16 ms·

I’m a public school teacher – the kids aren’t alright

166 points by imgabe 5y ago

scotty79 5y ago
> Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. Schools should teach that already because it's exactly accurate. Pandemic or not. We would be way better off now if current adults were tought that as kids and made it part of their social intuition.
rdtwo 5y ago
There will be a high price to pay for pandemic theater. In the immediate term because the theater does not work and effective actions are ignored and in the long term because the ineffective actions are also harmful.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  will there be? there wasn't any price paid for security/counterterrorism theatre under Bush. and most of that stuff never really went away, we just got used to it. we're not going to flick a switch off and "just go back to normal" after this. every time cold (both temperature and illness) season comes around, some stores will make masks mandatory, kids will be sent home from school for remote learning now that they all have laptops, etc. etc.
  - richiebful1 5y ago
    At least in the US, the debate around the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races was largely about school closures for COVID-19. And the Republicans did well on the premise of reopening in-person school. The price is already being paid. That said, most polls show a majority of Americans support mask mandates. [1] I don't think the future is necessarily an analogy of post-9/11 security theater. 1. Fox, Gallup, others generally agree: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/fox-news-poll-mask-vaccine-mandates-pandemic-worries-increase https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/fox-news-poll-mask-vacc...
  - csense 5y ago
    > there wasn't any price paid for security/counterterrorism theatre under Bush Every time anyone wants to get on an airplane,they're forced to take a nude selfie. And if there's a blip, a government employee will...well, let's just say any private business would get sued six ways to Sunday for sexual harassment. Osama bin Laden's been dead for years, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over. Everybody just accepts it. A high price to pay, in both (1) the TSA's budget, and (2) the fact that Americans just don't care about this infringement on freedom and privacy. When was the last time you saw disbanding the TSA suggested in any political debate from a candidate of either party? So all the stuff about mask mandates, vaccine passports, and so on -- that stuff, once implemented, will never go away. The September 11 response has taught me that the government will take your freedom in a crisis, but they'll never give it back. It's when the compulsion to have government to fix the crisis seems most reasonable that we should be most unreasonably insistent on keeping our freedom.
    - adamrezich 5y ago
      I think you might've misunderstood me—we agree completely. when I said "there wasn't any price paid" I meant by anyone but the average joe
- williamtwild 5y ago
  what effective actions are being ignored?
  - thoughtstheseus 5y ago
    A reduction of obesity. Living a healthy lifestyle has many benefits beyond Covid.
    - tracker1 5y ago
      Stop fat shaming! /s
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    Getting vaccinated and moving on with life.
    - henriquez 5y ago
    - version_five 5y ago
      Did getting vaccinated mean other people let you move on with life? I've had three shots, restaurants are currently closed where I am, I have to wait in line to do groceries because there is some kind of capacity restriction, and old women cower when I walk by them on the street (maybe that always happened). I have moved on long ago but people around me, or at least those with a monopoly on violence, are still hysterical
      - edmundsauto 5y ago
        The problem is that we live in an interconnected graph (society), and while you have done your part by getting vaccinated, others haven’t. And the people evaluating the evidence (experts) make recommendations to keep things closed. Why are you not upset at the other group members who are not carrying their part of the workload? Unless we can remove them from society, the decisions have to be made including their behaviors and risk factors.
- tracker1 5y ago
  I seriously doubt that... GB just rolled it all back. No idea what Austria, Australia or New Zealand will do though. Or France, NYC, Washington State, etc. I don't think any of the theater politicians will pay. Pelosi got more flack for presumed insider trading recently than ever saw for the mask theater.
YATA0 5y ago
People who brought up these worries about the indirect impacts of COVID lockdowns were shouted down as heretics. Now if you don't support full lockdowns and shelter-in-place, you're supporting genocide against the immunocompromised, minorities, etc. (according to Twitter, company Slack, etc.). TFA has a great line about many rites of passage being effectively stolen from a generation. That's something they'll never get back, and the fallout is something we'll be observing for decades to come.
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  Twitter is not real life.
  - 1over137 5y ago
    Is is for (many) Twitter users. :(
  - YATA0 5y ago
    It is when it's the real life accounts of coworkers who actively believe that, and similarly share these sentiments on the company Slack.
  - simplestats 5y ago
    It's junior high. But with grown adults doing the teasing and bullying.
  - superfunny 5y ago
    But Twitter has this annoying tendency to cancel the accounts of people who say things they don't agree with, irrespective of whether those things are true.
    - mrguyorama 5y ago
      They're doing those people a favor. Hell, even Trump is better off doing fun things instead of spending his time spewing, and reading, the toxicity of Twitter
Grakel 5y ago
I'm a professor and we're seeing drops in enrollment and huge drops in work being done, learning, and creativity. We need to say, hey it's been two years in March, we're done. March Onward, or something. No more. Hah, this comment dropped 6 points in less than a second. This article will be flagged soon.
- terminatornet 5y ago
  Me (angrily) to the global pandemic: "Enough is enough, mister, if you don't stop ravaging our population, we're putting you in a timeout!" I'm sure bargaining with covid will work.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    With proper vaccination risk is at an acceptable level.
    - terminatornet 5y ago
