Novel Coronavirus

[peb]

Let me clarify my view on schools with regards to this pandemic. Beyond the deaths occurring (thats obvious), the biggest long term damage to our society being cause by this pandemic is the failure to education our children (especially poor kids) adequately. On top of that, for the lower class, schools are often the mechanism we provide much of their nutrition, mental health services, and primary health care to children. Getting our schools functioning again should be at the top of importance. Other countries get this. France was having a HUGE surge and the one thing they did NOT shut down: schools. Here, we set arbitrary, and non-scientific, parameters (eg 3% positive test rate in NYC) as the threshold for having schools open. The data shows that kids are not at risk. Of course, we do know that some teachers are at risk. We need to protect our teachers (and other school staff). At this point, the best way to get that done will be to get them the vaccine as SOON as possible. But it appears to me that this has not been seriously discussed much at all. This is slowly starting to change.

A member of San Diego's school board member, Mark Powell, is finally making the case for this to be the case. Apparently Louisianna has put teachers in the second phase along with grocery store workers, maintenance personel, etc (better than nothing). New Hampshire has teachers in the third group.

[Hugh Conway]

Back to pebs South Dakota plan: kill ‘em all.

it’s always the fault of the line workers, the credit goes to the bosses, Republicans in a nutshell

[peb]

Back to pebs South Dakota plan: kill ‘em all.

it’s always the fault of the line workers, the credit goes to the bosses, Republicans in a nutshell

Would you mind giving some details of this supposed plan of mine? I do not recall ever suggesting any actions the people of South Dakota should be doing.

I am hopeful that South Dakota is possibly past its peak.

[Hugh Conway]

Almost double the yearly abortions in South Dakota and still climbing!

[peb]

Almost double the yearly abortions in South Dakota and still climbing!

You must be incapable of making any type of coherent argument. No wonder you don't care about our kids' education, its a generational thing.

[George Jung]

Teachers really do need to be 'first in line' for the vax. I've read nothing suggesting it's being promoted, at least, locally. Where's the Union, when ya need it?

[peb]

Teachers really do need to be 'first in line' for the vax. I've read nothing suggesting it's being promoted, at least, locally. Where's the Union, when ya need it?

I think the silence of the teachers unions on this point, after fighting so hard for limited school reopenings, is rather telling. I did find where the teachers union in Ireland is fighting for their members to be given the vaccine early.

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

Teachers really do need to be 'first in line' for the vax. I've read nothing suggesting it's being promoted, at least, locally. Where's the Union, when ya need it?

I know three teaching staff from our small local primary school who have been hospitalised since the schools re-opened in September - one has been off work for over six weeks and is unable to shower without supplementary oxygen.

So much for the claim that the little blighters do not pass the disease on.

[skuthorp]

Personal spats are pointless, the virus doesn't care.

[Hugh Conway]

You must be incapable of making any type of coherent argument. No wonder you don't care about our kids' education, its a generational thing.

For someone who complains about baseless attacks, you sure like to sling ‘em.

Im just pointing out the utter hypocrisy of the prolife morons in the Dakotas.

[George Jung]

I know three teaching staff from our small local primary school who have been hospitalised since the schools re-opened in September - one has been off work for over six weeks and is unable to shower without supplementary oxygen.

So much for the claim that the little blighters do not pass the disease on.

Yeah. Much more known now - and it appears the lil' buggers tend to (for the most part) not get particularly ill - but the relatively older teachers are swimmin' in the sewer! And fwiw - I believe peb has said just that, as well as others.

Curious your take on why the Unions aren't more pro-active - you think it's purposeful?

[ERGR]

So much for the claim that the little blighters do not pass the disease on.

Is there any evidence pointing at the children infecting the teachers? All studies I've read so far conclude that school personnel and other adults get the virus from other adults, rarely from children. Don't blame the children unless the infections chain has been traced to them. Do you know if the schools have been arranged to provide social distancing between adults, and covid-safe commuting to a fro their place of work.

/Erik

[Hugh Conway]

Curious your take on why the Unions aren't more pro-active - you think it's purposeful?

who should they talk to?

my sense is they are focusing on the now, not the still nebulous future with a TBD vaccine. I mean, if Trump is taking the credit for it, shouldn’t he take the responsibility for distribution?

[TomF]

Is there any evidence pointing at the children infecting the teachers? All studies I've read so far conclude that school personnel and other adults get the virus from other adults, rarely from children. Don't blame the children unless the infections chain has been traced to them. [/COLOR]Do you know if the schools have been arranged to provide social distancing between adults, and covid-safe commuting to a fro their place of work.

