Looks like Boston PS system is moving to all remote learning. Send the kids to Exeter, Andover, Groton or St. Paul’s quick, if you can swing it.
Looks like Boston PS system is moving to all remote learning. Send the kids to Exeter, Andover, Groton or St. Paul’s quick, if you can swing it.
Rojo (10-23-2020)
They did tear down Showcase Cinemas and replaced it with a shopping mall, IIRC, that houses a Costco, gas station, Chik-Fil-A, and other stuff.
As to your solution, I'm unsure why we'd want to create an admittedly "terrible situation" to replace an admittedly "terrible situation."
Virtual schooling sucks. For everyone. But it's safe too. We don't have to worry about bussing or food or kids making out or any of those logistics if kids are on computers. As a result, the bus drivers, teachers, and school personnel who would be endangered by a return to a building (any building) won't be endangered. And grandparents won't either. (Lots of kids live with their grandparents, apparently.)
My thought was to find area churches to take on some of the heavy load. (Area freshmen meet at First Unitarian, for example, while area sophomores meet at Holy Cross, etc.) Unfortunately, as you well now, Louisville's school choice system means kids come from all over the city to different schools and not those nearest them. That makes finding a solution even more difficult.
Unfortunately school is actually a place where far too many kids do indeed get food. I know what you're trying to say with your post, but it's just an unfortunate reality that remote learning is probably leading to hunger problems/issues for far more kids than most of us realize.
Falls City Beer (10-22-2020),mole44 (10-22-2020),Redhook (10-21-2020),Revering4Blue (10-21-2020),Rojo (10-22-2020)
The bulk of the population lives in Portland and we are still not fully opened, plus it's bluer here and that means more people doing their part, less screamers. Both those things help the numbers, take away Portland's population and Oregon is almost like Montana (1.6 million vs 1 million)
I'm a high school administrator in a building with 1800 kids. Some background info - we had around 400 or so opt to do virtual this year and we have a good number who do CCP (post-secondary) or leave early through our half-day work program. So we have 1100-1300 in the building at any given time. It's an old building. Even with the reduced number, students are sitting less than six feet apart. And demographically, Trump won our county by about 25 points in 2016.
We've had a total of seven students and two staff members who have tested positive. We've had somewhere around 150-200 kids who have had to quarantine due to close contact (all from other students - neither staff member as "knocked out" anyone). Only two of the seven student cases could be traced back to the school. One was a case of two friends (which could have happened outside of school) and the other was from a teammate. The other five got it from outside of school (older siblings coming home on the weekend from college was the #1 culprit). Neither staff member's case was traced back to the classroom.
We require masks unless there is a medical exception. Our special needs kids are basically the only ones not wearing them. Students have been fantastic about wearing masks. I was anticipating a lot of time being spent dealing with masks, especially knowing a lot of our parents' views on them, but we've only had one kid receive a consequence for not wearing his (and that was more about the repeated non-compliance than not wearing the mask). The biggest mask issue is having to remind students to keep them over their noses. But overall, we could not have asked for our kids to do better with them. Staff members wear masks unless they are giving instruction AND are more than six feet away from any student. So while I'm not 100% dogmatic about masks, my own experience is that they are working.
Our elementary and middle schools have had a combined four reported cases. They also have about 20-25% of their students choosing virtual this year, but collectively we have more than 5000 kids and 600 staff members showing up to school each day and we've had 13 total cases. In the heart of Trump country.
As I stated in an earlier post, I think it is clear that community cases drive school cases, not the other way around. Of our nine total cases, five were in the last two weeks, which coincides with the county's rise in cases/testing.
My other observations in regards to posts I've seen on here - our kids wear masks in the hallways and we keep them moving (no lockers unless special circumstances), but there's still not a ton of room. I don't see hallways as a big factor in the spread. Our guidelines for contact tracing is less than six feet for 15 or more minutes. That isn't going to happen during class changes. We are following the county health department's guidelines by having teachers spray their desks after each class. I'm honestly more worried about the long term effects of teachers having to spray such powerful chemicals each day than I am anyone getting COVID-19 from sitting a desk where a positive kid sat the period before. There just isn't any evidence that it is being spread in that manner. So I think the spraying is overkill.
Overall, I think kids need to be at school. If you believe in masks, then you have to believe that having kids being at school with masks for seven hours is safer for them than virtual where they are going to go hang out with each other after their Meets/Zooms are over (if they show up at their Meets/Zooms at all). If you are in an area with high community spread, then having your secondary kids go hybrid makes some sense, but elementary kids can still be at school each day.
Boston Red (10-22-2020),Falls City Beer (10-22-2020),redhawkfish (10-22-2020),Redhook (10-22-2020),Todd Gack (10-23-2020)
I know there was some talk earlier about wearing masks in cars by yourself. Well, I for one, do wear it. But, that's probably just because I know where I've been and what I've been up to...
Boston Red (10-22-2020),WrongVerb (10-22-2020)
As for me I got in the car yesterday and forgot I was wearing a mask and drove off.
