? I don’t get it.
Who is your governor? Is she/he specifically citing when case counts are very high?
We know for certain the highest risk behavior is prolonged contact indoors. Schools are literally 7-8 hours of this a day everyday. I don’t think it is a big leap to think schools are contributing to spread. Even if children transmit at a lower rate than adults they definitely transmit more in indoor confined spaces for hours than they do outdoors or at home on Zoom school. I don’t even think that is debatable.
The debate isn’t whether schools are “safe”. They are exactly as safe as every other similar activity. The virus doesn’t care if you are at school or Sunday school. The debate is what cost is acceptable to have in person school. Because it’s inherently obvious there will be a cost.
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It’s going to be years before there is conclusive proof about how much ofs contributed to the spread of covid. Right now the null hypothesis is children are people who spread human to human viruses. Until very strong proof exists that children either are not human, or for some reason do not spread covid, I’m going with ofs being a significant source of community spread.
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This is my last post on this aids, please ban me for a week if I write another word on it.
Anyone who cares can go here and follow the next 30 posts or so between me, Dan and bobman. I was definitely pretty abrasive here:
Frankly Danspartan I have a hard time believing you actually read any of this shit before posting it.
This was because I had found this pretty arrogant, frankly:
I call absolute bullshit on the opposing view. The math will get there as more data comes in with careful analysis. I’ll let some ego show— I’m known in my field for marrying math and intuition. This math is all closely related to my life’s work and my gut has yet to be wrong when it so strongly points me in one direction. Sometimes it takes time getting the data and calcs right to provide proof !but what we know now is actionable .
Bear in mind that’s my opinion he is calling “absolute bullshit” based on his vaunted “intuition” and that he is (in the same post) citing obvious bullshit in defence of his ideas.
I can be a dick at times for sure but I feel like I pick my targets, I am abrasive to people who are abrasive themselves (and feel like that’s all in the game) and not abrasive to people who aren’t. If the latter people disagree, I’ll try to tone it down a bit.
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DeWine - I’m in Ohio. He’s made this comment several times, including earlier this month.
He said schools have not reported many cases of transmission in the classroom or on school grounds. Most of it is coming from outside of school, he said.
“One of the ways we know [masks work] is we’re watching what’s happening in our schools. It’s not that we don’t have virus in our schools. We do. But by and large it’s not being spread in the classroom. And the reason it’s not being spread in the classroom is because students are wearing a mask,” DeWine said.
It’s fine if you take the attitude that schools shouldn’t be open until we know that the virus doesn’t spread at schools as long as they practice good safety procedures. We definitely don’t have conclusive data there, and I’m not sure we ever will. But the assertions in here have been much stronger than “we’re not sure it’s safe”. Instead, they’ve been closer to "It’s obvious that in-person school can’t be safe, and anyone who argues otherwise is a moron or trolling.
Like this:
What the fuck? As far as I know, no one here has argued that children cannot catch or spread the virus. The point, as illustrated in the governor’s quote above, is that some people believe schools can be partially opened because mask wearing, reduced attendance, and social distancing can prevent the virus from spreading in schools.
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And I think everyone concurs there will be a cost to not being in school but articles that compare missing a few months with dropouts is disingenuous.
Save lives now
Beat the virus first
Fix the fallout later
It would be great if we lived in a country that has an actual plan to support people through shutdowns, enact a scheduled cycle of openings and closings to allow business and school while trying to burn off the case rises before they overwhelm contact tracking (let alone the healthcare system). But we don’t. We used to debate Awvals number of deaths worth his tax breaks. We will be getting those types of numbers on a daily basis soon, but what can we do but let it happen. What can we do?
You guys are talking past each other. You agree that schools likely contribute to spread but should be a top priority to open over bars and restaurants right? Dan has been a big proponent of control the virus and then have school and sports and OFB and all the rest. I’m in that camp also and I don’t see how it’s wrong. It seems obvious to me the correct plan of action is to assume school will increase spread AND do everything possible to open schools. Restricting less valuable activity is the obvious step to do that.
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Churchill has been spamming the board with more or less this take.
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I doubt that primary schools (elementary schools in US-speak I guess) are a big driver of spread and think that there are huge downsides to keeping primary-age kids at home, in terms of missed education, missed socialization and burden on parents who need to figure out a way for them to be supervised. I think those downsides are frequently downplayed too much ITT and that the risks for spread are frequently exaggerated, where studies showing little spread among kids are greeted with “sounds implausible” and studies showing that kids do spread it are treated as gospel truth.
I acknowledge that the data are mixed and don’t pretend to know for sure what the answer is, but I think people who think the answer is obvious are wrong. High schools I’m less bothered about closing as the kids are better able to do distance learning (which all the evidence says simply does not work at all, basically, for primary students) and require less close care at home.
That’s my piece in its entirety. It’s crazy to talk about closing schools if bars, restaurants etc aren’t already closed but I think everyone ITT is in agreement about that.
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Even this might be optimistic. If the standard is conclusive proof, it may be never.
Okay, multiple people have made the claim that children don’t get it, or children can get it but don’t spread it, or maybe they just don’t get it as often and/or don’t spread it as easily. So my sarcasm is for those posters.
Ohio is just as much of a basket case as everywhere else. Masks aren’t fool proof, and lol @ thinking kids do a better job with mask compliance than the rest of the dipshits running around. The higher the community prevalence the better your chance of getting the virus even with masks.
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I think you need to re-read the thread then. And certainly the Atlantic article that started this shitstorm originally. I literally watched parent after parent on a local school board zoom make clear declarative statements that kids don’t get it, don’t spread it. Shockingly the school board still closed the schools based on what they were told by health experts. Cause those people really just want to close schools and don’t give a crap about educating children.
Wake up. There is serious gaslighting going on that is permeating the national discussion and I might suggest this thread at times. But of course once we get a sane federal government and the real Fauci and CDC get to fully use their voices I strongly suspect we will see a take that more closely aligns with the doc and science bros itt.
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Lucky for us there are all kinds of experiments being run in different countries, different states and even different localities. There will be a strong preponderance of evidence in some direction. And there will be poor analysis and even bad faith analysis to much things up in the popular press. But in the end there will be a strong scientific consensus among those researching in good faith. It will be a lot like global warming.
Look dude there’s not great data on this, but viral transmission spread by kids is very much a huge thing for every other droplet/airborne virus and I can’t think of a single plausible reason why covid would be different.
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I think we all agree there are significant costs to keeping kids out of schools. Or at least I think we do. Schools here in the US that have reopened haven’t exactly ran smoothly though. Teachers have died, lots of students get sick and many are going back to virtual or hybrid.
In short there is no pretend it doesn’t exist and go back to normal. In person school during Covid is a mess and less valuable than in person school at other times. It doesn’t have to be like that but when the virus is as prevalent as it is in the US right now people aren’t just going to ignore it. As always the solution is to control the virus and go from there.
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Yeah, that’s probably all true. My post was referring specifically to “conclusive proof”.
The Emily Oster article that you’re so fired up about certainly doesn’t say that children don’t catch or spread the virus.
For starters, because children typically have less severe disease (including higher proportion of asymptomatic cases) and less severe disease probably means less propensity to spread. For example, if you have a cough, that’s probably driving spread.
While I agree that it would be a surprising finding and skepticism is warranted, the thing is that while other respiratory diseases have been driven by spread among kids, studies have also never had any difficulty demonstrating that. There aren’t and never have been influenza spread studies out there showing that kids don’t spread it and that schools aren’t a problem.
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