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

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.

Boosters now available for 16+.

so i guess this was omicron weekend in nyc. i was traveling this weekend, but in the meantime, my wife caught covid (she's doing fine and i'm negative for now), as did a friend of ours she was at dinner with on friday night). my parents went to a wedding on saturday night in manhattan in which the bride, the bride's mother, plus an uncle and cousin tested positive. a close personal friend of my parents' also tested positive (her husband is negative so far), and both my wife, my parents, and my 86-year-old grandmother were together on sunday night. my parents and grandma are negative for now.

not to mention, i've heard at least 6 different anecdotes of people either getting it or being exposed to someone who now has it over the weekend. and the city md testing line is two blocks long.

getting some march 2020 vibes right now, not gonna lie.

Oh man, I'm sorry to hear that voodoo. Hope everyone in your orbit has mild cases.

Things are not looking good, I'm with you on those March 2020 vibes.

sorry to hear vc. i hope it stays mild for her.

thanks, guys. so far everyone is mild.

My wife went to a work lunch on Friday and was informed that one of the attendees had tested positive. So she got tested this morning. Results forthcoming within 40 hours.

We were being cautious but not panicking, then my son's school called to say that one of the teaching assistants has a positive test, and he was determined to be a close contact. So he's been sent home until January at least.

All caution is warranted, of course.

But. My son (as attentive readers may recall) is pretty seriously disabled and requires near-constant supervision, if not quite constant care.

If you are not a working parent, or if you are a parent of a reasonably independent older child, or if you just somehow lack the capacity for empathy, please feel free to just scroll past the next paragraph, which contains venting. Thank you.

GAAAAAH. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. My wife and I already have full-time jobs and moderately busy lives, plus the sometimes-challenging requirements of managing two school-aged children (which even in the best of times can be a frazzlement) plus our own mental health and self-care needs, plus family obligations. Add to that my son's decidedly special needs - and the absolute impossibility of having professional help to balance the load - gah.

There. Now that's over.

Carry on.

We have tests and boosters scheduled and we will do our best to weather this, and of course it could be way worse - e.g., we already had winter break coming up, so there would not have been

...school in any case. But we often use babysitting and respite care to manage breaks from school. Now obviously we can't, if there's a reasonable suspicion of transmission risk

hope everyone gets out of this with nothing but a particularly bad cold

a few cancelled meetups with friends who are suddenly under the weather. my gal and i both pushed our vaccine to when we could make it work and are getting nervous. both tested negative yesterday though. just need another week to get less freaked out. \

A couple of weeks ago (pre-omicron) my wife and I (fully boosted) scheduled our first night out in NYC in two years for this weekend (dinner, a hotel stay) and I was already a little worried but ready to say fuck it, but after reading the last several posts I'm having serious second thoughts.

listen, i’m traveling next week, y’all will be fine in a hotel

there’s also a cold going around and unseasonable weather affecting everyone afaict

Less concerned about the hotel than the dinner, but genuinely appreciate the encouragement.

I'd have more qualms in January or even a couple weeks but NYC's requiring vac cards + ID was a huge relief when I went last month.

yes you wouldn't be able to get into that restaurant without a vaccine card

honestly, i wouldn't be super concerned if you took a trip to nyc prior to december. it's astonishing how quickly this thing hit.

agreeing with the aboves

Yeah, feeling lucky about getting in before Thanksgiving. I'm scheduled to give a reading in late March/early April in Manhattan...but who knows whether that'll happen.

My stupid work is requiring us to come back at least two days a week on February 1.

They announced this yesterday!