no evidence to support that belief in this conversation.
All I will say is that the machinery required to enforce such policies, as put on display in Australia, once put in place, can be used for any end, by any ruler who seizes power.
Regarding the political party aspects, it wasn't intended as a threat, but more of as a single data point that should make you question what the long-term fallout will be when this already endemic virus is eventually recognized as such by the vast majority of the American public. I'm not the only one who has hit a point of no return. I know I am in a minority, but it's an intransigent one, and the effect will be generational. I used to support gun control as well. Knowing that people out there are happy to violate my rights, I no longer do. 2 years ago, I viewed the NRA as a bunch of psychopaths allied with gun and ammunition manufacturers. My opinions, likely correct, was that a lot of the "Obama will take your guns" was designed to boost ammunition sales and profits for the gun/ammo companies. Now I view them as a useful counterbalance. I've been radicalized. Was it worth it?
There’s a lot in here to respond to but I think the most important part is this
> I've been radicalized. Was it worth it?
Why do I always hear this from people who think the unvaxxed should be completely unrestrained in their behavior? And why do I always hear it from people who haven’t realized they’ve radicalized the rest of us.
If you asked about limiting someone to their home because they won’t take a vaccine for a plague, you would have only gotten odd looks because no one would have expected people to be that crazy en masse. But hey, they are, they’re inflicting their problems on the rest of us, and like to get threatening anytime it’s questions.
We’ve been radicalized by the insistence of personal freedom over not harming the rest of us. Was it worth it?
I tested positive for COVID in February of 2021. I have natural immunity but I'm being treated like I'm a risk to fully vaccinated people around me. I think that might explain why I feel like I'm having my rights violated.
Please explain to me why the scientists in the EU consider prior infection equivalent to being vaccinated but the United States doesn't?
Like any kid who grew up in Appalachia, I own firearms and a sweet compound bow, learned how to hunt when I was 9, caught my first fish when I was 4, and therefore have no need to "stock up on food." I grow cannabis and vegetables in a hydroponic system in my basement. Fresh tomatoes in the middle of winter makes a hell of an impression at dinner parties, and I highly recommend an indoor hydro garden to anyone. The wonders of LED grow lights and deep water recirculating hydroponics! I don't brew my own beer, so I guess I'll be hosed on that front. Obviously, I know I'll never be welded into my house, but I appreciate the dry wit of your statement.
I'm angry and disappointed, but I'm not afraid of you and the other innumerate immunity deniers. I pity you. The willful imposition of tyranny on others is dehumanizing for those who push it, and for those who go along with it. You're better than that, and I hope you realize it one day. I sincerely wish you a good evening, and I appreciate the opportunity to learn your perspective. I also want you to know that I apologize for being so harsh at times in my comments. I don't fault you, because I understand that people aren't themselves when they are afraid.
There is no free market. Due to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), medical insurers aren't legally allowed to set premiums based on vaccination status.
Medical services do not have price-elastic demand just because they are offered in a free market. It's the other way actually; I'd imagine medical services are some of the most price-inelastic things you can buy.
Yeah, but masks aren't doing much to prevent that. My kids go to an Oregon elementary school that requires full time masking and I can't think of a single kid who hasn't had it. COVID has run rampant through Oregon schools. I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools. The elderly and vulnerable need to get vaccinated, or be handled in a tent in the hospital parking lot. Stop punishing kids. This coming from a very large, male, angry "Karen."
Indeed. My twin brother lives just outside of PDX, and the schools were closed for a full year, then hybrid classes. His son was in kindergarten when it hit, just like my daughter. His son is severely delayed now. On top of all of that, they finally open the schools back up and shove the kids into useless masks. His son (Jack) needs speech therapy. When he goes, the instructor is wearing a mask. He can't see what her lips are doing.
It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who???
It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.
The strange part to me is that usually on policy issues there’s this band of reasonable behavior and people disagree on which end of that band we should fall, but if you’re honest you can understand the other side’s perspective. On COVID in Oregon, it’s the first time in my life I’ve felt like I’m looking at a completely different world than others. I’m just flabbergasted by the policy calls driven by COVID hysteria. I’m not some rabid right winger. (My wife and I are both triple vaccinated, AND we still recently got it!) I just feel totally, totally confused. We vacationed in Idaho over Christmas and it was like reorienting myself to reality. I have no idea what’s going on in Oregon, but I am confident that we have revealed a fundamental split in human psyches that some bad actor will exploit to terrible ends.
So what I'm about to write here is I want to emphasize just groaning and complaining from my brother. He recently moved just over the line to one of those suburbs of Portland in Washington State. He told me he was fed up with Oregon and although he doesn't like the Pacific Northwest in general, he is divorced and needs to be near his ex-wife since she has custody of the kids.