      Perhaps, I think the risk level for death or hospitalization may be acceptable, but I'd love to see data about the risk level for long covid after being vaccinated.
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      What's the risk of brain fog with proper vaccination?
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    We do so many ineffective Covid rituals. If we just wore n95s when reasonable that would give us equivalent protection and eliminate the need for the other stuff. Outdoor making is so dumb.
    - conception 5y ago
      Outdoor masking should be based on how likely it is you're breathing in someone's breath. At an empty park? Fine. At a sporting event? Probably want a mask.
sha256sum 5y ago
The children at my wife’s daycare are treated the same way (vectors of disease) by a selection of paranoid parents, inciting fear to the point that daycare closed last week. My toddler was crying a lot, wanting to see his friends. Who are we making these sacrifices for?
- terminatornet 5y ago
  - a45a33s 5y ago
    yes so lets do our best to make sure they cry as much as possible, especially if its for no justifiable reason what a ridiculous comment
    - terminatornet 5y ago
      Do you think they might be upset when their parents lungs turn to swiss cheese because they brought home covid from school or nah?
      - sha256sum 5y ago
        If those parents are as baselessly paranoid as you, they should keep their children home or find other accommodations.
      - remarkEon 5y ago
        >when their parents lungs turn to swiss cheese I'm going to be charitable and assume you don't think this actually happens, and are simply using this image for rhetorical effect. But, in the interest of trying to be helpful in yet-another-stupid-covid-thread, here's the CDC's take[1]: >Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four. [Emphasis mine] Now, I'm not saying it's time to stop worrying about this completely. Who knows, maybe a new "worse" variant comes up. But the existing data does not in any way make me worried about getting this, because I'm relatively young and healthy. Make your own judgements on personal risk, but if I were in charge I'd go completely back to normal tomorrow. Those who are still concerned are free to quarantine of their own free will, but I do not think it's fair to force the youngest to put their lives on pause because some people are still terrified of this. [1]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm?s_cid=mm7101a4_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm?s_cid=mm...
fxtentacle 5y ago
With Omnicron spreading as it is, I'm kind of expecting that everyone will get infected this wave. And afterwards, everyone is then either vaccinated or recovered or dead and we can drop all of the precautions. What am I overlooking?
- sneak 5y ago
  > I'm kind of expecting that everyone will get infected this wave I'm very glad that not all places on Earth have taken this destructive and defeatist view.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    Which country has successfully contained Omnicron?
    - 1over137 5y ago
      I guess China. But you probably have to be a full-fledged dictatorship to achieve it.
      - andrepd 5y ago
        Did they? They aren't exactly known for being teansparent.
        xster 5y ago
        It's exponential growth. They don't have to be transparent for the world to know if they contained it or not.
      - rdtwo 5y ago
        They have probably done more than anyone else, idk how you judge success here though… most lives fucked up then yes
    - sneak 5y ago
RayVR 5y ago
I'm not sure what to think of this from the article: > She told me that she didn’t want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying. > What am I supposed to say? That 23 children have died from Covid in Canada during the whole of the pandemic and she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? That kids in Scandinavia, Sweden, and the Netherlands largely haven’t had to wear masks at school and haven’t seen outbreaks because of it? That masks are not a magic shield against the virus, and that even if she were to pass it along to a classmate, the risk of them getting seriously sick is minuscule? > I want to tell her that she can remove her mask, and socialize with her friends without being worried. > But I am expected to enforce the rules. While I can sympathize with how the student is feeling, the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument) that having a conversation with a student isn't breaking the rules. That explaining the facts to a young woman, nearly an adult, is what is expected of a teacher. > At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends. Who was shaming children? local parents? government officials? I didn't see any of this shaming. In fact, where I live, more children were at the parks. I think what's really missing in most situations is honest conversations about the way the world is right now, the fact that many people are afraid, others are dying and many more will die as a result of this virus. Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering.
- bko 5y ago
  > While I can sympathize with how the student is feeling, the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument) that having a conversation with a student isn't breaking the rules. That explaining the facts to a young woman, nearly an adult, is what is expected of a teacher. I wouldn't be so sure. I would definitely be worried about being seen as a covid denier or similar. People feel really strongly about this and has strangely turned political, and its best not to discuss politics with your students so that you don't draw the ire of parents that could label you as something you're not > Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering. I just want my children to have a relatively care-free existence in their formative years, much like I had. Children and young people are not without their own low-stake drama but they should not have this weight of forced upon them at that age.
terminatornet 5y ago
The effects and handling of covid are so bad right now that cops are substitute teaching in Oklahoma https://www.mic.com/impact/police-substitute-teachers-oklahoma-schools-covid https://www.mic.com/impact/police-substitute-teachers-oklaho... A shortage of truck drivers means the legal age for commercial truck drivers is being lowered from 21 to 18, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/business/apprentice-program-truck-drivers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/business/apprentice-progr... There is no getting back to the way things were right now and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional
