https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6769594 - "A 1997 study by the American Trucking Association concluded that 82,000 new truckers were needed ... This shortage is making it more difficult for trucking companies to grow and contributing to higher costs for shippers."
Indeed it is not about trucker supply. The current industry is structured to allow shippers to ship a truckload of goods from random point A to random point B, on-demand and cheaply. This requires a large, relatively low-paid workforce that is subject to miserable work conditions of long stretches away from home sleeping in a truck cab and eating miserable food.
The industry does not have to be structured this way. Most obviously, trucker pay could increase, but this would increase rates. Or, working conditions could improve. For example, have drivers work a fixed route and ferry trailers back and forth. Indeed a lot of less-than-truckload travels this way. This would dramatically improve working conditions, but increase costs and transit time.
So I’ve concluded the trucking industry is just fine. There is no trucker shortage. Shippers want shipping on the cheap, and this is the marketplace that results. Shippers who want to, and can, fix this, do so by setting up their own in-house shipping or otherwise set up their business to not rely on rock-bottom shipping practices. Shippers who cannot or will not fix this for themselves, as well as trucking companies that make their business in this marketplace, sit around and whine about the “trucker shortage” they have created.
If they paid decent and made it so you could drive one way for four hours and drive back to base the next four hours and go home for the night, the shortage would end like that.
According to everyone else here, if we just dropped the mask requirements and social distancing, we'd have teachers lined up around the block to teach.
The level of disconnect among Ms. Lance & commenters here is astounding - as if this pandemic was an exercise in to see how they were damaged in their lifestyles. Not because COVID and pandemics in general really suck for everyone.
Because many hospitals are being stretched to the brink right now. Which would not be the case if most people were vaccinated. But that ship has sailed, so we have to deal with it. Luckily, this recent wave may be on the downslope and will have naturally immunized quite a few people so that maybe the next wave will be more minor.
I don't think flu has ever stretched this many hospitals this badly for so long. Flu is more seasonal and more regional in scope. Assuming COVID hospitalizations follow the same curve as COVID deaths (hospitalizations curve is actually steeper) then we are looking at an order of magnitude worse situation than flu.
In other words, for the 100th time, COVID ain't the flu.
The children at my wife’s daycare are treated the same way (vectors of disease) by a selection of paranoid parents, inciting fear to the point that daycare closed last week. My toddler was crying a lot, wanting to see his friends.
A mostly online minority who comes out of the woodwork to shout down the idea of any risk acceptance as equivalent to murder, or any restrictions as no big deal (see the replies to your comment). These people don't even exist in real life, but somehow they are now setting the tone of public discourse and policy. It is literally like if policymakers started reading through the unmoderated comments on news sites in 2005 and started using them as a basis for what we all need to do. We really just need to ignore these people.
Not sure what you’re talking about. Policymakers have been talking to medical professionals and the people who run hospitals, since that’s where the biggest risk is in all this (that hospitals will be pushed well beyond capacity).
Policymakers have been talking to donors and people that influence their decisions with money, since that is the biggest risk to them in all this. We're supposed to believe that relief checks sent out when COVID numbers were actually lower, but conveniently around elections was about helping people. When elections come up again we'll be hearing about relief checks again. If this was about helping people they would have been sending out masks and had tests kits long ago, and relief wouldn't have stopped.
Weird. My kid's school had a wild community spread right after the holidays. The owner basically informed me that because one kid's dad is a surgeon and he says it's ok (the same kids mom is an ICU nurse and disagrees completely), then they're not doing anything. In fact, she told me that it wasn't a big deal and everyone was going to get it anyway (her staff was the point of initial infection) so it didn't matter. Basically, chicken pox party rules. My four year old is disappointed but opted to not get covid instead of going to school (along with about half her class).
She has chosen to make this sacrifice for herself. Perhaps this is an artifact of how we discuss science and risk.
Risk = impact x probability. Impact is low for children, probability at this point is quite high.
Impact for the immunocompromised is high, as it is for people who have lived full lives. Social distancing works for them. I do not think it works for children, despite being told by the proverbial “science” that it would have no impact on kids.
I’m not going to continue asking my child to make sacrifices for a minority of people who can adapt and respond better than he can. As a two year old, he has missed out on enough.
I see statements like this a lot, and I have to say they don't compute to me at all. They are eerily similar to the "cancel culture" conversation that comes up whenever someone quits out of their own volition.
Who is forcing your wife to shut down her day care, and how? If a subset of parents are uncomfortable sending their kids to day care for the foreseeable future, just tell them to come back when they're comfortable. Did your wife forget that it's her daycare?
To clarify—my wife is not the owner of the daycare. A small subset of parents voiced concerns not about the children, but themselves, and raised voices until the director of the daycare shut it down. I don’t understand your point about cancel culture.
I'm going to be charitable and assume you don't think this actually happens, and are simply using this image for rhetorical effect. But, in the interest of trying to be helpful in yet-another-stupid-covid-thread, here's the CDC's take[1]:
>Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four. [Emphasis mine]
Now, I'm not saying it's time to stop worrying about this completely. Who knows, maybe a new "worse" variant comes up. But the existing data does not in any way make me worried about getting this, because I'm relatively young and healthy. Make your own judgements on personal risk, but if I were in charge I'd go completely back to normal tomorrow. Those who are still concerned are free to quarantine of their own free will, but I do not think it's fair to force the youngest to put their lives on pause because some people are still terrified of this.
> All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.
It’s worth discussing what these risk factors are, since they’re a lot more common and broader than people imagine.
I myself have at least 4 CDC identified factors: I’m lactose intolerant, have an anxiety disorder, seasonal allergies and “caffeine dependency”.
While the overall number of adverse advents in my age range aren’t terribly concerning, the “at least 4 risk factors” discourse strikes me as terribly misleading because many of these “risk factors” that are used to handwave away deaths are common and utterly benign. How many other people in this industry have acne, are on the autism spectrum, suffer from depression, experience lower back pain?
Practically everyone I’ve ever worked with is probably pushing 4 factors.
I'm probably misreading this, but I see "In this study, age ≥65 years, immunosuppression, diabetes, and chronic kidney, cardiac, pulmonary, neurologic, and liver disease were associated with higher odds for severe COVID-19 outcomes;" listed as the eight risk factors. Where are you seeing the ones you listed?
Good news! The CDC does not identify every comorbidity as a risk factor. I’m glad they provide the data so you can make a more nuanced decision on your own.
> I myself have at least 4 CDC identified factors: I’m lactose intolerant, have an anxiety disorder, seasonal allergies and “caffeine dependency”.
These are just widespread things in the population. If 80% of the population has a caffeine dependency, then it's not surprising that 80% of people who die of Covid have a caffeine dependency. That doesn't mean they're related.
Thanks for not taking the bait on my comment. My only issue with the argument you provided is that the CDC is pointing to comorbidities as a reason why we shouldn't worry about covid anymore. "Hey, I'm young and healthy, why should I worry about it?" feels like the wrong attitude we should be taking as a society.
I don't want anyone, comorbidities or otherwise to have to suffer the effects of covid and I think the fact that many hospitals and healthcare workers (at least in the US), seemed to be at their breaking point means now does not feel like the time to try and ignore covid
> I don't want anyone, comorbidities or otherwise to have to suffer the effects of covid
This is a childish worldview, not because empathy is wrong or harm minimization is wrong but because you're subjectively presuming that COVID harm is more valid a goal to minimize than: depression and suicide, deaths and bad health due to inactivity, etc, etc. Further, we have no idea of the knock-on effects, perhaps we'll realize in ten years that we've created a demographic time bomb because everyone under the age of 20 right now will be incredibly distrustful of society and government, and choose to not actively contribute. My point is, someone is being harmed by the choices we make, even if COVID deaths go down (but, then again, with all our actions in the US, we've seemingly not avoided that much COVID infection and death, worst of both worlds).
>and I think the fact that many hospitals and healthcare workers (at least in the US), seemed to be at their breaking point means now does not feel like the time to try and ignore covid
Perhaps, the issue is that we've created an industry where the credentialing is monopolized by special interest groups when we also need that industry to be adequately staffed to absorb shocks like pandemics. If we wanted to alleviate overburdened doctors, we could've eliminated the functional cap on the number of students studying each year to be doctors back in 2020. But, your average doctor would actually oppose that choice, because their incentives are not aligned with society's.
I would say that a solution to that would be more volunteerism. Perhaps even drawing some inspiration from the 2nd amendment. "A well organized militia being necessary..." ... Actually, you know go a step beyond registration and have more coordinated training, including field medics.