His view of Oregon is that it's filled with people who are really not that bright. Obviously this is a stereotype but I will say that being out there what I kind of sensed was a bunch of people who were descended from pioneers who were very religious and are wired for religion but don't have it. I think COVID helped foster a new form of religion in the population, but perhaps it was always a sort of case where people on the coast were kind of doing that with progressive politics in general.
Human beings really are herd animals, and the vast majority of the population would rather do what is popular than what is right. I think that you have a toxic mix of this ideology combined with the rather unique Pacific Northwest cultural trait of never speaking your mind and primarily using passive aggressive behavior at all times. My brother worked at Nike for a while and was always told by colleagues that he was "too intense". He and I both worked in military intelligence in the past in the DC area and he's a driven worker like I am. He's only intense to people that really want to take it slow all the time. He always told me that the cultural traits in the region were really obnoxious and obstructed. Getting good work done. Nike is after all a shitshow of a company. Highly unproductive, very unefficient, with the dramatically larger workforce then it needs at its campus in Beaverton. We are talking about a state that has made the decision that people can't pump their own gas because it would hurt the economy by robbing people of the job of pumping their gas for them. That's a special kind of stupidity at the government level.
On top of this rather insane groupthink that you are referring to west of the Cascades, you have this other weird situation which is the rather extreme government measures at the state level have completely radicalized people on the right side of the political spectrum. When going to a grocery store in Sherwood outside of Portland, I encountered a bunch of boogaloo boys. Half the time I was driving around there I would occasionally see a truck with radical right wing stickers all over it, signifying membership in some group. (3 percenters or something like that?) I almost never see that anywhere in Colorado outside of Denver.
But perhaps the most memorable part of that trip was the interior of the state and the fact that the state government of Oregon clearly has zero authority anywhere east of the Cascades. It's really something to behold. You have this massive land area that is essentially ungovernable by the state government. The local population absolutely hates everything from the capital. They aren't at all subtle about it. It is basically a state of open, proud disobedience. It is the only place I've ever been since the pandemic started where there is a state law requiring wearing a mask indoors, but if I walked into a convenience store wearing one, they would get angry at me including the employees. It's a very good lesson to me about the fact that urban areas should understand that large swaths of this country will become completely ungovernable if they continue to use the government as a cudgel to force their values on a population that doesn't want it.
Another item that was shocking was the fact that we had visited Portland a few times before in previous summers, and the horrific degradation of Portland's downtown was tragic to see. It's really insane. Granted I was there right as the federal courthouse was being besieged, and it was pretty crazy having young men dressed in black threaten me and my brother when we were walking. We are both over 6 ft and over 200 lb and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we didn't get our asses beat. Complete lawlessness in that city. I just don't know how people who live there aren't completely embarrassed by it.
> I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools.
According to the article, studies have said very little in a way that controls for variables. There haven't been great studies showing their effectiveness. The Bangladesh one said surgical masks were "modestly effective." Not that it matters. Omicron is so contagious masks are well past their usefulness.
> The Bangladesh one said surgical masks were "modestly effective."
And then the raw data came out and there was a difference of maybe 20 cases.
The gold standard is an RCT, and it failed to show any benefit to masks in general.
Masks work great on mannequins or hamsters but they are essentially useless as a public health measure. We learned this in 1912. I am astonished that so many people still cling to them and claim "masks work" when we have overwhelming data that as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, they really don't. unless 100% of the people wear an N95 24/7.
The masks were well past their usefulness in 2019.
I'd be more than happy to test and vaccinate in schools. In particular vaccinate. But having kids wear masks…which they don't do well, because they're kids…not like adults do it well either…is a fig leaf. It's not going to work. And you can see that from the massive infection rates in schools that have masks.
Of course all of our problems go away when you convince the remaining 40% of the population to get vaccinated.
I'm actually in favor of doing away with masks and social distancing. Just create a nationwide policy that the unvaccinated will not be admitted or treated for COVID and we can all return to our daily lives.
Please refer to countries like Australia/Israel who are still experiencing massive case loads with a ~95% vaccination rate. It doesn't make it go away. For example please see
> Please refer to countries like Australia/Israel who are still experiencing massive case loads with a ~95% vaccination rate. It doesn't make it go away. For example please see
I think people underestimate how big a number 5% of a population of most countries -- even small ones -- actually is, especially when compared against available health care resources.
About 1/3 of the covid cases in the ICU where I live [1]. No idea how that stacks up compared to total ICU capacity (I think <10% but am not sure on this).
