McKnight's discussion with health officer about in-person learning

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In short, they've put metrics around when an individual school may move to 14 days of virtual, but no system wide closure.

Now the health dept guys is lecturing about hand-washing.

Thank you for the summary, PP, which I really really hope is accurate!

The metrics are 5% or more unrelated cases within 14 days, or minimum of 10 in a classroom. Pretty reasonable I think.

5% is huge. My son’s school has 2200 kids so they wait until they have 110 cases confirmed before doing anything. We know lots of kids at that point are carriers and a symptomatic so the number is really higher. I bet they’ll be at the 5% after the holidays but have no idea because the reporting system is flawed.

They are basically saying that they are willing to sacrifice a certain number of lives before doing anything. It’s crazy. Our teacher shortages is about to get a lot worse too.

MCPS is acting like we live in some backward districts in Florida or Texas.

I think a threshold of 110 cases in a 2,200 student high school is completely reasonable.

The teachers should be vaccinated and boostered. Everyone aged 16+ in high school should be vaccinated and either boostered or at low risk of severe disease. Everyone aged 5-11 should have just gotten vaccinated. Everyone aged 12-15 should be vaccinated and can be boostered if at high risk. So why are you talking about "sacrificing lives"?

I believe its also over the course of 2 weeks, so it'll actually be pretty easy to hit that threshold

The metrics were manufactured to ensure the desired outcome. It's just a way for them to go virtual without saying that made the decision across the board. The thing is they cannot justify these decisions anymore. Why 5%? Why not 10%? Why not 3%? Even more so no one can tell us why this is necessary when everyone is vaxxed and boosted and at very very low risk of severe outcomes.

“Everyone” is vaccinated? Huh?
Well this kind of ignorance means nobody can take you seriously. Can’t you Google?
Another person so selfishly wrapped up in their own world. Painful.

If you are not vaccinated you do not care about your own health....so why should I? Done looking out for others that don't want to look out for themselves. Vaccines work!

You misunderstood. I agree with you that idiots who don’t vaccinate deserve what they get but young kids aren’t eligible and teens have old vaccines with no approved booster.

Vaccines work of course. We need to focus on mandating vaccines for those who are eligible and developing vaccines for those not yet eligible.
It seems like people without young kids feel like they don’t count. Saying everyone is vaccinated just isn’t true (sadly). Ask a mother of a baby in day care how scared she is. Her baby is with others who have siblings in school. The risk is real and it’s not that small.

Every school age child is eligible and has been for almost 2 months.

Absolutely not true. Kids up to age 5 go to day care and preschool. They are not vaccinated and several people on here think they are expendable. Also most kids are not boosted and many have old vaccines that aren't as effective as they need to be against these new variants.

Don't people realize that not everyone is over age 16? Surely people on here have had young kids at some point and thought their health was important. I'm really tired of people picking and choosing data that is misleading. If I say young kids can't get vaccines or boosters, telling me a 16 year old can get a booster really isn't that relevant.

Or (more realistically) the know the evidence shows that the risk to children from Covid is infinitesimal

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did I say it was inconvenient? I said that so many people on these boards found it inconvenient not to have an army of service professionals exposing themselves to covid while they themselves worked at home.

Accurate.

My brother and I aren't close. He's not exactly foaming at the mouth with conspiracy theories. I'm just finding his sudden pivot on going back to nature with his family a little oddly-timed.

Yes, you did.

Instead they just see their lack of manicures and how inconvenient it was having Larlo at home when they were doing their important brand marketing for a K-street firm job.

Is English not your first language? I said, "they just see... How inconvenient it was having Larlo at home...."

In this context, I am mocking these people. I am not agreeing with them that having Larlo home is inconvenient.

But I know how you play this pointless game. Have we played it before? Now you will accuse me of backtracking, insist that isn't what I was saying, and try and distract with more inanity to derail the thread. That's what you do.

NP. I'm no covid denier, but you seem exceptionally nasty. Also, your brother has other issues, clearly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did I say it was inconvenient? I said that so many people on these boards found it inconvenient not to have an army of service professionals exposing themselves to covid while they themselves worked at home.

