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Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most o

by vxNsr 5y ago

Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most of last year. Kids come first. Until this summer the chance of them getting sick or transmitting was super low, with delta it’s a little higher but with sane precautions most of the risk can be alleviated. In a few years time you’re gonna see real disparities between even religious private school kids (which don’t necessarily have better education standards) and public based solely on who was in person. If you’re trying to win one over your political opponents get out of this, it’s not game.

8note 5y ago
If you kill all the teachers, the students still aren't going to get an education
- twofornone 5y ago
  Are you implying that a significant proportion of teachers are going to die of COVID? You're aware that this is a virus with a 99.x% survival rate, right? And the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild?
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    The average American thinks if they catch covid their chance of death is around 10%. People are horrifically misinformed on the risks of covid. It has made it impossible to have a reasoned discussion on public policy. Source: http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
    - twofornone 5y ago
      The worst part is that you're effectively not allowed to have any sort of objective discussion, as evidenced by my immediate negative comment score. This has become a borderline religious hysteria.
      - spookthesunset 5y ago
        I’ve been called “dangerous” multiple times for posting screenshots of the state department of health covid dashboard. It’s crazy…
      - InitialLastName 5y ago
        > as evidenced by my immediate negative comment score. I don't like commenting on internet points (it isn't usually productive) but you'll note that the person you replied to has been downvoted and flagged into oblivion.
    - farmerstan 5y ago
      The split is worse between liberals and conservatives. Liberals think the chance of being hospitalized is up to 50%. I’m a liberal myself but the abject fear that I see among my friends and the families in my mostly liberal school is scary. Even worse, they believe it’s even more dangerous for children when it’s the exact opposite. Even considering delta the chance of hospitalization is still less than 1% and death is almost nil. “But what about long covid?” is the response I get, which is just as small. If fear is dictating policy we will never break out of this because the time to vaccinate everyone plus the chances of a variant coming along means we will never be free.
      - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
        I always catch flak for saying it, but we need to be honest about the fact that long COVID is largely a psychogenic illness. It can be a real thing, in the way that any infection can leave a sort of malaise that persists for years or even decades for the unlucky, but such reactions are incredibly rare. Yet based off the self-reported surveys, you'd think the rate of long COVID was like 10% among progressive twitter users in their early 20's... I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance), but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all things that happened before COVID and will continue to happen long after...
        in_cahoots 5y ago
        Most ‘long’ Covid cases aren’t that long. It’s entirely common for people to still feel symptoms 8-12 weeks after a respiratory infection; by most studies that’s ‘long’ Covid. What gets reported however are the extreme outliers, people who are reporting Chronic Fatigue-type symptoms 6+ months later. Some of these people genuinely have a delayed immune response, while others were probably psychosomatic cases (turns out having to live with the fear of a deadly virus does a number on people’s mental state if they actually do get sick). But either way, these cases are likely a minority of what’s included in the ‘long Covid’ umbrella. It’s irresponsible reporting, and I’m not sure if it happens through ignorance (scary news is fun to talk about) or an ulterior motive (if we can convince our readers that they’ll likely to have long-term effects from getting Covid maybe they’ll mask up and vaccinate). Either way, it’s proof that even ‘mainstream’ media often can’t be trusted to report the facts.