- nomel 5y ago
  > cops are substitute teaching in Oklahoma Yes, this was covered in the documentary South Park, The Pandemic Special (season 24, episode 1).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Arainach 5y ago
  > A shortage of truck drivers A shortage of trucking companies willing to pay the market rate for labor, rather.
  - guyzero 5y ago
    There have been articles about truck driver shortages running for years, decades even. https://money.cnn.com/2010/06/09/news/economy/truck_driver_shortage/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2010/06/09/news/economy/truck_driver_s... https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6769594 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6769594 - "A 1997 study by the American Trucking Association concluded that 82,000 new truckers were needed ... This shortage is making it more difficult for trucking companies to grow and contributing to higher costs for shippers." Maybe it's not about trucker supply.
    - massysett 5y ago
guyzero 5y ago
"My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. " Yes, that's because there's a pandemic going on that has killed 32,000 Canadians and significantly impacted a much larger number. It's pretty upsetting. The notion that people are only upset because of government restrictions is pretty silly. "she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? " Yeah, we should tell high school students a lot more forcefully that cars kill people. Making cars the backbone of Canadian society is terrible. "Our children need life on the highest volume. And they need it now." Wear a mask in school to try to minimize the transmission of the disease, take it off outside, get tested if you have symptoms and then isolate if you're infected. Get vaccinated. This is not difficult. I'm not sure why we need a hand-wringing essay.
- superfunny 5y ago
  Don't socialize in school. Don't play sports. Go to the prom wearing a mask. Yeah, this is not difficult.
  - guyzero 5y ago
    Don't congregate indoors in large groups. That's it. Amateur hockey teams are still playing hockey in Canada. Most sports are fine, just without spectators. Prom wearing a mask isn't exactly a burden. Again, kids are depressed because the disease exists, not because they're being asked to deal with it. Telling kids to go wild isn't going to make covid less depressing. That would probably kill a few teachers in outbreaks. Yes, it sucks. Spreading an extremely virulent disease also sucks. Schools have a responsibility to not encourage the spread of covid.
    - quocanh 5y ago
      There's an article written by a public school teacher that disagrees with you. What is your personal experience with the issue?
      - 5y ago
emptyparadise 5y ago
When (if?) the pandemic ends, we'll probably be stuck with the mental health impact of it (on top of yearly flu COVID) for a long time.
tonetheman 5y ago
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  From the comments, on these posts and climate change ones...there's plenty of people with religionist/anti-science agendas lurking on Hacker news. That's probably why, I mean one of the founders of Ycombinator is Thiel is a huge Trump backer/supporter and supposedly transfuses the blood of young men to increase longevity or telomere elasticity or something... (real or urban legend I don't know) very disturbing for the inequality of it, and I mean you don't get more exploitative than using healthy people's blood. Esp, when blood banks surely could put that to better use. Edit: IT could be pure urban legend, heresay, or just something gleaned from Silicon Valley, but I'm pretty sure I read about it somewhere... maybe even on here.
jaimex2 5y ago
In Australia there has been mass migration out of the states that had toxic culture towards covid. Victoria in particular lost of a lot of people who had enough and moved to more proportionate covid response states. The government chose the hardest covid policies in the country from the beginning which lead to division in the population. You had people that wouldn't accept the hard measures and you had people that championed them. The result was a state were covid was rampant and everyone was fighting over how selfish others were. Kids got it pretty bad - no playgrounds, no schools and you could only leave your home in a 5km radius for food and exercise. This went on for over a year.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
legerdemain 5y ago
> A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story > about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian > foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was > one of the best days that I can remember. On a tangent: is this... a healthy quality bar for a class presentation? Coming from the startup world, this sounds a lot like "and we all bonded so strongly at the 4 a.m. firefighting sessions." I'm glad the author enjoyed the delicacies the student's father labored all night to prepare, I guess.
- hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
  We do things like this all the time in AU, and it's great. So many cultures and yummy food here, great to give the kids a chance to share.
devwastaken 5y ago
The policy of universities and the federal government is to wait. What for? Undefined. Supposedly, they were going to lift covid restrictions, but then Omicron came. However we know that omicron is very mild and not any more a significant threat than driving a car or living in the U.S. in general. Yet here we are. The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. have already had covid, or have been vaccinated, or both. The socioeconomic affects of current restrictions are like a smog of cigarette smoke across the country. It won't kill you as fast as the very few people covid now will, but it will kill you later. We aren't looking at the carcinogenic effects of policies. If we were we would see a skyrocket in homelessness, unemployment, evaporation of jobs, and a market that overall will not take the same risks knowing the government(s) can shut their operations down at any moment. The policy makers for covid restrictions act like this is all a bandaid that will fall off eventually, but as far as I have seen they lied and the bandaid is actually a whole roll of duct tape.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  "The policy makers for covid restrictions act like this is all a bandaid that will fall off eventually, but as far as I have seen they lied and the bandaid is actually a whole roll of duct tape." No real epidemiologists is going to tell you that this is a bandaid that will fall off eventually. The people in the know will say "We don't have enough information." If you're talking about politicians, there are plenty red states that are not enforcing any restrictions. So is your complaint just that you disagree with some politicians?