/Erik

Yes, there is evidence that kids transmit COVID to adults as easily as adults do to each other. In fact, in the province of Quebec leading provincial epidemiologists think that transmission in schools was the key to starting the "second wave" there. Perhaps through aerosols lingering in the air which might have been filtered out if the school ventilation systems were better.

Princeton and Johns Hopkins researchers working with PH practitioners in India recently published a contact-tracing based study of half a million people in India. The article (published in the journal Science) finds that children and young adults may be very important spreaders of the virus, particularly within households (where presumably the closer proximity leads to higher viral loads in the air).

I mean, the virus is just the virus, eh? Viral loads in the mucous swabbed from kids are as large as those on swabs taken from adults. The notion that children couldn't transmit an aerosol-borne infectious disease seems to have been predicated on kids' respiratory systems being smaller, and less able to expel the droplets as effectively. It never made sense to me - or I'd have thought to anyone who's caught a cold from their child.

[ERGR]

I don't think the teachers unions should have to be more active in this case than anyone else. It's a common interrest that teachers are protected so they can keep schools going.
/Erik

[peb]

Yes, there is evidence that kids transmit COVID to adults as easily as adults do to each other. In fact, in the province of Quebec leading provincial epidemiologists think that transmission in schools was the key to starting the "second wave" there. Perhaps through aerosols lingering in the air which might have been filtered out if the school ventilation systems were better.

I mean, the virus is just the virus, eh? Viral loads in the mucous swabbed from kids are as large as those on swabs taken from adults. The notion that children couldn't transmit an aerosol-borne infectious disease seems to have been predicated on kids' respiratory systems being smaller, and less able to expel the droplets as effectively. It never made sense to me - or I'd have thought to anyone who's caught a cold from their child.

This seems to be another example of the experts saying two different things. Yesterday Dr. Fauci stated " you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all, not like one would have suspected... the bars, the restaurants where you have capacity seating indoors without masks, those are the things that drive the community spread, not the schools"

[George Jung]

Is there any evidence pointing at the children infecting the teachers? All studies I've read so far conclude that school personnel and other adults get the virus from other adults, rarely from children. Don't blame the children unless the infections chain has been traced to them. [/COLOR]Do you know if the schools have been arranged to provide social distancing between adults, and covid-safe commuting to a fro their place of work.

/Erik

I checked my membership site, and from that, appears that, as of Sept., student infectivity of teachers is still an 'unknown'. They recommended continued caution. To my eye, vax for the teachers makes a lot of sense. AFA - who to talk to? I'd think teachers would be lobbying their union leadership. At least in Nebr., that 'leadership' isn't going to arise from our Repub governor. Partisan influence is incredibly destructive to this effort.

[ERGR]

The experience from Europe is that school children don't drive the pandemic. The mechanism behind that would be that children generally have a much lower viral load, which also is shown as lighter symptoms and hardly any hospitalizations or deaths. Our experience is mainly from the first wave so everybody played as safe as rasonable also regarding interractions with children. Children with symptoms stay home of course. Countries that initially closed schools opened them as soon as they could.

Less likely to transmit the virus doesn't mean impossible, so if you deny the existence of Covid-19 and act as usual with the children the situation would not be the same.

/Erik

[George Jung]

Guess we'll file this under 'known unknowns', for now.

[George Jung]

The experience from Europe is that school children don't drive the pandemic. The mechanism behind that would be that children generally have a much lower viral load, which also is shown as lighter symptoms and hardly any hospitalizations or deaths. Our experience is mainly from the first wave so everybody played as safe as rasonable also regarding interractions with children. Children with symptoms stay home of course. Countries that initially closed schools opened them as soon as they could.

Less likely to transmit the virus doesn't mean impossible, so if you deny the existence of Covid-19 and act as usual with the children the situation would not be the same.

/Erik

Much less viral loads? Got a link? What I've read suggests very similar loads - but more rapid response and recovery from those numbers.

[ERGR]

Much less viral loads? Got a link?

No, you'll have to chalk that up as me trying to make sense of the statistics I've seen. I shouldn't have stated it like that.

What I'm trying to rationalize is the low number of positive test, hospitalizations and deaths amongst children. At the same time, the virus is considered sufficiently infectuous so everybody in a household will catch the virus if anyone is infected. The children should have been as infected as their parents but seldom show more than light symptoms. My (unfounded) rationalization for that was a lower viral load, but there might as well be other explanations.

