Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

Or we could just accept a new normal where we're most likely going to get COVID, and if we are vaccinated we will probably be ok. Because that's the most likely scenario. That's already the scenario for a lot of people who can't work from home - they either get it (or have gotten it) vaccinated and wind up ok or get it unvaccinated and have an elevated risk of not winding up ok. If anything, I think it's a fantasy that things aren't already going back to that kind of normal - most people are not in WFH jobs and are not avoiding crowded indoor places indefinitely.

This just strikes me as someone who has been completely unaffected by this entire pandemic.

The belief that the delta surge means almost everyone will end up getting infected with covid is just man alive's latest fixation. It could be true. It could be wrong. But it's pure prognostication, based half on extrapolation from the skimpy but frightening fact that we have to work with atm and half based on the emotional 'truth' those facts have engendered. iow, man alive is guessing a future that sounds personally convincing, like all the rest of us.

xp I am sorry, I don't know that. But your comments are infuriating to me.

man alive switched from "opening the economy is incautious" to "fuck it, open all the schools and stop crying, fewer kids than adults die and it will be summer sometime this year iirc" to "I'm vaxxed and I assume my kids have caught it, stfu and catch it you bussies" earlier this year

anyway further to Lily, in Seattle all city employees have to be vaxxed (cop union is fighting it, but a few of the many local cops who took part in the Jan 6 insurrection have been retired, so... yay?), and as of today anyone who works at a school in WA - teacher, bus driver, janitor, flower-arranging volunteer - has to get vaxxed, and there is a state-wide mask mandate for all non-private situations.

Pretty sure none of those are actual quotes

xp Both my kids had COVID (not "assumed," one tested positive and the other had the same symptoms) and my wife teaches in person. Also, not that it's remotely equivalent to loss of a loved one, but I haven't seen my brother or my niece (who I've only met three times) in two years, I've barely seen my elderly parents, I have another niece I've never even met, my wife can't visit her sick grandfather, when school was remote I had a child having regular emotional outbursts and saying she wished she was dead, etc. Yes, by comparison to many I have come out unscathed, but how exactly would a person be "unaffected" by this pandemic?

I 100% stand by opening the schools fwiw, it was the right move when they finally did it here, and there was no spread in the schools.

Ironically I think now we face a tougher situation where there actually will probably be spread in the schools, and I'm still sending my kids. Mandate that teachers get vaccinated imo.

But...there already has been spread in the schools. Lots of it.

Any limited spread we had in our school last year was traced to outside the school. We'll see how things shake out this year. As I understand it the biggest challenge so far has been lunch, largely because the school is in the midst of a large construction project and kids are jammed tighter than usual. I guess they're testing everyone once a week, so if Covid rears its head we'll know pretty soon.

how about other schools in other places on the planet

not "assumed,"

oh my mistake, I guess I misrecalled this

my kids have had it (one officially, the other tested negative but had the same mild symptoms at the same time)

how about other schools in other places on the planet

What is OK to open and when and where and to what extent? Should anything be open right now?

There have been outbreaks at schools that opened early in the US recently, that's correct. Much bigger outbreaks than anything we previously saw. Delta is very contagious.

For example:
https://www.wfae.org/education/2021-08-19/union-academys-covid-19-cluster-offers-cautions-as-students-return-across-nc?fbclid=IwAR07GOAT5tJHwNlmKjnIIZvCWMvT7al_dUGkB01y88OABdgVddipcNK9DDU

Dozens of kids and teachers at a K-12 charter tested positive -- they had a mask mandate but widespread "exemptions." However even after they returned to a full mandate, it looks like the virus continued to spread. Four of the vaccinated teachers got very sick but were not hospitalized, children all had mild symptoms.

I'm all for mandating vaccines for staff and students who are currently eligible.

I don't think it's an easy answer, but if you don't think schools should be open, then close them until what? All kids are vaccinated? Any estimates on how long that would likely take? Right now Pfizer may be available by October, Moderna is expected to take longer. I would assume that, if you closed schools until all kids were vaccinated that would mean another lost schoolyear.