If 1 in 10 people have a minimal level of field medic training, that would cover a LOT of slack in terms of something like a national or global pandemic. It doesn't have to be regular doctors, or even RNs that take up the slack. The bulk of the work is cleaning, monitoring and keeping things relatively calm and structured. Triage is meant to sort based on urgency of need... You don't need the most trained people to give attention, and keep things relatively calm.
Of course, the reasonableness of training 1:10th of the population in this way for an event that may occur once a century and is largely unavoidable is also up for debate.
This is the next big story about the deleterious effect of lock-downs and masking and social distancing etc, after basically ruining a generation of education. Many are in the worst shape of their lives right now because they haven't been able to do their usual work-out routine at the gym. The knock-on effects of this won't be felt for a while, but they will be real. Ironically this makes otherwise healthy <65 year old people more at-risk for bad covid outcomes (albeit it's still exceedingly low risk, especially if vax'd).
I'm sorry I'm a bit insensitive, this isn't my experience at all.
Me and all my friends are in better shape (most of them left big city to go to a more rural area), all of them now cook (i might have influenced this).
my brother and sister are too, two of my cousins went from 35+ BMI to 30 BMI, the rest are still in shape. It might be because of the environment, or the country. It is easier for me to be outside, we have outdoor gyms 8n most cities, sometime with gym trails. My point is the experience is very anecdotal, and can be great for some and a disaster for others.
I've heard that autistics people in the US suffer from wearing masks. My psychologist (specialized in functional autism) told me that most of her patients feel the same way I do, or better, even those deeper on the spectrum.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but you are generalizing too much, and maybe too US-centric.
Do you have the same reaction to other common virus/cold vectors?
Hospitals and healthcare workers are partly overworked at this point because there is under staffing, a huge number quit or were otherwise laid off and decided no to come back. It's not a lack of space. The other side are the number of people going to the hospital in a panic because they have a cough and think they're going to die out of panic.
The level of FUD spread over COVID is palpable and exceeds the danger, and largely has since the beginning. EVERYONE is going to get COVID at some point. That is the scientific consensus. Trying to reach COVID zero or force everyone to lock down in perpetuity is anti-science. This is largely why GB, one of the more oppressed nations in terms of response has now completely rolled back govt restrictions/mandates.
Omicron (latest variant) is so virulent that it's massively spread, but the symptoms are less than a typical flu year. I went through it a few weeks ago, so did my fiance. She's fully vaxxed and got it worse than I did. I'm not vaxed for medical reasons. I've had worse cases of the flu. I realize I'm an N of 1, but there are a LOT of people with similar results. These include a lot of vaccinated elderly.
As to the breaking point... the 2018 flu season had many facilities overwhelmed... it's actually really typical. Why, because hospitals don't have a ton of excess staff sitting around doing nothing all day. They are staffed to 50-65% of expected typical capacity, because emergencies are typically regional, and some will travel to help. When the problem is everywhere, there's no slack. There's literally not much that can be done about that.
If you want to hermetically seal off your home, you are welcome to do so... but to force everyone else to do so because you have unrealistic expectations on the risks of walking outside your front door is not alright.
> The other side are the number of people going to the hospital in a panic because they have a cough and think they're going to die out of panic.
Extremely high test positivity rates show that this isn't the case.
And yes, flu outbreaks can and do periodically overwhelm health systems, but not to this extent: where entire healthcare systems (not just hospitals) are cancelling lucrative elective procedures, broadly restricting/removing visitation, employing federal disaster relief, etc.
That's at least the case in my state; I can't speak for yours of course. AFAIK we also don't know much about the prevalence of "long COVID" from Omicron. Anecdotally, of the dozen or so people (mid-30s, all but 1 vaccinated) I personally know who got COVID over the holidays (so presumably Omicron), 2 were hospitalized and 5 were completely floored by COVID for at least a month. My vaccinated sister still doesn't have her sense of taste/smell back two months later. I think in a month or so we vaccinated folks can probably start acting normal again, like we did last summer. But at the moment it doesn't seem like the best time to take the gamble.
> where entire healthcare systems (not just hospitals) are cancelling lucrative elective procedures
It’s worth noting that in the context of the UK hospital system, elective surgeries are not elective in the sense that the person has made a choice to have surgery, but rather it’s simply the opposite of emergency surgery. It’s usually vital life saving surgery, but the scheduling of the surgery is elective.
For example, you could have heart attacks, find out you have blocked arteries and be told you need to have a triple bypass. If the need is not immediate right this very second or you’re going to die, that’s elective surgery.
A positive test for COVID is not equivalent to a need to be in the ER. MOST people with COVID don't need to go to the hospital at all.
As to your assessment, if you choose to stay inside that is fine... that doesn't mean that EVERYONE should be forced to do so.
I just got over COVID, I'm un-vaccinated because of high medical risks to vaccines, everyone else in my household is vaccinated. We went through COVID the past few weeks... I got through it in just over a week, my fiance, fully vaccinated and boosted had worse symptoms than I did that started and lasted longer. My 19yo daughter didn't even have any symptoms.
> This is largely why GB, one of the more oppressed nations in terms of response has now completely rolled back govt restrictions/mandates.
Well, that's more to do with our current PM flailing about under a whole swathe of self-inflicted wounds trying to a) gin up support from the right wing criticising the lockdowns/vaccines, and b) distract from said wounds by creating a lot of noise about this kind of policy. It is basically nothing to do with scientific consensus or sensible policy or anything like that.
> Those who are still concerned are free to quarantine of their own free will, but I do not think it's fair to force the youngest to put their lives on pause because some people are still terrified of this.
This is the whole reason we can't got back to normal tomorrow, even if you could make it so by being "in charge". When I look around at the faculty in my school district, I see a whole lot of comorbidities, and those are just the visible ones. And yes, some of the faculty have died from Covid, one of them was 37, the other 43. How do you get kids in school and protect teachers at the same time.
These teachers already have to deal with the looming threat of school shootings. But now they also have to deal with Covid, and on top of that they went from being called "essential workers" to being called criminals (just look at the comment section in TFA). This is leading to a teacher shortage, where young people no longer want to enter the profession, and older people are retiring. So if you really, truly want to open schools for the sake of children, figure out a way to do so that makes teachers feel safe to teach, or start teaching yourself.
>This is the whole reason we can't got back to normal tomorrow
Nah.
If you want to disengage from society based on your personal risk preferences, you should be free to do so. At this point, two years after this started, I should be free to reengage in my normal activities (the gym, catching the game with the guys on the weekend, taking my wife to a show).
>When I look around at the faculty in my school district, I see a whole lot of comorbidities, and those are just the visible ones.
And these policies are going to make those comorbidities worse, not better. Everyone is less healthy today than they were 2 years ago when this started because we're sitting in front of a screen all day. This includes children. Headline from 2034: Obesity and Type 1 diabetes are at an all-time high. Were school lockdowns during the 2020-2024 pandemic the cause?
>This is leading to a teacher shortage
Where? In places that are locked down? These policies are causing that, and it's actually exacerbating education gaps for underrepresented minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged folks who can't afford a private school that doesn't do this stuff.
>So if you really, truly want to open schools for the sake of children, figure out a way to do so that makes teachers feel safe to teach, or start teaching yourself.
My wife and I will likely be homeschooling, for a number of reasons, but one of them is that we'd like our children to not be held hostage to a cultural moment that wants to turn covid policies into the next 9/11. Permanent societal change for little if any tangible benefit.
> If you want to disengage from society based on your personal risk preferences, you should be free to do so. At this point, two years after this started, I should be free to reengage in my normal activities
Yes, 100% agreed.
> Where? In places that are locked down?
Let's take a look at Georgia, for instance. I don't think they instituted particularly heavy lockdowns. Here we have a state where 60 teachers/staff have died in Georgia over a roughly 3 month period [0]. Some notable statistics:
- They had 14 bus drivers who died. I know people like to pretend that Covid is safer than driving, but literally 14 bus drivers have never died over a 3 month period due to traffic accidents. That just does not happen. Anyway, what do you think it takes to replace those 14 bus drivers, and how are students getting to school while the vacancies persist? In the Griffin-Spalding School District, 3 bus drivers died within a week. That's not normal.
- 42 faculty and staff died, the average age of deceased faculty was 46, the average age of staff was 50. That's not normal.
