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

• ta988 5y ago
  And as usual the school officials will hunt that student.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    From the thread it looks like they already are.
• DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • djbebs 5y ago
    You need to relax. There is no legitimate reason to force people to undergo any medical procedure.
    • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      I am very relaxed. We had mandatory vaccination against smallpox and measles, and it worked well. There weren't even any discussions. The doctor came to school, we formed a queue and each got their jab. Nobody whined or wrote home about it. And hopefully we'll do it again very soon whether anyone whines or not.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • op00to 5y ago
      Legitimate reason number 1: based on your low effort reply, you’re unable to understand how not to pass on a highly communicable disease that causes misery, disruption, and death. Don’t post that anymore.
      • kbelder 5y ago
        How rude you are.
        • op00to 5y ago
          Far ruder to not get a vaccine that saves lives.
  • tomp 5y ago
    If you're afraid of the virus, get vaccinated yourself. That's literally the most you can do. If you're still afraid of the virus, you should know that vaccinating people (even forcefully) won't stop transmission. The virus is endemic. The only thing that can change between now and "back to normal" future is, your mind.
    • gorbachev 5y ago
      How lucky you are not having to worry about co-morbidity. I'm sick and tired of people generalizing their own conditions to the entire population. You are not like everyone else. Stop telling other people they don't need to worry.
      • sergiotapia 5y ago
        I'm sick and tired of doom larpers stealing the youth and life experiences of children and teenagers over this nothingness. If _you_ have comorbidities _you_ need to protect yourself.
        • gorbachev 5y ago
          Oh, totally. One of the ways I would personally prefer it done is not needing to send kids to super spreader spaces for no reason, since there is no learning happening as documented by the student in the reddit post, causing them to bring the virus home to their parents / grandparents suffering from co-morbidity or immune system issues.
    • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      I'm not afraid. I am triple-vaxxed not for myself but out of solidarity for those around me. I am simply at the end of my patience with people going to protests clogging my city and creating politicians using the greenpass and constant checks and testing to create a divide. mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone. there can still be an exemption if a physician approves that a person can not be vaccinated for some strange reason. that's the only way to go back to normal, the rest is silly greenpass rules or noisy discussions about "shall we pay un-vaccinated people less?", etc ...
  • VoodooJuJu 5y ago
    >It offers anti-vaxxers a road out of their self-radicalization. They are able to tone down their conspiracy and blame the government for having been "chipped", and so it's not like they "betrayed their cult" but they were forced to. I think that yours (and most people's) idea of the typical "anti-vaxxer" is a convenient caricature packaged and served to you by mass media and memes, that you've never actually listened to a real live one of these "anti-vaxxers", what they think and feel.
    • davidgrenier 5y ago
      You don't seem to spend much time on anti-vaxx forums. I don't either but the stories my sister share with me are quite telling. Not to mention every news channel covid-related videos on youtube is swarmed with comments from a minority of anti-vaxxer, regardless of the country of origin, regardless of the political stance of the channel. I'd say the evidence is against you.
    • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      > you've never actually listened to a real live one of these "anti-vaxxers" don't think you know me but: I lost my mother due to covid. she was an anti-vaxxer right until the last minute when she died just before Christmas. She was a vulnerable nutcase for years and easily gamed into any kind of MLM scheme. I was forced to cut off one of my 2 best friends (of 40 years) because they could no longer be reasoned with. we ignored his alternative life-style and individualism because why wouldn't we. but it also put him into a risk-group of suckers that get brainwashed. the same guy now cut off relations to his mother who is battling cancer on the grounds that "she chose to be vaccinated". These people are crazy, and it's their right to be crazy, but the cost of being crazy can not be exploited by media and politicians. That's why I am 100% for reducing their freedom and have them undergo a "forced medical procedure" (as they call it).
    • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Ohhhh... I have. As a matter of fact, he's going to go to Walgreen's today to get his first "DNA changing" jab because his Dollar General store manager salary won't keep up with the tests needed to maintain employment at his employer. He's also the dude who will go outside and take random pictures of the sky so that people are aware of the contrails being used to control people's minds.
  • fbmlk 5y ago
    [flagged]
    • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      > highly vaccinated area COVID-19 cases are sharply rising omnicron's effect on healthcare would be a lot worse without majority of people being vaccinated. everyone is anti-vaxx but it's always shocking how many of them clowns are not anti-respirator or anti-ICU.
      • cruelty2 5y ago
        [dead]
      • analogdreams 5y ago
        where is your proof of this statement. this is an assumption, not a fact.
        • pfg 5y ago
          This study[1] shows 70% effectiveness against hospitalization for the Pfizer vaccine (based on a two-dose regime; the level of protection would likely be significantly higher for boosted populations). I'll leave it to you to do the math on what this would mean for the healthcare system if we take current daily infections and remove that effect. [1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270
    • maxerickson 5y ago
      The vaccines are very protective against severe disease, not "useless". Of course that is more important for people over 40 or 50 where severe disease is more common. For younger people, they don't completely stop transmission, but it's very likely that they slow it down (preventing some infections, lessening the severity of others, etc).
    • op00to 5y ago
      You are spreading health misinformation. Please stop it.
  • watwut 5y ago
    Cant you print the qr code and have it on paper. Your batter going flat wont matter. You can have multiple copies one in any jacket/car/bag you have. Also, where in Europe are cops stopping you for vaccination on the street?
    • kaybe 5y ago
      You can. I do and I know multiple people who have. You can also get it printed on a piece of plastic in many of the quicktest locations.
    • nmlaT 5y ago
      Austria has a "strong leader" again. Papers please: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/austria-covid-lockdown-police-conduct-random-vaccine-status-checks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/austria-covid-lockdown-polic... It also has a higher cumulative death rate than Sweden, so all of this is virus-theater and authoritarianism.
      • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
        yepp it's the former minister of interior and he has a strong authoritarian streak.
    • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      > Also, where in Europe are cops stopping you for vaccination on the street? have seen it in Germany Austria and France. The worst is when you're also guilty of being a brown person, when you look poor, or belong to a specific group like the Roma.
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    How mandatory is mandatory though? Is it just gating everything with a vaccine passport, or strapping down people who don't want the vaccination and injecting them? The real issue is once you decide to force people to do this, what else would you do? The slippery slope is a common argument that you'll need to defend against.
    • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      > How mandatory is mandatory though? doctors exemption offers a way out. otherwise a hefty fine (unable to pay means prison time like it is done in Austria)
• serverlessmom 5y ago
  This is a heart breaking read and very eye opening. I knew that it was bad but actually reading this from the perspective of a student really clarifies how poorly handled the pandemic has been within the school system and the type of stress that the students themselves are under just trying to survive.
• errcorrectcode 5y ago
  Dayam. What a sh*t show. 1. It'd be nice if they held classes outside, when it's not freezing/windy/snowing "bomb cyclones" and where it's not concrete Manhattan. 2. Forcing kids back to school during the middle of a 600k-1M+ infections/day national peak seems absurd. Heck, the FAANG company I'm interviewing for cancelled all in-person interviews for 2021-2022. If the teachers are too worried and/or are getting sick, it's insane to "power through it" by getting more people sick. As much as people want "normalcy" because they're pandemic fatigued, it's not worth killing another million people. Heck, if lockdowns were done strictly similar to authoritarian countries like China or even resembling France's new laws, this pandemic wouldn't have reached endemic community spread. But no: must have no-mask "mah freedumbs". 3. Positive-tested non-symptomatic teachers should be setup with the technical capabilities to teach from home to school.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Jiejeing 5y ago
    Regarding 2, France is still not in lockdown despite having a much higher number of cases per capita than the US (400k cases for 66M people last monday), and schools are run to the ground in a similar manner than what is described in the reddit post, if not worse (they relaxed the isolation and testing rules very recently). edit: maybe you were referring to the "vaccine pass", but since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else). Lockdown is not being implemented because "omicron is mild". We have a somewhat good vaccination rate despite the strong antivax movement, but that is still leaving millions at risk, not in small part thanks to our asinine so-called leadership.
