Caitlyn Peetz on Twitter: 8am MCPS press conference for a “COVID-19 update”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What's the problem? This is exactly what MCPS said it would do. They aren't switching the entire school district to virtual; they are switching an individual school to virtual if it reaches a certain threshhold of absences due to COVID (or presumably any other illness).

Yes, there will soon be a LOT of school moved to virtual when all those yellow schools enter the red zone. But wasn't that expected?

Well, it’s clear MCPS was being disingenuous when it said 5% wouldn’t automatically lead to a switch to virtual, just that it would prompt a discussion with MoCo DHHS. If there was ever a time for discretion and nuance, this is it, given these new cases would have been detected over the break. So now it is evident that 5% ——> automatic closures.

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to see the list of yellow schools?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:You guys I can’t take it anymore. I just want the kids to go to school, to do my job as well as I used to, have some occasional play dates and birthday parties to break up the month. Anyone else hate this feeling of being consumed by thoughts of what MCPS is going to do next to screw your life over again. This feeling takes me back to summer 2020 (remember when they ditched hybrid?) and august 2021 when people were freaking out about delta buy thank god MCPs stuck to its plan. Sigh. I’m so tired. When will it end.

What did you think having kids was going to be? An endless round of birthday parties? Raising kids takes some effort.

If you want to do those things you need to be part of the solution.

And given that nearly 2 years of restrictions, and 1 year of availability of vaccines that remain highly effective at preventing serious illness, hasn't allowed us to get back to normal, the only plausible option left is letting Omicron burn through the community as fast as possible.

If we let covid run rampant (not that we seem to have a choice at this point) it will be over in 3 weeks. I say let it burn.

That’s absolutely my position as well. It wasn’t until the low case rates over the summer were still not enough to get people to chill out. I’ve been very pleased by how contagious omicron is. I think with a lot of work you could from Delta for a long time. But I don’t think there’s any hiding from Omicron. I was skeptical when news about the new variant came out, but the spike we’re seeing is really incredible.

you are one sick MFR. You like this S#$%?? Get out of here. This weirdo is happy about covid and the mess that it has caused. You need omicron and you need a bad case so that you can be intubated. Then we will see how incredible and pleased you are then!!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You guys I can’t take it anymore. I just want the kids to go to school, to do my job as well as I used to, have some occasional play dates and birthday parties to break up the month. Anyone else hate this feeling of being consumed by thoughts of what MCPS is going to do next to screw your life over again. This feeling takes me back to summer 2020 (remember when they ditched hybrid?) and august 2021 when people were freaking out about delta buy thank god MCPs stuck to its plan. Sigh. I’m so tired. When will it end.

What did you think having kids was going to be? An endless round of birthday parties? Raising kids takes some effort.

If you want to do those things you need to be part of the solution.

And given that nearly 2 years of restrictions, and 1 year of availability of vaccines that remain highly effective at preventing serious illness, hasn't allowed us to get back to normal, the only plausible option left is letting Omicron burn through the community as fast as possible.

If we let covid run rampant (not that we seem to have a choice at this point) it will be over in 3 weeks. I say let it burn.

That’s absolutely my position as well. It wasn’t until the low case rates over the summer were still not enough to get people to chill out. I’ve been very pleased by how contagious omicron is. I think with a lot of work you could from Delta for a long time. But I don’t think there’s any hiding from Omicron. I was skeptical when news about the new variant came out, but the spike we’re seeing is really incredible.

you are one sick MFR. You like this S#$%?? Get out of here. This weirdo is happy about covid and the mess that it has caused. You need omicron and you need a bad case so that you can be intubated. Then we will see how incredible and pleased you are then!!!

Omicron has a lot of trouble get into the lungs so intubation is very unlikely.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:You guys I can’t take it anymore. I just want the kids to go to school, to do my job as well as I used to, have some occasional play dates and birthday parties to break up the month. Anyone else hate this feeling of being consumed by thoughts of what MCPS is going to do next to screw your life over again. This feeling takes me back to summer 2020 (remember when they ditched hybrid?) and august 2021 when people were freaking out about delta buy thank god MCPs stuck to its plan. Sigh. I’m so tired. When will it end.

