Nah, you seem pretty reasonable.
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I’m referring to a collective position, you personally have more balance and nuance than a few others. Apologies for the implication.
Short term effects of course. I’m talking about long term effects on education. Will there be some? Sure. Will it be significant long term? Who knows? Will it be worse the longer this goes on? How do we keep it from going on a long time? Keep community spread down. You know what we can be sure of? People that die of Covid will be dead long term. 100%
We aren’t sacrificing 10s or 100s. We will be pushing a million. Well they are old?
Known death vs short term education issues vs theoretical long term education issues.
Maybe you live in a great school district with lots of resources and responsible folk. What is a governor to do when a significant fraction aren’t in that category?
But no we have to have this digital argument about open or closed.
How about if spread is above x we close. Then when it drops below Y we open (y<x)
How about we OFS with some planned breaks? Like it makes sense to jus close to in person mid November to mid January. About 3 weeks of that is break anyhow. It cuts overlap betweeen schools and holidays.
Otherwise something like 8 weeks open and 2 weeks closed. Of course dining etc could do something similar.
How about we say no to all the school associated activities that foster the spread. Indoor basketball. Locker Rooms. Secret parties. They are going on here locally in a very wealthy area. Seems like it’s actually worse in the private schools, at least those are getting in the press and Facebook battles.
I posted above or in the other thread data showing that school spread was proportionate to community until a threshold. After that school spread grows faster. British study. They said at “high” community rates but noted that current rates are much higher than the “high” rates in the study, meaning that schools are currently a big problem. And it’s worse here in lolUSA.
So there I have offered a nuanced position that schools should be open when possible but they should be closed when it makes sense to do so (high community spread which we are well past today).
I’d like to see a serious discussion by OFS advocates other than “my kids are going to grow up stupid and socially inept for the the rest of their lives”.
Is there any situation under which schools should be closed? What’s the awval number of deaths?
Is there a better way for schools to be open or is it just, “well the rest of society said F it so let’s say F it too.”
I sat for most of an hour and watched parent comments at a school board zoom that were 100% in the open our schools no matter what camp. And they used Emily Osters op ed logic. Literally quoted her.
New variant = possible high school problems so if you keep this up a few more months, you might be correct. No issues with the last 9 months though. Elementaries return as normal, for the time being!
The government has delayed the in-person return of secondary (high) schools in England by one week.
The extra time is supposed to give schools time to set up mass testing, supported by the army.
School closures seem completely reasonable as part of a broader strategy to control the spread of the virus. Closing schools while leaving bars and restaurants and offices open doesn’t seem like a good strategy to me though.
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Regarding transmission in children, I might be ponied here as this is a few weeks old, but the gold standard now is an Iceland study, in fact check out National Geographic’s headline:
The study found that children (defined by them as 15 and younger) transmit the virus half as effectively as adults. The study was very well controlled:
The best way to understand how transmission might occur between children and adults would be to constantly monitor healthy families with school-age children to see if they get infected. By testing frequently, scientists would catch infections as they occur, making it clear who got sick first.
Iceland and deCODE put this into practice by conducting comprehensive testing and tracing, screening more than half the country’s population: Anyone who was potentially exposed was quarantined, sealing them off from the community, but often exposing their families. By looking at the difference between adults and children in these quarantines, deCODE found that children play a minor role in transmission.
This is as close as you’re going to get to a lab-conditions study. This joins other large studies from South Korea and Germany, as well as many other smaller studies, in concluding that children are much less efficient transmission vectors than adults. The Princeton study from September which Dan has linked several times now is the only large study I’m aware of to come to the conclusion that children spread as efficiently as adults, and has a few limitations, a couple of the major ones are:
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Their definition of “children” goes up to 17 years. There’s no disagreement that older teenagers spread just as efficiently as adults, in fact 15 in the Iceland study is older than I’d like. (There’s discussion of this and links to many other studies in the section “Don’t treat all ages the same” in the NatGeo article).