    • bonzini 5y ago
      > since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else). This is a very partial view. Vaccinated people can have the virus and transmit it, but they will have it less, transmit it less, and anyway have lesser symptoms if they catch it from someone else. The third is why a vaccine pass helps the healthcare system more than a "vaccine or test" pass, in a situation where vaccinated people can have or transmit the virus.
• detaro 5y ago
  Has any country made noticeable progress in improving the situation for schooling (EDIT: during covid waves) compared to lets say 18 months ago? Here in Germany the mantra seems to be "keep the schools running at all costs!" - except if "costs" means spending anything or preparing anything. So we don't have meaningful improvements done to schools, still don't have universal setups for remote or hybrid schooling, any non-standard concepts to roll out... (well, I guess some more moodle installs. but that's really not the biggest thing that needs solving. and do testing at schools now, but even that's seems to have been winged quite a lot.)
  • IAmEveryone 5y ago
    Well... Most Asian countries seem to only fail your definition because the situation there was mostly okay 18 months ago, so they didn't have room to improve.
    • detaro 5y ago
      fair point, clarified with an edit. (i.e. the standard is not "what were you doing 18 months ago", but "how prepared are you for schooling in a covid wave now vs how prepared you were 18 months ago")
    • pvaldes 5y ago
      Germany was most okay 18 months ago also...
  • jaclaz 5y ago
    Italy is the same, "school must be in presence" is a kind of mantra, and though it is (IMHO) right in theory, it fails in practice (where/when teachers, janitors, bus drivers, and even pupils are COVID positive in more than a tiny fraction). Schools (generally speaking) are due to reopen on monday the 10th, but very likely only a part of them will actually be able to.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      I have two toddler granddaughters. Both their parents had COVID last year (presumably delta), so I guess the kids must have caught it too. Their mother teaches in primary school, and is tested daily. It's completely inadequate to rely on online schooling for small kids; a large part of what's important in their schooling is interacting with other kids. Over-12s: maybe not so much. So I think it's inevitable that more-or-less all schools are going to be disease-ridden. Really, they always have been (i.e. not just COVID). It's similar with hospitals; the whole point of a hospital is that it's full of sick people. I hate hospital waiting rooms.
• rini17 5y ago
  The pandemic is constantly reminding us how our institutions weeded out all agency and were running on inertia. Still are trying to, in fact.
  • rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
    Before the pandemic I had this uncomfortable sense that the people running the place were asleep at the wheel, and everyone was tacitly expecting someone else to do the actual hard work/thinking so they could go back to their phones/Netflix in peace. Now I’ve had to acknowledge that for a lot of institutions this more or less is the case.
    • ethanbond 5y ago
      I wonder if decades of malinvestment in those institutions and routing our most educated people to editing spreadsheets with dollar signs on them or selling ads (Now With Code!) has had negative consequences for our society.
      • sangnoir 5y ago
        When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market." When a multilateral, societal disaster strikes and schools struggle with contradicting demands: "What an inept bunch we have running these schools" Very few are being honest on why the kids have to be in school (so it doesn't disrupt parents' labor), so it's framed as "think of the children" when TFA shows that little education happens at school when teachers are sick. Zoom class is terrible, but its better than the shitshow described in the fine article. Worse, if students get into dangerous situations while at school/playing hooky because there isn't adequate adult supervision, the same people will have the gall to blame the schools.
        • pjscott 5y ago
          > When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market." Are school budgets being cut? I keep hearing people saying they are, but the US Department of Education says the opposite [1]: that per-pupil spending (adjusted for inflation) has increased greatly over the past century or so, and its trajectory has almost always been upward. What's the deal? (My best shot at a steelman is that either (a) the money has been disappearing down a mysterious rabbit hole and so teacher pay hasn't risen as much as the raw budget numbers would lead you to think, or that (b) teachers are underpaid relative to what they could get in other occupations that have seen more per-worker productivity growth, i.e. the Baumol effect.) [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_236.55.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_236.55.a...
• brohoolio 5y ago
  I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. The pieces attack school officials or teachers but complete ignore the logistics of having so many sick teachers. There aren’t enough subs to cover for the teachers. We know this surge will die down in 4-6 weeks. It’s a perfect time to pivot to remote to lower the strain our on failing healthcare system. Heck even if you have enough teachers the people who make things happen like bus drivers, aides, helpers, food prep are going to be knocked out too. My district had two hundred cases of covid in staff alone this week. That’s 10% of the staff. And we were remote.
  • in_cahoots 5y ago
    People are afraid that if districts go remote it’ll be a repeat of 2020, where there was no consensus of when it was safe to go back to in-person schooling. There is distrust on both sides (the teachers and the school district/parents) and I can’t see them agreeing on a rubric at this point in time. Yet another way Covid is exposing the divisions in our society.
    • mbg721 5y ago
      It not so much a lack of consensus; school officials burnt every scrap of goodwill they had by forcing parents to scramble and do multiple things at once, and they don't yet realize they're overplaying their hand. You're right that it reveals divisions, but one of those is that anybody who can opt out by homeschooling or using private/religious schools that aren't closing their doors is doing that.
  • wutbrodo 5y ago
    > I don’t understand why remote learning during this surge isn’t acceptable. I’ve seen opinion piece after opinion piece go on and on about how we need to have kids in school. I agree that this would be a great time for temporary remote schooling. I think the problem is that months and months of unnecessary school closures have broken parents (and kids), as well as burned a lot of trust that this will be handled with a modicum of competence or compassion. I don't personally have kids, but the parents I know are very reasonably at their breaking points over how poorly-managed and dogmatic school closures have been. That excludes those whose kids attend or started to attend private schools, whose immunity to the cacophony of Discourse means that they've handled the risk of Covid sanely and compassionately. I'm as annoyed as anyone at Covid denialists, but in my urban coastal context, the neurotic hysterics of restrictionist fanatics has been a lot more salient. There's been a faction of the conversation that insists that making any space to discuss the costs of restrictions is denialism, and the excess restrictions driven by those people are exactly why there's zero capacity left for NPIs like lockdown or school closures during a period where they would actually be helpful.
• fourseventy 5y ago
  How many students that got sick are experiencing symptoms more severe than the common cold? It seems like the chaos is caused by the attempted solutions to covid and not the actual symptoms? Edit: 7 day rolling average of COVID cases according to https://www1.nyc.gov/ https://www1.nyc.gov/ is 32k cases per day with 38 deaths. So there is a 0.1% mortality rate.
  • beardedwizard 5y ago
    You are failing to consider the spread to vulnerable populations where the symptoms are fatal. Omicron is not mild, people with vaccines have mild symptoms due to its efficacy. All these kids come home to families with parents and grandparents. They also have young siblings.
