insurance mainly. Your patient has good insurance? We’d love to send out our transport team and bring him here. Medicaid? Sorry no rooms available. Uninsured? lol sorry buddy can’t help you. Same as it ever was. Also, yes subconscious racism plays a role in individual care decisions as well. Individually those decisions can be chalked up to clinical judgement and are perfectly defendable, but systematic reviews of charts regularly show minorities receive a lesser level of care.
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Although there were de facto school closures because people kept their kids home and some private schools chose to close, public schools here were never closed in lockdown. The government’s expert advice is that schools are low-risk environments for COVID spread. It’s hard for kids to get infected and generally viral load is low even when they are, so putting a bunch of them together creates a herd immunity-like situation where R is well below 1.
We’ve had a little of it, but the numbers are much lower. Melbourne, a city of 5 million, had 100 people out or something at their anti-lockdown protest.
The levels of incompetence in the response to this are almost incomprehensible by the Trump Administration:
Like, as bad as everyone here thought and assumed it was, it was way fucking worse.
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There’s a discussion paper here from the British Medical Journal:
Conclusion reads in part:
Governments worldwide should allow all children back to school regardless of comorbidities. Detailed surveillance will be needed to confirm the safety of this approach, despite recent analysis demonstrating the ineffectiveness of school closures in the recent past.
There’s a Q&A here from the public broadcaster in Australia as an explainer for people wondering whether they should send their kids back to school.
Looks like I was wrong about viral load, but this is the relevant part:
Kids appear to be playing a very small role in the spread of this virus.
Dr Short and her colleagues reviewed the global literature to see how often it was kids who were bringing the virus home, and initiating clusters of cases in households. Their paper is available as a preprint, meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed.
“So in less than 10 per cent of cases was it actually the child bringing the infection into the house,” she said.
This is in comparison to avian flu, another emerging viral infection, where using the same approach they were able to show kids drove about 50 per cent of the transmission clusters.
That kids are not walking and talking coronavirus spreaders may be counterintuitive to a lot of people.
“One hundred per cent honesty, when we started this study that was my hypothesis, so I’ve come full circle,” Dr Short said.
And that’s good news for schools, said infectious disease physician and microbiologist Peter Collignon of Canberra Hospital and the Australian National University.
“If this was influenza, we would keep schools closed until this was over,” Professor Collignon said.
Read the BMJ paper. It’s from May 19. They discuss the Kawasaki-like syndrome, it’s very rare, much rarer than other severe childhood illnesses which don’t justify closing schools.
Edit: The mention is brief, it’s just this:
The media highlight of a possible rare new Kawasaki-like vasculitis that may or may not be due to SARS-CoV2 does not change the fact that severe COVID-19 is as rare as many other serious infection syndromes in children that do not cause schools to be closed.
Interesting. I still think closing schools and everyone who could working from home played a huge role in reducing R from March 1st compared to now. I also think the fact that is still happening on a wide scale is the biggest reason we haven’t seen an explosion of new cases now. That being said obviously I am far from an expert.
It really doesn’t matter if we knew for a fact no kids would ever get a single symptom. What we are really fighting against are asymptomatic spreaders who spread the virus undetected. Kids and schools seem like the absolute perfect medium for spread so I would be very surprised to find out somehow kids don’t spread the virus when asymptomatic.
Here is the bio of the guy who wrote that article:
SHORT BIO: I’ve been a reporter at CNET since 1998, covering all kinds of technology issues. I have a particular focus on Web browsers, Web development, and digital photography. In the past I’ve been the beat reporter for Google, Yahoo, Linux, open-source software, servers, and supercomputers. For some perverse reason, I have a soft spot in my heart for the work of standards organizations and I/O interfaces.
Your entire approach to COVID has been to complain about other people not taking evidence and expert advice seriously enough, but then when the evidence and expert advice indicates that you are being over-cautious, you just reject it out of hand.
There have been 200 cases of the Kawasaki-like syndrome worldwide. If you’re keeping kids out of school for that, you should never be sending them to school. Something like 150 kids are dead from influenza this season just in the US, even with the lockdown.
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The bigger problem with schools is the insane amount of cross-familial contamination that is inevitable. One kid who was an asymptomatic spreader seems like they could easily be responsible for hundreds of infections. Just their immediate classmates, teacher and all the people they ultimately come into contact with. Classes are literally in the same rooms breathing the same air for long periods of time. Then they go home and spend hours with the rest of their family. You couldn’t design a better system for rapid spread.
School would make some of these Covidiot pictures we have been posting with places swarmed over look relatively safe.
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At least read paragraphs 4 and 5 of the BMJ article.
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I mean, you keep citing this over and over, and it’s clear your position is that you’re never trusting the experts ever again because they might have been wrong once about this one thing. And I have to say, that’s a pretty bad take.
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I have been wanting to get out of the city and build my own house somewhat off grid for awhile and this has motivated me. Drove out to rural area about 45min to hour outside of Portland OR to look at some property. I saw lots of Trump 2020 signs. Any rural areas on the west coast that aren’t going to be like that?
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I get where he is coming from. The mask thing has bothered me the most. It’s unreal they told us it was more dangerous to wear a mask.
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Look in the mirror, buddy.
You should take a more “cautious approach” to posting your dithering drivel.
Think ~everyone paying attention at the time realized that was b/c
(1) they didn’t have enough n95 masks and didn’t want people to frantically toilet paper buy them so medical pros wouldn’t have them;
(2) concerns that people would be less apt to self-quarantine with masks at a time when quarantine was the biggest priority while they studied this weird new disease
Much of the “don’t wear mask” talk from March 2020 directly cited both of these reasons. There was never a question of effectiveness (why the hell would doctors treating COVID patients wear them if they didn’t work), it was a medical decision infused with politics (not all malevolent).
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As recently as March 31 , the World Health Organization was still saying only people sick with the coronavirus or those taking care of those with the virus should wear them, according to CNN.
Lol
They said people didn’t know how to wear them. They would touch their face putting on and taking off. Now it’s wear a home made mask that’s constantly falling off your face.
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Yes, that was a part of it, and it’s another obvious clue that they’re giving the game away!
They were saying they wouldn’t be effective not inherently but because of perceived user error. It’s also why doctors say “eat a balanced diet” instead of “count calories”.