- TrevorJ 5y ago
  My understanding is that the data indicate that children do not transmit Covid as easily as adults, so the situation is a bit more subtle than you seem to suggest here.
  - Gibbon1 5y ago
    Only true of Covid classic, the Delta variant negates that.
    - abduhl 5y ago
      Was in person schooling shut down before or after the delta variant? Imputing a risk to behaviors/decisions that occurred before the risk manifested is a logical error.
      - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
        I'd also note that an even-more-infectious variant of SARS-2 (Delta), in which children transmit just as readily (I haven't seen proof of this whatsoever but let's accept it for the sake of argument), and which largely-but-not-completely bypasses vaccine immunity (this is definitely the case; the Israel data confirms that the approach of vaccinating against just the spike protein was an incredible failure given that a couple point mutations on the spike like we saw with Delta was enough to drop vaccine efficacy to <=40% against infection), should tell us that trying to run away from this virus or wage war on it is folly and that, yes, your kid is going to be exposed to COVID, and that's okay. This is a bit of a side tangent but it never ceases to amaze me that the supposed asymptomatic spread of COVID (which was never proven; pre-symptomatic was but asymptomatic appears to have been a myth) was used as a justification for the necessity of lockdowns and the like, when really it should have been a screaming indicator that we should stop trying to aggressively contain the damn thing and just focus on population health and focused protection of the severely vulnerable. By the same logic (this is me basically restating my first paragraph), the idea that a variant that infects kids more easily or as was argued above that kids can transmit more easily, is a sign that we should stop trying to close schools, not that we need to double down. And regardless it seems like people seem to have forgotten that we're now in late September 2021. It's almost been two years of this now. Hell, I remember catching major flak here (on a different account) in early-mid 2020 for saying that we were going to stay locked down until they coerced everyone into being vaccinated, and at the time I was called a conspiracy theorist; nowadays people act like I'm crazy for not wanting vaccine passports, and will turn around and act as if we all collectively knew they were going to happen from the beginning! More than 18 months of this, a third-world child starvation / missed medical appointment crisis, a massive worldwide uptick in missed preventative care like cancer screenings, a >30% rise in y/y fentanyl overdose deaths in the US alone, and yet people still insist on more of these ineffective and outright authoritarian measures?!
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  The teachers can vaccinate if they want to now so that's a moot point. Even before that the likelihood of suffering any severe outcome from COVID was extremely low and no higher due to being a school teacher. Students are at very low risk of contracting it and/or spreading it.
handrous 5y ago
> Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most of last year. Teachers' unions are so weak in my state that they're nearly worthless as far as contract negotiation & enforcement goes, yet every district I know of in my city had a well-attended online option last year, if they weren't fully online, and in-person was largely "hybrid" (in-person some days, remote other days). The unions had nothing to do with it. Parents and teachers—not their unions, just teachers, directly—drove most of the decisions.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  I'm sorry but that's not been my experience at all, in my state the union refused to work in person even after they were vaccinated.
  - handrous 5y ago
    That's fine—my experience was very similar outcomes without a union involved. You asserted that unions were a major part of the difference in behavior between public and private schools, but our public schools behaved much the same way without union involvement. They may not be as major a factor in the outcomes as you expect, or, to put it another way, they may be an instrument of a will that was (apparently) present whether or not the union was.