hiyer 5y ago
> My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. This is ridiculous. I have a four-year old and even she understands that masks are for her own protection and not because she is a "vector of disease". If her students feel that way, then they've been made to do so by their parents, teachers, friends, or somebody else.
- horns4lyfe 5y ago
  Your 4 year old doesn’t understand that at all, they’re parroting what they hear at home. Because they’re 4.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    Strong disagree. 4 year olds are trying to understand. Parents know about the 'why' phase. Our son had a lot of questions concerning COVID,as it influenced what he's allowed to visit from one week to another. We gave answers as good as we could. He understands the basics about how diseases can spread by air, and masking is not a big leap from that point. He sometimes decides to wear a mask, even if he doesn't have to, which is cute. He did try to stab his fork in water droplets to try kill virusses, so there are limits, but a 'logical' initiative like this shows he gets the basic idea.
aklemm 5y ago
Bari Weiss stuff probably should be blacklisted here. There’s a reason the New York Times quickly figured it was worth the hit to fire her. She’s a mere sensationalist propaganda peddler.
- tracker1 5y ago
  Propaganda is going to happen... better to have it exposed and countered than for it to fester as "truth" because it aligns with your political views. Note: this is not an endorsement or counter to the opinion on Bari Weiss, not familiar enough to comment. Only that blacklisting people and ideas is often not the best solution. It can feel justified and be expedient, but will emphatically lead to worse outcomes for society. In general, there's too many hard lines drawn politically, and I'd rather see a return to some level of discourse, negotiation and compromise. IMO that's when the system is working at its' best. Not when anyone gets everything they want, but when opposing views work together to come up with solutions in compromise that lead to better.
  - aklemm 5y ago
    That's all true on the spectrum of reasonable, honest dialogue. Bari Weiss is in the group not being reasonable, while asking for reasonable (determined by intellectual honesty, not political leaning) people's time. Being tasked to reckon with the absurd and the deliberate muddling of issues is not, in my opinion, going to help much.
- imgabe 5y ago
  We don’t need to turn HN into another echo chamber. You can read something that doesn’t just parrot your own beliefs back at you once in a while. You’ll be ok.
  - aklemm 5y ago
    Luckily I didn’t suggest any such thing. Here’s a chance for you to reckon with whether you’re being intellectually honest. I suggested blacklisting a source with a history of intellectual dishonesty, some of which was picked up right in this thread. What are you suggesting?
n_plus_1 5y ago
From the article: >When we look at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of history, I believe it will be clear that we betrayed our children. We have not betrayed our children. We have betrayed the ides of human rights.
clutchdude 5y ago
Lemmee see... No discussion on impacts to staff, teachers or parents if their suggested course of action was followed during the pandemic. Another article wanting to push "Think of the children!" without the exercise of seeing what having allowed schools to operate without any restrictions would have been. My guess? We'd see what we're seeing in the Omicron wave but with much worse impacts.
- robhunter 5y ago
  We have a clear picture of what schools would look like without the myriad of restrictions we have in Ontario - the Scandinavian countries. No masking of young children. Minimal masking of older children, or teachers. No quadmesters. No banning of assemblies, or proms, or extra curriculars. Your guess is not grounded in the data we are seeing from dozens of other countries.
JoeyBananas 5y ago
quadrifoliate 5y ago
A counter perspective: > My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. According to all of my friends who are teachers and don't have a Substack, this was actually the case every winter. Anyone who was teaching would get sick for several days a year, and then either soldier on, or call in sick as a last resort. Calling in sick was shamed by most school administrations, and none of them seemed to have the health of teachers as a priority. To me as an outside, the entire focus seemed to be basically, "Can someone keep the kids occupied for today until their parents come get them?" Maybe these are the kind of conversations that the author could also be having with her students? How teaching and childcare seem to be pretty much conflated in North America, and how most schools seem to cater to the whims of paranoid helicopter parents who like to think of "learning" as just another job that they can offload to a teacher, just like they offload their groceries to Instacart. Also, for older kids, the teacher could introduce them to how tests work, and how they can in theory play just fine with their friends if everyone gets tested daily. She could also go into the governmental and financial factors that make such tests widely available in Europe, but not North America. I understand that we're likely not going to continue with the current restrictions forever, but having a healthy understanding of germ theory and epidemiology among schoolchildren doesn't seem to be a total downside to me. The optimist in me says that overall this will lead to fewer kids coming in when they are sick (or at least masking when they do), fewer kids wiping their noses and then playing with their friends without handwashing, and a reduction in the spread of various infections.
- watwut 5y ago
  The parents not having to deal with kids while they are in school and using that time to work is worldwide phenomenon. And it has zero to do why there is not enough substitute teachers.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
Getting to, and staying at, zero Covid would have solved this and many other problems. Unfortunately the effort and coordination required turned out to be beyond our current social setup.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  Yes, but sadly that ship has sailed.