    • Invictus0 5y ago
      I keep seeing this Boogeyman argument of "vulnerable populations". Vulnerable people are welcome to get vaccinated and isolate and take all the extra precautions they want for themselves; we're 2 years into the pandemic at this point and they should have figured out how to make it work by now. It's not a good argument for shutting schools because it's argument by hypothetical outlier.
      • cultofmetatron 5y ago
        [flagged]
        • chasd00 5y ago
          Well to be fair vulnerable populations are not the center of the universe either.
          • akomtu 5y ago
            Topologically, we are a sphere: its center is everywhere and its boundary is nowhere.
• tomp 5y ago
  This exemplifies the worst part of this pandemic - the mind virus. A lot of people in the society are LARPing (pretending) that the virus is serious - staying home, testing constantly, "close contact notifications", "running away from a positive student" - yet at the same time, acting as if it's obviously not a dangerous virus - if it were, they'd all be staying away from each other. Basically new "security theatre" like after 9/11.
  • cabalamat 5y ago
    Heathcare theatre.
  • op00to 5y ago
    This makes no sense. How is “staying home” not staying away “from each other”?
    • lozenge 5y ago
      I think they're saying that people have abandoned the number one effective policy (besides vaccines) - avoiding social visits and working from home - and trying to make up the difference with contact tracing, "being careful", masks, ventilation, lateral flow tests etc. The difficulty is, nobody wants to Zoom with me any more, so I have to meet them in person or not at all. When it was illegal to meet, people were happy to Zoom 90% of the time, but now they are not.
  • armchairhacker 5y ago
    It’s not even that the virus is not necessarily serious: all of these precautions are basically useless. Many people are spreading covid but are completely asymptomatic, and tests are limited so they aren’t getting tested. Omicron is also extremely contagious, spreading despite masks and other sanitation protocols. It’s too late and too contagious: if you’re not 100% isolating in your home you will get Omicron. Masking / testing / precautions like these only give false security, and maybe slow the spread a bit. But the virus is still spreading ridiculously fast. Look at Quebec - lockdown and cases are still increasing. Idk, I don’t see the point in these guidelines. Maybe it will reduce viral load? A key point governments can do is hire more nurses and substantially increase nurse pay, that would reduce the strain on hospitals and ultimately increase capacity and treatment outcomes. But governments don’t seem to be doing this. It seems like people are doing things without really understanding the justification, or doing them just for publicity.
• fbmlk 5y ago
  When we'll look back on the panic in 5-10 years, everyone will be mystified. Previous pandemics like the Russian Flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic) have stopped naturally without vaccines or major government intervention. How has humanity survived without $BigGov? In Austria (highly locked down, fascist vaccine policy) the cumulative death rate now surpasses Sweden's. This means that you cannot avoid deaths, and if you allow them sooner, the pandemic will be over sooner.
  • kaba0 5y ago
    There weren’t this many antivaxx idiots around, and they couldn’t spread their bullshit on the internet with no stop.
  • watwut 5y ago
    The past goverments did actually responded to pandemics and sicknesses. Quarantine is not something novel. People with disease considered contagious could be banished away. They were no vaccines tho. Those started to be used only after they were invented.
    • lamlq 5y ago
      Hence "major government intervention" instead of "government intervention". Do you have a source that the Russian flu (conjectured to be Sars-Cov-0 by some) had any measures like we see now? Certainly not KN-95 masks. They did not treat it like tuberculosis.
      • watwut 5y ago
        They did not use airplanes to get from place to place either. And it has zero implication about travel today too.
• edw519 5y ago
  Wow, it looks like this is the closest our schools have ever been at preparing students for life in the real working world. I could have written this myself about work (with a few changes noted below): Classes that I did attend were quiet and empty. would be: Meetings that I did attend were meaningless and pointless. I arrived at school and promptly went to Study Hall...Second period I had another absent teacher...Third period I had a normal class period. would be: I arrived at work and promptly went to the break room...Second meeting I had another absent manager...Third meeting I had a normal standup, but no one was prepared and no one cared. 90% of the conversations spoken by students concern COVID. It has completely taken over any function of daily school life. would be: 90% of the conversations spoken by I.T. workers concern AGILE. It has completely taken over any function of getting any real work done. One teacher flat out left his class 5 mins into the lesson and didn't return because he was developing symptoms and didn't believe it safe to spread to his class. would be: One manager flat out left his team 5 mins into the meeting and didn't return because he had no idea what we were talking about. I’ve removed the name of my school as it made me uncomfortable sharing such information, but I’ll say that it’s a specialized high school. This is occurring everywhere. would be: I’ve removed the name of my company as it made me uncomfortable sharing such information, but I’ll say that it’s a Fortune 500 company. This is occurring everywhere. This is around 10% of my school. As of Monday, only 30 of whom were reported to the DOE ... which just seems like negligence to me. would be: This is around 10% of our transactions. As of Monday, only 30 of which were reported to the auditors ... which just seems like negligence to me. I spent about 3 hours sitting around today doing nothing. (Didn't have to change a word.) Congratulations OP! You are officially ready to join our I.T. department at Megacorp.
  • mrkentutbabi 5y ago
    Here take my “Most Off Topic Comments Of the Year” Award!
    • edw519 5y ago
      Hardly. OP is complaining about inconveniences that are standard everywhere I've worked for years. I noticed it immediately and pointed it out. Open your mind a little and you too may notice interesting parallels between the lines of code. It's way better that your reptilian "Most Snarky of the Year" response.
• jbullock35 5y ago
  See also this Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-08/new-york-city-school-operations-crumble-under-omicron-s-weight https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-08/new-york-...
  • greenyoda 5y ago
    Archive with full text at: https://archive.md/YYd95 https://archive.md/YYd95
• da39a3ee 5y ago
  What’s Study Hall?
  • Glyptodon 5y ago
    Traditionally, a "class" where you study, do homework, etc., but which in practice is usually a lot of so nothing and goofing off. I think it's a way to get funding for educational minutes without actually having to have anything taught for a period.
    • da39a3ee 5y ago
      OK thanks. Does it (despite the name) take place in a conventional class room? Just wanted to check that the implications wasn't that it was particularly bad for covid transmission, like a big crowded gymnasium or something.
      • gpm 5y ago
        > Does it (despite the name) take place in a conventional class room I think usually yes, otherwise you call it something like a "spare" (i.e. a period where you don't have a class and aren't monitored). I suppose "hall" probably traditionally refers to something like a "great hall" or "meeting hall" not a "hallway", i.e. a relatively large room.
      • Glyptodon 5y ago
        In most circumstances (assuming it's during normal school hours and not an after-school program or something) it's in normal classrooms. I think there's some variation on whether students can't choose a classroom (IE "I need to work on or get help with Math") or it's always an assigned room (IE "my study period is always Ms. XYZ's room).
  • throwawayForMe2 5y ago
    In this particular school it is just the name they use for the large auditorium when it is not being used as an auditorium. It is a large theater-like space with seating and a stage.
• 0xCMP 5y ago
  From the description it seems like a good problem to solve is "how do we get students the support they needed in 2020 while not creating a dangerous situation?" they should treat homerooms as the place students stay all day to attend classes semi-remotely. This allows teachers to work while quarantining and students to keep learning if at home temporarily. An issue with covid is it spreads so fast but symptoms may be nothing so I bet most students and teachers could continue at home while isolated and prevent as much disruption (its obviously still not ideal). at the same time it gives students a place to go. it gives them technical and other support a school provides students.
