Yeah, masks are a little annoying, but they’re about the least burdensome of the protective measures. If mask use can keep things from getting so bad that you need to do extreme things like closing schools, then absolutely, bring on the masks.
To be fair, though, the “slide” is strongly nonlinear, and a four or five month gap is only slightly worse than a three month gap. The bigger problem was that there was no systematic effort to account for what was actually missed. Students who never actually finished Algebra I were just started straight onto Algebra II courses that assumed that they had all of that material, etc. Teachers are assuming that students have certain basic skills that they don’t. And we’re not over that yet; the basic skills that students are missing are just getting more and more basic. I’m really not looking forward to the Class of 2032, where the skills missing will be basic reading skills.
The ventilation thing was one of the things that pissed me off a bit. We had other interventions here that were arguable, or wrong on inspection, or clearly wrong, but ventilation was never even on the table. It wasn’t recommended, it wasn’t implemented.
I understand why ventilation wasn’t the first thing thought of – the medical establishment went off course. Between 1920 and 2020 they decided that ‘of course’ ventilation had no effect. But they eventually did get their research sorted out — and it had no effect on practice here.
And that’s a school thing too. In the great Flu epidemic, they had outdoor classes.
I know at least one local school that had more covid cases than they were comfortable with, and reacted by upgrading the school’s ventilation. That seemed to fix their problem, too.
But there’s not nearly enough emphasis on that overall. I’d like new code requirements, that could be implemented over time, the way accessibility and other code upgrades are.
As others have noted, COVID is now endemic rather than in the pandemic phase. Here’s a personal and a professional anecdote for where I think we’re at with COVID. I recently had a day where I had to see three patients with communicable diseases. One with COVID, one with influenza, and one with TB. Of course I used all the appropriate precautions for all three patients, but the one I felt the least concern in seeing WRT to my personal health was the one with COVID.
Among the frail elderly, these days it’s rare that I see anyone with more than moderately severe symptoms from COVID. All the nursing homes I work at still have the old policies in place, and so we sometimes find COVID when there’s an outbreak of any kind of viral respiratory illness. But even in the nursing home population that I care for COVID just isn’t the serious problem it once was.
That’s interesting. I’ve had flu about 5 times, and covid once. I was comparably sick at the worst part of the illness, but it took me much longer to recover from covid, and my sense of smell still isn’t what it was. So i am more afraid of covid.
But of course, i don’t want to catch flu, either. It’s pretty nasty.
I think TB is more serious, but also harder to catch. Fwiw, the only time I’ve walked out of a place (a nyc subway car) to avoid infection was when i thought a guy near me probably had TB. That was years ago, and back then, i didn’t carry masks. But even with a mask, i might leave a car with a guy coughing up cups of phlegm.
All mentions of number of times someone has had covid should be qualified “that you know of”. Remember, over half of covid cases show absolutely no symptoms whatsoever. Which is part of why it’s so contagious: People who don’t know they have it won’t take any precautions.
Through the week ending Sept. 6, 10.8% Americans tested were positive for COVID-19, according to the CDC’s latest data. This was a decrease from the prior week (11.2%).
During the same period, 0.8% of all deaths in the United States were attributed to COVID-19, up from 0.6% the week before, and 1.5% cases resulted in an emergency room visit, down from 1.7% in the previous week.
Map of COVID-19 test positivity by region
According to the most recent CDC wastewater data for the week ending Sept. 6, many Western and Southern states had “very high” levels of COVID-19 viral activity. Those states were Alaska, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Utah, plus Washington, DC.
It’s that still true? I think people who have previous exposure are more likely to have symptoms (most of which are an early immune response) and i know that people with previous exposure have symptoms early in the course of illness than was typical at the start of the pandemic.
Anecdata: I’m in a community that does a lot of covid testing for events. Recently, we’ve seen a few false positives (eliminated by a more sensitive, accurate, and expensive test), one positive that might have been asymptomatic, but might have been a false positive (no further testing), and a very large number of people who tested positive a day or two after onset of symptoms. This data pool represents several hundred, or a couple of thousand individual tests over a community of maybe 200 people. It doesn’t include many children, nor frail elderly. But does include a lot of parents of school-age children.