What did you think having kids was going to be? An endless round of birthday parties? Raising kids takes some effort.

If you want to do those things you need to be part of the solution.

And given that nearly 2 years of restrictions, and 1 year of availability of vaccines that remain highly effective at preventing serious illness, hasn't allowed us to get back to normal, the only plausible option left is letting Omicron burn through the community as fast as possible.

If we let covid run rampant (not that we seem to have a choice at this point) it will be over in 3 weeks. I say let it burn.

Agreed. We saw this in South Africa. Give Omicron the 3 weeks to run through.

Also, it is clear that we are not shutting down other aspects of society - hair salons, bars, restaurants, hookah bars, strip clubs, Caps games - all continue as normal. If we’re not going to go around shutting everything down (which I agree that we should not), we need to just accept that this needs to work it’s way through.

Ok but I’d prefer it “work it’s way through” with the idiots who won’t take precautions or vaccinate.
I’m tired of always being careful and then having no option but to send my kids to school with kids whose parents aren’t being careful.
I’m tired of hearing people say we need to just accept this. I’ve done virtual funerals for family members (front line workers) who died from Covid and I have a close family member who never recovered a year after getting Covid the one time she had to leave lockdown.

Letting this “run through” will overwhelm hospitals. It may also allow more mutations.

Hogan is not exactly a good guy - he’s not going to close certain businesses but it doesn’t mean MCPS can’t do the right thing and close for 2 weeks to protect kids and teachers. Just because salons and restaurants are open doesn’t mean we have to go in.

Your post would make a lot more sense if it wasn’t for the fact that we can’t actually stop the spread of covid. All we can do is slightly slow it down, but it will still hit everyone that isn’t continuing to go to extreme measures to isolate themselves. Reducing the rate of transmissions could help hospitals, but only if they're successful at reducing transmissions to the elderly, unvaccinated, and medically frail. Stopping low-risk kids from going to school, while keeping all adult-oriented activities and facilities "business as usual" isn't going to do that.

+1 agree with the pp

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What's the problem? This is exactly what MCPS said it would do. They aren't switching the entire school district to virtual; they are switching an individual school to virtual if it reaches a certain threshhold of absences due to COVID (or presumably any other illness).

Yes, there will soon be a LOT of school moved to virtual when all those yellow schools enter the red zone. But wasn't that expected?

No and they won’t. Some will but they certainly won’t all.

What makes no sense here is that this is after the break. When they announced the 5 percent plan it seemed to be about stopping school spread. Closing schools whose population have caught Covid while out of school over the holidays makes zero sense. School wasn’t driving that transmission as they were at home.

Well, that is a fair point. Except that a large number of kids sick in a neighborhood does indicate some level of local community transmission, I suppose.

Except they moved away from community spread as a metric for schools long ago. So closing schools because students who were not there got sick makes no sense.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:They should have just all gone virtual for two weeks and let the surge pass, staff get healthy, and return to "normal."

That’s ridiculous. Why shut down the whole system against prior assurances, needlessly punishing all 157,000 students? I might be Ok with it if they said 2 weeks and then ending quarantining of students until/unless they test positive, and a real assurance that no schools would ever close again. But in reality, we’d find ourselves in exactly the same place 2 weeks from now.

If staffing really becomes a problem, they should simply close for a week and add those days back with the makeup days in the calendar. 2 weeks would be too long to do that, but 5 days could be done fairly easily.

Doesn’t matter how you choose to close, they are all making their way to closing. Wait until school testing numbers return in the next two weeks, it will be almost everyone at this rate.

Perhaps parents will wise up that opting-in to testing only hurts the kids in the school. Or perhaps the next week of incredibly high covid numbers will drive people to accept the reality that covid is neither avoidable nor terrifying.