Large and mighty countries like Finland and Iceland have done DNA tracing to follow the infection chains. Their conclusion was that children seldom infected adults, it was the other way around. Sweden came to the same conclusion with a statistical analysis (we didn't have sufficient test DNA capacity this spring for known reasons, but we gathered lots of statistics....)

/Erik

[TomF]

I'm happy to be schooled () on this - but always thought that the various studies showing low transmissibility from or among children were somehow flawed.

The only logical reasons for the disparity would be that something:

1. mutated the virus in contact with pre-pubescent humans (and the samples taken show that this isn't the case), or
2. made children unable to actually release a coronavirus in droplets or aerosols. Which is also clearly untrue, as kids promiscuously pass colds and the flu and etc. among each other and to parents.

Individual kids can't perhaps project as much COVID out into the air as adults do, because childrens' lungs and etc. are smaller ... but in that case we're just talking about ambient viral load. We do know that viral load is a factor in infection - it's why choir practices in closed rooms and congregational singing in church services are such super-spreader events.

But 3 infected kids probably produce as much exhalation as 1 infected grown man, eh? If 3 kids in a classroom are asymptomatic carriers, anyone there faces the same risk as if their teacher was an asymptomatic carrier. Besides, kids transmit every other respiratory infection known to humanity ... it would be too much of an anomaly if somehow COVID was an exception.

As such Occam's Razor suggests that the research saying that kids weren't able to infect folks was flawed, and those flaws were perhaps overlooked to some degree because we'd hope that the illogical results were actually true.

[skuthorp]

I checked my membership site, and from that, appears that, as of Sept., student infectivity of teachers is still an 'unknown'. They recommended continued caution. To my eye, vax for the teachers makes a lot of sense. AFA - who to talk to? I'd think teachers would be lobbying their union leadership. At least in Nebr., that 'leadership' isn't going to arise from our Repub governor. Partisan influence is incredibly destructive to this effort.

Regardless of the infection rate from children to adults, and given that barely 12 months have elapsed since the Virus's emergence and that we are still finding out about it, surely the cautionary principle should apply?
The partisan corruption of the pandemic in the US in particular is just disgusting and undoubtably has, and is killing people every day.

[peb]

Much less viral loads? Got a link? What I've read suggests very similar loads - but more rapid response and recovery from those numbers.

Viral load studies seem to be all over the place. the other day I saw a study that suggested that viral loads are lower the more severe the illness, with asymptomatic people having the highest loads. Now, this might make sense, as the people with the sever illnesses have had the disease longer and their body is actually fighting off the virus, even through they are sick. But if thats the case, it only says that viral loads are heaviest early on in the infection.

[Hugh Conway]

This seems to be another example of the experts saying two different things. Yesterday Dr. Fauci stated " you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all, not like one would have suspected... the bars, the restaurants where you have capacity seating indoors without masks, those are the things that drive the community spread, not the schools"

yet another example of the persistent bad faith covid critic.

[peb]

yet another example of the persistent bad faith covid critic.

I am not being a covid critic. I quoted Fr Fauci's statement from yesterday, and acknowldeged that TomF had conflicting information from other sources. Why do you have a problem with that?

[TomF]

Kids are much more likely to be asymptomatic, even when infected - which is why some of the early studies thought that they maybe didn't catch it as frequently.

The degree of risk seems to be related with whether there are any chinks in an individual's immunatory armour, so to speak. Researchers observed that men often had a harder ride than women of the same cohort - and mused that perhaps men had done more risk-taking behaviours over their lives than women the same age. Bunging up lungs or assorted organs slightly - not enough to impair any function when they were otherwise healthy ... but creating minute weaknesses which COVID would exploit. Similar notions came up as people looked at the disproportionate impact on people of colour ... but then noticed that really this was just "social determinants of health" showing up again.

That is, it isn't that black or brown folks were genetically more susceptible to the virus, but that black or brown folks are socially more susceptible to having experienced poverty, poor nutrition, chronic illness, etc. Control for that factor, and the disparity between whites and others goes away.

Similarly, older people have lived long enough to wear out their immune systems a bit, so their armour's weaker too. Lower a person's overall health and vitality, and a bad bug will hit harder.

I think that kids' immune systems are still full of juice and pep, and they're less likely to have messed them up through drinking or drugs or through acquiring some kind of involuntary harm. So the COVID can't get a foothold, and just rides around in them doing nothing.

[WI-Tom]

I'm curious how the perception that teachers' unions aren't calling for school staff to be prioritized for COVID-19 vaccines. From the NEA (the U.S.'s largest teachers' union):

We agree wholeheartedly that it is important to include teachers and other school staffrelatively early to facilitate the reopening of school buildings and to protect the most high-riskadults.