None of those things have forced us to all drastically alter our lives in the forms of economic and social lockdowns like covid has. It is a pretty silly thing to compare.
Covid is old and busted. Now all you have is OMG Omicron that’s just basically an annoying flu, you go ahead and lose your mind over it - it’s a free country. I’m still freaking out about dioxin so I don’t have time for this shit.
Convincing that 40% to get vaccinated while members of our elected government preach to that particular choir about how things that are partially or mostly effective (masking, vaccines, etc) are NOT effective simply because they are not 100% effective is a losing battle.
Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or no, believes the vaccines to be effective. It was asked five times, his answers were nothing but stuttering, rambling, dissembling, meandering madness ('i mean what does effective actually mean' level bullshit). The republicans passed him out of committee once the democrats walked out in frustration.
We have a party that is in full denial mode because that's what their anti-vax constituents want to hear. The only upside might be that their vote share goes down because their constituents die in higher numbers.
The denial is so palpable. I know a couple in their early sixties who refused to get vaccinated because "COVID is way overblown". They were both regular weight and normal health. The wife contracted COVID and died in the hospital. Later, when asked if he was going to get vaccinated, he said no, because "COVID is no worse than a cold."
He apparently believes that even though his wife went into the hospital for COVID, she actually died from pneumonia, and not COVID. I guess no doctor explained to him that pneumonia is simply an infection that has spread to the lungs.
I'd argue it in a more adult way than just punishing those who are different from you. Just do away with the masking and social distancing regardless. As soon as we were throwing out the first doses of expired vaccine, the choice by every american to get vaccinated or not had been made. If the hospitals are overrun, it will be the unvaccinated, so they'll be punished anyway - no need to legally do it.
Also you need to update your Sam Harris stats, its not 40% unvaccinated anymore like some outlets continue to harp on, check CDC numbers, its closer to only 20% of the population remaining.
hospitals being overrun doesn't just affect the unvaccinated, it affects anybody who needs medical attention. just allowing the hospitals to get overrun is not a reasonable option
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...
I guess it depends on what you mean by vaccinated:
75.1% of total us population has had at least on dose (79.8% of eligible (>= 5 yr)
Fully vaccinated drops to 63.6/67.6%
And Boosted is at only 41% of the fully vaccinated, 86.5M.
Another thing I wonder about is what are the affects of wearing masks at young age and not getting usual amount of exposure to viruses and other germs.
I remember reading here and elsewhere that early childhood exposure to germs builds a robust immune system.
While my kid doesn’t wear mask in his class but his school is following very strict cleaning procedures. So he hasn’t gotten sick as much before pandemic. Maybe that is good, definitely easier on us. Maybe we will always have higher level of hygiene now. Or maybe in future there will be a lot of young adults with underdeveloped immune system.
Having young kids myself, I can say pretty confidently that kids are going to expose themselves to quite a lot of germs no matter what precautions we take, short of putting them in solitary confinement in clean rooms.
So I think it's possible that precautions reduce viral and bacterial exposure, but since they don't completely stop it, immune systems may still get enough exposure to build immunity to things while still not getting enough exposure to actually make them sick.
This seems to run counter to the current hygiene hypothesis, which is the current mainstream scientific opinion on one aspect of allergy development. Children in developed countries are decreasingly exposed to various microorganisms, and this is thought to result in increased rates of allergic disorders.
I believe that it's common for kids to wear masks during flu season in some countries. They probably have some relevant data.
I think there's a belief that strict adherence to vaccination and masks would get us to a place where we won't need masks all the time, and kids can resume their usual immune-system adventures. That might be less realistic than we might want. I don't know.
Is there a massive infection rate? My kid’s elementary school sends an email with the count of positive test results in the school each week. It seems like it’s consistently under 1% per week. (Typically 1-4 people testing positive in a city K-5 school, students and staff being tested.)
Our school has seemed to do OK keeping it from spreading between kids.
But they also do weekly testing. And did surveillance testing at the end of winter break, which kept about 15% of the school's students at home for the first week back because they had covid.
This statistic was also consistent with LA Unified surveillance testing after winter break - about 15%.
Before winter break, some parents of 2nd graders had an indoor, maskless, holiday party. Apparently all the kids got covid. Then gave it to the teachers - all 4 2nd grade teachers were out of school with covid the week before winter break. But from what our school's testing showed, it didn't spread beyond that.
I do know of a couple families who did seem to get covid from their school though.
Our elementary school in Oregon has required masks. And I can't think of a kid who hasn't got it, including our own. It's run rampant through Oregon schools. By my assessment, masks do very, very little to stop the spread.
You somehow manage to be condescending against all parties here.
