I don’t know how anyone can support restrictions at this point. All school aged children can be vaccinated and the vaccine is effective at decreasing hospitalization and death.
I guess we have different interpretations of what happened in Chicago and elsewhere. In our school district the teachers’ actions diverged from a group focused on safety, regardless of one’s interpretation of the covid threat level. I used to be 100% behind the teachers when they were fighting for better pay. I’m sorry to say that they have lost my support. I should probably also say that I’m not generally anti-union. Workers have lost a lot of leverage since the 70’s.
"Large" is subjective, and the vaccine moves the decimal point one or two digits in the correct direction.
Also, as a matter of practicality, you don't want a steady state where a rotating 10-20℅ of the class is out with whatever the current covid variant is.
They somewhat reduce it. Perhaps by 50%, against currently dominant variant (which is itself of course subject to change.)
Everything that helps to reduce prevalence helps kids stay in the classroom.
Here in the UK there's a huge subpandemic among 5-11 year old schoolchildren, a group which are not vaccinated. I have a child of this age, off twice with covid in the last few months. I wonder if it'd be more effective to vaccinate them or to just do away with self isolation rules for them. The problem is the spillover into parents, who will be at higher risk due to age and possobly at much higher risk if clinically vulnerable.
On this one I find it hard to form a strong opinion.
The data released by public health here in Ontario suggests that 2-doses has no impact at all on transmission, while boosters - which 5-11's aren't eligible for - reduce transmission against Omicron by about 40% for about 6-8 weeks.
While vaccines should be available to any 5-11 year old child whose parents want them, the idea that they help in keeping schools open doesn't seem at all logical.
It's less true for Omicron, but the study there looked at transmission in Danish households. Against Delta, vaccinated individuals were much less likely to get infected. Against Omicron, boosted individuals are less likely to get infected, and vaccinated are similar to unvaccinated.
> I don’t know how anyone can support restrictions at this point.
Off the top of my head...
- Kids can spread it in their community
- Adults and elderly people work at schools
- Not all kids are fully vaccinated
- Kids are adaptable, it's adults who are throwing temper tantrums about having to wear a mask
- Most of the mental health effects mentioned in the article are consequences of school closures, not caused by wearing a mask and reducing crowding in the cafeteria. In fact masking can make school more normal and routine, by reducing the need for substitute teachers, or skipping PE because the gym teacher is out sick, etc.
Even through the worst of the pandemic, children going to school has always been my primary concern. I'm totally fine with having to work from home for a few more years. Restaurants and big events closed sucks, but I can live with that. I personally really miss church, but I can totally see how a big crowd indoors singing is one of the most high-risk activities you can do. I'll survive.
But children need school. They need to socialise. Homeschooling can work, but it puts a serious strain on the parents, the kids, and their education. Until last week, Dutch kids would be quarantined until tested if a certain number of their class mates tested positive, but in the face of omicron, that lead to entire schools closing, so they ended that.
With everybody vaccinated and boosted, Covid is as under-control as it can possibly get. It's not going to get better than this for the time being, and with the vaccine and omicron's lower lethality, deaths seem to be down. The biggest problem there is that there are still unvaccinated people occupying ICU beds, leading to non-Covid related treatment getting postponed, and sometimes leading to deaths.
I think we should still do all the low-hanging fruit: wear masks, keep distance where possible, wash often, but other than that, open everything that's not clearly a very high-risk activity. And voluntarily unvaccinated people should not fill ICU beds that other people need.
>And voluntarily unvaccinated people should not fill ICU beds that other people need.
Wow. I'm speechless.
Blacks (along with some other minorities) are the group with the lowest vaccination rate, for rather obvious reasons. If you aren't familiar, look up the Tuskegee experiment.
You are proposing to flat out deny life-saving medical care, in a critical illness situation, to those very vulnerable groups that have completely justified distrust of a government that abused them for hundreds of years.
>there are still unvaccinated people occupying ICU beds, leading to non-Covid related treatment getting postponed, and sometimes leading to deaths.
Did you have a flu shot every year? Are all other vaccines you had in childhood boosted on schedule? Looking forward to you send us proof.
Also please prove you wash hands everytime you go to the washroom. Until then, I expect you aren't going to seek treatment for any infectious diseases, after all we don't even have proof you wash hands, and how can we waste precious medical resources on such irresponsible citizens who voluntarily refuse the best medical intervention of all time, basic hygiene? /s
The real biggest problem is people that do not understand why informed consent exists in the first place.
Lack of political will to expand the ICU capacity does not override informed consent. Even completely broke countries like El Salvador have been able to roll out field hospitals, it can be done.
This is also ignoring the fact that hospital staffing and beds have been on the decline for the past few decades. We were gonna run out of capacity at some point. COVID just made that come sooner.
I wouldn't say its forbidden. It's just that the antivaxxers have become the new "them", and "enemy". I'm not a fan of them, but ignoring the obvious problems in our healthcare system and blaming it on the action of a bunch of people who for multitudes of reasons don't trust the government is just liberalism in action.
But yeah, I'm really frustrated that we're ignoring the obvious problems here.