166 points by imgabe 5y ago

> Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. Schools should teach that already because it's exactly accurate. Pandemic or not. We would be way better off now if current adults were tought that as kids and made it part of their social intuition.

rdtwo 5y ago

There will be a high price to pay for pandemic theater. In the immediate term because the theater does not work and effective actions are ignored and in the long term because the ineffective actions are also harmful.

adamrezich 5y ago
will there be? there wasn't any price paid for security/counterterrorism theatre under Bush. and most of that stuff never really went away, we just got used to it. we're not going to flick a switch off and "just go back to normal" after this. every time cold (both temperature and illness) season comes around, some stores will make masks mandatory, kids will be sent home from school for remote learning now that they all have laptops, etc. etc.
- richiebful1 5y ago
  At least in the US, the debate around the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races was largely about school closures for COVID-19. And the Republicans did well on the premise of reopening in-person school. The price is already being paid. That said, most polls show a majority of Americans support mask mandates. [1] I don't think the future is necessarily an analogy of post-9/11 security theater. 1. Fox, Gallup, others generally agree: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/fox-news-poll-mask-vaccine-mandates-pandemic-worries-increase https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/fox-news-poll-mask-vacc...
- csense 5y ago
  > there wasn't any price paid for security/counterterrorism theatre under Bush Every time anyone wants to get on an airplane,they're forced to take a nude selfie. And if there's a blip, a government employee will...well, let's just say any private business would get sued six ways to Sunday for sexual harassment. Osama bin Laden's been dead for years, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over. Everybody just accepts it. A high price to pay, in both (1) the TSA's budget, and (2) the fact that Americans just don't care about this infringement on freedom and privacy. When was the last time you saw disbanding the TSA suggested in any political debate from a candidate of either party? So all the stuff about mask mandates, vaccine passports, and so on -- that stuff, once implemented, will never go away. The September 11 response has taught me that the government will take your freedom in a crisis, but they'll never give it back. It's when the compulsion to have government to fix the crisis seems most reasonable that we should be most unreasonably insistent on keeping our freedom.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    I think you might've misunderstood me—we agree completely. when I said "there wasn't any price paid" I meant by anyone but the average joe
williamtwild 5y ago
what effective actions are being ignored?
- thoughtstheseus 5y ago
  A reduction of obesity. Living a healthy lifestyle has many benefits beyond Covid.
  - tracker1 5y ago
    Stop fat shaming! /s
- the_snooze 5y ago
  Getting vaccinated and moving on with life.
  - henriquez 5y ago
  - version_five 5y ago
    Did getting vaccinated mean other people let you move on with life? I've had three shots, restaurants are currently closed where I am, I have to wait in line to do groceries because there is some kind of capacity restriction, and old women cower when I walk by them on the street (maybe that always happened). I have moved on long ago but people around me, or at least those with a monopoly on violence, are still hysterical
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      The problem is that we live in an interconnected graph (society), and while you have done your part by getting vaccinated, others haven’t. And the people evaluating the evidence (experts) make recommendations to keep things closed. Why are you not upset at the other group members who are not carrying their part of the workload? Unless we can remove them from society, the decisions have to be made including their behaviors and risk factors.
tracker1 5y ago
I seriously doubt that... GB just rolled it all back. No idea what Austria, Australia or New Zealand will do though. Or France, NYC, Washington State, etc. I don't think any of the theater politicians will pay. Pelosi got more flack for presumed insider trading recently than ever saw for the mask theater.

YATA0 5y ago

People who brought up these worries about the indirect impacts of COVID lockdowns were shouted down as heretics. Now if you don't support full lockdowns and shelter-in-place, you're supporting genocide against the immunocompromised, minorities, etc. (according to Twitter, company Slack, etc.). TFA has a great line about many rites of passage being effectively stolen from a generation. That's something they'll never get back, and the fallout is something we'll be observing for decades to come.

throwaway6734 5y ago
Twitter is not real life.
- 1over137 5y ago
  Is is for (many) Twitter users. :(
- YATA0 5y ago
  It is when it's the real life accounts of coworkers who actively believe that, and similarly share these sentiments on the company Slack.
- simplestats 5y ago
  It's junior high. But with grown adults doing the teasing and bullying.
- superfunny 5y ago
  But Twitter has this annoying tendency to cancel the accounts of people who say things they don't agree with, irrespective of whether those things are true.
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    They're doing those people a favor. Hell, even Trump is better off doing fun things instead of spending his time spewing, and reading, the toxicity of Twitter

Grakel 5y ago

I'm a professor and we're seeing drops in enrollment and huge drops in work being done, learning, and creativity. We need to say, hey it's been two years in March, we're done. March Onward, or something. No more. Hah, this comment dropped 6 points in less than a second. This article will be flagged soon.