by vxNsr 5y ago

8note 5y ago

If you kill all the teachers, the students still aren't going to get an education

twofornone 5y ago
Are you implying that a significant proportion of teachers are going to die of COVID? You're aware that this is a virus with a 99.x% survival rate, right? And the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild?
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  The average American thinks if they catch covid their chance of death is around 10%. People are horrifically misinformed on the risks of covid. It has made it impossible to have a reasoned discussion on public policy. Source: http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/ http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
  - twofornone 5y ago
    The worst part is that you're effectively not allowed to have any sort of objective discussion, as evidenced by my immediate negative comment score. This has become a borderline religious hysteria.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      I’ve been called “dangerous” multiple times for posting screenshots of the state department of health covid dashboard. It’s crazy…
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      > as evidenced by my immediate negative comment score. I don't like commenting on internet points (it isn't usually productive) but you'll note that the person you replied to has been downvoted and flagged into oblivion.
  - farmerstan 5y ago
    The split is worse between liberals and conservatives. Liberals think the chance of being hospitalized is up to 50%. I’m a liberal myself but the abject fear that I see among my friends and the families in my mostly liberal school is scary. Even worse, they believe it’s even more dangerous for children when it’s the exact opposite. Even considering delta the chance of hospitalization is still less than 1% and death is almost nil. “But what about long covid?” is the response I get, which is just as small. If fear is dictating policy we will never break out of this because the time to vaccinate everyone plus the chances of a variant coming along means we will never be free.
    - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
      I always catch flak for saying it, but we need to be honest about the fact that long COVID is largely a psychogenic illness. It can be a real thing, in the way that any infection can leave a sort of malaise that persists for years or even decades for the unlucky, but such reactions are incredibly rare. Yet based off the self-reported surveys, you'd think the rate of long COVID was like 10% among progressive twitter users in their early 20's... I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance), but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all things that happened before COVID and will continue to happen long after...
      - in_cahoots 5y ago
        Most ‘long’ Covid cases aren’t that long. It’s entirely common for people to still feel symptoms 8-12 weeks after a respiratory infection; by most studies that’s ‘long’ Covid. What gets reported however are the extreme outliers, people who are reporting Chronic Fatigue-type symptoms 6+ months later. Some of these people genuinely have a delayed immune response, while others were probably psychosomatic cases (turns out having to live with the fear of a deadly virus does a number on people’s mental state if they actually do get sick). But either way, these cases are likely a minority of what’s included in the ‘long Covid’ umbrella. It’s irresponsible reporting, and I’m not sure if it happens through ignorance (scary news is fun to talk about) or an ulterior motive (if we can convince our readers that they’ll likely to have long-term effects from getting Covid maybe they’ll mask up and vaccinate). Either way, it’s proof that even ‘mainstream’ media often can’t be trusted to report the facts.
TrevorJ 5y ago
My understanding is that the data indicate that children do not transmit Covid as easily as adults, so the situation is a bit more subtle than you seem to suggest here.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  Only true of Covid classic, the Delta variant negates that.
  - abduhl 5y ago
    Was in person schooling shut down before or after the delta variant? Imputing a risk to behaviors/decisions that occurred before the risk manifested is a logical error.
    - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
      I'd also note that an even-more-infectious variant of SARS-2 (Delta), in which children transmit just as readily (I haven't seen proof of this whatsoever but let's accept it for the sake of argument), and which largely-but-not-completely bypasses vaccine immunity (this is definitely the case; the Israel data confirms that the approach of vaccinating against just the spike protein was an incredible failure given that a couple point mutations on the spike like we saw with Delta was enough to drop vaccine efficacy to <=40% against infection), should tell us that trying to run away from this virus or wage war on it is folly and that, yes, your kid is going to be exposed to COVID, and that's okay. This is a bit of a side tangent but it never ceases to amaze me that the supposed asymptomatic spread of COVID (which was never proven; pre-symptomatic was but asymptomatic appears to have been a myth) was used as a justification for the necessity of lockdowns and the like, when really it should have been a screaming indicator that we should stop trying to aggressively contain the damn thing and just focus on population health and focused protection of the severely vulnerable. By the same logic (this is me basically restating my first paragraph), the idea that a variant that infects kids more easily or as was argued above that kids can transmit more easily, is a sign that we should stop trying to close schools, not that we need to double down. And regardless it seems like people seem to have forgotten that we're now in late September 2021. It's almost been two years of this now. Hell, I remember catching major flak here (on a different account) in early-mid 2020 for saying that we were going to stay locked down until they coerced everyone into being vaccinated, and at the time I was called a conspiracy theorist; nowadays people act like I'm crazy for not wanting vaccine passports, and will turn around and act as if we all collectively knew they were going to happen from the beginning! More than 18 months of this, a third-world child starvation / missed medical appointment crisis, a massive worldwide uptick in missed preventative care like cancer screenings, a >30% rise in y/y fentanyl overdose deaths in the US alone, and yet people still insist on more of these ineffective and outright authoritarian measures?!
CountDrewku 5y ago
The teachers can vaccinate if they want to now so that's a moot point. Even before that the likelihood of suffering any severe outcome from COVID was extremely low and no higher due to being a school teacher. Students are at very low risk of contracting it and/or spreading it.

handrous 5y ago

> Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most of last year. Teachers' unions are so weak in my state that they're nearly worthless as far as contract negotiation & enforcement goes, yet every district I know of in my city had a well-attended online option last year, if they weren't fully online, and in-person was largely "hybrid" (in-person some days, remote other days). The unions had nothing to do with it. Parents and teachers—not their unions, just teachers, directly—drove most of the decisions.

vxNsr 5y ago
I'm sorry but that's not been my experience at all, in my state the union refused to work in person even after they were vaccinated.
- handrous 5y ago
  That's fine—my experience was very similar outcomes without a union involved. You asserted that unions were a major part of the difference in behavior between public and private schools, but our public schools behaved much the same way without union involvement. They may not be as major a factor in the outcomes as you expect, or, to put it another way, they may be an instrument of a will that was (apparently) present whether or not the union was.