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Yes, and? The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1

Yes, and? The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/data-tables/421-010-CasesInNotFullyVaccinated.pdf https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/... Given the extremely contagious nature of Omicron, what plausible way do we have to prevent these individuals from getting COVID and using hospital space? And don't say masking up kids—because if they haven't gotten vaccinated, then why do you think they themselves would wear masks and social distance to prevent themselves from getting COVID? I have seen no plausible modeling that shows even high level of masking would significantly blunt the spread of this. https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=cumulative-deaths&tab=trend https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view... So why make the kids put on hair shirts I mean masks? Oh, and by the way: I have plenty of sympathy towards health care workers. I am dating a nurse. I have doctors, nurses, and paramedics as friends. I have extreme empathy towards them, and full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system. And the rest of our economy while they're at it.

dsl 5y ago
I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.
- pcmoney 5y ago
  So basically harming Billy possibly violating his rights and not respecting Grandpa’s autonomy to make his own decisions regarding risk/return tradeoffs is the solution? Hasn’t worked well to date.
- perardi 5y ago
  Or…grandpa can get vaccinated. I'd be more than happy to test and vaccinate in schools. In particular vaccinate. But having kids wear masks…which they don't do well, because they're kids…not like adults do it well either…is a fig leaf. It's not going to work. And you can see that from the massive infection rates in schools that have masks.
  - dsl 5y ago
    Of course all of our problems go away when you convince the remaining 40% of the population to get vaccinated. I'm actually in favor of doing away with masks and social distancing. Just create a nationwide policy that the unvaccinated will not be admitted or treated for COVID and we can all return to our daily lives.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - sleepybrett 5y ago
      Convincing that 40% to get vaccinated while members of our elected government preach to that particular choir about how things that are partially or mostly effective (masking, vaccines, etc) are NOT effective simply because they are not 100% effective is a losing battle. Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or no, believes the vaccines to be effective. It was asked five times, his answers were nothing but stuttering, rambling, dissembling, meandering madness ('i mean what does effective actually mean' level bullshit). The republicans passed him out of committee once the democrats walked out in frustration. We have a party that is in full denial mode because that's what their anti-vax constituents want to hear. The only upside might be that their vote share goes down because their constituents die in higher numbers.
      - jjeaff 5y ago
        The denial is so palpable. I know a couple in their early sixties who refused to get vaccinated because "COVID is way overblown". They were both regular weight and normal health. The wife contracted COVID and died in the hospital. Later, when asked if he was going to get vaccinated, he said no, because "COVID is no worse than a cold." He apparently believes that even though his wife went into the hospital for COVID, she actually died from pneumonia, and not COVID. I guess no doctor explained to him that pneumonia is simply an infection that has spread to the lungs. You can't help people like this.
- tqi 5y ago
  1. If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem. 2. The idea that anyone who wants in person learning is a "screaming Karen" is fucking stupid. There is lots of evidence that remote learning has all kinds of negative outcomes for kids, and your (frankly sexist) dismissiveness is the reason this conversation never goes anywhere.
  - aqme28 5y ago
    > If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem. Unfortunately though that's not true. It's putting a huge burden on hospitals that affects us all.
    - tqi 5y ago
      True, but thats a % of a % of a % (ie Masks could prevent some % of COVID transmission at school, of some % of which would have be transmitted to other individuals in the home, of which some % of which would have required hospitalization), which makes it seem likely to be a high cost for not much reward.
      - mlac 5y ago
        Which at scale is still a significant number of hospital beds, and queues grow exponentially when a system reaches capacity.
    - beiller 5y ago
      Isn't the point way up that nurses are quitting. This creates a burden at the hospital. Why are they quitting? Because they are treated like cattle instead of employed human beings. See the court case on the hospital suing the nurses in an at will employment state for quitting and going to another hospital for higher pay. There are even some who are fired for not getting a vaccine regardless of any special circumstance the individual may have.
      - lhorie 5y ago
- stvswn 5y ago
  You somehow manage to be condescending against all parties here. Calling mothers who want their children to receive an in-person education "screaming Karens" is terribly out of touch. I have young children, and my position is simple: the hospital load, the vaccination status of the elderly, the burn out of the teachers -- it's not my child's burden. It's the adults' burden. You are free to wear a mask for the rest of your life for all I care. I find it pathetic, but I really don't care. But you and people like you do not deserve power over my children, and if you don't see the reckoning coming you are not paying close enough attention.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    Maybe take your kids out of public school then? Your kids are not the only ones there and don’t take priority over everyone else’s (and the teaches)
    - JPKab 5y ago