terminatornet 5y ago
Me (angrily) to the global pandemic: "Enough is enough, mister, if you don't stop ravaging our population, we're putting you in a timeout!" I'm sure bargaining with covid will work.
- andrepd 5y ago
  With proper vaccination risk is at an acceptable level.
  - terminatornet 5y ago
    Perhaps, I think the risk level for death or hospitalization may be acceptable, but I'd love to see data about the risk level for long covid after being vaccinated.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    What's the risk of brain fog with proper vaccination?
- rdtwo 5y ago
  We do so many ineffective Covid rituals. If we just wore n95s when reasonable that would give us equivalent protection and eliminate the need for the other stuff. Outdoor making is so dumb.
  - conception 5y ago
    Outdoor masking should be based on how likely it is you're breathing in someone's breath. At an empty park? Fine. At a sporting event? Probably want a mask.

sha256sum 5y ago

The children at my wife’s daycare are treated the same way (vectors of disease) by a selection of paranoid parents, inciting fear to the point that daycare closed last week. My toddler was crying a lot, wanting to see his friends. Who are we making these sacrifices for?

terminatornet 5y ago
- a45a33s 5y ago
  yes so lets do our best to make sure they cry as much as possible, especially if its for no justifiable reason what a ridiculous comment
  - terminatornet 5y ago
    Do you think they might be upset when their parents lungs turn to swiss cheese because they brought home covid from school or nah?
    - sha256sum 5y ago
      If those parents are as baselessly paranoid as you, they should keep their children home or find other accommodations.
    - remarkEon 5y ago
      >when their parents lungs turn to swiss cheese I'm going to be charitable and assume you don't think this actually happens, and are simply using this image for rhetorical effect. But, in the interest of trying to be helpful in yet-another-stupid-covid-thread, here's the CDC's take[1]: >Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four. [Emphasis mine] Now, I'm not saying it's time to stop worrying about this completely. Who knows, maybe a new "worse" variant comes up. But the existing data does not in any way make me worried about getting this, because I'm relatively young and healthy. Make your own judgements on personal risk, but if I were in charge I'd go completely back to normal tomorrow. Those who are still concerned are free to quarantine of their own free will, but I do not think it's fair to force the youngest to put their lives on pause because some people are still terrified of this. [1]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm?s_cid=mm7101a4_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm?s_cid=mm...

fxtentacle 5y ago

With Omnicron spreading as it is, I'm kind of expecting that everyone will get infected this wave. And afterwards, everyone is then either vaccinated or recovered or dead and we can drop all of the precautions. What am I overlooking?

sneak 5y ago
> I'm kind of expecting that everyone will get infected this wave I'm very glad that not all places on Earth have taken this destructive and defeatist view.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  Which country has successfully contained Omnicron?
  - 1over137 5y ago
    I guess China. But you probably have to be a full-fledged dictatorship to achieve it.
    - andrepd 5y ago
      Did they? They aren't exactly known for being teansparent.
      - xster 5y ago
        It's exponential growth. They don't have to be transparent for the world to know if they contained it or not.
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      They have probably done more than anyone else, idk how you judge success here though… most lives fucked up then yes
  - sneak 5y ago

RayVR 5y ago

I'm not sure what to think of this from the article: > She told me that she didn’t want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying. > What am I supposed to say? That 23 children have died from Covid in Canada during the whole of the pandemic and she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? That kids in Scandinavia, Sweden, and the Netherlands largely haven’t had to wear masks at school and haven’t seen outbreaks because of it? That masks are not a magic shield against the virus, and that even if she were to pass it along to a classmate, the risk of them getting seriously sick is minuscule? > I want to tell her that she can remove her mask, and socialize with her friends without being worried. > But I am expected to enforce the rules. While I can sympathize with how the student is feeling, the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument) that having a conversation with a student isn't breaking the rules. That explaining the facts to a young woman, nearly an adult, is what is expected of a teacher. > At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends. Who was shaming children? local parents? government officials? I didn't see any of this shaming. In fact, where I live, more children were at the parks. I think what's really missing in most situations is honest conversations about the way the world is right now, the fact that many people are afraid, others are dying and many more will die as a result of this virus. Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering.

bko 5y ago
> While I can sympathize with how the student is feeling, the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument) that having a conversation with a student isn't breaking the rules. That explaining the facts to a young woman, nearly an adult, is what is expected of a teacher. I wouldn't be so sure. I would definitely be worried about being seen as a covid denier or similar. People feel really strongly about this and has strangely turned political, and its best not to discuss politics with your students so that you don't draw the ire of parents that could label you as something you're not > Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering. I just want my children to have a relatively care-free existence in their formative years, much like I had. Children and young people are not without their own low-stake drama but they should not have this weight of forced upon them at that age.

