outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

And there is irritating goalpost shifting in that series of tweets -- "maybe in spring 2020 it was a good idea," he says, but NOW, he goes on, the availability of vaccines to everyone should raise the ethical question of whether children should bear the cost in order to protect unvaccinated adults.

OK but there are TWO OTHER SEMESTERS you are not mentioning here. If he thinks that in fall 2020, schools should have been fully open, even though there were no available vaccines at that time, and that children shouldn't suffer that harm for old peoples' sake, he should say so! There's a case to be made! But you gotta actually do it!

So I'm just irritated because *I too* basically think that IN SPRING 2021 schools should be in-person, and I think they almost entirely will be, and gets my goat that people are presenting this as if it's some kind of brave contrarian stance which was obviously right all along under all the many conditions that have so far obtained.

hate to break it to you, but it's 2022

no we just started 2021 over

fuuuuuuckkk

child obesity is way, way up, which has a lot of its own long-term health consequences.

pretty sure not being able to exercise for 2 years is going to have health consequences for ppl the exact age as me too tbh

i've been put on two new medications and developed two new ailments and gained about 20 pounds myself

Btw if you're seeing scaremongering about a new French variant, it's tabloid bullshit

Lots of chat about B.1.640.2 in the last few days - just a few points to keep in mind:
- B.1.640.2 actually predates Omicron
- in all that time there are exactly... 20 sequences (compared to the >120k Omis in less time)
Def not one worth worrying about too much at the mo...

— Tom Peacock (@PeacockFlu) January 3, 2022

Really? I heard that one does serious damage to your Système D.

Not til now! xp

otm tbf

“look i almost stepped in this!” (holds handful of dog shit in bare hand)

I actually have seen some scare-mongering oblique refences to a "terrifying new variant", so I actually appreciated Neanderthal sharing that, but ilx seems to be really tetchy about Twitter links lately.

yeah, sorry for posting COVID news in the COVID news thread.

ok but ilx has generally been a beacon of healthy unflappability wrt unverified scare stories about new variants so getting schooled on the reality feels a bit preemptively patronising no

it’s not healthy to know that much YOU HAVE FLOWN TO CLOSE TO THE SUN NEANDERTHAL DESCEND DESCEND

Neander probably shouldn't have said "you" in that post, but it seems clear his intent was benign imo

to be sure!

on the road to hell i would expect nothing less!

That variant hasn't been in the news. It's pure twitter gossip.

Thus is v good to see. Lockdowns are done, we are v close to an end.

Africa's top public health official John Nkengasong, speaking today:

“The period where we are using severe lockdowns as a tool is over, we should actually be looking at how we use public health and social measures more carefully & in a balanced way as the vaccination increases." pic.twitter.com/Hez0cZIJmD

— Covid Fact Check UK (@fact_covid) January 6, 2022

xpost it has been, hence why my friends all started freaking out about it simultaneously the other evening. granted, not REPUTABLE articles but.....

careful, xyzzzz___, you posted a tweet with analysis, remember that's not welcome in this thread!

Pardon me if this was posted somewhere upthread—I searched but it's hard to filter 15,000 posts.

Nature: Do vaccines protect against long COVID? What the data say

With such bummer highlights as:

"For those who do experience a breakthrough infection, studies suggest that vaccination might only halve the risk of long COVID — or have no effect on it at all"

“It’s important to get that lab confirmation for care,” she says. “Otherwise, people struggle a lot.”

In other news, I was hoping my recent bout with COVID, which happened right as I got the booster, would give me super immunity. Sadly...

"Even in the most optimistic scenario, in which a post-vaccination infection does really turbocharge a vaccinated person’s immune responses, the durability of the most primo effects is still a wild card. Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute, in South Africa, told me that he suspects the post-breakthrough luster may dissipate within weeks, as antibody levels naturally fall. There’s also no telling how well Omicron-specific protection—should it show up, and persist—would shield us against the next variant, or the next. The arithmetic of vaccine + vaccine + vaccine + infection just isn’t very satisfying."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/01/do-post-vaccination-infections-improve-immunity/621172/

i had no idea

https://www.propublica.org/article/i-saw-firsthand-what-it-takes-to-keep-covid-out-of-hong-kong-it-felt-like-a-different-planet

It’s a lot and it was fascinating. I was in both Hong Kong and Tokyo in late 2018, during the winter and the precautions people took against colds etc with masks are well known. But I was interested in Hong King to go up escalators that were coated in disinfectant and regularly cleaned, for example. There was similar in Tokyo, although much less. The challenge for a city like HK where they both had the original SARS virus and also it’s incredibly dense must be huge - anything gets loose in HK, it’s going to tear through the place without stopping. I’d love to read about how other cities handled it.

whenever i ride an escalator i think of the nicholson baker bit where he imagines what it must have been like the first time the guy who cleaned the escelator handle in his building could do it by just standing still and waiting.

oof

This post from a NYC high schooler about the covid situation right now is wild https://t.co/iefprZq2fy pic.twitter.com/2xSIW5DCBq

— Adam J Calhoun (@neuroecology) January 7, 2022

My kids didn't go to school yesterday due to an ad-hoc teacher sick-out at their high school (San Francisco). They are back today, but I don't know the situation.

holy fuk @ that reddit post

We kept our unvaxxed pre-k student out all week, planning on going back on monday. One of her friends from the building who is in one of the two other pre-k classes got an exposure notification today.