      So he should foot the bill for private school because people like you don't understand basic statistics, or even bother to look at the data? With all due respect, there's a name for fear that is divorced from reality and not in proportion with the actual risk: paranoia. And that's what this is. The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. Virtually zero of those kids that died was healthy before they caught COVID. The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks.... it's almost like maybe, just maybe, you've let your brain get hijacked by a mass panic and are refusing to acknowledge reality now, because that would require you to admit you've completely overreacted, and have done damage to children in the process. I don't blame you for not wanting to admit that to yourself, but at some point this has to stop.
      - kingaillas 5y ago
        Kids aren't the only ones at risk - he also mentioned teachers, some of whom don't want to take the higher risk of in-person teaching or dealing with 100+ kids every day that aren't wearing masks. Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.
- pcmoney 5y ago
  Why? Masks dont help much. Vaccines dont stop contagion or transmission. They do lower risk of severe covid but kids are very low risk even if unvaccinated.
  - AnthonBerg 5y ago
    > Masks don’t help much It depends what kind of mask. Proper respirator masks like N95 and FFP2 work very well. There are now very clear results that show that the main mode of transmission is respiratory aerosol. As an example, this Lancet paper captures it well: ”Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2”, The Lancet, 2021. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00869-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Numerous results have come out since. I can’t find fault with the data or the investigation or the conclusion – I act according to this: We’re dealing with an airborne pathogen. Aerosolized. Closed masks – respirator masks – N95/FFP2. These do work. Almost unreasonably well. “Surgical masks” that gape at the sides do not protect well against aerosolized particles.
    - pcmoney 5y ago
      Masks as used by 90% of the mask wearing population which is only 40%? Of the total population dont work well* If you feel like you should wear an N95 properly to be safe then you should do that. But let’s not pretend we can get everyone to properly wear N95s
      - monksy 5y ago
        Even improper usage of N95s give much more protection than a surgical with a mask brace. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/10/commentary-what-can-masks-do-part-1-science-behind-covid-19-protection https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/10/commenta...
      - AnthonBerg 5y ago
        Whether people currently wear a particular type doesn’t indicate whether they are effective. If people knew that they actually are effective, more would wear them.
- brimble 5y ago
  > If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning In defense of the Karens (ew, I feel gross even typing that) remote learning absolutely was the disaster they say it was. It was really, really bad. It's hard to exaggerate how bad it was. And I mean specifically for the kids, not for the parents (it also sucked for them/us, obviously). We can probably recover well-enough from a semester or two of it, but without some top-down moonshot level effort to make it better fast, continuing it would have been an actual catastrophe. I doubt anyone else with school-side insight into how it went would claim otherwise. It was bad.
  - dsl 5y ago
    No. It wasn't that bad. School still continued. Your children are at most slightly inconvenienced during a global pandemic that has killed MILLIONS of people. All you have to do is keep your kid looking at a screen. They may need to repeat a year of school. At some point in their future your kids boss may say "oh right, you were a pandemic kid, here let me show you." It's like someone in WW2 UK complaining that the Germans dropping bombs on their neighbors houses knocked some of the good dishes off the shelf.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      The people getting hit hardest by remote learning are the poor kids, who have few enough opportunities as it is. (I can tell you from experience, these remote learning systems are horrible on a low-end device, yet almost tolerable on a high-end one. Parents with both the time and knowledge to assist with school-work aren't distributed evenly. etc, etc.) Universal education is supposed to be the great equaliser. I can't imagine the current state of remote learning achieves that, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people who push for schools to re-open in-person. I don't think it's worth people dying over, though, especially given that the qualifications are more important than the stuff you learn in school.
    - metadat 5y ago
      Actually, it didn’t go well. Nowadays we’ve got a bunch of 6th graders still at a 4th grade education level. Remote learning for children is substantially less effective for many of them. Think about it, what are the reasons making close supervision of school-aged children desirable? Their brains are still growing and developing! They often aren’t mature enough to be academically successful when they’re physically isolated and stuck on a shitty google hangout.
- eddieplan9 5y ago
  At what cost? If there were crazy people jaywalking onto the freeway, do you want to reduce speed limit nationally to accommodate that, or would you rather let it play out and people can realize certain things are just fatally stupid?
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  Yeah, but masks aren't doing much to prevent that. My kids go to an Oregon elementary school that requires full time masking and I can't think of a single kid who hasn't had it. COVID has run rampant through Oregon schools. I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools. The elderly and vulnerable need to get vaccinated, or be handled in a tent in the hospital parking lot. Stop punishing kids. This coming from a very large, male, angry "Karen."
  - JPKab 5y ago
    Indeed. My twin brother lives just outside of PDX, and the schools were closed for a full year, then hybrid classes. His son was in kindergarten when it hit, just like my daughter. His son is severely delayed now. On top of all of that, they finally open the schools back up and shove the kids into useless masks. His son (Jack) needs speech therapy. When he goes, the instructor is wearing a mask. He can't see what her lips are doing. It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who??? It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.