Accurate.

My brother and I aren't close. He's not exactly foaming at the mouth with conspiracy theories. I'm just finding his sudden pivot on going back to nature with his family a little oddly-timed.

Wait, that’s what happened - service professionals worked outside the home while DCUMers worked at home. So confused.

And if you aren’t close with your brother, you don’t know omicron caused it. My epidemiologist sister at Hopkins isn’t worried, so I will stick with her over your brother.

We know you're confused, Svetlana. It's probably because you don't really have an epidemiologist at Hopkins for a sister.

On one hand we have the person who sounds rational, and who says she has an epidemiologist sister at Hopkins. On the other hand, we have you, who sounds highly irrational and whose brother is clearly having a mental break, but you can't see it.

I know who I believe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did I say it was inconvenient? I said that so many people on these boards found it inconvenient not to have an army of service professionals exposing themselves to covid while they themselves worked at home.

Accurate.

My brother and I aren't close. He's not exactly foaming at the mouth with conspiracy theories. I'm just finding his sudden pivot on going back to nature with his family a little oddly-timed.

Yes, you did.

Instead they just see their lack of manicures and how inconvenient it was having Larlo at home when they were doing their important brand marketing for a K-street firm job.

Is English not your first language? I said, "they just see... How inconvenient it was having Larlo at home...."

In this context, I am mocking these people. I am not agreeing with them that having Larlo home is inconvenient.

But I know how you play this pointless game. Have we played it before? Now you will accuse me of backtracking, insist that isn't what I was saying, and try and distract with more inanity to derail the thread. That's what you do.

NP. I'm no covid denier, but you seem exceptionally nasty. Also, your brother has other issues, clearly.

I am. And he does. Thanks!

Those things have nothing to with me being right or not... Which I also am.

I love the DMV: our kids are being exposed to a potentially crippling illness, most of us agree this is bad, are horrified that other people ignore it and spread more covid.... But, of course, the real issue here is whether or not I'm rude.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In short, they've put metrics around when an individual school may move to 14 days of virtual, but no system wide closure.

Now the health dept guys is lecturing about hand-washing.

Thank you for the summary, PP, which I really really hope is accurate!

The metrics are 5% or more unrelated cases within 14 days, or minimum of 10 in a classroom. Pretty reasonable I think.

5% is huge. My son’s school has 2200 kids so they wait until they have 110 cases confirmed before doing anything. We know lots of kids at that point are carriers and a symptomatic so the number is really higher. I bet they’ll be at the 5% after the holidays but have no idea because the reporting system is flawed.

They are basically saying that they are willing to sacrifice a certain number of lives before doing anything. It’s crazy. Our teacher shortages is about to get a lot worse too.

MCPS is acting like we live in some backward districts in Florida or Texas.

I think a threshold of 110 cases in a 2,200 student high school is completely reasonable.

The teachers should be vaccinated and boostered. Everyone aged 16+ in high school should be vaccinated and either boostered or at low risk of severe disease. Everyone aged 5-11 should have just gotten vaccinated. Everyone aged 12-15 should be vaccinated and can be boostered if at high risk. So why are you talking about "sacrificing lives"?

The problem is with the high contagiousness and short doubling time, if you let the numbers get to 100, the horse is out of the barn and probably far more are actually infected but not yet showing symptoms. If Omicron has an R naught of between 3 and 6 and doubles every 2 days, and doesn’t show symptoms for, assume 4 days from exposure, even if we’re catching all the cases ( extremely unlikely), at the moment you hit 100 students testing positive, there are probably another hundred or more already infected.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In short, they've put metrics around when an individual school may move to 14 days of virtual, but no system wide closure.

Now the health dept guys is lecturing about hand-washing.

Thank you for the summary, PP, which I really really hope is accurate!

The metrics are 5% or more unrelated cases within 14 days, or minimum of 10 in a classroom. Pretty reasonable I think.

5% is huge. My son’s school has 2200 kids so they wait until they have 110 cases confirmed before doing anything. We know lots of kids at that point are carriers and a symptomatic so the number is really higher. I bet they’ll be at the 5% after the holidays but have no idea because the reporting system is flawed.

They are basically saying that they are willing to sacrifice a certain number of lives before doing anything. It’s crazy. Our teacher shortages is about to get a lot worse too.

MCPS is acting like we live in some backward districts in Florida or Texas.

I think a threshold of 110 cases in a 2,200 student high school is completely reasonable.

The teachers should be vaccinated and boostered. Everyone aged 16+ in high school should be vaccinated and either boostered or at low risk of severe disease. Everyone aged 5-11 should have just gotten vaccinated. Everyone aged 12-15 should be vaccinated and can be boostered if at high risk. So why are you talking about "sacrificing lives"?

The problem is with the high contagiousness and short doubling time, if you let the numbers get to 100, the horse is out of the barn and probably far more are actually infected but not yet showing symptoms. If Omicron has an R naught of between 3 and 6 and doubles every 2 days, and doesn’t show symptoms for, assume 4 days from exposure, even if we’re catching all the cases ( extremely unlikely), at the moment you hit 100 students testing positive, there are probably another hundred or more already infected.

Likely even more than that. This is just plain ridiculous. Yes, we don't have crystal balls, but in terms of how rapidly the landscape is changing, this is more like March 2020. It's not like March 2020 in many respects, but I'm having flashbacks to that time.

DH's cousin visited with her kid and niece and they all stayed over. A few days later, they went with my kid to the Smithsonian and I was like... I guess use hand sanitizer and don't touch stuff? Then they left on a train, wondering if maybe it wasn't ideal. At work the next day, we had a little COVID meeting where they told us not to touch our faces and to wash hands for 20 seconds and we'd be paid if we were home sick w/COVID (ha?) They gave us info on the VPN and set up our personal laptops. The next afternoon, I was told to go home and not come back for a while (WAH, thankfully). As I was packing up, I heard that schools would be closed starting the next week. That was a Thursday, so I kept my kid home Friday, too.

I'm not saying we're going to be similarly locked down. I'm saying this thing is rapidly doubling, which means quadrupling, then x8, x16, x32, x64... What you thought last week doesn't apply. And like PP said, this means that, honestly... they should get 5% testing positive the very first day, or if not because positives haven't been reported by families over the holiday, then on the day of the week they test the kids who have opted in. By then, of course, it won't be 5%. It might be 10% or more. Which means it's likely that even if everyone is sent home immediately, twice that or more will likely test positive in the few days following that. It's madness, really. And I'd love schools to stay open, but it seems very likely we will need to close them for January.

If you want to get a chill, check out COVID threads from early March 2020 and see all the people with friends and relatives in NYC getting very nervous, and lots of others telling them they were Chicken Little.

And, you know...

"Italy has lots of old people! It won't be that bad here."

[Anonymous]

Feels like that to me, too.

[Anonymous]

Except we have vaccines. Those who are hospitalized and dying right now are primarily unvaxxed people. Not vaccinated people. Not children. The rise in cases, so far, is not causing a similar rate of rise in hospitalizations and deaths. There’s data out of South Africa and Denmark to support this.

Calm down. Ive noticed that most MoCo moms don’t do the calm thing very well. 🙄

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Likely even more than that. This is just plain ridiculous. Yes, we don't have crystal balls, but in terms of how rapidly the landscape is changing, this is more like March 2020. It's not like March 2020 in many respects, but I'm having flashbacks to that time.

Yes, that's an understandable emotional response. However, unlike in March 2020, we now have effective vaccines.

[Anonymous]

It wasn’t as bad here as it was in Italy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In short, they've put metrics around when an individual school may move to 14 days of virtual, but no system wide closure.

Now the health dept guys is lecturing about hand-washing.

Thank you for the summary, PP, which I really really hope is accurate!

The metrics are 5% or more unrelated cases within 14 days, or minimum of 10 in a classroom. Pretty reasonable I think.

5% is huge. My son’s school has 2200 kids so they wait until they have 110 cases confirmed before doing anything. We know lots of kids at that point are carriers and a symptomatic so the number is really higher. I bet they’ll be at the 5% after the holidays but have no idea because the reporting system is flawed.

They are basically saying that they are willing to sacrifice a certain number of lives before doing anything. It’s crazy. Our teacher shortages is about to get a lot worse too.

MCPS is acting like we live in some backward districts in Florida or Texas.

I think a threshold of 110 cases in a 2,200 student high school is completely reasonable.

The teachers should be vaccinated and boostered. Everyone aged 16+ in high school should be vaccinated and either boostered or at low risk of severe disease. Everyone aged 5-11 should have just gotten vaccinated. Everyone aged 12-15 should be vaccinated and can be boostered if at high risk. So why are you talking about "sacrificing lives"?

I believe its also over the course of 2 weeks, so it'll actually be pretty easy to hit that threshold

The metrics were manufactured to ensure the desired outcome. It's just a way for them to go virtual without saying that made the decision across the board. The thing is they cannot justify these decisions anymore. Why 5%? Why not 10%? Why not 3%? Even more so no one can tell us why this is necessary when everyone is vaxxed and boosted and at very very low risk of severe outcomes.

“Everyone” is vaccinated? Huh?
Well this kind of ignorance means nobody can take you seriously. Can’t you Google?
Another person so selfishly wrapped up in their own world. Painful.

If you are not vaccinated you do not care about your own health....so why should I? Done looking out for others that don't want to look out for themselves. Vaccines work!

You misunderstood. I agree with you that idiots who don’t vaccinate deserve what they get but young kids aren’t eligible and teens have old vaccines with no approved booster.

Vaccines work of course. We need to focus on mandating vaccines for those who are eligible and developing vaccines for those not yet eligible.
It seems like people without young kids feel like they don’t count. Saying everyone is vaccinated just isn’t true (sadly). Ask a mother of a baby in day care how scared she is. Her baby is with others who have siblings in school. The risk is real and it’s not that small.

Every school age child is eligible and has been for almost 2 months.

Absolutely not true. Kids up to age 5 go to day care and preschool. They are not vaccinated and several people on here think they are expendable. Also most kids are not boosted and many have old vaccines that aren't as effective as they need to be against these new variants.

Don't people realize that not everyone is over age 16? Surely people on here have had young kids at some point and thought their health was important. I'm really tired of people picking and choosing data that is misleading. If I say young kids can't get vaccines or boosters, telling me a 16 year old can get a booster really isn't that relevant.

Or (more realistically) the know the evidence shows that the risk to children from Covid is infinitesimal

Unfortunately that doesn't really matter since it isn't true for their parents and grandparents. A lot of people seem to be unable to grasp that this is contagious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Unfortunately that doesn't really matter since it isn't true for their parents and grandparents. A lot of people seem to be unable to grasp that this is contagious.

Their parents are vaccinated and boostered, though. A lot of people on DCUM seem to be unable to remember that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Unfortunately that doesn't really matter since it isn't true for their parents and grandparents. A lot of people seem to be unable to grasp that this is contagious.

Their parents are vaccinated and boostered, though. A lot of people on DCUM seem to be unable to remember that.

If we continue to spread it like this there will be more mutations and this will never end. This is exactly why we are in this mess right now.

[Anonymous]

We received an email asking to report positives over winter break. I certainly hope positives over winter break will not count toward this new 5% in a two week period metric since those students were not in school and can continue to quarantine on January 3.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Unfortunately that doesn't really matter since it isn't true for their parents and grandparents. A lot of people seem to be unable to grasp that this is contagious.

Their parents are vaccinated and boostered, though. A lot of people on DCUM seem to be unable to remember that.

If we continue to spread it like this there will be more mutations and this will never end. This is exactly why we are in this mess right now.

We cannot stop the spread of omicron nationally, much less globally. Let's be real and stop punishing our children to "stop the spread".