Calling mothers who want their children to receive an in-person education "screaming Karens" is terribly out of touch.
I have young children, and my position is simple: the hospital load, the vaccination status of the elderly, the burn out of the teachers -- it's not my child's burden. It's the adults' burden.
You are free to wear a mask for the rest of your life for all I care. I find it pathetic, but I really don't care. But you and people like you do not deserve power over my children, and if you don't see the reckoning coming you are not paying close enough attention.
So he should foot the bill for private school because people like you don't understand basic statistics, or even bother to look at the data? With all due respect, there's a name for fear that is divorced from reality and not in proportion with the actual risk: paranoia. And that's what this is.
The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. Virtually zero of those kids that died was healthy before they caught COVID. The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks.... it's almost like maybe, just maybe, you've let your brain get hijacked by a mass panic and are refusing to acknowledge reality now, because that would require you to admit you've completely overreacted, and have done damage to children in the process. I don't blame you for not wanting to admit that to yourself, but at some point this has to stop.
> The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period.
That's just deaths, though. What about other long-term effects? Long COVID and MIS-C come to mind.
> TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR.
And you'll notice that schools tend to take measures to prevent drowning - namely, barring unsupervised access to bodies of water deep enough for kids to drown.
> The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks
Everyone will inevitably be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that exposure occurs in school or somewhere else hardly matters. We can't wrap our children in protective bubbles. At some point they have to exist in the real world with all of it's risks.
Care to back up any numbers with long COVID? Or am I again going to have to suffer with hand waving and zero quantitative analysis?
Throughout this pandemic, measures were taken with a public health benefit in mind that was purely limited to the virus, and any and all mentions of weighing the cost of these measures or even trying to quantify it was met with "You're killing people!!! You shouldn't have a platform. You should be silenced!" Shaming tactics are the last resort of people with bad policies and bad ideas.
I wasn't aware that any schools had completely closed their doors to prevent kids from drowning or were preventing kids from learning to speak by forcing them to cover half of their faces to prevent drowning. The point is that you don't know a kid that's drowned most likely and most of us don't.
Additionally, masks don't stop the spread. So we're sitting here arguing about an intervention that hasn't done anything to prevent omicron from spreading all over classrooms anyway. If you had school age children you would know this, but I'm going to take a wild guess you don't do you?
Your last question indicates that you think making mask wearing in school by children a permanent feature should be explored. I would welcome you to submit your own children if you ever have them to this experiment, but good luck finding researchers that think it would be ethical to conduct this experiment. They certainly wouldn't endorse it for more than a short period of time, but we did it to all of our kids in an uncontrolled experiment born out of panic.
Kids aren't the only ones at risk - he also mentioned teachers, some of whom don't want to take the higher risk of in-person teaching or dealing with 100+ kids every day that aren't wearing masks.
Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher. We face the "risk" on two fronts. Unlike many of her colleagues, she was unhappy with the obvious impeded ability to teach resulting from the school closures. A large percentage of her colleagues were clearly enjoying working from home. That's a dark side of this that people on your side are unwilling to admit.
I deeply resent it when people call it an issue of convenience. Proper emotional and social development of children is not an issue of convenience despite the constant claim from people like you that "You're just mad because you lost your free babysitting. Get over it."
The teachers were first in line to get vaccinated. Every other kind of employee in public places faces equivalent risks. As usual nobody is talking about numbers because your side has no numbers to back you up. It's just waving your hand and talking about people's comfort levels. Unquantifiable emotional nonsense, with people who are impervious to any form of facts or statistics or actual numbers.
Why? Masks dont help much. Vaccines dont stop contagion or transmission. They do lower risk of severe covid but kids are very low risk even if unvaccinated.
It depends what kind of mask. Proper respirator masks like N95 and FFP2 work very well. There are now very clear results that show that the main mode of transmission is respiratory aerosol.
I can’t find fault with the data or the investigation or the conclusion – I act according to this: We’re dealing with an airborne pathogen. Aerosolized.
Closed masks – respirator masks – N95/FFP2. These do work. Almost unreasonably well.
“Surgical masks” that gape at the sides do not protect well against aerosolized particles.
At what cost? If there were crazy people jaywalking onto the freeway, do you want to reduce speed limit nationally to accommodate that, or would you rather let it play out and people can realize certain things are just fatally stupid?
Until when? What’s the endpoint? Children are little bundles of disease; it has always been and will always be strictly better for public health to prevent children from interacting with each other. But what kind of world is that?
So basically harming Billy possibly violating his rights and not respecting Grandpa’s autonomy to make his own decisions regarding risk/return tradeoffs is the solution? Hasn’t worked well to date.
