For my mental health I’m ignoring a couple of folks for the next week.
2 Likes
Oh and as a quick aside, generally things that make no sense require very strong evidence to make me believe them.
For you to get me to believe that kids don’t spread covid well, you’d have to do some extremely controlled studies. Kids spread other viruses like freakin wildfire. Kids that go to daycare can expect to get 3-6 fevers from viral illnesses every year. Is it possible covid is magically different? Sure I guess, but no one has come close to hitting the bar I have for believing this.
9 Likes
Option A - people are suffering and dying with fully conscious thought
Option B - people are suffering and dying while being heavily sedated
Option A is my nightmare
1 Like
Yep. They’ve obviously reached the conclusion in the movie that masks don’t work.
1 Like
Early searches everywhere spiked when it became news
After that initial spike, the searches are pretty heavily correlated with cases based on those graphs
You don’t assume something based on data. You draw conclusions based on data. You assume based on your priors, without consulting data. That’s the definition of the word.
The irony is that you are assuming that children pose a high risk of COVID transmission, because kids get the sniffles a lot in the absence of any efforts to prevent sniffles transmission. Then you get to claim, Dothraki-style, that sending kids to school is known to cause deaths, and any arguments about how harmful a completely unprecedented shutdown of primary schooling will be get waved away as mere speculation (where’s the data on this thing that’s never happened??). And then when someone tries to create the data, you just set the bar impossibly high so you can never be convinced.
Is there a better data source on COVID transmission in American schools than Prof. Oster’s project? If so, let’s see it. If there isn’t, then quit pretending you worship the data and acknowledge that you’re really a disciple of science-as-an-institution.
But even assuming that Prof. Oster is a completely hacky, bad-faith advocate (shudder) of school reopening, is that actually bad? The actual state of play in the United States today, contrary to your preferences and mine, is that bars and restaurants >> schools. Not sure how public health authorities let that happen, but that’s where we are. If those weaselly economists trick everyone into believing that schools are no-risk, then they’ll reopen the schools and when COVID numbers get completely out of control, they’ll just have to close the bars and restaurants until we get back to the weekly 9/11 that society has decided to tolerate. That’s an improvement, right?
3 Likes
I can’t do pretty graphs, but this is a little provocative:
New York (first wave state):
Georgia (second wave state):
North Dakota (third wave state):
1 Like
Your need to stan this prof has led you to a truly bizarre place.
1 Like
Let’s cut to the chase, do think kids do or don’t spread COVID-19?
Quote from Emily Oster.
“I think we’re starting to get a picture of, you know, this being a relatively low-risk activity where the risks are maybe outweighed by the benefits, at least in more places than are doing it. So that’s different from saying all places should reopen or that, like, when you reopen, nobody will ever have COVID. But to - you know, the idea that, like, places in Massachusetts with very, very, very low positivity and case rates are not open at all seems like it probably is not good for kids.”
So its basically moot.
I’ve been skimming most of the school posts in here, and I think the take that I read that is correct was something along the lines of sure, open up schools, but first close bars and restaurants and other stupid gatherings, and when cases drop to some number (less than 25 cases per 100,000), open up schools but keep the other shit closed.
That seems like the right path forward for schools. Opening up everything first, and then trying to open up schools seems like a recipe for disaster.
4 Likes
Yup. In positive news, we’re only 2nd worst country in Europe regarding covid19
Gist: Belgium is worse because they have a higher 7 day rolling average of daily cases per 100,000 people than we do.
Oh wait…
And…
Turns out you’re gonna have more cases per 100,000 when you run nearly double the tests of another country with a nearly identical population.
Simply put, the CR is trying (again) to make it look like things are getting better by reducing the number of tests as that is a way to reduce the number of cases thus leading to restrictions being removed earlier than they need to be.
Of course because people despise the restrictions they’ll buy anything that makes it look like things are getting better.
EDIT: Also I suggest you guys check out where your country compares because it’ll make all of you feel way better about your situation.
1 Like
Certainly one can have reservations about dishonest but effective advocacy, but If the alternative is being a useful idiot for the other side…
I tried to get into this controversy and have an opinion, but I got derailed at “Dothraki”. Hot take: GoT was pretty boring and wildly overrated.
eta: I guess with the title of this thread and all it is a good place to go for clever references. Hat tip I reckon.
eta: “winter is coming” is a GoT thing, right?
1 Like
I really agonized over that line tbh. It did feel a bit forced. Hello fellow pop culture afficianados!
1 Like
This might be a reasonable take! But you’re leaving out the part where some have suggested that opening the schools won’t lead to a major increase in COVID spread. And when you ask for the evidence behind this counter-intuitive claim, you get called a science institution-worshiping Dothraki.
The rhetoric is pretty thick, even by bobo’s normal standards.
2 Likes
He is one of the few people for who it makes sense to risk Covid. He could literally be making a billion dollars if his career goes well.
I’m convinced the schools issue is just a way for some (not necessarily here) to “what about the children” and “we must think about the children” to justify all the terrible bullshit they are doing to spread the disease in the other aspects of their life. If you are eating out every week, traveling to Florida to party on the beach, attending Trump rallies, attending huge indoor events maskless like church you don’t care about anyone but yourself. These people don’t give a fuck about public education and have largely been voting to either directly or indirectly cut funding to it for decades. The whole children need school thing is just cover for their overall monstrosity and to try and put that in the column and safe and necessary along with restaurants and bars to “win” their dumbass covidiot political conversations.
That being said schools should be a top priority. I think we all agree here on that. But the covid denial crowd isn’t using kids in schools in good faith whatsoever. So I am going to be extremely skeptical of any non-peer reviewed study on this issue.
This issue isn’t that complicated and the fact we are going round and round on it for literally 6 months now here is really grinding my gears. Treat school as a top priority. Take steps to reduce communal spread and open schools taking what precautions you can. The real problem is Karen needs her Chili’s and salon time so it is impossible to control the spread outside of school.
The bottom line is that school isn’t going to be safe from a community perspective with widespread Covid cases. It doesn’t really matter if kids spread it at 25%, 50% or more. It’s just one more vector for rampant spread and death. School can be fairly safe but not in most places currently in the US that are filled with selfish dipshits.
13 Likes
The Dakotas are absolutely exploding right now:
To put that in perspective, adjusted for population, it would be like California having 70,000 cases/day.
3 Likes
JFC, I posted about North Dakota last week and it’s gotten worse. Population adjusted their 7 day average is equivalent to the US having 375k cases and 4300 deaths per day. Yesterday alone is the equivalent of 582k cases and 5600 deaths.
4 Likes