It was a response to your lame solution of “shade.”
I don’t object to the idea of schools using outside classes in places where that is feasible, and I’m sure it IS feasible in some places.
I would guess she is referring to the sack lunches provided by the school, not those brought from home. Sack lunches from the school cafeteria (which a LOT of students in my school would depend on due to the free/reduced lunch program) aren’t intrinsically awful but tend to be pretty much the same all the time–cold sandwich, chips or carrots, an apple or orange.
OK, but it rains just about everywhere except for maybe Southern California. Is that a lame objection too?
Having classes outdoors sounds like a terrific idea until you actually do some deep thinking.
I don’t know if quality control has gone down on contactless thermometers over the last through months, since there’s been so much demand for them, but reports I’m getting from my daughter indicates that it’s been pretty hopeless (They started temperature checking two weeks ago - only the highest two grades are currently attending). They’re constantly giving readings outside the ‘living human being’ zone, so then they just keep going till they get a reading they like. My daughter rides her bike to school, so she’s always triggering it, and they just keep going till they get a reading they like. One of her friends has POTS, so they just keep going on her till they get a reading they like. And so on…
What Tangent said. Our district provides free lunches for all because 90% qualify. The sack lunches the cafeteria serves are pre-packaged. When we serve them, they are half frozen gross sandwiches. I don’t know why or if they could be improved, but think 180 days in a row of the worst convenience store deli bun you ever saw. Plus a piece of suspicious fruit and some goldfish. They are really, really bad.
Nothing wrong with bringing food from home. This isn’t that.
And still need sunscreen, even in a temperate climate. Especially since hours spent outdoors with no sun protection, even in shade, could set kids up for skin cancer later in life.
Yeah unless you’re up here in Canada, where are about eight months of the year are in the winter and it’s snowy and cold.
I wonder if they’d be better if they were regularly ordered. I talked with our cafeteria manager about them once, and she explained that sack lunches were a rare-enough item that they ordered the ingredients frozen. They need to be lunches that could sit unrefrigerated for hours on field trips, and also meet technical requirements, and survive for a long time in the freezer.
If instead a cafeteria served them every day and in large numbers, they might be able to serve higher-quality ingredients and vary them.
(That said, our cafeteria manager is amazing and I’m always afraid we’ll lose her as she decides to open her own restaurant. With a manager who’s less capable, I dunno.)
I really have no idea if they’d get better. The normal lunches are not bad. Not great, but not bad. But I don’t know how much flexibility the cafeteria has.
I don’t see why they couldn’t pick up hot lunch and return to rooms, but that was apparently a crazy idea when I suggested it.
Paediatricians absolutely care about both the physical and emotional wellbeing of their patients. Parents and teachers care as well.
Obviously, there is more confidence in governments that make good decisions. There will be disagreement on what those are. In Canada, Toronto saw something like six new cases yesterday (out of 111 in Ontario). Nevertheless, I would guess 30% of parents would feel unhappy even if levels continue to be excellent. There’s certainly reason for concern, but also hype and fear. You can look at another country and see it as a lesson or a warning.
The Economist argues long-lasting damage to not being in school, and believes the real question is “schools need to open, how can this be done as safely as possible”? Not everyone believes that is the real question. There are big differences between areas, and different levels of confidence in authority. In any place, there will be parents and teachers genuinely concerned about going back too early. There will be different professional opinions. And this will be equally true in areas where the risk is medium to high, and where the risk is low or very low.
The cafeteria at our school (1400 students) provides great food choices but will not be operational in September due to Covid concerns. Bag lunches will be the norm, and no one will be allowed to leave the campus to go across the street to Popeye’s or Edo.
That was a joke, son.
This incredible patchwork of different precautions will be Ph.d fodder for epidemiologist (and sociologists) for decades to come.
Since most children are intrinsically healthy, pediatricians probably spend as much time discussing children’s emotional health and development with parents as their physical health. Perhaps one of our local pediatricians can weigh in on that, but it’s absolutely within the realm of a pediatrician.
Fisman comes across as pretty damn arrogant here.
OK, so they’re saying that a smaller percentage of children with coronavirus require hospitalization now compared to earlier in the month? Sounds good.
And just as districts here have begun to clarify their plans based on long-awaited guidance last week from the governor and TEA, the Texas Attorney General has just waded in and stomped around and muddied the waters again. 
To a profound and infuriating degree, indeed.
Basically he just opined that counties to not have the authority to close schools to prevent disease. It isn’t legally binding, but it was enough for the state education organization to declare that if the county orders you to close and you do, you lose state funding.
Now, this is mostly theater right now. Districts do have the option to stay virtual for the first 8 weeks, and in 8 weeks everything will be different in some way.
One side effect that isn’t theater is that it was the county order that protected school employees and gave them the right to work at home. So now we can be compelled to come in or hit the road.
What you say about trusting the government is really important, and it’s a big problem here. I would say I trust the government maybe 1%, and school districts maybe 5%. In other words, I think they are lying when they say they can make schools safe.
we’re seeing that here now. the legality of our lockdown is being examined.
while it was in place it had very widespread community support and compliance so the legality wasn’t the primary concern.
however moving forward the parameters of any such closure orders is being examined.
we had / have very high levels of trust in “the system” here though.
For the record, I have never argued “for an approach like Sweden” … I have argued that it was not the way would be doing it but it is too early to say their approach is a failure. That judgement can only be made on the other side of the global pandemic. But that we’ve covered many other times …
You seem a bit contradictory by the way. It does not matter to you if specific states or regions of the United States has low rates, everywhere needs to be completely locked down, because pandemic. But a country the population about a third the population of just Illinois can open widely despite global pandemic? And your confidence that two months would be it seems unrealistic unless by there is a safe and effective vaccine widely used by then, which is highly unlikely.
In any case the argument of whether a nationwide lock down is a hijack in this thread. For the purpose of this thread the question is the same for whatever size unit is locking down or opening up: there should be levels of open each first adding in that which has the most benefits for the least harms. Keeping kids out of schools is an action that has huge harms and has no proven benefits.
To the exact same degree that you need to quantify the benefit. The analogy is exactly right. Keeping kids out of school is akin to giving the patient, the patient being the entire population in this case, a dose of chemotherapy with known significant harmful effects. You don’t do that without some solid support that it will deliver benefits that justifies the harms of treatment.
You are simply mistaken: pediatrics is heavily focused on the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children, on their safety, and on the social determinants of health and well being in this population, with consideration to individuals and to population health levels of analysis. This is their specialty.
I don’t quite agree with the absolute nature of that position. At some level (and I made a stab at some metrics to use but bigger the aim is keeping hospital capacity sufficient to not only handle some unforeseen rise but to also still have capacity for other things well) broad reversal might be needed, and I suspect are in places like Florida, for example. Closing in-person schools, especially High Schools, as part of that broad measure would be reasonable (even if Finland’s experts now think it was not necessary to do so).
Then let me make it very simple. You claim to be a medical doctor, and I believe you. But you are not an epidemiologist nor a public health or infectious disease expert, and you’re certainly not affiliated with any of the elite research institutions I mentioned. That’s clear enough, right?
Dozens of those experts have recommended a national lockdown and start-over. That’s clear enough, right?
In the choice between one MD (or DO) on the internet and dozens of real experts, the logical choice is to go with the real experts. That’s clear enough, I hope.