COVID-19: Chapter 6 - ThanksGRAVING

[WichitaDM]

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.

[WichitaDM]

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.

[anon29622970]

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.

[boredsocial]

I’m sure deciding to hold a bike rally was worth it. As I think about it it’s a bad spot to be in out there, deciding whether to let it happen or not. If you say no your constituents who are very red are going to all but lynch you for ruining the local economy… and if you let it happen this happens.

In other words what’s happening out there is 100% Trump’s fault. And to think that six short years ago I was convinced that it was very hard for a president to have actual impact domestically. I should have remembered my own framework for historical figures… that usually big moments are triggered by incompetence rather than brilliance. Don’t get me wrong brilliance wins usually, but that usually looks like a ton of small opportunistic gains made in the total absence of major fuck ups.

[anon29622970]

I don’t know how they don’t end up completely wrecked as a state by this. They don’t have the healthcare facilities to handle this absurd of a wave. It’s a major health emergency worse than anything we saw in NYC early on and there’s zero leadership to do any about it.

[bobman0330]

I suppose you’re just editing the timeline for persuasive effect, but I prefer to imagine that you’re like a Westworld host, and just can’t perceive information that isn’t peer-reviewed.

Mr Science: demands data
Girl Economist: assembles a bunch of data
Mr Science: It doesn’t look like anything to me…

[Trolly]

Ohio is exploding on worldometer right now.

[WichitaDM]

Damn.

[Churchill]

Coronavirus: US sees record-high daily Covid numbers as election nears

The US saw a record high of 91,000 new Covid-19 cases reported on Thursday, with spikes in dozens of states just days before the presidential election.

The same day, over 1,000 Americans died with the virus, as the national death toll and number of patients in hospital continue to trend upward.

Will we see 6 figs today?

[WichitaDM]

If we don’t have any weird reporting issues with any of the states I think we will.

[spidercrab]

I feel like there are multiple arguments happening, and I’m not even sure I know what those arguments are.

I am taking for granted that we are in this baffling world where we have prioritized bars and restaurants being open. Yes, that sucks, but I can’t do anything about it. So in that world, should schools be open?

I am in a location with a very high rate of spread right now (just outside of Columbus, Ohio). We’re at something like 200 cases per 100,000 individuals over the last two weeks, which is the metric that our school district is focused on. Everything over 100 per 100,000 is deemed high spread.

Does that high spread mean that we should open schools or not? I’m actually not sure. This is how I view the various factors.

Arguments in favor of opening:

• Kids’ education will be better if they are in school. My belief is that this is almost certainly true.
• Households’ well-being will be better if they are in school. A couple of factors are that kids being in school makes it easier for parents to earn their incomes, and families are going batshit crazy being around each other 24 hours at a time and becoming de facto teachers.

Arguments against opening:

• It’s potentially unsafe for the kids.
• It’s potentially unsafe for the community.

I want to focus on these last two points, because I think people have different assumptions about how true they are with regard to schools opening vs. being closed.

I’ll start by saying that I have no doubts kids can spread it. Some quick data from my school district:
We have 11,500 students currently attending in-person schools on a hybrid basis, with 2,000 staff members. The state of Ohio reports a cumulative 63 positive tests among students and 18 positive tests among staff. That’s a 0.56% rate for students and a 0.90% rate for staff. Since 8/31, the state of Ohio has recorded roughly 82,000 new cases out of a population of 11.69 million, for a rate of about 0.70%.

In short, I think it’s reasonable to say that the virus is spreading at about the same rate among students and staff as it is among the general public.

But I think the important question is whether this transmission is happening within schools or not - does school opening actually cause an increase in transmission? Much of the communication that we’ve gotten has been clear that many of these student cases are being transmitted through outside events. I believe that more than a quarter of the student cases were traced to a single private party that was hosted on what would have been Homecoming Weekend. (The actual Homecoming event was cancelled.)

If that can be generalized, then I’d say we should just open up schools because opening up schools doesn’t meaningfully increase transmission above the rate it would otherwise be.

So even though I’m very concerned about the virus and believe that many businesses should be shut down, I’m not sure I understand the argument for shutting down schools completely. Is it based on the assumption that school transmission is going to be greater than the transmission that would otherwise have happened? If so, have we seen any evidence that actually attempts to capture that counterfactual?

[superuberbob]

If it makes you feel any better, our new Minister of Health doesn’t know how reproductive numbers work:

Blatný se seknul při výpočtu reprodukčního čísla. A hned dvakrát - Novinky

"If we have a thousand infected and the reproductive number is 1.5, then the number will increase to 1500. So only by five hundred. If we have a million infected and the reproduction number is only 1.1, there will be an increase of one hundred thousand, "said Blatný in the Chamber of Deputies as an example

.

[anon10387340]

@WichitaDM

The Dakotas are absolutely exploding right now:

Maybe eating a hot dog dangling off a string look ma no hands style while drunk, shirtless, and sitting on a motorcycle isn’t actually a good idea during a pandemic?

[spidercrab]

Putting this in a different context, Ohio State University is testing (largley at random) roughly 3,000 students and staff each day, and has had a positivity rate of <1% for at least the past month.

I think it’s fair to say that this forum largely believed that opening a large university would be a disaster. (I myself thought that OSU would reverse their decision by mid-October.) My question is this: If you knew that OSU would be able to maintain a positivity rate of <1% through aggressive testing, tracing, and quarantining, would you have been more in favor of opening? I know that I definitely would have been.

[SensiblePerson]

@WichitaDM

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.

Agree with this, and it also applies to their sudden concern about mental health, suicides, etc.

[Danspartan]

That’s 2.5 percent of the population if constant for 2 weeks. At least ND. That’s 4x NYS at its worst.

[WichitaDM]

Many schools have been shut down with severe outbreaks. Your opportunity cost point is a good one. You can’t just say kids got it at school so school bad. You have to compare it to what they otherwise would have been doing. Same with the teachers.

Things we know almost for certain:
-Virtual school is worse than regular school for learning, social interaction, social safety nets.
-Kids can spread the virus.
-The average school setting is towards the highest risk activities you can do. Getting 1000 people into an indoor space is always going to be risky and that won’t change.
-Teachers will die. Here in Oklahoma we have had 5 teachers die from Covid already since we went back to school. Now we don’t know for sure they contracted it at school I suppose but that is still bad.

Weighing risk/reward is a judgment call that there isn’t likely to be a black and white answer to. There are costs and benefits on both sides of the argument. If you are going to have public policy be one that has high rates of spread anyways and people indoors at Chili’s and church then school at least has a lot more benefit than those activities and it makes little sense to keep those open while you close schools.

But that doesn’t mean it is “safe” it just means we are saying fuck it in all situations so there is no real reason to treat schools any different.

[suzzer99]

And when this happens the base will just ignore it if it doesn’t hit close to home, or find some way to be mad at liberals if it does.

Rs know this - being soft and weak or saying no is the only thing that can get them in trouble. There is zero accountability for making their core constituents’ lives worse.

[WichitaDM]

Isn’t OSU mostly virtual so far?

[MrWookie]

Yes. Especially since schools can, at least in principle, enforce universal and consistent mask compliance. Bars and restaurants fundamentally cannot, and as such they will always be dangerous unless and until we can get case loads down to near eradication levels. Movie theaters are a curious case, because in principle you can have a mask on the whole time, but I’m not sure a theater can justify opening without concession sales, making that moot.