  • fourseventy 5y ago
    COVID is not dangerous to students. Look up the number of deaths of people under the age of 18 due to COVID. It's basically nothing.
    • knowaveragejoe 5y ago
      Death is the worst outcome possible. But COVID causes all kinds of other problems, including in children. Just today: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/health/kids-covid-diabetes-cdc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/health/kids-covid-diabete...
    • 0xCMP 5y ago
      To put a bunch of students in a crowded auditorium and fears of a spreading virus as the student described... seems unnecessarily dangerous. Just purely from a crowd control perspective. To allow students to spread the virus and infect staff without intervention is negligent. This isn't even accounting for unknown long term effects and recent studies suggesting kids with covid are more likely to be type 1/2 diabetic. So something has to be done and what is being done is suboptimal. Students need support. They are, as you mention, unlikely to die but still not possible to allow known spread.
      • dude187 5y ago
        So you believe that we should NEVER have ANY events in an auditorium ever again? Covid is here for the rest of our lives. What you say we should do now, needs to be what you think we should do permanently. Any removals of freedom you advocate for, will not end. I think when you frame it in that reality, most realize that we don't actually want to get rid of the freedom in the ways people push for.
• funstuff007 5y ago
  The NY Governor for a variety of reasons has call remote learning a "failed experiment." NYS probably more observations to work with on this matter than anywhere else. CA is not urban enough.
• parkingrift 5y ago
  • voisin 5y ago
    Death is only one outcome. Other consequences (e.g. scarred lung tissue) also exist, and don’t fall neatly in the stats that are regularly discussed.
    • danielvaughn 5y ago
      Another long term (and equally hidden) consequence is the loss of critical educational development in children. We adults can toss off 2 years because it's just a drop in the bucket to us, but 2 years for a child represents a potentially staggering setback in their mental development.
      • voisin 5y ago
        I agree with you, but I think it overstated the value of schooling as the only source of this development. There are so many free online education sources it is truly amazing, and yet for some reason our society’s answer to the pandemic was to have Zoom school at home which no one is happy with, rather than embrace different delivery methods that are actually engaging. Khan Academy, Duolingo, etc etc. I don’t think my kids are behind at all as a result of utilizing these technologies.
        • deegles 5y ago
          Yes, thankfully 100% of kids have access to their own computer, sufficient internet access, an environment free of stress or distractions, and the focus and internal motivation to be an successful auto-didact in the absence of adult supervision… /s
          • voisin 5y ago
            Almost all of your concerns are the same in the scenario of Zoom home school. Internal motivation is needed for success in learning no matter what delivery mechanism is utilized. Having a teacher in a box on a screen is not going to change whether a student has internal motivation. Auto-didact is not the same as having an app teach and guide through levels of learning any different than having a teacher lead it. I feel like your comment is a knee jerk, disingenuous reaction rather than honest consideration of alternatives to the false dichotomy of “in class school” and “zoom school”, but whatever floats your boat.
• mynameishere 5y ago
  If they cut teacher pay whenever they are "sick" or told children they would have to make up missed days during summer or after the normal graduation date, I'm sure the Covid cases would mysteriously drop, and fast. There is a definite "Cartman" component to this whole thing, and if I was 11 I damn well know I'd have the same BS attitude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=379oevm2fho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=379oevm2fho
• sovietmudkipz 5y ago
  The best thing about people talking about Covid is how civil and understanding everyone is about everyone else’s perspective. It restores my faith in our society (USA) when I see or overhear a conversation about Covid and our nation’s response to it. I think all people have very high emotional intelligence and have willingness to understand, and not fight. I’m glad that 99% of conversations don’t devolve into tribal affiliation signaling and wishes for bad outcomes for anyone not in their tribe. When my local social networks (friends, family, coworkers) talk about COVID I internally jump for joy because I know I will hear everyone’s heavily considered thoughts and opinions on the subject, and not ones assigned to them by their own curated bubble of influencers. Yay.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    A+ sarcasm
  • totetsu 5y ago
    say that's quite a rhetorical technique you've got going there, you got a name for it?
    • sovietmudkipz 5y ago
      Laying it on pretty thick ;)
    • sgjohnson 5y ago
      post-irony although this is obvious enough to be just satire
      • mbg721 5y ago
        It'd be Times-Irony otherwise.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    It's sad. COVID discussion has ruined multiple online forums I (used to) participate in. Well-moderated forums that I used to love and respect, all turn into the YouTube Comment Section whenever the topic comes up. Something about the COVID, even moreso than politics, draws the trolls like a lightning rod and is astonishingly resistant to effective site moderation. I think mods (not just here) have gotten really good at nuking obvious flamewars, spam, and left-vs-right political threads, but for whatever reason hesitate when it comes to misinformation. HN has a guideline about "political or ideological battles" but what do you do when the entire topic has become ideological?
• rdl 5y ago
  This sounds like some kind of incarceration or at best day care program, rather than actual learning. Unclear if that is the baseline for schools vs something specific to a Covid surge. I don’t have children but if I were to do so I don’t think I would put them in a schoool like this for 12+ years.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    Many schools are basically an incarceration like day care program.
    • Spivak 5y ago
      You didn’t have “SCHOOL IS A PRISON” as random thing to shout back in your day?
      • whimsicalism 5y ago
        no. i did have to go through a metal detect and xray every day to get into school though, certainly reinforced the prison feeling.
        • Spivak 5y ago
          No cap an actual literal xray? Metal detector sure, but your school had one of those things like at the airport?
          • whimsicalism 5y ago
            yes. what else would they do for stuff like a backpack that set off the metal detector? even had them in middle school, not elementary though.
            • Spivak 5y ago
              Look through it by hand? Like. I’ve never seen those bag scanning machines used anywhere other than airports and high security government buildings. A non-school example would be concert venues and sports — they just metal detect you and search your bag if it lights up.
• alfor 5y ago
  Everyone in the north, take vitamin D and vitamin C. It help fight every respiratory infection Source: medcram, Dr in pulmonary diseases
  • _bfhp 5y ago
    Seconded, I ordered more D3 gummies online recently and they came pretty quick (Nature's Way brand are vegan) We introverts are staying inside even _more_ than usual so it's probably a very good thing to do
  • astrange 5y ago
    I wanted to tell people to take zinc as well (it has a small positive effect only if taken ahead of time) but unfortunately many brands aren't actually bioavailable and just give you the worst nausea you've ever had.