5 minutes later I thought “Dammit I am a buffoon!”
Last edited by Rojo; 10-23-2020 at 04:36 AM.
Long haulers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/w...er.html“[I]
“It felt like an elephant sitting on my chest,” Maggie said. “It was hard to take a deep breath, I was nauseous all the time, I didn’t want to eat, I was very light-headed when I stood up or even just lying down.” She also experienced joint pain and severe fatigue.
At first, specialists suggested Maggie’s symptoms might be psychological, in part because she showed no sign of heart or lung damage. She also tested negative for both the coronavirus itself and for antibodies to it. But viral tests taken long after the initial infection are generally negative, and antibody tests are frequently inaccurate.
“They didn’t know anything about ‘long-Covid’ at that point,” said Amy Wilson, Maggie’s mother. “They said it was anxiety. I was pretty sure that wasn’t true.”
Aaaaaaand I'm pretty sure it was true.
Last edited by Rojo; 10-23-2020 at 03:02 AM.
I can't vouch for this, but MAYBE a major Danish mask study is being held up.
https://twitter.com/MaMoMVPY/status/1319002978146263040
Hey, unions!
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/fu...aff.2020.01011
Mortality Rates From COVID-19 Are Lower In Unionized Nursing Homes
More than 40% of all reported coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) deaths in the United States have occurred in nursing homes. As a result, health care worker access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and infection control policies in nursing homes have received increased attention. However, it is not known if the presence of health care worker unions in nursing homes is associated with COVID-19 mortality rates.
Therefore, we used cross-sectional regression analysis to examine the association between the presence of health care worker unions and COVID-19 mortality rates in 355 nursing homes in New York State. Health care worker unions were associated with a 1.29 percentage point mortality reduction, which represents a 30% relative decrease in the COVID-19 mortality rate compared to facilities without health care worker unions.
Unions were also associated with greater access to PPE, one mechanism that may link unions to lower COVID-19 mortality rates. [Editor’s Note: This Fast Track Ahead Of Print article is the accepted version of the peer-reviewed manuscript. The final edited version will appear in an upcoming issue of Health Affairs.]
Last edited by Rojo; 10-23-2020 at 02:23 AM.
We panicked.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/world...ntl/index.html
By February 25, the World Health Organization said the virus had already killed thousands in China and was spreading through northern Italy, but at the time there were just 13 confirmed cases and no deaths in the UK. While the government ordered hospitals to prepare for an influx of patients, its advice to some of the country's most vulnerable people -- elderly residents of care or nursing homes -- was that they were "very unlikely" to be infected.
That guidance would remain in place over the next two-and-a-half weeks, as the number of coronavirus cases in the UK exploded. By the time the advice was withdrawn on March 13 and replaced with new guidance, there were 594 confirmed cases, and it was too late.
By May 1, of the 33,365 total confirmed deaths in England and Wales, at least 12,526 -- or 38% -- were care home residents, according to the latest estimates from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
There's no shame in admitting to panic.
There's a great deal of shame in denying it to save face.
We probably panicked and killed a bunch of our elders.
And now we're doing a dance on our kids to help us from facing up to this fact.
Last edited by Rojo; 10-23-2020 at 03:03 AM.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-...laide/12796640
Health authorities have launched a review into a "cluster" of baby deaths at Adelaide's Women's and Children's Hospital after a parliamentary committee heard a lack of infant heart and life support services was to blame.
Doctors' union official Bernadette Mulholland told the committee a fourth baby had died last week, also due to the lack of services.Doctors' union official Bernadette Mulholland told the committee a fourth baby had died last week, also due to the lack of services.
Professor Svigos said the infants could have been saved if the right treatment were available at Adelaide's central hospital for children.
He said Adelaide was the only mainland state capital city that does not offer heart surgery or external oxygenation machines (ECMOs) for babies and children, and the usual process of referring infants to a Melbourne cardiac unit was "no longer tenable" because of the COVID-19 situation.
Time to give this up. We're hurting more than we're saving.
Hate me, but you know I have a point.
Last edited by Rojo; 10-23-2020 at 03:44 AM.
https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/...disease-expert
The harm caused by lockdowns is much worse than the disease of COVID-19. That’s the argument from numerous public health officials and economists around the world, including an Alberta expert in infectious disease and critical care, Dr. Ari Joffe of the Stollery Children’s Hospital and the University of Alberta.
“I’m truly worried the (lockdown) approach is going to devastate economies and the future for our children and our grandchildren,” says Joffe, who has practised at the Stollery for 25 years and has now written a review paper on the impacts of the lockdown.
The cost of lockdowns in Canada is at least 10 times higher than the benefit in terms of population health and well-being, he estimates, at least if you account for numerous variables such as economic recession, social isolation and impacts on life expectancy, education and the full gamut of health-care priorities.
Last edited by Rojo; 10-23-2020 at 04:41 AM.
You're not being a humanitarian, you're not.
https://twitter.com/mmjblair/status/...866439/photo/1
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