    - hcurtiss 5y ago
      The strange part to me is that usually on policy issues there’s this band of reasonable behavior and people disagree on which end of that band we should fall, but if you’re honest you can understand the other side’s perspective. On COVID in Oregon, it’s the first time in my life I’ve felt like I’m looking at a completely different world than others. I’m just flabbergasted by the policy calls driven by COVID hysteria. I’m not some rabid right winger. (My wife and I are both triple vaccinated, AND we still recently got it!) I just feel totally, totally confused. We vacationed in Idaho over Christmas and it was like reorienting myself to reality. I have no idea what’s going on in Oregon, but I am confident that we have revealed a fundamental split in human psyches that some bad actor will exploit to terrible ends.
- deleted 5y ago
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- closeparen 5y ago
  Until when? What’s the endpoint? Children are little bundles of disease; it has always been and will always be strictly better for public health to prevent children from interacting with each other. But what kind of world is that?
WillPostForFood 5y ago
The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated. Are you sure this is true? The data you linked to shows that hospitalization rate for 65+ unvaccinated is 7x 65+ vaccinated. But WA has a great vaccination rate, over 99% for 65+ with one or more shot. So even with 7x the rate, unvaccinated elderly probably aren't massively dominating hospitalizations because it is such a small pool of ppl. vax rate: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/washington https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
- ianferrel 5y ago
  The data that is showing 99+% with one or more shots is bad. Lots of second and third doses could not be linked to the original dose and got counted as "first" doses, then the percentage of people with first doses got capped at 99.9% (or something very high) because it would be obviously absurd if 115% of people had one or more doses. Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    I dug out a more accurate number, 93.6%, from the Washington dashboard. Even at 93.6%, the remaining 6.4% unvaccinated can't overwhelmingly account for hospitalizations even if they are being hospitalized at 7x the rate. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated combined. We can definitively say that the hospital case load is not overwhelmingly dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.
    - deleted 5y ago
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alsetmusic 5y ago
There’s a simple solution, but good luck getting everyone on board with it: stop treating the willingly unvaxxed in hospitals. Only vaxxed patients and medically-ineligible unvaxxed patients get treatment. If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  Firstly, there no way to check someone’s vaccination status. There are fake cards, there are people who got vaccinated before government databases, there are people who got vaccinated without documentation, there are people who got documentation from medical people who didn’t actually perform the vaccination. Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. Medicine knows where that goes and is strongly incentivized to never go there again.
  - lovich 5y ago
    > Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage
    - adamcstephens 5y ago
      Sure, the electorate has thus far been unwilling to increase the capacity. At the same time the private medical facilities have been underpaying, overworking, and under-resourcing our hospitals. They close rural hospitals because they're not profitable /enough/. We could have more beds, and happier staff, but then the profits would be lower.
      - lovich 5y ago
        I agree that the hospitals as private businesses have not handled the situation well because they are seeking profit, but the electorate has no punished them for it. There are no single issue voters for increasing the medical systems capacity. There are multiple political groups who care about the medical system but none who are willing to sacrifice every other possible gain if they get an improved medical system. That is what I mean about the electorate signaling that they do not care
groby_b 5y ago
You're aware that you're arguing about the health impact on children using a doc that ignores anybody <12 years of age, right? Anything that follows from that will be a flawed argument.
JadeNB 5y ago
> So why make the kids put on hair shirts I mean masks? Because wearing masks is a good thing. A large part of the resistance to mask wearing in the US stems from seeing it as an abnormal thing and an oppression, but, in fact, wearing a mask when you're sick—even if it's just a minor sickness, not in the context of a global pandemic—is a good and respectful thing to do, practiced as a matter of course in many countries. Kids who grow up wearing masks will not have the horror of them that their vaccine-avoiding forebears did, and hopefully will be better equipped to meet the next pandemic sanely.
tragictrash 5y ago
Stop spouting disinfo. Your actions have real repercussions.
tpoacher 5y ago
When you started with "yes, and", for a second I thought you were about to do improv! > I have full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system What do your medic friends say?
totony 5y ago
>Oh, and by the way: I have plenty of sympathy towards health care workers. I am dating a nurse. I have doctors, nurses, and paramedics as friends. I have extreme empathy towards them, and full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system. And the rest of our economy while they're at it. Instead of blaming unvaxxed people, you should blame the government for not having more capacity and not planning on how to handle surge in demand for hospitals. We're lucky covid is so tame, this could have been a crazy disaster. This rhetoric where we try to divide the population is insanely toxic when the fault should be placed on the ruling class for mishandling both the planning, the communication and the handling of the pandemic.