• diveanon 5y ago
• eigenrick 5y ago
  As I type this, I'm infected with Covid. I have a wife and three kids, all tested positive. The oldest complained of a sore throat for one day, the others were "a bit tired" for two days. I've had it the worst. I had intestinal issues for 3 says and now have a mild sore throat and fatigue. Overall, I skipped about 2 half days of work because I felt tired. (I work from home) Omicron has swept through pretty much every family we interact with. 1. We and most people we interact with are very responsible wrt stopping the spread. Vaccines, Masks, social distancing. Both my wife and I work from home. We got infected anyway. 2. For people under 65 with no comorbidities, Covid, in general, is nothing to be afraid of. My in-laws (both over 70) got it just before us. They basically had nasty head cold symptoms for 3 days. 3. Omicron is far more mild than prior strains. 4. For people with comorbidities, even the flu is something to be afraid of. Before covid, the flu was the cause of most cardiac and pnemonia related mortality. Prior strains of Covid are worse, for sure, but deaths due to influenza should be enough to make people panic. We just never assigned flu as the underlying cause of death. *[0] 5. I think the last data I saw on the Pfizer vaccine said it was 24% effective against omicron. I don't know what this means exactly. But current evidence says that was too optimistic. *[1] 3 shots of it wasn't enough to stop the contagion, though maybe it made my symptoms milder. Who knows. 5. Omicron is likely a much more effective inoculation against covid than the vaccines which all now appear to be outdated. *[2] My takeaway from all of this: Vaccines aren't helping. Masks and social distancing aren't helping. Omicron itself might be the biggest help we have. It's time to work to stop the hysteria, and also update our covid policies, because they're no longer relevant. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5158013/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC5158013/ [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451# https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451# [2] https://www.ahri.org/omicron-infection-enhances-neutralising-immunity-against-delta/ https://www.ahri.org/omicron-infection-enhances-neutralising...
  • happytoexplain 5y ago
    Your conclusion may be broadly correct (of course some of these things help a non-zero amount, but maybe are futile long-term). However, if you want to convince people that a different solution to the shared problem is better, it doesn't sound honest to call them "hysterical", as the favorite insult goes right now.
• walkhour 5y ago
  Around half a million cases of child abuse are reported in USA [0]. It hard/impossible to find data post 2019 (if you have it, please share), but there are estimates that the number of reported cases lowered by between 20 to 40%, mainly due to kids not going to school and teachers not being able to report it [1][2]. Less than a 1000 kids ages of 5-18 have died of Covid [3]. Tentatively tens/hundreds of thousands of kids are being silently abused in their homes, and they have been prevented to go to school, where teachers can find out. I can't find a way to justify the policy of keeping children at home, which is effectively a transfer of health from kids to adults after we have vaccines, it's simply immoral. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/639375/number-of-child-abuse-cases-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/639375/number-of-child-a... [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/has-child-abuse-surged-under-covid-19-despite-alarming-stories-n1234713 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/has-child-abuse-s... [2] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/child-abuse-cases-got-more-severe-during-covid-19-could-teachers-have-prevented-it/2021/06 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/child-abuse-cases-got-more... [3] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-on-Ages-0-18-Yea/nr4s-juj3 https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
• mrkramer 5y ago
  I think the main question is how much are we willing to sacrifice of our lifestyle? People die every day of various reasons alcohol, drugs, strokes, car accidents etc. COVID is imminent danger to the people with underlying conditions and they should practice maximum precautions(distance, masks etc. plus Vitamin D intake). Other people should carry on living. COVID is coming to endemic soon.
  • wildrhythms 5y ago
    This mindset- let the weak fend for themselves while the strong go on- is literally the justification for eugenics.
    • mrkramer 5y ago
      I said >COVID is imminent danger to the people with underlying conditions and they should practice maximum precautions(distance, masks etc. plus Vitamin D intake). So what is alternative? Let kids down the drain with their education and childhood.
      • narrator 5y ago
        The bottom of the slippery slope is what's going on in China right now. Worldwide, the non-ivermectin early treatment block of governments seems to want to slowly push everyone there. In China, they have an app that ties to your social credit score that you need to show everywhere to do anything. It tells you you are ok, or you are banned from society until you test, or you have to go to quarantine camp indefinitely. Ivermectin seems to be the big red line in the sand. Governments that promote it as a treatment don't want to go full China. Those that forbid it do.
• kodah 5y ago
  > One student tested positive IN THE AUDITORIUM, and a few students started screaming and ran away from him. There was now a lack of available seats given there was a COVID-positive student within the middle of the auditorium. This is really awful behavior.
  • sgjohnson 5y ago
    Media & policy is to blame for it, isn’t it?
  • megablast 5y ago
    Why?? This is normal and natural.
    • kodah 5y ago
      No, it's not normal and it's not natural. I remember being treated like this by the same people I heard spread fear and misinformation about COVID throughout the year before I got COVID. It's incredibly dehumanizing, isolating, and fractures any sense of community. My relationship with those people will never be the same.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • justin66 5y ago
        It seems to me that one essential function of high school is being served here: to teach that in the realm of human behavior, “horrible” and “normal” are not mutually exclusive.
      • ergocoder 5y ago
        It is normal. CDC and US has full on PR every day on how bad COVID is and how we should get vaccine and wear masks. People who don't do those are ostracized. People who don't think covid is a big deal is labeled anti-science and covid-denier. With all this, of course, every normal reasonable person is scared of covid. If a person next to me has covid, I sure as hell will run away as soon as possible. Saving myself is way more important than saving your feeling. I hope anyone would do the same. Don't worry about hurting my feeling. That is negligible. Save yourself first.
• the__alchemist 5y ago
  I speculate that students who spend time learning from internet resources like Khan Academy will get a significant leg up over their colleagues in this case; even more so than usual. This applies both in the sense that "They will learn more effectively", and "They'll have a better shot at getting into universities".
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Any kid who is disciplined and focused enough to do and benefit from self learning already has a big leg up, whether they are in school or at home.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    This has always been true in a way. A lot of schools have nothing to offer the top 10% of students, so the students/parents of the students who broke away from the pack were finding ways to learn on their own/have their kids learn on their own.
    • analog31 5y ago
      Top 10% of what? I was technically in the top 10% of my high school class, GPA wise. I also got a national merit scholarship, and had learned computer programming. I would simply not have had the self discipline or motivation to learn everything on my own, no matter how good the learning materials were. Oddly enough, even through college, there were subjects that I easily taught myself, such as electronics and programming, others that I needed to learn in a classroom, such as math and physics. I would have had no parental supervision at home -- both of my parents worked. The kids who succeed will succeed. That's not to say that everybody succeeds in school either.
      • Valakas_ 5y ago
        I was in the top 1% both in highschool and college and for me going in person, in terms of learning, was (and still is) a waste of time. I would learn MUCH faster outside of classes. I much prefer a recording of a class which i can watch, rewatch, play at 2x, take notes without stress and note down all my questions, than a regular in person class. The only thing I got from being in person was friends. But that can be achieved in other ways without having to be forced to sit on a class. Group studying is one, and helps a lot in learning. If people choose a course and then don't have motivation for it that's a totally different problem. The problem lies not in tricks to make the person do it anyway, but on them reassessing why they chose that course in the first place. I always had motivation to do my course on my own because I chose it for a reason. And if kids are too young to see why they might want to do this specific course, then maybe the course itself needs to change to be a tiny bit more practical and fun.
• crate_barre 5y ago
  What this little pretentious kid doesn’t get is that public school has always been like this and the majority of kids wing it through K-12 (many even wing it through a bullshit degree in college). There has never been serious learning going on, and kids love any and all disruptions to class. Bomb threats is one that kids in my school used to call in as pranks daily when I was in school. For weeks everyone missed the first 3 periods of the day. Everyone loved the disruption. I can absolutely promise you nothing is bringing more joy to the kids than this COVID fiasco. Now, is education really being missed here? Not really. The kids that were going to excel anyways have somewhat involved parents that will expect them to prep and score respectable grades in standard tests/classes (your ap classes, SATs). Those kids already know they have to study more than whatever bullshit goes on in school. The parents/kids relying on the school system to help them achieve were never going to achieve just due to that reliance (it’s always been the case in public school). So what is this stupid post about? It sounds like business as usual to me.