terminatornet 5y ago

The effects and handling of covid are so bad right now that cops are substitute teaching in Oklahoma https://www.mic.com/impact/police-substitute-teachers-oklahoma-schools-covid https://www.mic.com/impact/police-substitute-teachers-oklaho... A shortage of truck drivers means the legal age for commercial truck drivers is being lowered from 21 to 18, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/business/apprentice-program-truck-drivers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/business/apprentice-progr... There is no getting back to the way things were right now and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional

nomel 5y ago
> cops are substitute teaching in Oklahoma Yes, this was covered in the documentary South Park, The Pandemic Special (season 24, episode 1).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Arainach 5y ago
> A shortage of truck drivers A shortage of trucking companies willing to pay the market rate for labor, rather.
- guyzero 5y ago
  There have been articles about truck driver shortages running for years, decades even. https://money.cnn.com/2010/06/09/news/economy/truck_driver_shortage/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2010/06/09/news/economy/truck_driver_s... https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6769594 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6769594 - "A 1997 study by the American Trucking Association concluded that 82,000 new truckers were needed ... This shortage is making it more difficult for trucking companies to grow and contributing to higher costs for shippers." Maybe it's not about trucker supply.
  - massysett 5y ago

guyzero 5y ago

"My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. " Yes, that's because there's a pandemic going on that has killed 32,000 Canadians and significantly impacted a much larger number. It's pretty upsetting. The notion that people are only upset because of government restrictions is pretty silly. "she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? " Yeah, we should tell high school students a lot more forcefully that cars kill people. Making cars the backbone of Canadian society is terrible. "Our children need life on the highest volume. And they need it now." Wear a mask in school to try to minimize the transmission of the disease, take it off outside, get tested if you have symptoms and then isolate if you're infected. Get vaccinated. This is not difficult. I'm not sure why we need a hand-wringing essay.

superfunny 5y ago
Don't socialize in school. Don't play sports. Go to the prom wearing a mask. Yeah, this is not difficult.
- guyzero 5y ago
  Don't congregate indoors in large groups. That's it. Amateur hockey teams are still playing hockey in Canada. Most sports are fine, just without spectators. Prom wearing a mask isn't exactly a burden. Again, kids are depressed because the disease exists, not because they're being asked to deal with it. Telling kids to go wild isn't going to make covid less depressing. That would probably kill a few teachers in outbreaks. Yes, it sucks. Spreading an extremely virulent disease also sucks. Schools have a responsibility to not encourage the spread of covid.
  - quocanh 5y ago
    There's an article written by a public school teacher that disagrees with you. What is your personal experience with the issue?
    - 5y ago

emptyparadise 5y ago

When (if?) the pandemic ends, we'll probably be stuck with the mental health impact of it (on top of yearly flu COVID) for a long time.

tonetheman 5y ago

gremlinsinc 5y ago
From the comments, on these posts and climate change ones...there's plenty of people with religionist/anti-science agendas lurking on Hacker news. That's probably why, I mean one of the founders of Ycombinator is Thiel is a huge Trump backer/supporter and supposedly transfuses the blood of young men to increase longevity or telomere elasticity or something... (real or urban legend I don't know) very disturbing for the inequality of it, and I mean you don't get more exploitative than using healthy people's blood. Esp, when blood banks surely could put that to better use. Edit: IT could be pure urban legend, heresay, or just something gleaned from Silicon Valley, but I'm pretty sure I read about it somewhere... maybe even on here.

jaimex2 5y ago

In Australia there has been mass migration out of the states that had toxic culture towards covid. Victoria in particular lost of a lot of people who had enough and moved to more proportionate covid response states. The government chose the hardest covid policies in the country from the beginning which lead to division in the population. You had people that wouldn't accept the hard measures and you had people that championed them. The result was a state were covid was rampant and everyone was fighting over how selfish others were. Kids got it pretty bad - no playgrounds, no schools and you could only leave your home in a 5km radius for food and exercise. This went on for over a year.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

legerdemain 5y ago

> A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story > about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian > foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was > one of the best days that I can remember. On a tangent: is this... a healthy quality bar for a class presentation? Coming from the startup world, this sounds a lot like "and we all bonded so strongly at the 4 a.m. firefighting sessions." I'm glad the author enjoyed the delicacies the student's father labored all night to prepare, I guess.

hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
We do things like this all the time in AU, and it's great. So many cultures and yummy food here, great to give the kids a chance to share.

devwastaken 5y ago

The policy of universities and the federal government is to wait. What for? Undefined. Supposedly, they were going to lift covid restrictions, but then Omicron came. However we know that omicron is very mild and not any more a significant threat than driving a car or living in the U.S. in general. Yet here we are. The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. have already had covid, or have been vaccinated, or both. The socioeconomic affects of current restrictions are like a smog of cigarette smoke across the country. It won't kill you as fast as the very few people covid now will, but it will kill you later. We aren't looking at the carcinogenic effects of policies. If we were we would see a skyrocket in homelessness, unemployment, evaporation of jobs, and a market that overall will not take the same risks knowing the government(s) can shut their operations down at any moment. The policy makers for covid restrictions act like this is all a bandaid that will fall off eventually, but as far as I have seen they lied and the bandaid is actually a whole roll of duct tape.

nouveaux 5y ago
"The policy makers for covid restrictions act like this is all a bandaid that will fall off eventually, but as far as I have seen they lied and the bandaid is actually a whole roll of duct tape." No real epidemiologists is going to tell you that this is a bandaid that will fall off eventually. The people in the know will say "We don't have enough information." If you're talking about politicians, there are plenty red states that are not enforcing any restrictions. So is your complaint just that you disagree with some politicians?

