So you are staying at home with them?
I was responding to your theory by suggesting obvious empirical consequences and pointing out that they aren’t there.
Sucks but my therapists were declared essential workers during the pandemic. Their kids have to get their education from somewhere and the spots for emergency care are limited. If they have to stay at home we cant treat people. Also especially in Germany the average age of teachers is pretty high and they arent really used to work with IT solutions. I also didnt say there arent other possibilities but the recent month showed me that the people in power didnt prepare. It was only the system of hope that their wont be a 2nd wave. Now that we were hit again all they knew was to use the axe again instead of using adjusted solutions for different areas.
Now its like a prisoners dilemma: We could close schools for a limited time which would result in a manageable negative impact, we keep them open with a better outcome or we have to close them much longer with the worst impact if the rest of the population (party folks, defender of freedom) doesnt also stay at home. Unfortunately the 2nd crowd thinks celebrating christmas as usual is at the top of the list.
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Someone earlier asked parents about their kids and extracurriculars. Guess I’ll chime in.
We decided to let our daughter go back to gymnastics. We’ve been very careful through the entire pandemic. I’ve barely left the house, my wife has been working from home, we haven’t sent our kids back to school, etc. But we reluctantly decided that we couldn’t make our daughter sit out of her sport for a year.
Even after her gym reopened, we didn’t send her back. We heard some iffy things about how they were handling safety and eventually withdrew her from the program. A friend who is also a coach recommended the county-run program, so we checked it out and were satisfied with their safety protocols. It also helps that there aren’t many girls in the gym. I’m not thrilled with the situation, but it’s been hard enough for my 8th grader to sit in the house all the time (though we have been letting her go for walks or to hang out outside with a friend, wearing masks), so as much as I don’t love the risk, it’s just something we thought we needed to try.
I always remind my daughter to let me know if there’s something she sees that’s unsafe.
The big problem is going to be the competitions, which start Saturday. We were given all the info about safety protocols and they are fine overall, but I still don’t love it. We asked the coaches if there was any thought about not going to meets, but of course there wasn’t. On the bright side, the meet this weekend is in a facility that holds 2000+ people (it’s huge - I’ve been there) and there will be max about 200 people there. Gymnasts are required to wear masks when they aren’t actually competing, only one parent per kid, etc. I believe my wife is going to go - she and my kid will wear N95 masks or even double-up.
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Just a thought, but why cant therapy be done as WFH?
WFH?
Work from home, remote, via the internet, teleconference, etc
By the way, I mentioned a couple weeks ago that two FB friends of mine had weddings during the pandemic (one mask seen in the pics they posted) and both have gone on honeymoons. Well, as expected, one just posted today that he has COVID and has felt horrible. He says he thinks he got it from someone he sat next to on the plane (to Hawaii, so long fucking flight) who appeared sick. Ya think?
Oh, and he had cancer a couple years ago.
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Well unfortunately there are other problems like data protection. Especially in healthcare thats very problematic. A lof of employers would have an issue with employees taking too much of their work with them. There are several areas where the insurances allowed for telemedicine during the pandemic. We thought about it for logopedics but in the end you have to find a suitable software thats accepted by the insurances. Everything has to be approved to be safe. During the first wave it wasnt clear if the investment would have paid off. Not many thought it would get that bad. But for the other areas like phys. and ergo. the use is very limited. The first session is usually doing a report. Often this report consists of several tests that you need to do in person to get a good look. The patients need to have a suitable receiving set as well and a stable internet connection. In my area internet sucks. Hard to accept in a developed country like Germany but it is what it is.
You can just hope that the pandemic showed all the shortcomings in several areas and we address them in the future.
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Not trying to disagree with my fellow poster here, but it absolutely drives me crazy when I see this used as a reason to not use safer means of doing any number of tasks during this pandemic (and I’m not suggesting that you are).
I get it, launching a Zoom meeting is hard and all that, but are you telling me that there are human beings that, if they spent one full hour of their life, sixty full minutes, creating Zoom meetings, joining them, muting people, unmuting, turning video on and off, sharing their screens…they really couldn’t figure it out? I’m sorry, but if you can’t manage that with just the tiniest bit of training and effort, there has to be a WHOLE lot of things that you can’t really manage well.
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I agree it should be possible. The questions is more of “wont” or “can’t”. There are a lot of teachers who didnt evolve in 30 to 40 years at the job. They still teach like 20-30 years ago. They dont attend advanced training. People say teacher isnt just a profession its also a diagnosis.