What's the effect of this? This article sums up my thoughts pretty well [1]. Some excerpts:
[I]n my district there are several schools scrambling to fill vacant teacher positions with qualified teachers
A big group of baby boomer teachers is retiring, some on time, some early. Fewer people are going into education because it is seen as less of a profession and more of “calling,” with little pay. There is a movement called “The Great Resignation” that is speaking directly to the exploited feeling many teachers have.
The author goes on to list a number of suggestions that she believes would help the situation, but we all know approximately none of those will happen. Hence the teacher exodus. Hence the substitute teacher shortage [2]. Hence the bus driver shortage [3]. Hence school closures [4], which make parents angry. Parents lash out at teachers demanding that schools open, which further just drives teachers to want to quit. Because they're not closed by choice -- they're closed because teachers and staff are dying, quitting, and finding other opportunities, and the sales pitch to fill those vacant roles is really quite terrible.
Anyway, my point is this: no matter how much anyone wants to get back to normal, getting there isn't a matter of someone "in charge" ordering things to just open up. This sounds like an Underpants Gnome strategy:
1. Open schools
2. ...
3. Kids are educated and mentally whole
There's a whole lot of detail missing in step 2 there, and I think people who want things to be fully open and back to normal really need to grapple with the complexity of what step 2 is eliding.
> My wife and I will likely be homeschooling, for a number of reasons
We all do risk assessment differently. My wife is immunocompromised. My kid is four. We justify our decisions by accepting that being cautious is a safe choice. Mommy can get really sick and our kid is too young to get a vaccination.
And that's fine. You should be allowed to homeschool your kids or enroll them in online learning. But you shouldn't be allowed to force restrictions on everyone else's kids.
More teens are getting hit by cars than dying of covid, but for some reason it's the teen suicide numbers people always bring up, even though they're not rising. Isn't that odd?
In the Netherlands they rose 15% in 2021 compared to 2020. But that wouldn’t be in an article from April 2021.
Teens aren’t getting hit by cars more due to lockdowns. But the suicide numbers are up due to lockdowns. That’s why they are brought up when talking about how COVID should be ‘managed’.
> My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease.
According to all of my friends who are teachers and don't have a Substack, this was actually the case every winter. Anyone who was teaching would get sick for several days a year, and then either soldier on, or call in sick as a last resort. Calling in sick was shamed by most school administrations, and none of them seemed to have the health of teachers as a priority. To me as an outside, the entire focus seemed to be basically, "Can someone keep the kids occupied for today until their parents come get them?"
Maybe these are the kind of conversations that the author could also be having with her students? How teaching and childcare seem to be pretty much conflated in North America, and how most schools seem to cater to the whims of paranoid helicopter parents who like to think of "learning" as just another job that they can offload to a teacher, just like they offload their groceries to Instacart.
Also, for older kids, the teacher could introduce them to how tests work, and how they can in theory play just fine with their friends if everyone gets tested daily. She could also go into the governmental and financial factors that make such tests widely available in Europe, but not North America.
I understand that we're likely not going to continue with the current restrictions forever, but having a healthy understanding of germ theory and epidemiology among schoolchildren doesn't seem to be a total downside to me. The optimist in me says that overall this will lead to fewer kids coming in when they are sick (or at least masking when they do), fewer kids wiping their noses and then playing with their friends without handwashing, and a reduction in the spread of various infections.
No discussion on impacts to staff, teachers or parents if their suggested course of action was followed during the pandemic.
Another article wanting to push "Think of the children!" without the exercise of seeing what having allowed schools to operate without any restrictions would have been.
My guess? We'd see what we're seeing in the Omicron wave but with much worse impacts.
We have a clear picture of what schools would look like without the myriad of restrictions we have in Ontario - the Scandinavian countries.
No masking of young children. Minimal masking of older children, or teachers. No quadmesters. No banning of assemblies, or proms, or extra curriculars.
Your guess is not grounded in the data we are seeing from dozens of other countries.
Bari Weiss stuff probably should be blacklisted here. There’s a reason the New York Times quickly figured it was worth the hit to fire her. She’s a mere sensationalist propaganda peddler.
Propaganda is going to happen... better to have it exposed and countered than for it to fester as "truth" because it aligns with your political views.
Note: this is not an endorsement or counter to the opinion on Bari Weiss, not familiar enough to comment. Only that blacklisting people and ideas is often not the best solution. It can feel justified and be expedient, but will emphatically lead to worse outcomes for society.
In general, there's too many hard lines drawn politically, and I'd rather see a return to some level of discourse, negotiation and compromise. IMO that's when the system is working at its' best. Not when anyone gets everything they want, but when opposing views work together to come up with solutions in compromise that lead to better.
That's all true on the spectrum of reasonable, honest dialogue. Bari Weiss is in the group not being reasonable, while asking for reasonable (determined by intellectual honesty, not political leaning) people's time.
Being tasked to reckon with the absurd and the deliberate muddling of issues is not, in my opinion, going to help much.
We don’t need to turn HN into another echo chamber. You can read something that doesn’t just parrot your own beliefs back at you once in a while. You’ll be ok.
Luckily I didn’t suggest any such thing. Here’s a chance for you to reckon with whether you’re being intellectually honest. I suggested blacklisting a source with a history of intellectual dishonesty, some of which was picked up right in this thread. What are you suggesting?
I’m suggesting we don’t blacklist anything. If there’s something dishonest you could be specific about exactly what and why instead of making demands based on unsupported assertions. I didn’t find anything intellectually dishonest about this or anything else Weiss has written or published.
You keep acting like you can just make these statements and they’re self-evidently true. If you want anyone to consider what you’re talking about you have to, you know actually make a case and present an argument and evidence, not just declare things like everyone is supposed to automatically agree with you.
In Australia there has been mass migration out of the states that had toxic culture towards covid. Victoria in particular lost of a lot of people who had enough and moved to more proportionate covid response states.
The government chose the hardest covid policies in the country from the beginning which lead to division in the population. You had people that wouldn't accept the hard measures and you had people that championed them.
The result was a state were covid was rampant and everyone was fighting over how selfish others were. Kids got it pretty bad - no playgrounds, no schools and you could only leave your home in a 5km radius for food and exercise. This went on for over a year.
> My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease.
This is ridiculous. I have a four-year old and even she understands that masks are for her own protection and not because she is a "vector of disease". If her students feel that way, then they've been made to do so by their parents, teachers, friends, or somebody else.
Strong disagree. 4 year olds are trying to understand. Parents know about the 'why' phase.
Our son had a lot of questions concerning COVID,as it influenced what he's allowed to visit from one week to another. We gave answers as good as we could. He understands the basics about how diseases can spread by air, and masking is not a big leap from that point. He sometimes decides to wear a mask, even if he doesn't have to, which is cute.
He did try to stab his fork in water droplets to try kill virusses, so there are limits, but a 'logical' initiative like this shows he gets the basic idea.
I'm a professor and we're seeing drops in enrollment and huge drops in work being done, learning, and creativity. We need to say, hey it's been two years in March, we're done. March Onward, or something. No more.
Hah, this comment dropped 6 points in less than a second. This article will be flagged soon.
We do so many ineffective Covid rituals. If we just wore n95s when reasonable that would give us equivalent protection and eliminate the need for the other stuff. Outdoor making is so dumb.
Outdoor masking should be based on how likely it is you're breathing in someone's breath. At an empty park? Fine. At a sporting event? Probably want a mask.
It's very strange the way mask guidance hasn't evolved at all since mid 2020. I know people who are very careful, even wipe down their groceries, but still wear cloth masks. Usually because they're more comfortable or nicer looking or washable. If people knew how much protection they were getting for the extra discomfort it might be different.
Yeah it's really frustrating how long we've taken to acknowledge that covid is airborne. At least in the US, we should have had free n95s mailed to everyone. As much as I would love vaccines to be the end of this, we still need NPIs like high quality masks and not stupid stuff like 6 foot social distancing that everyone got sick of and no one follows.
Ravaging the population? It's this exaggeration of the disease that I'm saying we should stop. Just accept it like it's a weird sequel to the flu and move on.
Perhaps, I think the risk level for death or hospitalization may be acceptable, but I'd love to see data about the risk level for long covid after being vaccinated.
> A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story
> about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian
> foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was
> one of the best days that I can remember.
On a tangent: is this... a healthy quality bar for a class presentation? Coming from the startup world, this sounds a lot like "and we all bonded so strongly at the 4 a.m. firefighting sessions." I'm glad the author enjoyed the delicacies the student's father labored all night to prepare, I guess.