  • fxtentacle 5y ago
    They got all the learning disruptions without any of the fun.
    • crate_barre 5y ago
      Where do you get these ideas from? Simply not having to commit to class work is fun. You can literally play a video game if you are remote too. It’s a dream come true for these kids.
  • _bfhp 5y ago
    Agree with a lot of this but there's something to be said about 1. daily routine and morale, having a normal routine is a good thing for everyone, even kids who don't "succeed" in academic measures at all, and 2. losing years of time of socializing in-person where you make lifelong friends or have experiences that form your place in the world. I had no friends in school until 10th grade when I joined a club that somewhat let me be myself and have fun with other weird kids. If that was taken away from me soon after I joined it would have been pretty terrible!
• antisthenes 5y ago
  Here's my somewhat selfish take on this: I will absolutely hate interacting with these COVID kids once they start entering the workforce. The US already has a massive maturity and tribalism problem, and I only see the lack of school and any sort of discipline and structure here reinforce it several-fold. Thankfully, so far I haven't had to manage anyone just out of school. Add missing 2 years of education (essentially) on top of this and you get a recipe for disaster. I doubt most parents are compensating for these atrocious school conditions in any way. The only slight positive I can think of that will come of this, is that it may normalize staying home when you are sick and not coming to work. The current generation cares too little about spreading disease at work.
• sebow 5y ago
  Forget myocarditis, forget the f#cking covid for a second. If we want to apply about "let's think of the kids" mentality, then let's think of the kids.What will we do now or in the upcoming years when suicide rates, cognitive development problems, and a lot of other issues from subfields of psychiatry are >bound< to rise due to the measures imposed on these kids? We think of protecting others but we don't think of protecting kids who require more care: in the sense of them becoming self-reliant and developing themselves. To me this is the biggest hypocrisy and bullsh#t indicator of this whole mentality of "protecting others".We don't need >restrictive< measures to protect kids themselves, the best thing we can do to protect them is to let them develop, which is the exact opposite kind of measure we take to protect adults and elderly people.
• autarch 5y ago
  Freddie de Boer just wrote something on his Substack about this - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-warm-safe-healthy https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-w... The quick takeaway is that school is that for the most vulnerable kids, school is about a lot more than education. Taking school away from those kids can be much more damaging than many people realize. It seems to me like that right strategy would be to just say something like: We encourage all kids to stay home, but if you can't, that's ok. You can come to school and have a warm, quiet place to spend the day, and we'll provide free lunch to everyone who comes. Forget about the education piece for a while, just provide the (very important for some people) day care part.
  • trenchgun 5y ago
    Yes.
  • brightball 5y ago
    IMO this is probably the best solution.
  • double_nan 5y ago
    I’m wondering what has changed in the human nature (if any) that we need day care for ppl older than 18-19 years now. What did such ppl do 100 (or 1000) years ago to overcome all that.
    • imgabe 5y ago
      We don't. Schools are mostly people under 18.
    • autarch 5y ago
      I'm not following. The vast majority of people in school are younger than 18. I agree with you that it should be fine for most parents to leave an older kid (say 14+?) at home alone. But again, some kids just want to go to school to get some damn food, regardless of age!
      • 5y ago
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Has technology for teaching remotely improved this pandemic? Anyone heard of anything? It has been two years and the high school teachers I talk to say it has not at all.
  • noah_buddy 5y ago
    Technology won't solve the fundamental problem that people are generally more engaged and focused when they're physically proximal.
  • bradlys 5y ago
    It’s almost entirely due to cultural barriers. Teachers don’t want to do remote and neither do students. A lot of students want to socialize in person and a lot of teachers are extroverts. Put both in a very anti-social environment (remote) and they tend to be quite upset. The big reason for older teachers retiring early is due to their network exploding due to stock market gains, fear of Covid, and hatred of remote teaching. I think at this point - people are starting to learn that education wasn’t the primary goal of school. It was to be a daycare with the guise of learnings being done. Go with remote - no one wins.
• analog31 5y ago
  Interestingly, the prevailing belief seems to be that parents, teachers, and students, all want to keep in-person school going. Yet when you actually hear from each of those groups, it's a mixed picture. Here's a HS student with boots on the ground describing the situation in what seems to be a fairly objective way. Elsewhere, teachers unions are voting to suspend school. This seems to be what a lot of people want, though of course I can't say that it's a consensus or how prevalent the view is.
  • wildrhythms 5y ago
    Interestingly, the 'boots on the ground' that you've lent credence to is in agreement with what you assume is the teacher's union 'non-objective' stance.
    • analog31 5y ago
      Indeed, what I was hoping to convey is that the prevailing belief is contradicted by both the boots on the ground and the teachers unions.
• mrkentutbabi 5y ago
  The land of the free, home of the brave. Never expected this land would have a lot of problems. I thought only 3rd world countries have a lot of problems.
• mlindner 5y ago
  Seems to me that the school is unnecessarily scaring kids more than doing anything else. These teens have almost nothing to fear from covid. Most of the rest of the country (outside major cities) almost ignores covid exists. Good article on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/where-i-live-no-one-cares-about-covid/620958/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/where-i-li...
  • The5thElephant 5y ago
    Hate to tell you this, but this is not a good article on the subject. It was as performative as the mask wearing it complains about, and is oddly disconnected from reality considering how many deaths of people the author's age have happened in Michigan (Where he lives). Sure the teens might be fine with Omicron (earlier variants had much higher chances of lasting health impact it appears), but not necessarily their parents or family back home. Sure some fears and actions are overblown, but not to the degree being implied here.
    • mlindner 5y ago
      My parents are from Michigan and I'm visiting them here. People get covid all over the place but people just don't care about it. That's really how it is here.
      • justin66 5y ago
        > People get covid all over the place but people just don't care about it. One would like to believe they, at a minimum, responsibly dispose of the remains of the departed.
        • mlindner 5y ago
          It's like car accident deaths. They happen all the time to random people but it's not like that stops people from driving.
    • ars 5y ago
• freedom2099 5y ago
  I do understand it depends on the kind of person you are… but I can’t really relate to those who suffer from luck of social interactions! Lockdown for me was a bliss! And I still fondly remember when I was 12 and got a very severe pneumonia that forced me to stay at home for almost 2 months! It was amazing… and when I got back my marks immediately among the highest of my class (and we are talking about the 90s… I was calling classmates to get book pages to read)
• steveylang 5y ago
  The current procedures in place were for a Delta pandemic. If schools are to remain open now, the rules need to reflect Omicron. Either you believe Omicron is contagious enough that you have to go back to 100% remote learning, or it is generally harmless enough (especially if you’re vaccinated) that you don’t have such strict standards in place (I am for the latter but that’s just my opinion.) But the situation described in the Reddit post seems like the worst of all worlds.
  • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Covid isn't some seasonal ensemble. It's still very possible to catch the Delta variant.
    • steveylang 5y ago
      That is a good point. But I have read (famous last words) Omicron is now 95% of tested cases, it’s staggering how fast it has overtaken previous strains. If it was say a pretty stable 50/50 or even 75/25 ratio of Omicron to Delta, that might favor shutting down in-person schools. But this current explosion in cases and resulting chaos is almost all Omicron.
• sva_ 5y ago
  I read this post earlier today, and found it quite shocking. I really hope this is an exception rather than the normal. I previously didn't think about it this way, and thought closing schools was the more sensible choice. But we're failing a whole generation like this. It more and more feels like we live in a society that sarcrifices their young, just to keep old people on their life support machines a little longer. Yeah, that's hyperbole. I don't know what's the right path, tbh.
