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

and then you can dispense with the fiction that NPI achieves anything in schools which is questionable at best imo

Questionable that it’s fiction?

questionable that they achieve anything in schools

the power of kids to ignore rules and be disgusting is a force far more powerful than paper masks and guidelines about 'bubbling'

I mean, anecdotal evidence for sure but my son is the same age as my nephew. My son's school has done, to my eyes, an admirable job trying to get 10 year olds to stay masked and relatively distant. Even with two kids in the class testing positive earlier this year, there was no transmission in the class and only the 3 other kids in their "pods" needed to quarantine. My nephew's class, in a much more conservative leaning district and much to my sister's chagrin, has done a terrible job of enforcing much of anything and his class has just been sent remote for three weeks for the THIRD time since August due to what is being categorized as an "outbreak" by the county's health department.

yeah, masks totally reduce transmission and anyone who doesn't think so is fooling themselves

esp if they're KN95s or N95s, but surgical also have benefits, just not as good

Someone in my department died of Covid two days ago. She was 39 & had two kids. I guess we didn't work together a whole lot but we still talked every week or so (back when we were in the office) so it's all kind of surreal. A buddy of mine was in a group chat with her and apparently she stopped responding about 3 weeks ago. I have never heard her say anything political but her husband always struck me as a major chud. I looked her up on Twitter and one of the first people she's following is Marjorie Taylor Green. Its just all so senseless.

here's my anxiety post - Eric Topol is right about many things, wrong about more than I like, but man was he correct about boosters. the debate remained philosophical even after data emerged showing their benefits, and even as we knew curbing the spread of COVID was just as important as preventing severe disease. but a lot of his own peers shot him down and unfortunately a lot of people (me included) listened to him. and a lot of people are probably going to be hesistant to get them now. and....they're not even available for young folk now. so we're going to be behind on getting the youth boosted (though I know they're still doing experiments to see whether they need it as much as adults).

early data showing boosters most def needed for Omicron, even if you didn't think so before for Delta.

Vaccine equity IS important, but I don't think we should let people in the US just spread the disease at will, either (which we've basically been doing since May 2020). it's a hard problem to solve, esp considering how badly the COVAX problem has failed in bringing vaccine equity to the globe.

xpost it always amazes me how people ekep saying "I don't need a vaccine, I got an immune system" while simultaneously seeing stories like these of young people dying from the disease :(

oh and well this just happened

https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/09/fda-expands-authorization-for-pfizers-covid-19-booster-to-cover-16-and-17-year-olds/

thats terrible frogbs.

the health dept in my county has been trying & failing to get the bigger school districts to stop doing "five minute mask breaks" every hour for students during the school day. the schools' main argument is that it improves student morale. weirdly, the schools seem to be having constant major outbreaks.

this is possibly based on the old (outdated and very incorrect) guidance that "close contact" with someone requires 15 minutes of exposure. and should be eliminated.

xpost it always amazes me how people ekep saying "I don't need a vaccine, I got an immune system" while simultaneously seeing stories like these of young people dying from the disease :(

― hopefully this review helped someone (Neanderthal), Thursday, December 9, 2021 11:03 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I mean I get saying dumb shit like that in the early days but we're at nearly 800,000 dead now in the US. everyone knows someone who either died from this or got horribly ill and have not recovered. even "mild" cases may be no walk in the park. what kind of mindset is leading all these people to think it won't happen to them? is this just the natural outgrowth of conservative programming convincing people that nothing bad actually happens outside of whatever's pushed by "the liberal agenda"? like even when Omicron was discovered I noticed a lot of people treating it not like a variant of the disease but rather something the media just made up because they're trying to distract you from whatever. it's so fucking dumb. sorry I know this is the non-political thread but how do you divorce the two?

I feel so bad for the kids. I met them several times at various company events. I think they are 9 and 7 now. I can't stop thinking about my own kids and how devastated they'd be if something happened to one of us. and it was all preventable!! fuck!!

Sorry about your coworker 🙁

masks totally reduce transmission and anyone who doesn't think so is fooling themselves

no argument from me. but the foolers of selves category imo includes anyone who thinks kids mask or social distance properly. there is a vaccine. make them take it if they want in-person teaching.