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The study took place in India, where conditions are very different in terms of high-density living, inadequate hygiene and so forth. It’s possible children do transmit just as effectively under these conditions, although I’m still skeptical given the weight of other data we have.
The author of the study goes on to say:
Iceland never closed its elementary schools, although it did close its high schools at the peak of its first surge. Data from its wave in September support the idea that younger children are less likely to get sick or to infect others. Stefánsson is in the process of publishing these results in a peer-reviewed journal, but he says the meticulous dataset is conclusive for Icelandic transmission—“and we have turned out to be a reasonable animal model for the human population.”
Stefánsson cautions that if everything but schools and childcare centers are closed, children would then become one of the primary sources of transmission. He explains that while the individual risk might be low among youths, schools will still have outbreaks.
That means the question becomes not a scientific one, but rather what level of risk society is prepared to accept to keep children in school: “What are you willing to live with?” he asks.
This is sort of the opposite of what school-closure advocates are saying, that schools should be closed when trying to get an outbreak under control. The state of Victoria here closed schools during their outbreak but:
Brett Sutton, Victoria’s Chief Health Officer also said that in retrospect, the state would not have closed schools. Partly thanks to his advice, Ireland left its schools open during the most recent lockdown while closing gyms, churches, restaurants, and non-essential businesses. Nevertheless, community infections have declined by 80 percent in six weeks.
“Our priority to keep the virus out of schools,” Russell says, “is to keep it out of the community.”
That last sentence is my opinion in a nutshell. I recommend reading the whole NatGeo article, it’s a good summary.
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I’ve often wondered why Rebekah has not accepted the unspoken invitation to join us in this thread and defend herself.
It’s because she was waiting to send Chris’ lawnmower into orbit.
https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1343579984804392962?s=20
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Okay, I’ll check next time, but to be fair, all ponies use the same credentials
I think Rebekah is not the hero we need, but she’s the hero we deserve.
That we can agree on. Thank you.
I don’t think half is “safe”. It’s certainly better if it holds though this mutant may erase any edge if all the popular info holds.
Schools should be open but we also have to be cognizant if the conditions on the ground in terms of the community spread and how effective the schools are at minimizing transmission.
Detente?
Jones turned herself in to Florida police after a warrant was issued for her arrest, on one count of “offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks and electronic devices”. Jones claims that the FDLE found no evidence that she sent the message on the emergency broadcast system, however FDLE’s statement explicitly says that they did find evidence of this, as well as a second failed attempt to access the system. FDLE also allege that Jones downloaded private data from an FDH system which included contact information for 19,000 people.
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There any reason to post national review articles without further comment? Like, are you posting it because you are sourcing it? Or are you posting it because you’re criticizing it? Because if you’re criticizing it, then fine, but at least put in some explanation. And if it’s because you are sourcing it…
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Don’t be so priggish. It’s a comprehensive, well-sourced account of the RJ grift. I believe it will be of interest to followers of the RJ grifting thread. If you have substantive thoughts about it, I’m sure everyone would love to hear about them.
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I got no clue really about Rebekah Jones or Florida COVID results, but it took like two sentences to be like, uh oh, this is some highly biased pseudo-journalism and noped right out of there. Also dunno what the National Review is, but I’m sus.
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National Review is Breitbart for the wealthy folks.
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It’s worth reading, but a little overblown imo. I mean, it starts off by noting her claims of a cover-up are inconsistent with her personnel records. Which, I don’t know - would I expect to see evidence of a government’s cover-up laid out in the employee’s personnel file?
It also digs up her unrelated-but-bad history with universities/students. Maybe not irrelevant, but also not new.
That being said, some of the timeline he lays out is sourced and seems directly at odds with her claims. Probably not going to change anyone’s mind, but worth reading.
Article spends basically zero time addressing the merits of her claims re: the Florida dashboard and a LOT of time going over things like her being charged and then never convicted of various petty crimes. I think she’s a fraud but this article is meh.
lol @ giving NRO clicks gtfo with that nonsense what did Fox and Friends have to say about it
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