There will be a high price to pay for pandemic theater. In the immediate term because the theater does not work and effective actions are ignored and in the long term because the ineffective actions are also harmful.
will there be? there wasn't any price paid for security/counterterrorism theatre under Bush. and most of that stuff never really went away, we just got used to it. we're not going to flick a switch off and "just go back to normal" after this. every time cold (both temperature and illness) season comes around, some stores will make masks mandatory, kids will be sent home from school for remote learning now that they all have laptops, etc. etc.
> there wasn't any price paid for security/counterterrorism theatre under Bush
Every time anyone wants to get on an airplane,they're forced to take a nude selfie. And if there's a blip, a government employee will...well, let's just say any private business would get sued six ways to Sunday for sexual harassment.
Osama bin Laden's been dead for years, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over.
Everybody just accepts it.
A high price to pay, in both (1) the TSA's budget, and (2) the fact that Americans just don't care about this infringement on freedom and privacy. When was the last time you saw disbanding the TSA suggested in any political debate from a candidate of either party?
So all the stuff about mask mandates, vaccine passports, and so on -- that stuff, once implemented, will never go away.
The September 11 response has taught me that the government will take your freedom in a crisis, but they'll never give it back.
It's when the compulsion to have government to fix the crisis seems most reasonable that we should be most unreasonably insistent on keeping our freedom.
At least in the US, the debate around the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races was largely about school closures for COVID-19. And the Republicans did well on the premise of reopening in-person school. The price is already being paid.
That said, most polls show a majority of Americans support mask mandates. [1]
I don't think the future is necessarily an analogy of post-9/11 security theater.
Many countries (Japan, India) have used therapeutics prior to hospitalization. In the states therapeutics have been demonized as "horse medicine" and people have been told to say home and take NyQuil until their oxygen levels are so critically low they have to be admitted.
There has been a myopic focus on vaccines and they have performed by any estimation terribly. Any questioning this no matter how qualified are instantly demonized as anti-science. How many lives could have been saved if all options were on the table? Instead we see censorship on a level most of us never even thought possible.
Japan relied on near universal masking (voluntary too, no mandate) and high vaccine take up. Current approved pharmaceuticals are remdesivir etc. refer:
You're creating a strawman. I only said that our government has demonized self applied therapeutics and pushed vaccines only. There is no scientific reason to demonize therapeutics the way the institutions in the US have done. And what about the censorship? How can open debate happen when qualified individuals are shut down? It's all very anti-science and anti-democratic.
Did getting vaccinated mean other people let you move on with life? I've had three shots, restaurants are currently closed where I am, I have to wait in line to do groceries because there is some kind of capacity restriction, and old women cower when I walk by them on the street (maybe that always happened). I have moved on long ago but people around me, or at least those with a monopoly on violence, are still hysterical
The problem is that we live in an interconnected graph (society), and while you have done your part by getting vaccinated, others haven’t. And the people evaluating the evidence (experts) make recommendations to keep things closed.
Why are you not upset at the other group members who are not carrying their part of the workload? Unless we can remove them from society, the decisions have to be made including their behaviors and risk factors.
> And the people evaluating the evidence (experts) make recommendations to keep things closed.
This is definitely different than my view of what society should be. Other people don't know my priorities, and should not be able to dictate them to me. A representative government (not experts) is some proxy for people's overall priorities, and strong constitutional limits on government power should ensure that democracy doesn't devolve to "two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner". "Experts" should be a data point, and have no direct control over what people can do
If the vaccine works, and you are vaccinated, then why should you care what someone else does with their body? The vast majority of every western population is vaccinated, the number with COVID antibodies at this point is even higher still.
Do you really want to round up and kill anyone that doesn't comply with what you deem to be what they should do?
Because those making the decision are tasked with looking out for the health of everyone. I personally don't care what other people do until it impacts more than just their own health - which is why I'm also against drunk driving. Yes, I consider people's choice to not get vaccinated up there, morally, with drunk driving.
And no, obviously I don't think people should be rounded up and killed for not complying. But you are also aware your comment was not in good faith and not intended to advance the conversation, so the less said about your second paragraph the better.
I was serious about the second paragraph. It was not in bad faith... because that is what tends to happen after mass incarcerations, mass killing. There are people out there who genuinely have expressed those intentions. It's not funny, it's not ironic, and it can and has happened in history.
And no, it doesn't compare to drunk driving... Why, because the vaccinated still carry and transmit COVID, so that effectively means that everyone who goes outside is in your mind doing the same thing as drunk driving.
Where are the mass incarcerations right now? I’m mostly familiar w/ the US, but are people being arrested in droves for not wearing masks or following C19 guidelines? I agree that mass incarceration is a pre-req but don’t think it leads to genocide, while not seeing much mass incarceration.
The risks from C19 go beyond infecting other people. The only way to claim individuality would be if the unvaccinated were willing to bear the cost of hospitalization as well as accept lowest priority for health care. And if optional surgeries, like knee replacements, weren’t put aside to give care to someone unvaccinated.
That’s the problem with saying we all make our own choices and are “independent”. The reality is we are so interconnected that sometimes people can’t get their own way when required to protect the broader group.
You mean besides Australia, Austria and China for starters.
Also, if you are breathing, you can be a carrier for COVID. Are you saying you don't go outside among other people?
Beyond this, you specifically a few reptiles back are calling for mass incarceration. It's not okay, the drunk driving analogy is a false equivalence that applies to the vaccinated as well as unvaccinated.
UK is already completely dropping all restrictions. CDC finally recognizes natural immunity. Nearly everyone in the US has either been vaccinated or has COVID. All further restrictions, vaccine mandates or vaccine passports are FUD and anti science.
I seriously doubt that... GB just rolled it all back. No idea what Austria, Australia or New Zealand will do though. Or France, NYC, Washington State, etc.
I don't think any of the theater politicians will pay. Pelosi got more flack for presumed insider trading recently than ever saw for the mask theater.
I'm not sure what to think of this from the article:
> She told me that she didn’t want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying.
> What am I supposed to say? That 23 children have died from Covid in Canada during the whole of the pandemic and she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? That kids in Scandinavia, Sweden, and the Netherlands largely haven’t had to wear masks at school and haven’t seen outbreaks because of it? That masks are not a magic shield against the virus, and that even if she were to pass it along to a classmate, the risk of them getting seriously sick is minuscule?
> I want to tell her that she can remove her mask, and socialize with her friends without being worried.
> But I am expected to enforce the rules.
While I can sympathize with how the student is feeling, the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument) that having a conversation with a student isn't breaking the rules. That explaining the facts to a young woman, nearly an adult, is what is expected of a teacher.
> At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends.
Who was shaming children? local parents? government officials? I didn't see any of this shaming. In fact, where I live, more children were at the parks.
I think what's really missing in most situations is honest conversations about the way the world is right now, the fact that many people are afraid, others are dying and many more will die as a result of this virus.
Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering.
> While I can sympathize with how the student is feeling, the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument) that having a conversation with a student isn't breaking the rules. That explaining the facts to a young woman, nearly an adult, is what is expected of a teacher.
I wouldn't be so sure. I would definitely be worried about being seen as a covid denier or similar. People feel really strongly about this and has strangely turned political, and its best not to discuss politics with your students so that you don't draw the ire of parents that could label you as something you're not
> Young adults should be encouraged to think about this situation, it's the world they are entering.
I just want my children to have a relatively care-free existence in their formative years, much like I had. Children and young people are not without their own low-stake drama but they should not have this weight of forced upon them at that age.
"I just want my children to have a relatively care-free existence in their formative years, much like I had. Children and young people are not without their own low-stake drama but they should not have this weight of forced upon them at that age."
Kids read newspapers. They know what's happening. Even high school kids are depressed by things like climate change, income inequality and the broken Canadian real estate market. I don't think encouraging the spread of disease is likely to cheer them up much.
Wearing a mask and not meeting in large groups is not stopping socialization. Acknowledging that certain behaviours spread an already virulent disease isn't callous, it's realistic and it's why the pandemic is depressing. Ignoring covid doesn't make most people feel any better, they know it exists.
> Wearing a mask and not meeting in large groups is not stopping socialization.
I'm sorry, but I can't engage in good faith when this is your opening statement. Facial cues are an essential part of socialization. Meeting in large groups is one form of socialization, one that's incredibly common among teenagers and children.