dsl 5y ago

I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.

pcmoney 5y ago
So basically harming Billy possibly violating his rights and not respecting Grandpa’s autonomy to make his own decisions regarding risk/return tradeoffs is the solution? Hasn’t worked well to date.
perardi 5y ago
Or…grandpa can get vaccinated. I'd be more than happy to test and vaccinate in schools. In particular vaccinate. But having kids wear masks…which they don't do well, because they're kids…not like adults do it well either…is a fig leaf. It's not going to work. And you can see that from the massive infection rates in schools that have masks.
- dsl 5y ago
  Of course all of our problems go away when you convince the remaining 40% of the population to get vaccinated. I'm actually in favor of doing away with masks and social distancing. Just create a nationwide policy that the unvaccinated will not be admitted or treated for COVID and we can all return to our daily lives.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sleepybrett 5y ago
    Convincing that 40% to get vaccinated while members of our elected government preach to that particular choir about how things that are partially or mostly effective (masking, vaccines, etc) are NOT effective simply because they are not 100% effective is a losing battle. Watch the widely circulated video of the Florida's nomination hearing for their new Surgeon General, where a democrat asks the nominee if he, yes or no, believes the vaccines to be effective. It was asked five times, his answers were nothing but stuttering, rambling, dissembling, meandering madness ('i mean what does effective actually mean' level bullshit). The republicans passed him out of committee once the democrats walked out in frustration. We have a party that is in full denial mode because that's what their anti-vax constituents want to hear. The only upside might be that their vote share goes down because their constituents die in higher numbers.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      The denial is so palpable. I know a couple in their early sixties who refused to get vaccinated because "COVID is way overblown". They were both regular weight and normal health. The wife contracted COVID and died in the hospital. Later, when asked if he was going to get vaccinated, he said no, because "COVID is no worse than a cold." He apparently believes that even though his wife went into the hospital for COVID, she actually died from pneumonia, and not COVID. I guess no doctor explained to him that pneumonia is simply an infection that has spread to the lungs. You can't help people like this.
tqi 5y ago
1. If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem. 2. The idea that anyone who wants in person learning is a "screaming Karen" is fucking stupid. There is lots of evidence that remote learning has all kinds of negative outcomes for kids, and your (frankly sexist) dismissiveness is the reason this conversation never goes anywhere.
- aqme28 5y ago
  > If your Grandpa chose to not get vaccinated and gets COVID, thats his problem. Unfortunately though that's not true. It's putting a huge burden on hospitals that affects us all.
  - tqi 5y ago
    True, but thats a % of a % of a % (ie Masks could prevent some % of COVID transmission at school, of some % of which would have be transmitted to other individuals in the home, of which some % of which would have required hospitalization), which makes it seem likely to be a high cost for not much reward.
    - mlac 5y ago
      Which at scale is still a significant number of hospital beds, and queues grow exponentially when a system reaches capacity.
  - beiller 5y ago
    Isn't the point way up that nurses are quitting. This creates a burden at the hospital. Why are they quitting? Because they are treated like cattle instead of employed human beings. See the court case on the hospital suing the nurses in an at will employment state for quitting and going to another hospital for higher pay. There are even some who are fired for not getting a vaccine regardless of any special circumstance the individual may have.
    - lhorie 5y ago
stvswn 5y ago