  • odonnellryan 5y ago
    We can't exactly ask teachers to get covid can we?
    • strombofulous 5y ago
      Devil's advocate: We were fine asking grocery store clerks, baristas, and cashiers to get covid
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        And perfectly fine with RSV risks: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33015684/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33015684/
  • vanilla_nut 5y ago
    I found it shocking at first. Then I thought about the shitshow that is any kind of organization in high schools. Then I thought about the utter confusion that my own school had trying to set up a simple website. Then I wasn't so surprised any more. Just disappointed.
  • stefan_ 5y ago
    I don't understand. This is what you took away from this? I thought this post shows that keeping schools open is an absolute fantasy. This is one of the best funded schools in NYC; it's going to be absolute shambles in the rest of them.
• lvl100 5y ago
  They should really consider repeating grades for kids. The pandemic is robbing the kids of proper education. I suppose this is too late.
  • discardedrefuse 5y ago
    These kids have been getting robbed of a proper education since well before the pandemic arrived. Holding them back a year is just going to create a generation of delayed adults that will ripple through the economy in ways we can't even imagine. But lets try: Shifting average graduation age to 18-19 * Drop out rate: TO THE MOON! * Shit pay "high school" jobs no one wants: Now for adults! * Wages don't just stagnate by age groups: Stagnant wages for everyone! * Entering the work force a year later? Great reason to raise retirement age!
    • lvl100 5y ago
      Grades are arbitrary. Plenty of kids start a year late sometimes on purpose by parents to give them a leg up. Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital. You seem very concerned about the economy.
      • discardedrefuse 5y ago
        > Plenty of kids start a year late sometimes on purpose by parents to give them a leg up Don't be ridiculous. The amount of parents that do this is practically non-existent. > Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital. I disagree. I've worked in a top 5 largest school district for over 22 years. Under normal circumstances a handful of kids graduate high school with trigonometry under their belt, some with only algebra, and some in between (its the same for science). There's plenty of wiggle room in there. Colleges already offer remedial classes for kids that need it and its unfair to the students that managed to succeed even in this environment. > You seem very concerned about the economy. I shouldn't have used the word economy (as that tends to translate directly to "the stock market"). I really meant its bad for labor (but good for the companies that exploit labor). Let me re-iterate my most important point: If everyone is held back, the dropout rate will be catastrophic for years to come.
• throwawayForMe2 5y ago
  This is very sad to see at the Bronx High School of Science, a school I attended in the 70’s. Many of these kids will travel 1 1/2 hours each way to get there, hoping to get a world class educational opportunity.
• cryptica 5y ago
  I feel so bad for the next generation. Society is already acting as if it's pointless to educate them because all the opportunities to extract value from the economy have (apparently) already been monopolized by earlier generations. The whole economy feels like a first-in-best-dressed pyramid scheme. If I had been born 5 years earlier, I'm sure I would have been very well off now. Still, it wasn't a complete failure for me, I did manage to benefit from some small opportunities which were presented to me... But when I look at the people entering the workforce today, it's much worse. Unless you're the child of a rich person, you have 0 opportunities. Social mobility is 0. The message I'm getting from society nowadays is that the game of capitalism is over so instead of wasting your time with education, you may as well emotionally prepare yourself to flip hamburgers for the next 65 years. I'd be surprised if developed countries are still capitalist in 20 years... But who knows, maybe the elites will find a way to break the next generation's morale even further to make them feel even more hopeless so that the idea of system change wouldn't even enter their heads.
• tamaharbor 5y ago
  Covid and democrats are destroying our country.
  • trailingComma 5y ago
  • dang 5y ago
    Please do not take HN threads into partisan flamewar. Last thing we need here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: could you please also stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments generally? You've been doing that repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
• jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
  >90% of conversations about covid, it has taken over daily life this is what the powers that be want to happen. they want you to live in a state of panic and fear. when i was in school (i am 30 now), i had many severe illnesses like pneumonia twice, shingles, mono, staph. nobody ever gave a shit, and nobody died.
  • thebigjewbowski 5y ago
    I was thinking along the same lines. My coworkers get tested all the time, mostly for no real reason. Ironically one guy was out with covid for a few days after being vaccinated and boosted. All indications are that omicron is more often than not a cold… how many of the teachers would have normally come to work with a cold? I like to think back to Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown telling everybody to come on down in 2019/early 2020 and wonder if all the panic wasn’t incited on a near daily basis, would this would be as big of a problem?
  • timbeccue 5y ago
    > this is what the powers that be want to happen. they want you to live in a state of panic and fear. Do you think this is a conscious desire? Is it something that our leaders developed after attaining power, or is it a preexisting desire that led them to seek power in the first place? Why do they want people to live in a state of panic and fear?
    • convery 5y ago
      I mean, the top careers for psychopaths are: CEO, Politician, and Journalist. Remember the last time someone of them said "I'm not in this position because I want to have power, it's my duty to X that drives me"?
    • jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
      I would argue that panic and fear gives them the legitimacy to maintain physical control over some things that would have normally resulted in them being voted out of office or impeached. Let us not forget that the roaring 20s and laissez faire capitalism, all of which were voted for, came after an era of pandemic flu, a world war, and increased government control of things under Wilson.
• thepasswordis 5y ago
  I think I'm getting something different from this than what the author intended. * They mention their study hall as a "super spreader event". This feels...hysterical to me. Not just because it worries me that this kid is thinking about this in the way they are, but also because it's wrong. The risk this person faces is much more likely from the HVAC system in the school, not the study hall. * The way they talk about the other kid asking questions "with their mask down". To be obsessed with this sort of minutiae as a kid is scary to me. * Kids thinking about test...and apparently being given something like 5 tests in a single day? This seems wasteful and hysterical on behalf of the school. * Begin upset at kids for taking these tests in the bathroom instead of at home. It just seems like there is a whole realm of paranoia that this kid is trying to fit on top of their life, and I don't think this sort of paranoia is in any way reasonable. I think that teaching kids to think about their world with this framing, and at a formative age, is and already has done major damage to their development.
  • starkd 5y ago
    Indeed, it's truly sad. It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses. From his comments, I wonder if he actually thinks he will be dead from standing next to someone who just tested positive. The preliminary results from UK and SA indicate that this recent wave could be a blessing in that it serves as an innoculation rather than severe illness. And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with.
    • kixiQu 5y ago
      Good thing high school students never live in multigenerational households, right? Or otherwise have family members at high risk?
      • starkd 5y ago
        When a virus is endemic, it means everyone will get it. Which means most of these precautions are ultimately worthless - other than to flatten the curve and relieve the burden on services. But oh, how long have we been "flattening the curve" now?
• agotterer 5y ago
  I have preschool aged kids in Long Island. They have been to class for 3 days in the past 5 weeks. Every time they return to school there’s another student or teacher who tests positive and the class is closed for 10 days. Last year they missed 8 weeks of school. The impact is detrimental to the children and incredibly challenging for parents.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    I'm super worried about all this. We all grew up hearing the stories about the country mobilizing to take on WWII and such. Whether those stories are fully accurate or applicable or not, I feel dismayed we can't even mobilize against a virus. We're going to have multiple generations who basically missed out on several years of education and will have an even greater distrust of institutions due to living in the wake of those institutions failing. These generations are growing up in a time of community disarray. It feels like nothing is working in this country and the world at large. Meanwhile, the capitalist machine is eating the country and world alive.