While the pandemic has certain gone on far too long my experience with teenagers is that none of them has forgotten what a human face looks like, most go unmasked around family and close friends and they're still meeting in small groups on a regular basis. I don't think regular mask wearing in school is going to result in stunted social development. And most kids are not very eager to catch covid or spread it to their teachers or parents.
I wouldn’t worry about a child’s face to face socials skills development any more than I’d worry about her horseback riding skills development. Perhaps some eccentric hobbyists will indulge, but the world where that was a universal life skill is never coming back.
Vaccines were the only plausible way out of restrictions. Since they turned out not to be, it is clear that restrictions are forever.
This is intellectually dishonest. No one pushing for mask mandates is attempting to punish people. You can argue that masks are a poor tradeoff or ineffective without willfully casting those on the opposite side as evil or malicious.
This unwillingness to acknowledge each others’ humanity and points of view is precisely why every issue is so unbearably partisan now. It’s not sufficient that we disagree. It’s but sufficient that the other side it’s just wrong. They must be actively evil for being wrong.
If you think wearing a mask in social gatherings is abuse or mass punishment I don't know what to tell you. We may as well have not come up with germ theory! Children are not the fragile little snowflakes you're making them out to be, they understand the concept of responsibility and it is our job (ostensibly) as adults to make sure they embody it.
Whining about masks in public during a viral epidemic is telling the youth that their personal whims come before the collective health. Which some of you may believe, I'm not here to argue with you if you do. Should masks and vaccines have been the only solution? No. Should families and small businesses have to deal with inconsistent public information and almost no financial support? No.
But given the reality in which we find ourselves the bare minimum would be to not act like a mask is some particular burden. If you want to talk about mass punishment we could get on the topic of what nurses, doctors, and med techs are dealing with. Or all the "essential workers" that were treated like disposable refuse.
It's especially funny when you take into account billions of people around the world regularly wear masks in public during flu season, but apparently North Americans can't handle it.
This is a great dataset because it controls for a lot of variables - it's two school districts in the same county; one optional and one mandatory. The mandatory masking county consistently has had higher rates of Covid.
Wearing a mask and not meeting in groups also won't stop COVID.
"it's realistic" it's realistic to face the fact that kids are unlikely to die from COVID so living in fear and spreading that fear is absolutely callous.
They are stastically more likely to die from tripping on a sidewalk than dying of Covid.
Telling them they are "spreading disease" when it's literally a cold/flu is irresponsible...
The problem is the fear of COVID has reached religious status and only heathens talk against the Church. The COVID Crusaders will burn witches at the stake no matter if they are spreading fear not based in facts or reality.
> it's literally a cold/flu
> they are spreading fear not based in facts or reality.
You can’t appeal to facts and reality and then also falsely claim COVID is literally a cold/flu. A cold and a flu aren’t even the same thing as each other. And COVID is certainly neither of those with over 5 million deaths worldwide. Even if you think the numbers are inflated, COVID has still killed something like an order of magnitude more people than the flu would in the same timespan.
You don’t convince others by listening by spreading your own lies. Rational thought is not built on misinformation.
"then also falsely claim COVID is literally a cold/flu" It's in the same area... the only difference is we've had those for generations and covid is new.
COVID is in effect a bad flu...
"5 million deaths" 5 million deaths FROM covid or WITH COVID?
Hint: You don't know because we don't know... those numbers are mixed, conflated and confused.
"Order of magnitude" In places like the US where hospitals get 30% more money for stamping "something" as "covid"? Hard to take numbers seriously... especially when you admit that "FROM" COVID and "WITH" COVID are different things and haven't been tracked properly.
If I have a heart attack... but I had COVID... Am I a COVID death or not? Currently, it's yes... you're a COVID death no matter what kills you. No matter that you're really not a COVID death.
"rational thought is not built on misinformation" but the fear around COVID is.
That's why kids who are statistically more likely to die tripping on a sidewalk are getting pushed to get vaccines that don't block transmition, don't stop covid and won't end the pandemic.
People aren't getting vaccinated for "rational though" because if they were then the people getting the vaccines would be the people who need the extra protection - as they also get that extra protection. Not kids or people in their 20's and younger who are proven a LONG time ago to not need to live in fear.
It's not rational thought that's driving COVID at this point. It's fear, misinformation, lies and the Holy Religion of The Vaccine.
No, it’s not. It is literally a different disease and the impact is well outsized relative to the flu.
> "5 million deaths" 5 million deaths FROM covid or WITH COVID?
> Hint: You don't know because we don't know... those numbers are mixed, conflated and confused.
This “but numbers are inflated” stuff is FUD. There is zero evidence that the real impact of COVID is lower than the reported numbers. (If you have any, please do share.) Excess deaths indicate that the official COVID death tallies are actually significant undercounting.
It’s utterly crazy that people can legitimately hold the view that COVID is no worse than the flu in the face of mass cremations happening in India or refrigerator trucks filled with corpses outside New York hospitals. This doesn’t happen in a typical flu season.
> That's why kids who are statistically more likely to die tripping on a sidewalk
This seems like an easy claim for you to provide a citation for. Where is it?
I’m totally on board with the fact that the risk to children of COVID is very low. But I’m relatively certain that sidewalks being more deadly is bullshit.
> fear, misinformation, lies and the Holy Religion of The Vaccine.
This coming from someone spreading misinformation. Why do you expect people to engage in real discussion with you when you’re spreading misinformation? Your righteous outrage is unjustified when you’re as guilty of lying to yourself as those you’re arguing with.
I didn't read the newspaper or know anything about climate change, income inequality or Canadian real estate. And I pray to god my children don't either. This wasn't a thing growing up in Northeast US in the late 90s
"i was sheltered from the realities of the world i occupied and my children should be too"? whether or not your children are aware of climate change (or any of the things you listed) isn't going to change its impact when they're adults -- if anything, you're ensuring they won't be prepared.
Everyone judges book by its cover, its just a built in mechanism in our reptilian brain.
If someone acts like antivax they are placed in a wacko conspiracy theory box immediately. It will take effort on their part to be not view through only that prism.
So its a tight rope walking situation.
Personally I changed my mind about children masks after argument that children need social cues (including facial clues) to properly respond and develop. It makes sense and I feel bit silly not to think about it in the first place.
There is a discussion to be had about how we deal with covid, and there are always trade offs, sadly as you mentioned making public safety a political issue is moving away from facts and statistics into emotional warfare
Part of the problem is that our medical science institutions in the US are 100% controlled by the executive wing of our government. The CDC and FDA currently must operate under the rules and guidelines set by the sitting president. That's completely against science, in my opinion. These two institutions should be decoupled from politics.
> the author seems to be forgetting (intentionally ignoring for the sake of their argument)
I agreed with many of the arguments in the article when I red it, but checking out the other submissions on that blog, I think there are a lot of suspicious omissions like this.
E.g. There is another post [1] about a transwoman and a transman both competing in the women's swimming team. Sounds weird and at first glance seems to confirm all the usual "trans agenda" accusations. Except, the linked original article [2] clears it up:
> Henig is eligible to compete on the women’s team as a trans man because he’s chosen not to receive gender-affirming hormones, also known as hormone replacement therapy, such as testosterone.
Any mention of that in the blog? Nope - on the contrary, she doubles down on the confusion and emphasizes it to push the "trans agenda" narrative:
> Can you ask any questions about this and whether it makes sense for women’s sports to become a free-for-all for all that leads to a man winning? Do you want to keep your job? Because by the definitions of the movement, Iszac is a male who cannot compete on a women’s team, right? This whole thing is becoming increasingly absurd.
So in closing, I think the source is heavily biased to push certain outrage-generating narratives and cannot really be taken serious - even though I absolutely empathize with a lot of her observations in the OP article.
An “honest conversation” about COVID and children would treat it as a risk on the order of drowning, not something that warrants the terror people have.
This is simply blatant fear-mongering. Note the second word in the figure: "putative". If you click the associated link, you'll see that the figure is taken from a review that covers a bunch of papers that present all of these things as hypotheses. None have been shown to be true.
I'm sorry to say it, but Eric Topol is no longer a reliable source of information. He routinely mis-represents "science" in the scariest way possible, and as exemplified here, nuance and and measured communication are essential to prevent panic.
Can you please post multiple examples of how he routinely misrepresents science in the scariest way possible? I've yet to see it, but I'm certainly willing to change my mind if you present it here
Another, equally valid, way of looking at that is that half of the people in that study reporting "long Covid" have no evidence of ever having Covid.