two pre-k classes at my kid's school. one got shut down this week. including my daughter there were 7/18 kids in the other today. it's a matter of time til hers get shut down too.

her teacher told me there were 45 staff members out today just at that school.

our daycare has 6 classes each with about 8 kids. they're making every kid take a PCR test today for the first time. any class with >0 positive results on monday will close next week. any class with a kid who has a sibling in a class with >0 positive results will also close.

over/under on how many classes there are next week? i'd be surprised if 3/6 are still open.

me too

Also two kids have been suspended because their parents lied about plane travel over the holidays haha

o_O to all of that

seems kinda wrong to punish the kids for the sins of the parents tbh, but I'm not sure how else you could handle it at this point in the pandemic. maybe keep them home but with a different terminology?

yeah "suspended" is my choice of words because i happen to dislike those parents for other reasons haha

the politics of fancy westide of la daycare faceook groups have blown my mind

(also the willingness of people to drive SUVs one handed while talking on the phone in the parking lot of a preschool)

lol, fair enough

any class with >0 positive results on monday will close next week. ?

Why is that? K-12 schools aren't sending whole classes home for a single positive case, are they?

:shrug:

(A follow-up from TPM Reader LF …)

In your recent post about Covid and school closures, I think you get something very right when you talk about the PhD and elite scolds demanding schools remain open no-matter-what. There is one element in all of this that I think you do not fully appreciate—the anger and legitimate fear that teachers have been living with for the entirety of the pandemic.

I am a college teacher, my partner teaches high school, my friends teach at every level of the educational system. During the pandemic, many have retired early or quit, many of those who have stayed have only done so because they are too young to retire and too old to do something else. Just to be clear, the kids are alright. Almost all teachers love teaching–given how shitty the job is, why else would we do it?

The problems with teaching are also the same as they’ve always been–the parents, the school board, the local and state governments. We get it, they pay us shit, dictate idiotic curriculum and blame us when their kids grow up to be queer/communist/atheists—same as it ever was. What is new is that we are now being asked—actually not even asked—told that we must be heroes.

Everyone talks about how schools are a young population, so schools are safer than most other institutions. Even you wrote something like that in a recent tweet.

“And despite the totally out of control spread of omicron now ripping through schools I think it makes sense to keep them open because of the mix of generally mild outcomes for kids and the availability of vaccines.”

What the fuck, am I chopped liver to you? From a teacher’s perspective, school is a place where you spend 8 hours in poorly ventilated, densely packed rooms with the least vaccinated people in America (the young). Last semester I taught a class with 150 people in a subterranean room—no mask mandate, no vaccine mandate, voluntary testing if someone had symptoms.

You wrote in your post today…

“We shifted back to in-person instruction once vaccines were widely deployed, backstopping the great majority of the people from bad outcomes from COVID infections. By the fall of 2021 we also collectively had much more knowledge about COVID, how to operate schools in relative safety with a mix of masking, ventilation and testing.”

While we may know about masking, ventilation, testing and vaccination—in many of the classrooms in this nation we are not requiring masking, ventilation, testing or vaccination. All of this discussion of masking, ventilation, testing and vaccination is little more than performative ethical posturing of the ‘think of the poor children’ crowd. As a teacher, I don’t care about the posturing. I care about what is happening in the room in front of me. This is a job safety issue, not a political issue. In most of the country masks and vaccines are not required. As for ventilation, I expect to see that fixed right after states and municipalities deal with the endemic asbestos and black mold problem that pervades schools across the nation.

So, I am furious, almost all the teachers I know are furious. I love teaching, but that doesn’t mean I want to risk my life to do so. At a minimum, I expect that all students be required to be masked and vaccinated to attend in person. Short of that, I’m gonna go remote whenever the case counts start going up. Fuck anyone who demands otherwise. Fuck ‘em twice if they tell me how much they respect teachers while the refuse enact even the most basic safety protocols that would make our jobs safer.

Warzone Workplace

Thus is v good to see. Lockdowns are done, we are v close to an end.

lol

no COVID in football stadiums if the fa cup match on tv was anything to go by

These two threads (one macro, one micro) don't leave me feeling very sanguine about now.

Watching national data

And being in the hospital this week

I see two things that appear contradictory

But both are true

1. Link between cases & hospitalizations is much weaker with Omicron than in the past

2. Our healthcare system is in trouble

Thread: the moment we are in

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) January 8, 2022

I’ve been tweeting about Covid for nearly 2 years. But this week it became personal when my 28-year-old younger son got it.
With his permission, I’ll describe his experience & how I approached his situation, given the realities of life and the rapidly changing evidence.(1/25)

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) January 8, 2022

A friend of mine who is a pediatric nurse in Florida regarding Jha's post: "I had to close the thread." Said friend's been very, very open about how utterly horrible it's been.

fyi parents of under fives

Can confirm Moderna was asked to increase enrollment in their pediatric trial. End of Jan study close has been pushed out. This is really heartbreaking because Moderna already increased trial size last year (Pfizer didn’t). Rapidly increasing hospitalizations in <5 is concerning. https://t.co/sio0QCImrj

— Sabina Vohra-Miller (@SabiVM) January 8, 2022

I've seen a lot of tweets etc. noting increasing pediatric covid hospitalizations, but so far all of the ones I've seen quickly add a clarification that these are kids in the hospital *with* covid, often detected when they check in for something else, not *for* covid. Are there any numbers attesting to the latter?