I'm at the point where...well, I tamped down a rage-out yesterday when I saw one of the known handful of antivaxxers in our building once again strolling through a common area maskless. So just physically hold these adult babies down and jam a fuckin needle in their stupid arms, is where I'm at now. Or lock them all inside a big auditorium and hose them down with the 'VID and let god sort 'em out.

So yes. Everyone who can be vaccinated should be vaccinated like yesterday and push any grousers into the goddamn ocean.

^^^^^

It's always going to be a mix of reasons and rationales, and not everyone's out to actively piss in the pool. It's frustrating absolutely, but still. Thought this was a good piece:

http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/081821_tucson_vax_voices/voices-from-tucsons-newly-vaccinated-why-theyre-getting-their-covid-shots-now/

Or we could just accept a new normal where we're most likely going to get COVID, and if we are vaccinated we will probably be ok. Because that's the most likely scenario.

In the UK I think this is definitely the case. I spent almost 18 months being hyper cautious and then all restrictions (except for use of masks in Scotland) ended. It then came down to making peronal choices / risk assessment. I chose to participate in some crowded events (it is my job) fully aware I was putting myself at risk.

I caught Covid over the weekend. I am fully vaccinated but it broke through. It is very unpleasant but so far not as bad as I had feared and I have definitely had things that were a lot worse. Of course it may yet get worse but I am hoping I am on the mend now.

If it wasn't what I did for a living I probably would not have ventured out yet but it I know it would only have been a matter of time before i felt i had to trade the level of risk with the desire to share the experience of music in a room with other people. I do think everyone who goes out is probably going to get it eventually here.

Cant believe we havent yet gotten this sorted

xp best wishes tho

culver city (a small relatively white, relatively techie enclave of los angeles county) is mandating vaccines in schools for all kids over 12.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-18/culver-city-unified-requires-covid-19-vaccine-for-students

I don't think it's an easy answer, but if you don't think schools should be open, then close them until what? All kids are vaccinated? Any estimates on how long that would likely take? Right now Pfizer may be available by October, Moderna is expected to take longer. I would assume that, if you closed schools until all kids were vaccinated that would mean another lost schoolyear.

i get that there's a trade-off, and i don't think waiting for all kids to be vaccinated is tenable, but a significant fraction of the population of the US lives somewhere schools should not be open right now.

this is because they live somewhere cases are as high or higher than they've ever been, cases are still rising very rapidly, and hospitals are literally full so care/prognosis for serious cases is poor. open schools will make all these problems worse at the community level.

i mean if you want an "close until what", a bunch of states established very reasonable quantitative thresholds for school reopening (e.g. under 10 cases per 100k/day for a week, whatever) they applied sensibly back in the spring to the decision to reopen. they were good criteria. we could use those again, rather than ignoring them because we don't like the answer now they say close.

Cant believe we havent yet gotten this sorted

not sure what this means.

this is because they live somewhere cases are as high or higher than they've ever been, cases are still rising very rapidly, and hospitals are literally full so care/prognosis for serious cases is poor. open schools will make all these problems worse at the community level.

these aren't particularly unusual places btw. florida's vaccination rate is exactly the national average and this is what's happening https://covidactnow.org/us/florida-fl/. there's no reason to think the same thing won't happen where you live if your state eliminates all NPIs like they've done in florida (unless you're in vermont or somewhere else with a vaccination rate 15% above the national average).

i mean if you want an "close until what", a bunch of states established very reasonable quantitative thresholds for school reopening (e.g. under 10 cases per 100k/day for a week, whatever) they applied sensibly back in the spring to the decision to reopen. they were good criteria. we could use those again, rather than ignoring them because we don't like the answer now they say close.

sounds a lot like "Data not Dates"...

(^ uk catchphrase that lasted until boris' dad wanted to go on holiday again)

the idea to open schools wasn't bad, but the moment governors started banning mask mandates, telling parents they didn't have to quarantine their exposed kid, and people at school board meetings began threatening public officials, and outbreaks hit the heights that Florida and Texas had - it changed the game a bit.

transmission in school seems to be higher than it was last year because we were only dealing with the ancestral strain.

I don't want to speak for teachers or parents, and I understand closing schools would lead to a lot of working parents who are no longer wfh having to find emergency arrangements, which I know is something we can't neglect. but I'd feel a fuck-ton of a lot better if FL schools weren't open right now.