> Using SARS-CoV-2 serology and IFN-γ ELISPOT, we found evidence of a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection in 50% (15/30) of patients
See also this large (N=26k) study from France, where the only "long Covid" symptom correlated with confirmed infection was loss of smell. Nearly every other symptom was associated with belief of prior infection, but not infection itself:
Psychosomatic illness is a real problem. I understand that they don't want to mock people with it (as it's not really helpful), and post viral syndromes do exist, but the mass hysteria people are raising is even less helpful.
Completely agreed. Post-viral syndromes are real, as is psychosomatic illness.
But we're now locked in cycle of speculation about speculation -- these papers on long Covid are usually stunningly bad, and dispense with basic things like controls, or even separating the subjects by age and severity of primary illness. So you get review articles postulating complex theories of biological mechanisms for "illnesses" where the primary evidence base consists of a web survey. It's madness, and it's almost impossible to properly debunk it all, given how quickly its being churned out.
Viruses period, Covid or not, apparently do a lot more damage and require a lot longer to recover from than we expected.
People dismissing "Long Covid" in non-Covid patients are being blind to the fact that we had a LOT of people who had "weird" symptoms even before Covid that we allocated to "hysteria", "psychosomatic", "chronic", "Lyme disease", etc. that are going to turn out to be "Long General Virus Recovery".
Epstein-Barr has some huge correlation to multiple sclerosis. HPV vaccines have almost eliminated certain cervical cancers. Chicken pox necessitates a shingles vaccine because its so horrible.
Viruses are a lot worse than we realized, and the medical system is going to be coming to grips with this for decades.
> Viruses period, Covid or not, apparently do a lot more damage and require a lot longer to recover from thane we expected.
No, this is not supported by the evidence. So far, even the worst of the long Covid papers suggests that a minority of people suffer from lingering illness. And most of those papers are bad, defining "long Covid" arbitrarily, and mixing together "cough after three weeks" with far more serious symptoms experienced by a tiny set of people.
When people say "we need more research on long Covid", this is what is meant. We literally have no idea what "it" is, other than an arbitrary container into which people are dumping their worst fears and speculations.
Going from this to "viruses are much worse than we ever knew!" is both wrong (post-viral syndrome is a known thing, affecting a small fraction of people) and overgeneralization.
Let's assume "minority" means 5%. Total "confirmed" cases of Covid are now north of 70 million in the US and at 20 million just before the vaccine.
At 1 million people before the vaccine (5% of 20 million), that would make "Long Covid" one of the most common medical conditions.
That 5% number is probably close for Covid prior to vaccines. Look at the sheer number of people who had anosmia and how long it is taking them to recover. How many people would even have mentioned anosmia after having a cold or flu? That sure goes into the "Long Covid" bucket in my book and we're not even discussing the panoply of other damage that Covid does.
Post-vaccine, the "Long Covid" percentage certainly drops by quite a bit.
> post-viral syndrome is a known thing, affecting a small fraction of people
The number of people who got cervical cancer from HPV is small, and yet, before the vaccine, it was one of the more common and fatal of cancers.
"Small fraction" != "unimportant"
In addition, things pile up. Carcinogenesis takes a long time with key mutations as far back as the womb and early childhood. Viruses are part of the landscape that causes those mutations.
You have provided no evidence to counteract my statement so I still stand by it: Viruses period, Covid or not, apparently do a lot more damage and require a lot longer to recover from than we expected.
> At 1 million people before the vaccine (5% of 20 million), that would make "Long Covid" one of the most common medical conditions.
...and yet, we're not seeing these waves and waves of disabled people. This should give you pause, and make you doubt the claims of prevalence, the claims of severity, or both.
By the way: "reported" infections vastly underestimate the true prevalence of disease. Up until the Omicron wave (which has tremendously increased the number) the CDC estimated that almost 150 million US citizens have had it:
Again, this should make you doubt the claims of prevalence. If even 5% of cases have this "long Covid", we're talking about 8 million cases. If claims of 20% prevalence are true, boost that number to 30 million people. The burden on the medical system would be immense; you would not be able to get appointments for even basic care. Chronically disabled people should be swamping medical clinics everywhere.
It's simply obvious nonsense. Only by conflating minor symptoms with pathology do you get to an estimate anywhere near these kinds of numbers.
> Look at the sheer number of people who had anosmia and how long it is taking them to recover.
I'm one of them. Took about a week.
> That sure goes into the "Long Covid" bucket in my book and we're not even discussing the panoply of other damage that Covid does.
We're discussing it right now. What we're not discussing is the evidence for this "panoply of other damage"...because for the vast majority of "long Covid" symptoms, the evidence simply doesn't exist. We leap from self-reports of "symptoms" directly to "panoply of damage", based on little more than speculation and quotes from doctors.
If you bother to read the papers cited within this press release, you'll see they all go on fishing expeditions to find anyone reporting symptoms, then claim that these are caused by Covid. From the headline study [1]:
> Presenting symptoms included palpitations, chronic rhinitis, dysgeusia, chills, insomnia, hyperhidrosis, anxiety, sore throat, and headache among others.
Literally anyone reporting sweating, headache, anxeity or insomnia is counted as "long Covid", if they hadn't reported it before their Covid diagnosis. Completely ridiculous. This is not research.
While I agree this isn't over, I disagree with your conclusion. We have little idea how early COVID exposure will affect us decades from now, but there's already signs of psychological strain in kids which could prove to be worse. Nobody knows.
You mean among hospitalized individuals? i.e not children
> Initial reports of neurologic syndromes accompanying COVID-19 described changes in level of consciousness or cognitive dysfunction, weakness, and headache in hospitalized patients...
> A UK-wide study of hospitalized patients identified the most common neurologic conditions...
> Direct examination of autopsy brain tissue has caveats—those who died with acute COVID-19 had severe disease that may not be representative of the majority of those infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Children spread covid to more vulnerable people just as easily as adults do.
Unless your world view is that we should all teach our children to be maximally selfish and to not care when grandma dies then thinking only of your own direct mortality during a highly contagious pandemic is a bit silly.
> Children are Infrequently Identified as the Index Case of Household SARS-CoV-2 Clusters
> In analysis of the cluster index cases, we included 43 articles, in which there were 213 SARS-CoV-2 transmission clusters; only 3.8% (8/213) were identified as having a pediatric index case (Table 1 and Supplementary Tables 1 and 3). Of 611 individuals in the 213 clusters, there were 102 children. These pediatric cases only caused 4.0% (16/398) of all secondary cases, compared with the 97.8% of secondary cases that occurred when an adult was identified as the index case in the cluster (Table 1).
> Unless your world view is that we should all teach our children to be maximally selfish and to not care when grandma dies then thinking only of your own direct mortality during a highly contagious pandemic is a bit silly.
Is this really necessary? You started by saying that COVID is multiple orders of magnitude more deadly than drowning. You were shown to be wrong, so you retreated to the “gotta protect grandma” stance (which is unrelated to your original claim, and also very possibly wrong), and then for good measure you knocked down a straw man and cast wrycoder as basically just evil for disagreeing with you.
The reality is that children seem to have extremely low risk from COVID. And it appears that they aren’t particularly likely to pass it to vulnerable populations. And those vulnerable populations should be vaccinated already (as should everyone eligible).
Maybe unmasking children would increase the danger to at-risk populations. Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe it’s selfish to keep demanding children wear masks for 8 hours/day out of fear when the evidence that it’s doing anything useful seems lacking. What I know is that COVID isn’t going anywhere and “everyone wear a mask all the time until the end of time” is not an end game strategy.
As an aside, the most frustrating thing about arguments (“discussions”) is that even when people are wrong and proven so, they rarely accept it or change they claims. They go right out saying the same stuff again. Most of the people spouting misinformation on both sides of the COVID debate are pretty well informed about the reality at this point. They just willfully ignore information that didn’t fit their narrative.
This teenager has been telling me on a monthly basis since last year that "food still tastes like garbage to me." It is some kind of strange side-effect she has from holding her breath at the bottom of the deep end of the pool.
Oops, did I write, "holding her breath at the bottom of the deep end of the pool?" I meant to write "a mild case of covid."
> Who was shaming children? local parents? government officials? I didn't see any of this shaming. In fact, where I live, more children were at the parks.
Here in Santa Clara County, our public health department demanded that play structures close down during the first lockdown order and many parks closed. It is the one part of the response that I thought was really stupid and lambasted at the time.
Afterwards, many parents were still anxious and didn't let their kids out.
