Sure, and as we know "covid is an epidemic of the unvaccinated" so you need to get vaccinated. Then you get vaccinated and it becomes "an epidemic of the those who have not received their monthly booster." Yes, best public health practices. Or should that be "best health practices for this week because last weeks have been proven to be bullshit?"
Vaccination is proven to prevent severe illness and death. Until the Omicron variant came around, vaccination was also very effective at stopping infection -- with a vaccinated breakthrough rate during Delta of a mere 0.56%. Due to Omicron being vaccine evasive and highly infectious when large numbers of people are in crowded situations for longer periods of time with a prevalence of Covid in the community then masks should be used. Especially keeping in mind that children are not voluntarily going to school each day; they are required to be at school each weekday --- and some have existing medical issues which put them at risk with Covid coupled with the possibility of bringing Covid home to at-risk adults. As well as keeping in mind if 20%+ of your school is out sick then the students are not learning. Keep in mind the R factor (Reproductive factor) for the Flu is merely between 1 and 2. The R factor for RSV is around 2.3 The basic reproductive factor for Omicron is between 5.5 to 24 for the various strains with the average being 9.5 and the most recent strains (BA.4/BA.5) possibly being near 18. Hence masks are effective for a highly infectious disease spread via the air and should be required during a Covid outbreak in schools. Masks will help minimize the spread, keep students in school, and prevent the closing of the school.
And the lockdowns were intended to stop the spread in order to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. According to all the in-depth studies -- the lockdowns early in the pandemic worked as intended in terms of keeping the public health care system up & running until effective treatments and eventually vaccines could be made available. Or would you like to have been like some countries where they were just piling the bodies in the streets and could not find anyone to bury them? Oh, the sweet smell of "freedum".
In a Pandemic, certain people are able to intelligently weigh the worst outcome of doing one thing versus doing something else...others can not see down the road what "will happen" if lockdowns had not been used. The lockdown was needed when the threat became to grave and then when that threat decreased substantially...the lockdowns were removed. Yet, nobody stated that lockdowns will not harm society but what was stated is that without the lockdowns... There would be more harm until our hospitals were able to manage the overflow of severely ill and until we had vaccines & medical therapeutic treatments. I knew lockdowns would be bad for our education system, bad for those struggling with mental health, bad for the economy and so on. Yet, I also knew it would have been much worst had we not lockdown because we don't have a society in North America that will do the right thing to avoid a lockdown... It's the reason why I often compared the behavior of residents in Sweden versus the behavior of residents in North America just prior to the lockdowns. We were too polarized with politics while protesting to bitch about not being able to get our hair cut at the salon. North America has too many people that believe (still do) that the Pandemic is a hoax as in there was no Covid, hospitals not over capacity, hospitals had enough PPE to properly protect front line workers, and so on. Of those that left their medical jobs in this Pandemic...more than 1/2 quit because of the Pandemic, another 25% took retirement at 60 - 62 years of age and the remainder lost their jobs when vaccine mandates were being used. Today, front-line workers that remained/survived...these workers are still traumatized and there's a high increase in suicide among them. Simply, they saw too much shit. Yet, what happened to India, Brazil, and places in Italy...Covid dead people piled up in the streets, outdoor cremations of the dead, and medical hospital beds outside / inside tents like what you would have seen in a war... it's not something that North America could have stomached. The worst I saw personally in this Pandemic as a resident in North America...some hospitals turning away severe Covid sick patients that were struggling to breathe and outdoor military tents setup for the overflow of severe Covid sick patients. Those were scenes that I saw and it made me think that stuff only happens in other countries...not in Canada or the United States. It's a disturbing thing to understand even with my strong understanding of Pandemics (historically) and the disruption to normal life for the duration of the Pandemic. Yet, I was very glad that we never reached that point as India, Brazil and parts of Italy had reached. wrbtrader
‘Learning Loss Is Real’: Lori Lightfoot Slams Randi Weingarten’s Teachers’ Union for Delaying School Reopening Outgoing Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday criticized Randi Weingarten and the influential teachers’ union she runs for delaying school re-openings after the pandemic. “Obviously, every union should advocate for its members, but it’s gotta be in the context of an organization,” Lightfoot said Monday on CNN This Morning. Chicago Public Schools demonstrated that it had implemented a number of Covid-19 mitigation measures to make it safe for kids to return to the classroom, Lightfoot said, but “the union needed to work with us and they never did that.” “Schools are about children. We demonstrated over and over again that our schools were safe. We put $100 million into retrofitting classrooms, making sure that they had the PPE, making sure that every single classroom had filters to make sure that the air was safe. Deep cleaning of every single building,” she said. “But fundamentally, we know that where children learn the best and where they are safest is in the classroom, and in-person learning, and none of our parents signed up to be homeschoolers. And the learning loss is real.” In testimony before Congress last week, Weingarten attempted to rewrite her pivotal part in the prolonged school closures that led to massive education disruption nationwide. “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” she claimed. “We know that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.” Throughout the pandemic, the AFT fought to postpone reopening schools, calling such an idea “reckless, callous, cruel” in the fall of 2020. Weingarten made other arguments to keep schools shuttered through the spring and summer of 2020. Her union aggressively lobbied the CDC to adjust its school-reopening guidance. Two of its language recommendations were adopted verbatim. “The CDC in February and March basically asked all sorts of different organizations to sit down with them and give them comments about what they thought was important. They talked to parent organizations, they talked to the two unions, and one of the things that we didn’t see in the CDC draft is that there were variants that were right around the corner,” Weingarten said in May 2021. On Monday, Lightfoot disputed Weingarten’s revisionist account of the school reopening debates. “That’s not the reality that was happening on the ground in cities like Chicago, like Los Angeles and other places,” Lightfoot said. “We needed to get our kids back in school, and I’m unapologetic about the fight to make sure that we put our kids and our parents first.” AFT affiliate unions like the Chicago Teachers Union, which Lightfoot battled well into 2022 to reopen schools in the city, in December of 2020 said that the push to reopen schools “is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” In January 2022, Chicago students missed multiple days of instruction due to the union striking against in-person school and allegedly inadequate Covid-19 safety protocols. Speaking to lawmakers last week, Weingarten doubled down in her justification for consulting with the health arm of the government before reopening schools. “It made sense to consult with the CDC and it was not only appropriate for the CDC to confer with educators, it would have been irresponsible not to,” she said during the hearing. Lightfoot is set to turn over the mayoralty to Brandon Johnson later this month after failing to advance to the final round of the runoff in February.
Let's see how the 2023/2024 school year is kicking off in places that don't give a shiat about Covid. School districts in Kentucky, Texas cancel classes amid 'surge' of illnesses including COVID https://abcnews.go.com/Health/schoo...-cancel-classes-amid-surge/story?id=102561169
Let's see how things are going this year in states and counties that don't give a shiat about Covid -- where social distancing, masks, testing --- or even policies of keeping kids at home when they are sick are not enforced. Of course, these are places where vaccination is not encouraged by politicians. Education is off to a fine start this school year in red states and counties when entire school systems are being shut down as Covid sweeps the district in mere days after school opens. I am sure the virtual remote education will go so well. School districts in Kentucky, Texas cancel classes amid 'surge' of illnesses including COVID The districts said attendance had fallen due to sick staff and students. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/schoo...-cancel-classes-amid-surge/story?id=102561169
Guess who spent the majority of their high school experience locked down and kept out of school. Thanks GWB-Trading.