What is this bananas line of thinking? What hurts schools are unvaccinated morons who send their kids to school and/or selfish idiots who send their exposed and/or sick kids to school. Not testing doesn't make covid go away. Are you a toddler who thinks that because you have a blanket on your head, everyone can’t see you? It’s this nonsense that’s perpetuating covid and therefore new variants.

[Anonymous]

Is there a list of schools by green, yellow, red?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They should have just all gone virtual for two weeks and let the surge pass, staff get healthy, and return to "normal."

That’s ridiculous. Why shut down the whole system against prior assurances, needlessly punishing all 157,000 students? I might be Ok with it if they said 2 weeks and then ending quarantining of students until/unless they test positive, and a real assurance that no schools would ever close again. But in reality, we’d find ourselves in exactly the same place 2 weeks from now.

If staffing really becomes a problem, they should simply close for a week and add those days back with the makeup days in the calendar. 2 weeks would be too long to do that, but 5 days could be done fairly easily.

Doesn’t matter how you choose to close, they are all making their way to closing. Wait until school testing numbers return in the next two weeks, it will be almost everyone at this rate.

Perhaps parents will wise up that opting-in to testing only hurts the kids in the school. Or perhaps the next week of incredibly high covid numbers will drive people to accept the reality that covid is neither avoidable nor terrifying.

This doesn’t rest solely on a test self-report. When kids and staff go missing for 14 days at a time because they are sick with Covid it’s pretty obvious without reporting. Out ‘sick’ for weeks is a perfect tell. If staff go missing the reason why doesn’t matter as much. Now you have parents and teachers affected from newly closed schools (their children, siblings) on top of that who will then have to stay home with their children—which leads to greater staff shortages. If nobody reported a single new case this would still happen.

[Anonymous]

We need to take a cue from the new NYC mayor who said we need to stop wallowing in Covid and schools will be open.

[Anonymous]

Governor should be making an announcement today. He will announce additional COVID-19 emergency actions today at 10 a.m.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They should have just all gone virtual for two weeks and let the surge pass, staff get healthy, and return to "normal."

That’s ridiculous. Why shut down the whole system against prior assurances, needlessly punishing all 157,000 students? I might be Ok with it if they said 2 weeks and then ending quarantining of students until/unless they test positive, and a real assurance that no schools would ever close again. But in reality, we’d find ourselves in exactly the same place 2 weeks from now.

If staffing really becomes a problem, they should simply close for a week and add those days back with the makeup days in the calendar. 2 weeks would be too long to do that, but 5 days could be done fairly easily.

Doesn’t matter how you choose to close, they are all making their way to closing. Wait until school testing numbers return in the next two weeks, it will be almost everyone at this rate.

Perhaps parents will wise up that opting-in to testing only hurts the kids in the school. Or perhaps the next week of incredibly high covid numbers will drive people to accept the reality that covid is neither avoidable nor terrifying.

What is this bananas line of thinking? What hurts schools are unvaccinated morons who send their kids to school and/or selfish idiots who send their exposed and/or sick kids to school. Not testing doesn't make covid go away. Are you a toddler who thinks that because you have a blanket on your head, everyone can’t see you? It’s this nonsense that’s perpetuating covid and therefore new variants.

Do you not realize that most of these schools are located in highly vaccinated zip codes? Blame the unvaxxed all you want but everyone I know who has Omicron is vaccinated.

And FYI, no one has been at school for two weeks. These cases are not from spread at school.

[Anonymous]

I would not even know this was happening without DCUM. Hopefully MCPS sends out an email today.

[Anonymous]

How does MCPS even know Covid numbers at schools? These must be based on self reporting to schools. Which means the actual Covid numbers are much higher. I think January is going to be a tough month with schools but then hopefully things will improve

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Except they moved away from community spread as a metric for schools long ago. So closing schools because students who were not there got sick makes no sense.

Well, it isn't rocket science to anticipate that if tons of kids in your neighborhood have COVID today, that even more will have it tomorrow.