That’s not “shaming”. Shutting down playgrounds was a panic reaction and turned it to be useless but no one was “shaming” children. (It also went on for way too long in many places. Playgrounds were still shut down long after many things opened up for adults in many areas, which was incredibly shitty.)
There was a study I saw recently that talked about how politically and culturally, some people are negatively motivated by shame (loosely on the right), and some are not (loosely on the left).
It's related to an overall value on "Purity" as a moral virtue.
I think what happens is that people like the author are very influenced by shame and therefore project the intent to shame on situations when they FEEL shame.
If I do something and someone tells me not to, I don't feel "shame", regardless of whether I agree with the direction or not.
That's not the case with some people.
I believe it's also associated with narcissism. If you are powerfully negatively impacted by shame you will do everything possible not to feel it including intense denial gaslighting and narcissism.
No playgrounds have been closed due to covid since the very early days of the pandemic when noone had any idea how infectious or deadly the disease was.
At that point, since you didn't know any more about the epidemiology of covid than the experts, I should hope you had another reason to stay away not just arbitrary rule following or social pressure.
I was exceptionally careful during early COVID. And I thought many restrictions: closing hiking trails, small playgrounds... benches! were exceptionally stupid. Most localities did not go that far. Mine did.
You can think that, and you were right, but it was a justifiable perspective in the absence of better data.
BTW, if you start tracking the current spread of Omicron, there is strong evidence that Omicron is contageous enough through close proximity even outdoors for short periods of time: Benches, ski chair lifts, playgrounds, hiking trail bottlenecks.
The original COVID variants weren't that contagious, but if they were equally threatening and as infectious as Omicron, it would have been a completely correct policy.
> You can think that, and you were right, but it was a justifiable perspective in the absence of better data.
A weakly justifiable perspective that was away from the consensus view at the time and caused harm (probably reduced compliance with the reasonable measures, in addition to all the secondary harms).
I had cops threaten to give me a massive ticket for standing in the middle of a field with a telescope by myself. Said cops were 100% of my human contact outside my household in March. This probably wasn't our best enforcement bet.
> there is strong evidence that Omicron is contageous enough through close proximity even outdoors for short periods of time
I don't buy this. I'm in a test-100%-weekly environment and this happening any more than rarely isn't compatible with our observations.
> The original COVID variants weren't that contagious, but if they were equally threatening and as infectious as Omicron, it would have been a completely correct policy.
We already had a decent estimate of R0 as 2.0-3.5 even in dense environs, and consensus was already forming around a 2.4 "best guess". We also knew that indoor was the vast majority of that 2.4.
This is extremely anecdotal, but I have a friend group who are all extremely careful (no socialization; grocery delivery only; other measures that many would consider too extreme)
But we're in a mountainous region and it's winter, and we all ski. I know 3 people that got Omicron and the only close proximity to people they had in the time period was chair lift lineup and the chair lift itself.
Many things we did early on were of dubious value. I used to wear gloves in the grocery store. Totally pointless. I still know people who are anxious about getting takeout, so they microwave / reheat all their food, "just in case" it has covid.
>Who was shaming children? local parents? government officials? I didn't see any of this shaming. In fact, where I live, more children were at the parks.
They are somewhere in Canada. Regulations and attitudes differ depending on the location and phase of the pandemic.
>The City of Ottawa said Tuesday that an Orléans man confronted by a bylaw officer while kicking a soccer ball with his four-year-old autistic son in an empty field was given a warning, but not fined $700.
I hope people aren't forgetting what we went through and how the public and officials reacted to it. It would be hard to improve unless we remember what happened.
"overzealous municipal bylaw officer" isn't exactly some sort of mass oppression. I'm pretty sure bylaw officers writing dumb tickets existed before covid.
In March of 2020 when pretty much everything in North America closed and they reopened in May of that year. I didn't notice at first that the ticket was issued at that time. The understanding of covid was significantly less then and some of the measures were unnecessary in retrospect. This all has little to do with an essay penned this year about schools.
I was similarly confused with the contradiction of her kids having spent ‘one third of their lives in lockdown’ and mentions of going out to restaurants and seeing friends at their houses. Is that lockdown?
IMO, as a teacher: The kids are alright. For elementary kids, the rules are no big deal. For middle school, where I mostly teach... the rules are OK, but the unpredictability of what they're looking forward to happening (sports, dances, get-togethers, travel) is not great. Two years of indefinite uncertainty about everything good happening, with no end in sight, is crushing to adults, let alone kids with 13 years of experience in life.
In high school, it's a source of anxiety for some students. They don't want to bring a dangerous virus home or to their grandparents. Others refuse to comply with restrictions in normal adolescent defiance. Asking for the courtesy of wearing a mask is often a very "OK boomer" moment.
All of these things suck. But the students I work with are resilient and are working through it and making the best of it all.
I do think we should "call our shot" -- name some endpoints and acceptable levels of risk a priori, rather than making judgments heavily influenced by feelings and sentiments of the moment. This isn't enough to make the restrictions predictable, but they'll be more predictable than they are now-- right now we have to predict both the virus and how most other people will react to it to know what we'll be allowed to do.
With Omnicron spreading as it is, I'm kind of expecting that everyone will get infected this wave. And afterwards, everyone is then either vaccinated or recovered or dead and we can drop all of the precautions. What am I overlooking?
Assuming that the protection of a previous infection is approximately equivalent to vaccination, then the GP’s question is spot on - after Omicron burns it’s way through the population, we will effectively be at “full vaccination”. At that point, what are we trying to contain?
The question is how effectively recovering from omicron prevents a future omicron infection. If it prevents it then great, the problem solves itself, but if you can still pretty easily catch another round of omicron then basically this is just our life now, and eventually people will give up on any mitigation efforts and covid will just keep killing people.
Right now we are dealing with the fact that omicron hits hard, and fills hospitals. Here in Maine we did okay through previous waves, so we have plenty of people with no "natural" exposure to covid. Our hospitals are pretty much over capacity. So what happens if you get into a car crash and need medical attention if there's no room for you? It's somewhat unanswered.
Either option, thousands more will die and everything will be open in a year or two.
And you can get a cold more than once. What's your point? Omicron is a mild illness, especially if you're vaccinated. I'm not sure why we should keep acting like we were in mid 2020, when we didn't have vaccines at all.
It may be a “mild” illness, but a mild illness that spreads through the entire population at once is still a bad thing. Many hospitals in areas with Omicron have been pushed to the absolute limit, and that’s despite the fairly strict procautions that have been taken.
I live in Ontario in Canada and it’s a problem here. I don’t understand what 2 years has to do with it. The big point of restrictions is to flatten the curve. This might be the last time it’s a problem, or it might continue for another year, who knows? It really depends on what variants emerge and how serious their effects are.
Nothing. That's the plan most governments (except the very few Covid-zero governments) are going with. Once the impact to healthcare is low enough, the plan is to remove all restrictions, which is what treating a disease as endemic instead of pandemic means.
That's a different position than the one I advocated.
Containing an extremely contagious airborne pathogen is not the same as not simply assuming that "everyone will get infected" (which suggests that any activity to contain or restrict the spread of infection is 100% wasteful).
Mutations. An increased infections means increased chance of evolution of this virus. If the virus changes in the right way, current vaccinations wont work anymore. Another problem is if it becomes more mutable, we could have waves of seasonal covid that like a cold doesn't care if you had another variant.
It's in our best interest to try to stop the spread as much as possible.
Viral mutations trend toward reduced risk to carriers as a means to being more sustainably transmissible.
Like other biological entities, viruses evolve to survive and replicate more efficiently. If the hosts die off, survival and replication is stunted.
We’re not out of the woods yet w/r/t dangerous variants, but health risks will likely wane over time, and we’re obviously well past the point of meaningfully controlling transmission. We will absolutely experience seasonal waves and variance similar to the cold.
All of that said, we need to do some realistic cost benefit analysis at this point. We have a new cold-like virus on the planet, and we’re implementing new ways to protect ourselves and treat it (if we’re smart). At this point, are the mental health and quality of life sacrifices we’re making worth it in the face of an inevitable endemic?
Say there's a group of 100... like my county 42 of them are vaccinated. Say 10 die.... now you have 90... 42 vaccinated... that's now 46%...
More deadly strain comes along, hitting the unvaxxed, and maybe 10 more die.. vaccinated rate is now 52.5%..
Eventually anti-science people will just fall victim to evolution and we'll trend towards 100% vaccinated, and then less vector for mutation.