The belief that the delta surge means almost everyone will end up getting infected with covid is just man alive's latest fixation. It could be true. It could be wrong. But it's pure prognostication, based half on extrapolation from the skimpy but frightening fact that we have to work with atm and half based on the emotional 'truth' those facts have engendered. iow, man alive is guessing a future that sounds personally convincing, like all the rest of us.

― it is to laugh, like so, ha! (Aimless), Wednesday, August 18, 2021 11:02 PM bookmarkflaglink

the problem isn't so much the statement "everybody is going to get COVID" (caek said something similar upthread, more that he figured he'd get it eventually), it's what it is used to then justify.

if you say "everybody is going to get COVID, so let's just remove the restrictions, stop vaxxing, roam around mask free and just go about our lives like it's 2019", fuck right off. the healthcare industry is in crisis with how fast hospitals are filling up. this sounds like a strawman but I literally hear a variant of this every day.

if you say "everybody is going to get COVID, and the outcome we are trying to prevent is serious disease or death (and possibly long COVID), we should change our strategy to be more of harm prevention rather than zero COVID", well...actually experts believe that, so, that's not a disagreeable position. Because it still involves things like mask mandates, capacity limits, vaccine mandates, fixing filtration in public places, etc.

we will get to a point where COVID just hangs around with us like more of an annoying cold than an actual deadly virus, but we're nowhere near that right now.

I'm torn. We return to all-hands-on-deck full-time face-to-face teaching at my university in DeSantisland, and, jitters notwithstanding, I'm looking forward to it despite my not knowing who's jabbed and who will choose to wear a mask despite our coaxing. It would fucking suck for my mental health if I had to go remote again.

now to my other pet peeve - right now, very prominent experts are on opposing sides of the booster debate, and are both very loud and confident about it.

on the pro-booster side appear to be doctors like Bob Wachter, Eric Topol, and Peter Hotez. I wouldn't call their support necessarily "aggressive booster support", but all have acknowledged that data supports immunity waning after 6 months (or sooner), and that boosters are something they support.

But there is a loud faction on the other side that says this is premature and that the data doesn't support it. People like Dr Angela Rasmussen, Dr Monica Gandhi, Dr Gavin Yamey, Natalie Dean (epidemiologist/stats modeler) - who believe the current data is insufficient to suggest there'd be a benefit, and that it's irresponsible to do it rather than either getting more first shots in arms here stateside, or globally.

I've been sympathetic to the second side so far, but it does really obfuscate things for us laypeople. Scientists, doctors et al aren't a monolith, no, and this is a novel virus that we still don't know a lot about, so I don't expect every professional to have a unified front, but....it would be nice if there could be some kind of national or even global consortium that actually could meet behind closed doors and try to calibrate on some kind of loose 'consensus' or at least disagree in a way that seemed less like them painting you as an immoral vaccine grubber if you get a booster. I'm sure decision-making like that doesn't make some people anxious, but there are people who will actually stress over doing the right thing and be afraid to commit to a decision that harms somebody. I'm one of those people, though fortunately for me, it's irrelevant for *me* here.

course I brought this concern up to a rando Dr on twitter yesterday who was anti-booster and they seemed insulted that I didn't just gravitate towards their opinion and eschew the other side.

xpost oh I don't blame you. remote learning fucking blows.

caek, any thoughts on whether some of the heavily hit southern states are truly plateauing/flattening now, especially Florida? FL seemed to be doing so with cases and hospitalizations, though I know cases will decline long before hospitalizations do, and we still continue to set daily records for # of people hospitalized.

side note, I have taken a BinaxNOW test 5 times in the past two weeks. all negs.

remote learning fucking blows

maybe now, after the firsthand experience of the past 18 months, we'll stop hearing claims that remote learning is the future of education. tbf, these claims were mostly made by 'experts' hired by companies that facilitate remote learning and by people who don't like paying taxes to fund public education.

i'm not familiar enough with the weirdness in florida's reporting to say if there's a plateau, but https://covidactnow.org/share/44602/?redirectTo=%2Fus%2Fflorida-fl%2Fexplore%2F44602 doesn't look like one to me.