I mean some kids do mask and social distance properly! Kind of like adults, some are really diligent and good about it and others not so much.

also wanna mention there's something very surreal about people you know just suddenly dying without warning. and their last social media post will be something like "hey can anyone identify this bird". like even at work, we've got Teams meetings she was supposed to be in this week, what do you do? do you just like acknowledge it and move on?

make them take it if they want in-person teaching.

considering the vaccine mandate is stuck in the courts in the US. . .this ain't happening any time soon, we can't even ban non vaxxers from airplanes. . . and *plenty* of kids mask properly & social distance

plus even if we did mandate it there would be so many parents who wouldn't let their kids get it even if the kids wanted to get it

suppose a well fitted mask reduces the likelihood of catching covid during a given 15 minute indoor interaction a covid+ person from 10% to 1%. i think those numbers are in the ball park. masks massively reduce transmission for a given single interaction. but it doesn't follow that they're reducing transmission by that much in a situation like schools.

kids in schools are 1) not wearing well fitted masks 2) having lots of these interactions every week in places like the UK where the case rate is ~50 per 100,000 and has been for nearly 6 months. in those circumstances, it approaches a certainty that they're going to get it eventually, even though masks reduce transmission!

same goes for anyone working indoors with literally hundreds of people for months on end, even if you wear a n95 mask.

make them take it if they want in-person teaching.

considering the vaccine mandate is stuck in the courts in the US. . .this ain't happening any time soon

fwiw it's happening in most of california for 12+ starting in january, and for all 5+ starting in september.

it's like: if you're going to park on the hard shoulder at night then yes you should put on your hazard lights (wear a mask). if you do that, you are much safer. but if you're going to park there for hours (go to school with a mostly unvaccinated population for months) eventually a truck is going to hit you. it would be better not to park on the hard shoulder (vaccinate everyone!)

cool. . . it's not going to happen everywhere though, which sucks. covid has really brought out the glaring problems with the US and one of them is allowing states to be little labs of democracy

i mean i'd love a national mandate for vaccines for everyone but i don't think it's possible.

mandates are incredibly popular with an overwhelming but largely silent numerical majority. this is a vote winner all over the world.

a political focus on masks is a distraction that allows timid e.g. US democrats to avoid doing incredibly popular things because they don't want the ball.

mandate vaccinations! take it to the supreme court if necessary! lose if necessary!

i admire your enthusiasm--and you're totally right! supreme court. lose if necessary. thanks for your optimism

this is praxis https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/world/europe/austria-covid-vaccine-mandate-lockdown.html

at a certain point you have to decide if you want to go round and round with closures and quarantines forever or just require vaccination for in-person imo

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, December 9, 2021 11:21 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

and then you can dispense with the fiction that NPI achieves anything in schools which is questionable at best imo

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, December 9, 2021 11:21 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The thing is I mostly agree with you here, and I ultimately am ok with schools mandating vaccines, just like they do with other vaccines. But I still wonder why universal vaccination has to be the hurdle. Kids are already low risk, and parents can get both themselves and their kids vaccinated if they want. At some point I feel like if some parent doesn't want to get it for themselves, that's their risk to take, and if they don't want to get it for their kids, it's probably not that big a deal, because it's unlikely the kid has much risk, and because it's not putting my vaccinated kids or my boosted self and boosted wife and extended family at risk. So why even wait til all the kids get the vaccine?

ps officially more than 24 hours out from pfizer #3. So far ok. A little tired, but that might just be from getting five hours of sleep and then juggling remote school and work alone.

man alive you keep seeing this through the lens of individual risk. but the risks aren’t just to parents or kids who have decided not to vaccinate. the risks are also to those whom those infectious/unvaccinated can infect! kids can transmit the virus to people who are higher risk, i.e. grandparents on chemo. this is literally a situation i am facing right now. where i live 10 y os cannot get vaccinated. he’s the chink in the armor when i go home for christmas. my mother is boosted - great. (luckily - if she’d waited till she was on chemo she would not have been able to.) but a breakthrough infection for her would be quite serious. this same logic applies to your part of the world except you are in the enviable position of kids being allowed to have vaccinations. but of course not all of them are. so around and around you go. you really want to remove ALL mitigation from school settings, when many kids (and some staff) aren’t vaccinated? remember, it’s not just those kids and their parents at risk! it’s the people they can infect!

“he’s the chink in the armor” = my 10yo, currently swimming in coronavirus and boarding a plane with me soon, passing through multiple airports on the way to see my mom.

i know this thread isn’t supposed to be political, but the “individual risk lens” is the problem with antivaxers - they see their decision as purely impacting themselves, maybe their immediate family at a stretch. but every person who decides they won’t mitigate spread is raising the risk for everyone.

I don't see it solely as individual risk, I see it as a matter of how much burden we can place on young kids to mitigate the risk of the elderly and immunocompromised who were already especially vulnerable to flu and other viruses before this ever happened. My kids have a grandparent with cancer too, fwiw, and we always base things on what the grandparent is comfortable with. Like you're saying all kids should have their lives negatively impacted by the fact that some people in the world have cancer, and I just fundamentally don't agree with that. In fact, I suspect the only reason we put that burden on kids is because we have greater power to tell them what to do. Why not shut down parties, clubs and restaurants? Those things are much worse for spread than school.

schools aren't shut down

what sepcifically are you advocating for schools here? no mask mandate? no vaccine mandate? both? one but not the other? does what you're advocating for change based on local case rate?

man alive kids should be vaccinated in school is what i’m saying

imo most NPIs don’t work in schools so i don’t really give a shit about that

but school concerts with a packed auditorium? school dances? in many school districts i would say absolutely not - particularly not right before christmas when people are going home to visit elderly relatives. you know what would really have a negative impact on a kid is knowing they gave their grandma coronavirus. whoops! hope that production of moana was worth it

man alive, every other week you post a uh variant on the argument but ai have no idea what you're suggesting if you're begging for sympathy, no offense

Tracer do you get told when kids in your son's class/year have tested positive?
Where I am it's all word of mouth. I'm trying to weigh up risks of meeting grandparents etc and could be completely oblivious to the fact that four kids my kid sits next to for hours a day have all tested positive.

Here is what I am saying: It is not the responsibility of other people's kids to curtail their lives for multiple years to protect someone else's grandparents, especially now that those grandparents can be vaccinated and boostered if they so choose. And it's time to end arbitrary and ridiculous NPIs in school -- eating snack on a blacktop six feet apart, wearing masks, curtailing activities, not allowing (even vaccinated) parents to set foot in schools. This stuff is completely arbitrary. Tracer and I are in agreement that it doesn't do jack shit, or at least it does very little, and even if it had some collective benefit I'm not sure it's justified. We could do the same with any virus. It's not my kids' job to reduce the risk for an adult who refuses to get vaccinated.

If people are concerned that their own kids might transmit to their own parents, they can vaccinate their own kids. If both your kids and your parents are vaccinated, the risk is extremely low. What is the basis of then also restricting what other people's kids can do at school?

That’s some selfish ass bullshit right there, particularly that part about mask wearing being “arbitrary and ridiculous”. Perfect? No. But it does help more than not wearing them at all.

But you clearly are just fishing for more people to agree with you, so all I can say is you aren’t going to get that from me.

I agree with man alive that the line is being drawn in the wrong place, or rather a large number of very disruptive and ineffective NPIs have persisted for too long out of basically folk wisdom. E.g.

Earlier I deleted a tweet about my kid's school because I felt like I hadn't done enough to confirm what my daughter was telling me, but now I have. At least one NYC public school is indeed making kids sit on the floor to eat lunch inside, for covid reasons.

— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) December 8, 2021

I mean we're only a few months removed from hospitalization numbers that were scary af that we previously thought weren't possible in a population with 50%+ full vaccination and prior infection.

and numbers are headed back up now that the mid-west, west, and north are getting hit.

and that's Delta, not Omicron.

I don’t disagree that there are some absolutely ridiculous things being pushed like making kids face the same direction at lunch, sit on the floor, etc. There are definitely some ineffective and stupid NPIs out there that don’t do a damn thing to curb transmission and make school more stressful and harder for kids, but I think it’s incredibly disingenuous to just toss “mask wearing” in that category.

an encouraging sign (that's more posts in the thread but....read em on yr own)

9. An important caveat is that we do not know what level of conservation is likely to preserve functional T cell responses, but from the data available it seems likely that T cell activity will be far less impacted that neutralizing antibody responses.

— Alessandro Sette (@SetteLab) December 9, 2021

But surely you can see the wider community has a stake in the extent to which schools are breeding grounds for covid? It’s a public health issue in the most literal sense of the word. When lots of people get covid and stress a healthcare system to the point where preventative and elective treatment is delayed, medical staff quit, and in the extreme when emergency care is unavailable, that affects everyone, even individuals.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, December 9, 2021 10:19 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Except there just isn't that much evidence that schools are "breeding grounds for COVID"?

And also, I've seen how elementary school kids wear masks, and there is no way it makes a significant difference.

man alive - I cannot vaccinate my kids. it's not possible where I am. I'm not asking people to curtail things. I'm asking that information is shared in a timely manner about when there have been cases that are very likely to transmit to my child so I can assess my own risk.