I think it'll always be w/ us....just maybe w/ less load via updated vaccines, we can continually keep it below high mortality thresholds for the general public, and lower viral load is lower chances for spread, and for mutations.
I'm at the point of not much caring anymore, esp as far as anti-vax people come, though it'd be nice if we could triage them better where all other people come first in the hierarchy of needs and then --and only then if there are available beds can they receive one.
I mean for decades we've done the same thing, except it was rich > poor... not it's people who trust doctors and are health responsible like organ donors are expected to be, who would receive first dibs at care.
My biggest worry is the plummeting health of the healthcare workers themselves. Their mental health, their mass exodus. You can't just replace them. It takes years to encourage people to go into and then graduate from medical fields.
I'm also worries about Cancer, i have lots of friends/family who've dealt w/ Cancer scares and most of them can't get even the littlest bit of pre-emptive care. My wife's mom died of Cancer last year and maybe she wouldn't have --had they not been throttling assesments and other doctor appointments.
I have toddlers in preschool, but at this point I just accept we're all going to get it... so not worth worrying about.. As virulent as this version is, I just can't fathom a 4 year old not catching it somehow...I just hope they have mild cases and no lingering after-effects, I think I might have it now, as I've been super lethargic past 3 days and just exhausted... I'm triple vaxxed and still if this is it, it's not pleasant.
TLDR: Delirious rambling re: I agree mutations are bad, dwindling healthcare worker health and resources is more bad, but also feel helpless, and kinda have given up, and just hope we can hurry up and get through all the unvaccinated people asap so we can fight this better. I'm a humanist, and usually compassionate, and care about human rights but I'm a bit jaded by the selfishness lately, and honestly the people who wouldn't wear a mask to protect others last year, I could care less if they end up winning a Herman Cain/Darwin Award this year. They provide so little value to society, they wouldn't have even been missed during the Thanos 'blip'. "Oh were you blipped? Huh...didn't evne notice...weird....awkward!".
> And afterwards, everyone is then either vaccinated or recovered or dead and we can drop all of the precautions. What am I overlooking?
Omicron is spreading rapidly for a wide variety of reasons, but not least among them is the fact that it significantly escapes any prior immunity gained via vaccination or infection with a prior strain of the virus.
It’s not at all clear to me why we’d assume that this will mark “the end” - if anything this seems like a good indication that we’ll see future strains with this measles-like contagiousness that significantly escapes any prior immunity gained from Omicron. And this is on top of the fact that immunity to coronaviruses in general does not seem to be particularly long-lasting.
At which point, unless we have significantly invested in hiring a lot more nurses and creating a lot more hospital beds (which I see no signs of), we will be looking at bringing back at least some restrictions in many jurisdictions to avoid having to cancel many medical procedures that have spent the last 2 years getting canceled repeatedly.
Luckily you don't need a crazy conspiracy theory because it's far more likely that Omnicron just mutated into a more successful version like viruses do.
Are they though? Assuming that they and their loved ones are vaccinated, the risk of death is relatively small, to the point where one could expect that they die of other causes first.
That said, they are correct. Assuming that at some point lockdowns just stop, everyone will be either recovered or dead.
Vaccinated people will be almost completely recovered, with unvaccinated numbering the most death.
This is not sarcasm, it's not selfish, it's a simple fact. Vaccinations are available to the general public and there are very few that are not capable of receiving the vaccine, many that choose not to.
Those that choose not to will have a higher risk of death, due to a decision they made.
> Those that choose not to will have a higher risk of death, due to a decision they made.
This makes it sound like you think the consequences of their actions are limited to them; if that were true, then I think the debate would be a lot less interesting.
I for one don't believe that the decision only affects the individual in this case.
The policy of universities and the federal government is to wait. What for? Undefined. Supposedly, they were going to lift covid restrictions, but then Omicron came. However we know that omicron is very mild and not any more a significant threat than driving a car or living in the U.S. in general. Yet here we are.
The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. have already had covid, or have been vaccinated, or both. The socioeconomic affects of current restrictions are like a smog of cigarette smoke across the country. It won't kill you as fast as the very few people covid now will, but it will kill you later. We aren't looking at the carcinogenic effects of policies. If we were we would see a skyrocket in homelessness, unemployment, evaporation of jobs, and a market that overall will not take the same risks knowing the government(s) can shut their operations down at any moment.
The policy makers for covid restrictions act like this is all a bandaid that will fall off eventually, but as far as I have seen they lied and the bandaid is actually a whole roll of duct tape.
"The policy makers for covid restrictions act like this is all a bandaid that will fall off eventually, but as far as I have seen they lied and the bandaid is actually a whole roll of duct tape."
No real epidemiologists is going to tell you that this is a bandaid that will fall off eventually. The people in the know will say "We don't have enough information."
If you're talking about politicians, there are plenty red states that are not enforcing any restrictions. So is your complaint just that you disagree with some politicians?
"My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. "
Yes, that's because there's a pandemic going on that has killed 32,000 Canadians and significantly impacted a much larger number. It's pretty upsetting. The notion that people are only upset because of government restrictions is pretty silly.
"she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? "
Yeah, we should tell high school students a lot more forcefully that cars kill people. Making cars the backbone of Canadian society is terrible.
"Our children need life on the highest volume. And they need it now."
Wear a mask in school to try to minimize the transmission of the disease, take it off outside, get tested if you have symptoms and then isolate if you're infected. Get vaccinated. This is not difficult. I'm not sure why we need a hand-wringing essay.
Don't congregate indoors in large groups. That's it.
Amateur hockey teams are still playing hockey in Canada. Most sports are fine, just without spectators. Prom wearing a mask isn't exactly a burden.
Again, kids are depressed because the disease exists, not because they're being asked to deal with it. Telling kids to go wild isn't going to make covid less depressing. That would probably kill a few teachers in outbreaks.
Yes, it sucks. Spreading an extremely virulent disease also sucks. Schools have a responsibility to not encourage the spread of covid.
I'm married to a public (high) school teacher and while I don't have the same level of risk as she does with regards to direct exposure, I get a lot of detail about how kids are reacting to the pandemic. The kids are upset about a lot of stuff. Mask wearing is not one of those things. They're upset about friends and family being infected, they're upset about their parents who work hourly jobs being out of work due to illness. Some smaller number are upset about it being harder to get a 4.0 on all their AP courses.
My point, such as it is, is that there seem to be a lot of people who think that kids are stressed out by disease control measures. My belief is that the kids are stressed out by the disease itself and they're actually pretty happy to try to help in controlling the spread of the disease. Of course not everyone is the same, etc.
My mother is a teacher. Yeah things suck for the kids but kids are more observant than people realize. You could not possibly hide this from them. Globally, millions are dead, and the kids would see that, as well as family members getting sick, no matter what you told them to do or how dangerous you told them it was.
My brother tells his young son this is all an overblown liberal hoax and the vaccine does nothing. Didn't stop the little guy from losing his sense of taste and smell.
These kind of things always sound like people thinking they can hide money trouble from their kids. You basically can't hide stressors from kids. They'll feel it. Hell, you can't hide stressful situations from a damn dog!
People who brought up these worries about the indirect impacts of COVID lockdowns were shouted down as heretics. Now if you don't support full lockdowns and shelter-in-place, you're supporting genocide against the immunocompromised, minorities, etc. (according to Twitter, company Slack, etc.).
TFA has a great line about many rites of passage being effectively stolen from a generation. That's something they'll never get back, and the fallout is something we'll be observing for decades to come.
But Twitter has this annoying tendency to cancel the accounts of people who say things they don't agree with, irrespective of whether those things are true.
They're doing those people a favor. Hell, even Trump is better off doing fun things instead of spending his time spewing, and reading, the toxicity of Twitter
From the comments, on these posts and climate change ones...there's plenty of people with religionist/anti-science agendas lurking on Hacker news.
That's probably why, I mean one of the founders of Ycombinator is Thiel is a huge Trump backer/supporter and supposedly transfuses the blood of young men to increase longevity or telomere elasticity or something... (real or urban legend I don't know) very disturbing for the inequality of it, and I mean you don't get more exploitative than using healthy people's blood. Esp, when blood banks surely could put that to better use.
Edit: IT could be pure urban legend, heresay, or just something gleaned from Silicon Valley, but I'm pretty sure I read about it somewhere... maybe even on here.
A shortage of truck drivers means the legal age for commercial truck drivers is being lowered from 21 to 18, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/business/apprentice-progr...
There is no getting back to the way things were right now and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional