Wyoming.
That’s awful.
I have 35 at a time lined up in a portable classroom that’s 600 square feet. If we have one to two feet of space between students we’ll be doing well.
Yikes, Biffster. Wishing you the best of luck.
The Wyoming district where I taught is, as I mentioned before, supplying neck gaiters for all students. If the Duke study is correct and gaiters are worse than no mask at all, the district may become the world’s largest petrie dish.
IIRC, the Duke study posited that gaiters made of fleece were worse than none at all because of some arcane characteristic of fleece that aerosolized the virus even more making it yet more contagious because it stayed suspended in the airspace longer. Gaiters of regular cloth work to a degree, the better the cloth (and the number of layers) the better they work. Even a bandana is better than nothing. The Duke article didn’t make any of this clear until you read it all the way to the bottom twice.
For high school kids, if they are more likely to wear gaiters than a mask, gaiters they will wear instead of a mask that they won’t are a good idea.
For every student, staff, teacher, parent, family everywhere, every day.
Not true that gaiters are worse than no mask at all.
Save the gaiters! Scientists say fear over their virus protection is unwarranted.
Even so, gaiters are just about at the bottom of filtration ability. The only place they would be appropriate would be places where the risk is very low, like on an outdoor walking path. They are totally inadequate for being indoor for long periods of time where the person is more likely to encounter more droplets more often.
And then there is the whole way that gaiters are used. They are constantly moved on and off the person’s face. Each time is an opportunity to contaminate the mask with whatever is on the person’s hand. And because of the soft shape, the outside of the fabric is often rubbed against the person’s nose and mouth when the gaiter is put back on. If you imagine the person having ink on their fingers, it wouldn’t take too long for the ink to be transferred to the gaiter and then end up on the person’s mouth or nose. Regular masks have insides and outsides that generally don’t roll around. The outside of a surgical mask doesn’t typically directly contact the person’s face, so contamination on the outside will stay there. A gaiter, and probably a bandanna as well, is ill-shaped and is likely to have the potentially contaminated outside contact the person’s face.
With all that, there really is no reason to wear a gaiter. It provides little protection and makes it more likely that contamination gets directly rubbed into the person’s mouth and nose. It has the advantage of being convenient and comfortable, but that’s not what kids and staff in schools need to be safe.
Gaiters are also called fleeces in some places, but they’re not made of fleece.
AND I forgot to mention this: there are only 4 subs on the sub list…for the entire district…7 schools. There are usually 40 or so.
It very much depends on what material they’re made of. For men with beards, it seems a much better choice than a regular mask that ends before the bottom of the beard. And I see people wearing regular masks wrong all the time. The part on either side of their nose is often standing off their face, especially if they have prominent noses and no metal strip in the mask. Homemade cloth masks may or may not have enough filtration; they too depend on what they’re made of. At least gaiters conceivably close or tuck in at the bottom, unlike bandanas, which seem relatively useless, as you say.
That said, I haven’t seen a gaiter in action, so I have no idea how much they shift around or how much people fiddle with them. Some of the gaiters I’ve seen in photos look like they’re snug around the nose; others, not as much.
From the article:
Thanks for this. It was helpful.
In other news:
A lot of students and teachers are in quarantine in Mississippi.
Another new study on the transmission rates of children. Another study showing that viral loads may be higher in children. These are multiple articles on the same study. Each of them emphasized something different about the study. This puts into question whether temperature checks would be adequate screening techniques since only 50% of children who were infected had a fever. Screening for symptoms will also miss a lot of infection since the viral load was higher in the first few days of infection when children were asymptomatic.
The last article gives some of the critiques of the conclusions of the study. It’s the same critique the AAP has been having since the beginning. As an academic argument, it could be interesting. But as policy making insight, the critique is saying that just because it’s possible to be transmissible with high viral loads and that’s how adults transmit it, it’s not proven until there’s a statistically significant proportion of the population that is shown to get it this way. Unless they can prove that through another study, proving that by exposing more children to settings where they could infect more people could cause a lot of deaths.
Here is small town Tennessee… Schools open. Remote learning optional. Mask wearing “encouraged”.
My wife is a teacher. Three teachers in one classroom. One of them thinks things are overblown, masks are stupid, etc. (you know the type)
She has tested positive. My wife who wasn’t around her much has now tested positive. So, I was tested today.
We have done the mask thing, no dining in restaurants, home deliveries, ordering food online and having them delivering to the car, etc.
No symptoms - yet.
Sorry about the positive tests. When did your wife test positive? I hope you get good news.
So the Trump administration has officially declared teachers to be essential workers. AFAICT, that means districts don’t have to have teachers quarantine if they’re exposed to the virus, as long as they don’t show any symptoms. Surely districts would have teachers tested, though, right? Then again, the test results are taking quite awhile, so maybe it’s more likely the symptoms would show up first?
I was thinking that if students and teachers are masked and social distancing is enforced, the main worry would be teachers’ household members, but Author_Bulk’s post makes it clear some districts aren’t requiring either measure.
Of course, districts are free to ignore the official declaration should they choose, but I’m thinking many districts will find it simpler and cheaper to use the declaration to shape their policies.
I’m so sorry to hear that and I hope that the two of you get through this with flying colors.
Some of the highlights:
- The RA told her to not call her parents and to wait until the school told her what to do
- While sick, she had to pack up and carry her stuff alone to a decrepit dorm reserved for quarantine students
- The food they provided her was cold rice, meat, and 3 bottles of water
- Deciding to go home instead of stay in the quarantine dorm, she took a 4+ hour bus ride even though she was positive
- The university said they were prepared for CV19, but they didn’t expect to have anyone sick the first day so they hadn’t actually done the preparations.
Good news, and bad news.
The good news, the test I had on Tuesday came Negative.
The bad news, a coworker in another school I work part time for came with a positive result on Thursday.
Meaning that she could had infected others in the car that also me and others had carpooled on Wednesday. (We all used masks even there, no recycled air in the setup of the air conditioning of the car as a precaution, no mixing of the groups in a specific carpool as recommended, etc)
I will have to test again, hope to get lucky again with the schools’ Russian roulette.
(Have to because management and government in Arizona see us as essential workers and as part timer, I have no benefits here)
With a daughter entering college this year, this is how we handled the school question.
If you have questions, please ask them in the linked thread, thanks.