    • fundad 5y ago
      The country mobilized to breed more variants
• thallukrish 5y ago
  Why can't they give laptops and internet connection free to kids and get them going online until this settles down? What is so difficult about this ?
  • djrogers 5y ago
    We tried that last year, and in 2020, and kids didn’t learn anything.
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Students shoudn't be tested for COVID. It should be allowed to spread until localized herd immunity is established. Most of the public over-estimates the risk of COVID, by 10 to 100 times: https://kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_opinion_tracker_wave-4.pdf https://kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-19_o... These over-reactions, and anxiety, along with all of the testing that is caused by, and contributed to the social obsession about it, does more damage to students than the COVID-19 virus.
  • tomjakubowski 5y ago
    All I see in the survey is that people have largely overestimated the impact of the pandemic, how many people have been infected and how many have died. In other words, they overestimated the current progression of the pandemic at the scale of society. That doesn't indicate people misunderstand the risk of the disease at personal scale.
    • CryptoPunk 5y ago
      This survey specifically looks at risk at the personal scale, and finds the same order of over-estimation: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
      • zwirbl 5y ago
        This only holds if hospitalization is the only thing to be concerned about and in my opinion is just as misleading as focusing solely on death rate. I am much more concerned about long term effects of an infection, even if asymptomatic (which by definition doesn't lead to hospitalization), specifically on stamina/concentration.
        • CryptoPunk 5y ago
          Perceptions of hospitalization are a pretty reliable proxy for perceptions of overall risk, and it's clear from the data that most of the public is massively over-estimating the risk posed by COVID. >I am much more concerned about long term effects of an infection The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... >even if asymptomatic COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
• throwawayHN378 5y ago
  I’m hearing a very similar thing from my high school aged nephews from the inner suburbs of NYC. I work for a NYC university and they are making some serious mistakes as well
• Diesel555 5y ago
  I just want to point out that I see two common arguments here which are not mutually exclusive and are for some reason used to debate one another. 1) Those not at risk are a threat to those at risk (at home, at restaurants, etc). We should be concerned not because of their own safety, but because of the risk to others. 2) The author appears to be (or children in general) overly scared based on the risk COVID poses to them. They are relatively safe. I like to look at risk in terms of things I can relate to - safer than dying from a car accident this year. Parents should worry more about driving (1:10k per year [1]) than their child dying to COVID (1:500k [2]). The difference is even greater for injured in a car vs hospitalized by COVID (magnitudes of difference). Can we stop talking around each other and recognize both are true? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... [2] https://www.ncmd.info/news/covid-deaths-children-rare/ https://www.ncmd.info/news/covid-deaths-children-rare/ (I could list others - most sources are children deaths / total deaths which is different than children tested positive / children deaths - and that discounts all asymptomatic / not tested children).
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  And my kids are public school students in Texas. It’s not that bad here. This is all hysteria, not Covid itself.
• csense 5y ago
  Contrarian viewpoint: Everyone's eventually gonna catch COVID-19 and it can't be stopped. All the travel restrictions, testing, school closures, quarantines, vaccine mandates, etc. are accomplishing is imposing costs and creating chaos. People will be hospitalized. People will die. Hospitals will be overwhelmed. It's unavoidable at this point, but no politician or policy maker has the courage to admit that. COVID might have been containable with massive travel restrictions, testing, and contact tracing in the first couple months of 2020. Between the testing screwups, the factually challenged political posture adopted by a certain former POTUS in the early days of the pandemic, the WHO's general incompetence, China's questionable actions, the disease's ease of transmission, and the delay in travel restrictions, that scenario is long gone. We're all going to take our X% roll of the dice against COVID. You can have a better roll if you get vaccinated, but then you have to consider: (1) The Y% chance the vaccine has a side effect that wasn't caught in trials and won't show up for years, and (2) The cost of meekly accepting that the government of a free country has the power to force people to get a medical treatment they don't want by taking away their ability to work or travel if they refuse, and also the privacy implications of allowing airlines and employers to ask for personal medical information, and the establishment of centralized databases for that information to deal with people who fake vaccination cards. (I personally got vaccinated, but I'm not getting the booster; reason (2) above is a part of that calculus. Another part is that when I got the first vaccine, I justified that decision by reasoning that long-term side effects are unlikely as the MRNA, adjuvants, or other weird leftovers will wash out of the body within months. That justification goes out the window if the vaccine's not a one-and-done and you start accepting boosters.) It's not a choice between (a) Massively disrupt these kids' lives, or (b) they catch COVID and some of them die. It's a choice between (a') Massively disrupt these kids' lives / educations, and some of them catch COVID and die, or (b') These kids have a reasonable education and some sense of normalcy, even though some of them will catch COVID and die. It's the truth. Unfortunately, no one who has real authority to set policy is willing to admit it out loud.
  • valachio 5y ago
    Yeah what you said is pretty much it. And not only will everyone catch COVID at some point, but they will catch it many times over the course of their lives as the virus mutates; you'll get sick but it won't kill you (unless you are really unlucky). Sounds similar... oh right, just like the flu. Imagine if you stepped on a nail. Guess what, it's gonna be painful no matter what you do. It's better to pull the nail out in 1 go and endure a large amount of pain in a short amount of time, than to pull the nail out 1cm a day and endure a moderate amount of pain over a long period of time. Right now, almost every human society has decided to do the latter and implement lockdown after lockdown; going into total mania over new variants and semi-mandating vaccines and pumping 3 shots (more to come!) of rushed, insufficiently tested vaccines within a single year. I say semi-mandating because if you are faced with a choice of losing your livelihood or getting a jab, do you really have a choice? Here in Toronto, the government just started another 3-week lockdown. I believe this is the 3rd lockdown we've had. In some weird way, I'm strangely at peace with everything that's happened. I think I have adopted somewhat of a fatalistic attitude, not towards COVID but rather towards human nature and our ape-like herd-like nature.
• blindmute 5y ago
  It is what it is. People will get sick in school like they always have with colds and flus. The students (who are essentially at zero risk) are going to have to get over this fear eventually; we can only hope their young minds haven't been permanently warped by two years of fear mongering. The teachers should get vaccinated and ensure they aren't obese.
  • Daishiman 5y ago
    And they should ensure they're not diabetic, above 60, and just be perfectly healthy, right? "It is what it is" but as of now staff can't work because they're out sick.
    • blindmute 5y ago
      Let the natural immunity develop quickly rather than dragging it out. Everyone is getting this disease.
      • Daishiman 5y ago
        The natural immunity is preventing people from getting good medical attention for other emergencies. It's preventing vulnerable people from not dying.
        • blindmute 5y ago
          Sounds like we should get through that situation quickly rather than slowly. Everyone is getting this disease.
          • Daishiman 5y ago
            We're not "getting through the situation". The more spread the higher the likelyhood of new variants appearing, the more people that die of completely unrelated causes due to there being no available hospital care, and the greater the economic chaos. It is a dramatically higher cost that gets paid in loss of life for those who choose not to be vaccinated and those who can't, and in staff shortages and basic infrastructure weakness for everybody else.
• fundad 5y ago
  We can’t have public schools and force children to go while we don’t have public health care too
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• GorsoSurthis 5y ago
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