You somehow manage to be condescending against all parties here. Calling mothers who want their children to receive an in-person education "screaming Karens" is terribly out of touch. I have young children, and my position is simple: the hospital load, the vaccination status of the elderly, the burn out of the teachers -- it's not my child's burden. It's the adults' burden. You are free to wear a mask for the rest of your life for all I care. I find it pathetic, but I really don't care. But you and people like you do not deserve power over my children, and if you don't see the reckoning coming you are not paying close enough attention.
- katbyte 5y ago
  Maybe take your kids out of public school then? Your kids are not the only ones there and don’t take priority over everyone else’s (and the teaches)
  - JPKab 5y ago
    So he should foot the bill for private school because people like you don't understand basic statistics, or even bother to look at the data? With all due respect, there's a name for fear that is divorced from reality and not in proportion with the actual risk: paranoia. And that's what this is. The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. Virtually zero of those kids that died was healthy before they caught COVID. The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks.... it's almost like maybe, just maybe, you've let your brain get hijacked by a mass panic and are refusing to acknowledge reality now, because that would require you to admit you've completely overreacted, and have done damage to children in the process. I don't blame you for not wanting to admit that to yourself, but at some point this has to stop.
    - kingaillas 5y ago
      Kids aren't the only ones at risk - he also mentioned teachers, some of whom don't want to take the higher risk of in-person teaching or dealing with 100+ kids every day that aren't wearing masks. Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.
pcmoney 5y ago
Why? Masks dont help much. Vaccines dont stop contagion or transmission. They do lower risk of severe covid but kids are very low risk even if unvaccinated.
- AnthonBerg 5y ago
  > Masks don’t help much It depends what kind of mask. Proper respirator masks like N95 and FFP2 work very well. There are now very clear results that show that the main mode of transmission is respiratory aerosol. As an example, this Lancet paper captures it well: ”Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2”, The Lancet, 2021. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00869-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Numerous results have come out since. I can’t find fault with the data or the investigation or the conclusion – I act according to this: We’re dealing with an airborne pathogen. Aerosolized. Closed masks – respirator masks – N95/FFP2. These do work. Almost unreasonably well. “Surgical masks” that gape at the sides do not protect well against aerosolized particles.
  - pcmoney 5y ago
    Masks as used by 90% of the mask wearing population which is only 40%? Of the total population dont work well* If you feel like you should wear an N95 properly to be safe then you should do that. But let’s not pretend we can get everyone to properly wear N95s
    - monksy 5y ago
      Even improper usage of N95s give much more protection than a surgical with a mask brace. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/10/commentary-what-can-masks-do-part-1-science-behind-covid-19-protection https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/10/commenta...
    - AnthonBerg 5y ago
      Whether people currently wear a particular type doesn’t indicate whether they are effective. If people knew that they actually are effective, more would wear them.
brimble 5y ago
> If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning In defense of the Karens (ew, I feel gross even typing that) remote learning absolutely was the disaster they say it was. It was really, really bad. It's hard to exaggerate how bad it was. And I mean specifically for the kids, not for the parents (it also sucked for them/us, obviously). We can probably recover well-enough from a semester or two of it, but without some top-down moonshot level effort to make it better fast, continuing it would have been an actual catastrophe. I doubt anyone else with school-side insight into how it went would claim otherwise. It was bad.
- dsl 5y ago