We respectfully encourage you to broaden this crucial target by explicitly includingfaculty and all other workers in institutions of higher education. Indeed, as the discussion draftnotes, many professors and other university employees are older or have underlying healthconditions. We further urge you to include all education employees in Phase 1b, in recognitionof the crucial role these institutions play and the underlying vulnerabilities of many of theemployees who work in them. We strongly agree with the draft report’s statement thatexposures in school settings is very difficult to control, especially when providing care oreducation to young children.We also support the draft’s conclusion that educators who are at higher risk because of age,crowded conditions inside facilities, and other factors should be vaccinated in Phase 1b. Asnoted above, we urge that all education employees be vaccinated in this phase.

Source

Tom

[WI-Tom]

Individual kids can't perhaps project as much COVID out into the air as adults do, because childrens' lungs and etc. are smaller ... but in that case we're just talking about ambient viral load. We do know that viral load is a factor in infection - it's why choir practices in closed rooms and congregational singing in church services are such super-spreader events.

But 3 infected kids probably produce as much exhalation as 1 infected grown man, eh? If 3 kids in a classroom are asymptomatic carriers, anyone there faces the same risk as if their teacher was an asymptomatic carrier.

And of course, length of exposure matters. An unmasked retail encounter poses less risk for the customer, who is in and out. Much more risk for the cashier, who works all day.

As a teacher, I'm closer to the cashier. Our school began virtual classes today, but before that, I teach (I think) 143 students every day. Each one spends a minimum of 50 minutes in the same room with me, some 60 minutes, and some 90 minutes, every day. I spend 6 hours each day in a space with 19-24 students when teaching in person. All of them breathe, and talk.

Music teachers, art teachers, and other "specials" instructors are exposed to literally hundreds of students every day, for 5-6 hours a day.

All of this happens in spaces with poor ventilation and inadequate air filtration, in a setting where physical distance largely doesn't happen, and handwashing is almost impossible.

Yes, I think the precautionary principle should apply. Our school has had a total of 40 confirmed cases--27 students, and 13 staff--so far.

Tom

[peb]

I'm curious how the perception that teachers' unions aren't calling for school staff to be prioritized for COVID-19 vaccines. From the NEA (the U.S.'s largest teachers' union):



Source

Tom

Tom, Thanks for that reference, its good to know the NEA has not been completely silent on the subject. I can only answer your curiosity by saying they certainly hide their advocacy well in this case. I have recently checked their web site and could find nothing on the subject. And they seemed to have been silent since the vaccine has been the big issue the last couple of weeks. They certainly seemed to be more out front during the summer when the debates about how to open up the schools was going on. But it is good to know they have taken a stand.

[WI-Tom]

Tom, Thanks for that reference, its good to know the NEA has not been completely silent on the subject. I can only answer your curiosity by saying they certainly hide their advocacy well in this case. I have recently checked their web site and could find nothing on the subject. And they seemed to have been silent since the vaccine has been the big issue the last couple of weeks. They certainly seemed to be more out front during the summer when the debates about how to open up the schools was going on. But it is good to know they have taken a stand.

I do know what you mean--they're not mounting any public campaigns about it that I've seen.

They are making a "strong" push in Wisconsin to call for state-wide benchmarks of community spread to define when in-person/virtual/hybrid models happen. I think that's much more urgent. Right now, local governments and school boards are operating in open defiance of health department recommendations all over Wisconsin.

But at least in Wisconsin, unions are not the powerhouse they once were, thanks to Governor Walker and Act 10. Between 2013 and 2019, union membership in the state (all unions) is down over 30%.

Tom

[WX]

From my daughter in Arizona.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/30/h...day/index.html

It’s bad over here and getting worse

[George.]

What I'm trying to rationalize is the low number of positive test, hospitalizations and deaths amongst children.

Simple. Children get infected just like any human, but they don't develop the disease, i.e., symptoms. Their immune system does not seem to freak out as much as older people's. So the kid feels fine and goes to school, where he/she breathes out virus particles unto others, just like any human.

The problem is all the rationalizing. "We don't know" does not mean "therefore we can pretend."

[Bob Adams]

My father in law passed from it last night. SWMBO and Mom in law were allowed to be with him a few hours before he died. Wear your mask. You don't want to be responsible for infecting someone. It is a horrible, nasty death.

[TomF]

I'm really sorry, Bob. Prayers for you all.