Am I missing “slow the testing down” ?
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Any teachers or spouses of teachers for kids ITT? Would love to hear more of y’all’s perspective on going back.
A few of the teachers on the forum gave some of their views in this thread
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My girlfriend is an elementary school teacher. I basically have no faith that our school board will do anything to protect her. This is in Florida.
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Pretty thrilled my mom retired from 40 years of teaching last year.
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My wife is a first grade teacher. They are set up to back in 4 weeks. They have some bullshit guidelines that won’t do much. She has 30 students in her class. Large tables (not individual seats). I’m really stressing about her going back. We could probably have her quit and be fine until she gets a different job, but that seems very drastic.
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Working and almost certainly getting COVID-19 seems pretty drastic, too. I think it’s very tough to make logical decisions right now in a society where 99% of peopl are being absurdly illogical. They are almost inadvertently gaslighting logical people through their behavior.
It’s extremely reasonable to consider not working.
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My wife has a couple health issues and was working at target, she took leave in march i think, we thought they were going to force her to go back last week and literally that week they call her and say they have had their first employee test positive. We can do alright, not great, but ok without her working so she’s going back on leave.
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My wife is considering quitting rather than go back to work in July, when they want her back in the office. (Even though she can do 98% of her work from home.) But since it looks like my daughter will be going back to school in the fall anyway, we’re reconsidering if her quitting makes sense. No good answers, and for the most part a lot of it is out of our control as we have been completely left hanging by our leaders.
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Im a former high school teacher. Quit after 2008 to go back to school while playing poker
I would quit before returning to work in August.
Going to a school now is absolute madness.
We are drawing live to the stand or station 11 scenarios.
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Our county in Georgia lets us choose virtual or in person learning. It’s a 1 semester (for middle/high school) or 1 quarter (for elementary) commitment.
The virtual students have a different teacher so I think some teachers will be in person and some virtual so hopefully those who don’t want to be in a school to get covid can be the ones who opt to do virtual teaching.
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Warnings of hospital bed shortage in Texas
The Mayor of Austin, Texas has warned that hospitals in the city could be “overrun” within two weeks if cases continue increasing at the current rate.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Steve Adler warned that places in intensive care could possibly fill up within 10 days.
“If we don’t change the trajectory, we are within two weeks of having our hospitals overrun,” he said.
The number of Covid-19 patients currently hospitalised in Texas has risen to 7,890, up from 3,247 two weeks ago.
In the first four days of July, 15 US states have reported record increases in new cases of the virus which has infected nearly three million Americans and killed almost 130,000 people.
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Have they considered slowing down testing?
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Ty to you (and all others) for sharing. I would feel so conflicted as a teacher. I recognize the risk from returning and the challenges ahead if school does not resume. I would feel like I was abandoning the kids, even though the actual abandonment has been from a government that believes helping people hurts them.
But as you point out, as bad as the issues are without returning to school, I am not looking forward to a scenario where even a small percentage of teachers get sick and die. The teachers who feel they’re abandoning the kids and so return to work tend to be among the most empathetic and valued teachers to their students. Seeing them die will wreck the kids.
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Regarding the low death rate, I don’t understand why it can’t just be the leading edge of this wave (or escalation of first wave or whatever you want to call it) is mostly just youngs/healthies, combined with nursing homes infinitely better prepared? Why are we waving that off as not enough to explain it?
A lot of communities just weren’t taking this thing seriously the first go-round. According to Van Jones there was a rumor running rampant in the black community that black people were immune. They know better now. Latino and other recent immigrant families who live in tight-nit clusters with at-risk and older members should hopefully be taking it a lot more seriously now.
Hospitals are reporting a much lower average age right? That either means the virus has mutated into something that affects youngs more, or this wave skews drastically younger. The latter seems a lot more likely.
Now will this hold true for just the leading edge, then fall apart as they spread it to older/at-risk people? Seem like a good possibility.
SC numbers for today:
1465 cases
9 deaths
16.6% positive
1251 hospitalizations
Other than the hospitalizations not too bad. Deaths cases and positive % are down. Seems like the lower R0 has taken effect and we may be approaching a plateau in new cases and near the top of hospitalizations by the end of July. Nowhere near being overrun in any foreseeable future! More than 2 open beds for each hospitalized Covid patient right now, and the hospitalization growth has thus far not made that be in danger.
I am a high school teacher in Germany. We opened up in May (we started with the oldest students and added one year every week).
Classes are separated. One half is in school, the other works from home and we switch from week to week. Students have to spend times off (e.g. lunch break) outside the building.
Around 20% of colleagues wear masks in the hall, but not all of those do in classes. At risk students and teachers can continue working from home.
Groups are fixed, so the same students sit next to each other every lesson (5 feet apart). After the summer holidays we will most likely go back to full groups.
It feels quiet safe this way, but that is mostly because there is almost no virus in our area. The county (~150k people) has had two cases in the last four weeks. I definitely would not feels safe with Florida numbers.
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“Some testing sites in Texas are struggling to keep up with demand”
Best testing in the world ever but we ran out of tests
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It’s Sunday of a holiday weekend. That means reporting is down, and lots of YOLOing likely went down this weekend. I’ll be updating my model tonight, I’m not particularly optimistic though, even with the lower reporting (which I do not account for).
I still think the most likely outcome by far is that we find out in a few months to a year that there was a significant increase in deaths year over year in the South and it just wasn’t counted as COVID.
They don’t care so much if they get caught, the damage is already done at that point and they’ll have gotten what they wanted out of it.
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