  No. It wasn't that bad. School still continued. Your children are at most slightly inconvenienced during a global pandemic that has killed MILLIONS of people. All you have to do is keep your kid looking at a screen. They may need to repeat a year of school. At some point in their future your kids boss may say "oh right, you were a pandemic kid, here let me show you." It's like someone in WW2 UK complaining that the Germans dropping bombs on their neighbors houses knocked some of the good dishes off the shelf.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    The people getting hit hardest by remote learning are the poor kids, who have few enough opportunities as it is. (I can tell you from experience, these remote learning systems are horrible on a low-end device, yet almost tolerable on a high-end one. Parents with both the time and knowledge to assist with school-work aren't distributed evenly. etc, etc.) Universal education is supposed to be the great equaliser. I can't imagine the current state of remote learning achieves that, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people who push for schools to re-open in-person. I don't think it's worth people dying over, though, especially given that the qualifications are more important than the stuff you learn in school.
  - metadat 5y ago
    Actually, it didn’t go well. Nowadays we’ve got a bunch of 6th graders still at a 4th grade education level. Remote learning for children is substantially less effective for many of them. Think about it, what are the reasons making close supervision of school-aged children desirable? Their brains are still growing and developing! They often aren’t mature enough to be academically successful when they’re physically isolated and stuck on a shitty google hangout.
eddieplan9 5y ago
At what cost? If there were crazy people jaywalking onto the freeway, do you want to reduce speed limit nationally to accommodate that, or would you rather let it play out and people can realize certain things are just fatally stupid?
hcurtiss 5y ago
Yeah, but masks aren't doing much to prevent that. My kids go to an Oregon elementary school that requires full time masking and I can't think of a single kid who hasn't had it. COVID has run rampant through Oregon schools. I don't care what the lab studies show. Masks don't do shit in schools. The elderly and vulnerable need to get vaccinated, or be handled in a tent in the hospital parking lot. Stop punishing kids. This coming from a very large, male, angry "Karen."
- JPKab 5y ago
  Indeed. My twin brother lives just outside of PDX, and the schools were closed for a full year, then hybrid classes. His son was in kindergarten when it hit, just like my daughter. His son is severely delayed now. On top of all of that, they finally open the schools back up and shove the kids into useless masks. His son (Jack) needs speech therapy. When he goes, the instructor is wearing a mask. He can't see what her lips are doing. It's an absurd horror show. I live outside of Boulder, and thank God, our schools weren't closed nearly as long, thanks to the culture here being a lot more common sense than the hysterical, politically radical group-think out there. I visited there in the summer of 2020 (drove), and they had the fucking beaches closed to 4x4s. Because God forbid you drive your truck on an empty beach and catch COVID from..... who??? It was a really tense vibe everywhere we went, and when I went to Oceanside and rented a house, everyone was masking outside like idiots. I've never seen such a nutty, poorly governed state in my life, and that foolish governor did everything she could to maximize the fear, when she should have been trying to calm everyone down.
  - hcurtiss 5y ago
    The strange part to me is that usually on policy issues there’s this band of reasonable behavior and people disagree on which end of that band we should fall, but if you’re honest you can understand the other side’s perspective. On COVID in Oregon, it’s the first time in my life I’ve felt like I’m looking at a completely different world than others. I’m just flabbergasted by the policy calls driven by COVID hysteria. I’m not some rabid right winger. (My wife and I are both triple vaccinated, AND we still recently got it!) I just feel totally, totally confused. We vacationed in Idaho over Christmas and it was like reorienting myself to reality. I have no idea what’s going on in Oregon, but I am confident that we have revealed a fundamental split in human psyches that some bad actor will exploit to terrible ends.
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closeparen 5y ago
Until when? What’s the endpoint? Children are little bundles of disease; it has always been and will always be strictly better for public health to prevent children from interacting with each other. But what kind of world is that?

WillPostForFood 5y ago

The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated. Are you sure this is true? The data you linked to shows that hospitalization rate for 65+ unvaccinated is 7x 65+ vaccinated. But WA has a great vaccination rate, over 99% for 65+ with one or more shot. So even with 7x the rate, unvaccinated elderly probably aren't massively dominating hospitalizations because it is such a small pool of ppl. vax rate: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/washington https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

ianferrel 5y ago
The data that is showing 99+% with one or more shots is bad. Lots of second and third doses could not be linked to the original dose and got counted as "first" doses, then the percentage of people with first doses got capped at 99.9% (or something very high) because it would be obviously absurd if 115% of people had one or more doses. Vaccination rates in liberal states for the elderly are pretty good. But not 99%.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  I dug out a more accurate number, 93.6%, from the Washington dashboard. Even at 93.6%, the remaining 6.4% unvaccinated can't overwhelmingly account for hospitalizations even if they are being hospitalized at 7x the rate. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard edit: According to the dashboard, 59.5% of people in the hospital with covid like illness are 60+. That's vaccinated and and unvaccinated combined. We can definitively say that the hospital case load is not overwhelmingly dominated by the elderly unvaccinated.
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alsetmusic 5y ago

There’s a simple solution, but good luck getting everyone on board with it: stop treating the willingly unvaxxed in hospitals. Only vaxxed patients and medically-ineligible unvaxxed patients get treatment. If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
Firstly, there no way to check someone’s vaccination status. There are fake cards, there are people who got vaccinated before government databases, there are people who got vaccinated without documentation, there are people who got documentation from medical people who didn’t actually perform the vaccination. Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. Medicine knows where that goes and is strongly incentivized to never go there again.
- lovich 5y ago
  > Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage
  - adamcstephens 5y ago
    Sure, the electorate has thus far been unwilling to increase the capacity. At the same time the private medical facilities have been underpaying, overworking, and under-resourcing our hospitals. They close rural hospitals because they're not profitable /enough/. We could have more beds, and happier staff, but then the profits would be lower.
    - lovich 5y ago
      I agree that the hospitals as private businesses have not handled the situation well because they are seeking profit, but the electorate has no punished them for it. There are no single issue voters for increasing the medical systems capacity. There are multiple political groups who care about the medical system but none who are willing to sacrifice every other possible gain if they get an improved medical system. That is what I mean about the electorate signaling that they do not care

groby_b 5y ago

You're aware that you're arguing about the health impact on children using a doc that ignores anybody <12 years of age, right? Anything that follows from that will be a flawed argument.

JadeNB 5y ago

> So why make the kids put on hair shirts I mean masks? Because wearing masks is a good thing. A large part of the resistance to mask wearing in the US stems from seeing it as an abnormal thing and an oppression, but, in fact, wearing a mask when you're sick—even if it's just a minor sickness, not in the context of a global pandemic—is a good and respectful thing to do, practiced as a matter of course in many countries. Kids who grow up wearing masks will not have the horror of them that their vaccine-avoiding forebears did, and hopefully will be better equipped to meet the next pandemic sanely.

tragictrash 5y ago

Stop spouting disinfo. Your actions have real repercussions.

tpoacher 5y ago

When you started with "yes, and", for a second I thought you were about to do improv! > I have full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system What do your medic friends say?

totony 5y ago

>Oh, and by the way: I have plenty of sympathy towards health care workers. I am dating a nurse. I have doctors, nurses, and paramedics as friends. I have extreme empathy towards them, and full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system. And the rest of our economy while they're at it. Instead of blaming unvaxxed people, you should blame the government for not having more capacity and not planning on how to handle surge in demand for hospitals. We're lucky covid is so tame, this could have been a crazy disaster. This rhetoric where we try to divide the population is insanely toxic when the fault should be placed on the ruling class for mishandling both the planning, the communication and the handling of the pandemic.