I don’t know how many of you have heard of this author’s writing before:
And I am not going to go into an in-depth discussion, but I feel the need to comment a bit. School re-opening is a very complicated topic, and trying to simplify it inevitably leads to poor decisions. My usual line is that it is a decision point with no correct answers. Every option is wrong, and trying to find the least harmful option is fraught to say the least. I have written previously about the steep psychological toll this pandemic is taking on kids, and the deepening of the divide between wealthier kids with good internet access and parents who can work from home, and those less fortunate in their settings. At the same time, death is not the only endpoint to be considered, and the evolving but incomplete knowledge of long term effects on cognition and health from even asymptomatic cases of covid cannot be just ignored.
In short, any discussion style that tries to make this into a simple, obvious choice is doomed to be erroneous. The “rightest” answer will be different for every child, and every family, and every choice inevitably involves taking on a risk to your children, which is something the vast majority of us will move heaven and earth to avoid.
Let me repeat the take home on this: There is no correct answer, every answer carries significant risk to our children, a risk we cannot even quantitate at this time. Does that suck? Yes! Yes, that sucks, which is probably why so many want to oversimplify the question. But (IMHO) we cannot afford to do that. Our kids are our future, are the most meaningful and valuable things most of us will ever be responsible for, and as such they deserve the effort that it takes to actually assess the risks and uncertainties inherent in this issue.
And before anyone brings it up, I know I have not even touched on the economic and psychological impacts on parents, their employment and childcare needs, the added expenses incurred and etc. I am a medical doctor and not an economist, I have not studied those issues in any depth and choose not to make ill-considered statements in fields I do not understand. Make of that what you will.
(Edit because the edit button and the delete button are way too close together for my clumsy fingers!
What pisses me off is that instead of situations like this leading to efforts to improve security, they get used by pols who want to restrict or cut programs off completely. If a future wave of cases leads to more lockdowns, work from home, and unemployment, we need better support systems.
Yup this doesn’t strike me as a one off unfortunately given the ecocide going on.
Also, dole fraud is such an emotive issue for right wing politicians. Their own departments tell them that more money is lost through administrative and information failure from the departments, and that many people don’t get their due but they will still run campaigns based on it (the current deputy prime minister here abused his ministerial position to run a campaign on this that he used to gain power in his party).
Also, and I can only speak for Ireland here, but the sentencing practices for dole fraud versus tax fraud are extraordinarily lop sided. I did some figures years ago based on some high profile tax cases that actually did lead to custodial sentences (millions of euros worth) versus social welfare (tens of thousands of euro worth). A poor woman stealing could be sentenced to as much as twenty to fifty times the amount of jail time per euro as a wealthy man.
Sorry for the derail. But if we have social welfare hating politicians in power when a pandemic strikes they will behave poorly and with bad outcomes. It needs to die as a political issue used by the right wing.
NY Times reprint from the front page of Yahoo
https://www.yahoo.com/news/delta-variant-symptom-bigger-threat-120206554.html
America is one of the few countries with enough vaccines at its disposal to protect every resident — and yet it has the highest rates of vaccine hesitance or refusal of any nation except Russia.
Public health experts have fruitlessly warned for months that the virus — any version of it — would resurge if the country did not vaccinate enough of the population quickly enough. Bill Hanage, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, predicted in January that Florida might have a rough summer. Now 1 in 5 new infections nationwide is in Florida.
True, the speed and ferocity with which the delta variant is tearing through Asia, Europe, Africa and now North America has taken many experts by surprise. It now accounts for about 83% of the infections in the United States.
Be also aware that this article seems very hand-wavey to me, as conservative businesspeople and politicians alike were also abusing the PPP offer.
Just got my first one this morning.
Colour me surprised! We have an outrageous kartel based insurance system in Ireland. The pols hav insisted, for decades and without any evidence but backed up by the newspapers who take lots of advertising from the corrupt system, that the problem is fraud, particularly personal injury.
Needless to say the very parry that uses this as a mantra had members caught lying in depositions about disabling falls caused by others negligence, contradicted by their Strava stats for the races they were running while disabled.
Projection 100% of the time from the right wing.
That’s odd because he said that both he and his wife had battled Covid-19 in January 2020. I’m not saying that it wasn’t Covid, but the first case was officially in WA state around January 21, 2020. I’m wondering why he never got tested for the antibodies?
Short of a qualified medical diagnosis, I’ll hold off believing either of his infections were C-19.
THIS.
I refer to my posts regarding the fact that vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 does not mean sterile immunity., and have to emphasize the word symptomatic from the headline.
Emphasis on “could.”
Logic!
They’re starting to realize that dead constituents don’t vote.
Just another reason the get the shot!
Seriously, I watched my grandma vanish down that hole. The thought terrifies me.
Today, Tokyo Prefecture reported 2,848 new cases of COVID-19, which is the most cases that they have reported in a single day to date. This was just now reported, so I only have a link in Japanese now.
Only 78 of these cases were among those over 65, so it does at least appear that the vaccines are working (so far, the elderly and those with preexisting conditions have been prioritized).