xp, you'd think so, but the guy who won the mayoral election in NYC said this during the campaign https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/eric-adams-criticized-for-suggesting-one-nyc-teacher-can-teach-300-to-400-students-with-remote-learning/ar-AAKYNyc

the problem isn't so much the statement "everybody is going to get COVID" (caek said something similar upthread, more that he figured he'd get it eventually), it's what it is used to then justify.

if you say "everybody is going to get COVID, so let's just remove the restrictions, stop vaxxing, roam around mask free and just go about our lives like it's 2019", fuck right off. the healthcare industry is in crisis with how fast hospitals are filling up. this sounds like a strawman but I literally hear a variant of this every day.

if you say "everybody is going to get COVID, and the outcome we are trying to prevent is serious disease or death (and possibly long COVID), we should change our strategy to be more of harm prevention rather than zero COVID", well...actually experts believe that, so, that's not a disagreeable position. Because it still involves things like mask mandates, capacity limits, vaccine mandates, fixing filtration in public places, etc.

we will get to a point where COVID just hangs around with us like more of an annoying cold than an actual deadly virus, but we're nowhere near that right now.

― there's too much fucking shit on me (Neanderthal), Thursday, 19 August 2021 18:01 (fifty-four minutes ago) link

I agree with this though, at least in large part. I certainly don't think we should "stop vaxxing" (!), or go 100% back to 2019, and I'm not against masks at this point (although I don't think we should be under illusions about how much they will prevent spread, especially among kids who are unlikely to be wearing a well-fitting KN95 or better all day). It's more that I think there is going to have to be an endpoint where we accept the grim truth that we aren't getting to 90% vaccination ever, or at least for a very long time, and therefore we aren't going to reach herd immunity except by a lot more people getting the virus. I guess I don't know exactly what that means in reality, but I feel like we are in a holding pattern where we are still assuming we are just going to reach a point soon where spread is and stays low, and I increasingly don't think that is going to happen.

I mean, fixing ventilation is a good idea everywhere regardless (although not without costs, including environmental costs, because increasing air filtration past a certain point restricts airflow and thus requires more powerful HVAC units)> Mask mandates -- ok, but are we grappling with the fact that maybe we just continue to wear masks indoors everywhere for the next year? Two years? Longer? Same with capacity limits - are we just going to, e.g., put large weddings, concerts, conventions, large indoor family events, etc. on hold for the foreseeable future? Are we going to make in person school impossible in some urban areas for another year or even longer? I'm all for vaccine mandates fwiw.

I guess what I'm saying (maybe?) is that, if we are implementing an NPI, and it's not just a temporary "surge" type NPI (e.g. hospitals are over capacity and we just have to get them back down to normal), then we should really be weighing the possibility that it would remain in place for the very long term and whether the costs are worth whatever short-term reduction in spread we get.

well
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/well/live/covid-plastic-barriers.html

I never honestly had any belief that those were anything but props for COVID theater.

I think these plexiglass barriers were a good idea last year when we thought expelled particles were a major factor, honestly haven't really seen them in a long time and didn't know they were still a thing

They're everywhere and people who I would definitely expect to know better still seem to value them. See also those fucking plastic face shields that don't do anything to filter the air you're breathing.

Like, "Clear barriers have sprung up at restaurants, nail salons and school classrooms" is a weird subhed for an August 2021 article about a practice that was more widespread a year ago than now -- why not "Clear barriers still remain at many restaurants, nail salons and school classrooms"

It has definitely been at least a year since I saw anyone wearing a plastic face shield -- masks, on the other hand, both blue paper + KN95-style, remain common

See also the plastic chin mask/shields that are very popular on Japanese TV

there is going to have to be an endpoint where we accept the grim truth that we aren't getting to 90% vaccination ever

In the USA there are plenty of points of leverage to require people to get vaccinated that have not yet been fully exploited. And the strategies I'm thinking of fall short of using the full power of the government to compel compliance, a power has been tested in the courts and is undeniably within its legal remit, if the government chose to do so.

It has definitely been at least a year since I saw anyone wearing a plastic face shield -- masks, on the other hand, both blue paper + KN95-style, remain common

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

lol my dentist wears them and a surgical mask but he did pre-COVID.

tell it to me straight, once you do get vaccinated how much worse is this than the seasonal flu?