hiyer 5y ago

> My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. This is ridiculous. I have a four-year old and even she understands that masks are for her own protection and not because she is a "vector of disease". If her students feel that way, then they've been made to do so by their parents, teachers, friends, or somebody else.

horns4lyfe 5y ago
Your 4 year old doesn’t understand that at all, they’re parroting what they hear at home. Because they’re 4.
- hyperman1 5y ago
  Strong disagree. 4 year olds are trying to understand. Parents know about the 'why' phase. Our son had a lot of questions concerning COVID,as it influenced what he's allowed to visit from one week to another. We gave answers as good as we could. He understands the basics about how diseases can spread by air, and masking is not a big leap from that point. He sometimes decides to wear a mask, even if he doesn't have to, which is cute. He did try to stab his fork in water droplets to try kill virusses, so there are limits, but a 'logical' initiative like this shows he gets the basic idea.

aklemm 5y ago

Bari Weiss stuff probably should be blacklisted here. There’s a reason the New York Times quickly figured it was worth the hit to fire her. She’s a mere sensationalist propaganda peddler.

tracker1 5y ago
Propaganda is going to happen... better to have it exposed and countered than for it to fester as "truth" because it aligns with your political views. Note: this is not an endorsement or counter to the opinion on Bari Weiss, not familiar enough to comment. Only that blacklisting people and ideas is often not the best solution. It can feel justified and be expedient, but will emphatically lead to worse outcomes for society. In general, there's too many hard lines drawn politically, and I'd rather see a return to some level of discourse, negotiation and compromise. IMO that's when the system is working at its' best. Not when anyone gets everything they want, but when opposing views work together to come up with solutions in compromise that lead to better.
- aklemm 5y ago
  That's all true on the spectrum of reasonable, honest dialogue. Bari Weiss is in the group not being reasonable, while asking for reasonable (determined by intellectual honesty, not political leaning) people's time. Being tasked to reckon with the absurd and the deliberate muddling of issues is not, in my opinion, going to help much.
imgabe 5y ago
We don’t need to turn HN into another echo chamber. You can read something that doesn’t just parrot your own beliefs back at you once in a while. You’ll be ok.
- aklemm 5y ago
  Luckily I didn’t suggest any such thing. Here’s a chance for you to reckon with whether you’re being intellectually honest. I suggested blacklisting a source with a history of intellectual dishonesty, some of which was picked up right in this thread. What are you suggesting?

n_plus_1 5y ago

From the article: >When we look at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of history, I believe it will be clear that we betrayed our children. We have not betrayed our children. We have betrayed the ides of human rights.

clutchdude 5y ago

Lemmee see... No discussion on impacts to staff, teachers or parents if their suggested course of action was followed during the pandemic. Another article wanting to push "Think of the children!" without the exercise of seeing what having allowed schools to operate without any restrictions would have been. My guess? We'd see what we're seeing in the Omicron wave but with much worse impacts.

robhunter 5y ago
We have a clear picture of what schools would look like without the myriad of restrictions we have in Ontario - the Scandinavian countries. No masking of young children. Minimal masking of older children, or teachers. No quadmesters. No banning of assemblies, or proms, or extra curriculars. Your guess is not grounded in the data we are seeing from dozens of other countries.

JoeyBananas 5y ago

quadrifoliate 5y ago

A counter perspective: > My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. According to all of my friends who are teachers and don't have a Substack, this was actually the case every winter. Anyone who was teaching would get sick for several days a year, and then either soldier on, or call in sick as a last resort. Calling in sick was shamed by most school administrations, and none of them seemed to have the health of teachers as a priority. To me as an outside, the entire focus seemed to be basically, "Can someone keep the kids occupied for today until their parents come get them?" Maybe these are the kind of conversations that the author could also be having with her students? How teaching and childcare seem to be pretty much conflated in North America, and how most schools seem to cater to the whims of paranoid helicopter parents who like to think of "learning" as just another job that they can offload to a teacher, just like they offload their groceries to Instacart. Also, for older kids, the teacher could introduce them to how tests work, and how they can in theory play just fine with their friends if everyone gets tested daily. She could also go into the governmental and financial factors that make such tests widely available in Europe, but not North America. I understand that we're likely not going to continue with the current restrictions forever, but having a healthy understanding of germ theory and epidemiology among schoolchildren doesn't seem to be a total downside to me. The optimist in me says that overall this will lead to fewer kids coming in when they are sick (or at least masking when they do), fewer kids wiping their noses and then playing with their friends without handwashing, and a reduction in the spread of various infections.

watwut 5y ago
The parents not having to deal with kids while they are in school and using that time to work is worldwide phenomenon. And it has zero to do why there is not enough substitute teachers.

somewhereoutth 5y ago

Getting to, and staying at, zero Covid would have solved this and many other problems. Unfortunately the effort and coordination required turned out to be beyond our current social setup.

Viliam1234 5y ago
Yes, but sadly that ship has sailed.