And we must because without schools we can’t pretend that everything is hunky-dory and get all that human capital back to being processed, I mean processing.
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Yeah, that’s actually a point Drosten mentioned in the interview podcast more than once, as far as I remember: kids are usually in far closer contact than adults, both to each other and to their parents and caretakers. Even if they have lower virus concentration and do aspirate less volumes (hence, less virus transmitted in each breath, sneeze and cough), they are still likely to play an important role in population transmission.
ETA: @anon29537550 beat me to it while I was writing.
All in all, the discussion is really messing with my perception of even close friends as being rational.
Sidenote, I held a three minutes monologue today because asked about antigen tests and what they do tell us. I tried to point out what they do not tell us, ending and beginning the suggestion that the person who asked should get tested to have more information to base their actions on.
They took the takeaway that everything was ‘unsure’ and they still would have to make hard decisions, so - and I am not kidding here! - they said more information was less helpful.
And this was a scientist. A pedologist working in ecology, but still a scientist. PhD, formal scientific training, everyday work is science.
How are we, as a species, called “sapiens”, I ask you?
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I can support this by anecdote; I was far more regularly sick during my son’s time in school than at any period of my life before or since.
Interestingly, the government here closed down schools over the objections of public health officials, who thought kids would have more opportunities for exposure outside of schools. Now that the schools have reopened, the government has made it clear that if a second wave appears they will not close the schools again. They’ve been enforcing in-school social distancing protocols that seem impossible to me; I hope to talk about this soon with a friend of mine who is a teacher.
In Sweden, where the schools never closed, the number of deaths among children has been vanishingly low, but there have been a fair number of actual cases among children (which looks small only because there have been so many cases among adults), and presumably all these cases could have been vectors of infection for their more susceptible parents. Won’t someone think of the parents?
(In the US and maybe the UK I also worry about the number of comorbidities our children have. We needed more years of Michelle Obama in the bully pulpit.)
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Murderous fuckers.
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That is truly the polite way of putting it.
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I’m trying to be more respectable, ya know!
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The policies around reopening explain why some teachers don’t want to return to schools. I don’t blame them one bit.
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This gif is the sweet, cheerful little girl end of the spectrum for how I feel about it.
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Samesies…
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Good for them! My uni’s president announced that they were planning in-person classes in the fall, but I’m pretty sure that won’t happen; we have a strong union.
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A grade school teacher I know called the plans for her district “unworkable” because all the responsibility for all the new procedures fall on the teacher. School in-person for 2 days a week for each half of a class, plus distance learning for the other half, each day. Then a full day of online full classes on Friday, which they have already seen to not work. This doesn’t include the new feature of being the cafeteria monitor, because lunches are eaten at desks, and the janitor, because there has to be cleanup after lunch, not including the sanitizing that needs to be done every day all day, and the nurse to take temps and look for symptoms.
Their union seems to think this is fine.
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You’re right, that plan sounds like a lot of risk, and little reward - for the students or the teachers.
Just like in “nursing homes,” my state ¶ has been cutting back on the number of nurses on site at educational institutions for years. Now the chickens have come home to roost. Passing that on to the teachers would be terrible:
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Perhaps on Sunday you watched the entire nation being lectured on what constitutes fatherly responsibility by Boris Johnson, a man who won’t even say how many children he has, and leaves women to bring up an unspecified number of them.
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Came to post this. Amazingly powerful.
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Which is less than $2000 apiece. All the costs can be covered by the sale of one citizenship, an odd mainstay of their economy. I doubt many of the wealthy people who have bought these citizenships were "re"patriated.
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Gawd, I mean, we pay them out of sacred TAX dollars… aren’t’ they miracle workers? /s
Just, FYI, my university basically implemented the same thing, essentially.
Post war, the corporate view of unions won out.
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