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Listen the big problem is that OFS is not digital or at least it doesn’t have to be.
Same with OFB, some dining etc.
Some schedule of 4-8 weeks on with good practices and 1-2 week lockdowns would provide set periods to burn out transmission chains. Kids get mostly in school instruction. Everyone can plan their lives, schools, and businesses.
We are being asked to make false choices and essentially those are Republican style talking points.
BLM doesn’t mean that others lives don’t.
M4A doesn’t mean rationed medicine (any more than the current system rations based on wealth).
Anecdotes aren’t data. I’m glad there are first world schools that take it seriously. I’m inclined to believe that where there is school transmission it’s due more to transgressions-out of school activities, non compliance with best practices in school/bussing. We have to consider what the typical school is doing. Public health officials have to consider what the least compliant schools are doing.
Second topic - there is a big difference between setting universal public health policy vs what you can do locally. If we were all that smart then no one would be indoor dining, it’s effing insane.
So here we are with a crazy system that obviously does not prioritize keeping schools open. IMO after the necessary production for society (eg toilet paper!) then schools should absolutely be next on the list for f2f instruction.
As far as kids deficits- is rather try to fix that problem then
A try to raise the dead
B deal with the long term consequences of millions of infections that have shown to have a fairly high frequency of long term effects so far and no reason to believe that there will not be substantial health care and life impact costs in the coming decades among those infected.
But finally- it’s a false choice. Instead of agitating for OFS people should be calling for a sane planned out system that enables OFS.
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There are millions of kids living in a house with their grandparents as well.
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I’m doing mine over Skype.
Definitely lacks the intimacy of in-person therapy.
Thankfully, my therapist can open her office starting next week.
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Just to clarify my statement since you are directly referencing something that I wrote: When I said zoom classes were borderline useless for my kids, that was just a descriptive statement of my experience. It is based on my specific experience with my specific kids, I didn’t intend to extrapolate that to zoom classes are useless for all (I think they are obviously harder to execute for younger kids) or as criticism of a schools should be closed argument. Apologies if it came across that way, I certainly dont take offense at what you characterize as corrections.
I am glad that your kids are having a better experience than mine had. Hopefully my kids experience will be better the next go round because I dont have a lot of optimism of remaining in person through the winter just given the likely community spread. We were well under 5 daily cases/100,000 when school started and it is up to 15 and rising now.
Schools just frustrate me (and Im sure others) most of all in terms of our response to the pandemic and Ive seen anecdotal evidence that they could be opened if we had the will to handle the pandemic properly and the proper resources for schools.
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Quoted for truth.
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This is a great plan, and we should definitely do that. Until then, though, open up the schools. Once there’s a rational strategy in place for combatting COVID, I’m sure no one would begrudge a school closing here or there when it’s necessary. Let’s get that strategy in place first though!
Less sarcastically though, it’s completely reasonable to expect young children and parents to make sacrifices for the greater good of defeating COVID. It’s much less reasonable to ask people to make sacrifices that are instantly frittered away by the insane irresponsibility that’s all around us. Your pitch essentially boils down to waiting for a serious public health policy (never happening) or a vaccine to defeat the epidemic, then we can consider reopening schools. It’s meaningless.
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Everybody, I think, agrees that schools should not be closed while we have bars and restaurants open. But the answer to that imo is to close everything we can but schools so that schools remain open. But obviously that requires a coherent response from the government that will support people and businesses while everything is shut down. So fuck us, right?
The amount of learning my kids are getting from Zoom is debatable. What isn’t debatable is the impact this has had on them from a socialization perspective. My older kid started a new high school this year and knew nobody. That has sucked. My younger one is in his last year of elementary school. My older one sees one friend in person and my younger one two friends, we trust both the families. But the isolation has taken a real toll on both kids.
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Not to open an anecdotal can of worms.
My wife’s co-worker in Houston just found out their 7 year old is pozzed. The only known poz they have is her teacher. But who knows. Believe that they are pretty careful in their home life. Both parents are wfh.
Give this the same weight for any other anecdotal account.
OFS should have started with what amounts to a first day of seminars on what is COVID, what are the restrictions, and why those restrictions are in place, appropriate to the student’s level.
And they should figure out how to encourage students to snitch on each other for violating protocols, both in school and out.