Have you sign-up for weekly asymptomatic testing at APS
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Anonymous
COVID's risk is highly age stratified and it is misinformation to not list it, considering someone 85 years old has a 1000x higher likelihood of dying from COVID vs. someone less than 18. So try again. COVID is actually less risk to kids than the flu. I'm actually a Democrat and this has nothing to do with national politics (weird for you to even bring it up). If you saw Lunch Petitioner's post on AEM before school started, that is someone who wanted school reopening to fail (and reminded me of Rush Limbaugh when Obama got elected). Also, take a look at Smart Restart's Twitter page right now, with constant fear porn regarding cases for 00.2% of the school (again, for a disease less harmful to kids than the flu and for which those 12 and over in Arlington are almost all vaccinated) and pediatric hospitals being full locally (if you read the fine print, it's not from COVID). These people do not want this pandemic to ever be over (Smart Restart was praising New Zealand's military style lockdowns for 1 case the other day). |
Anonymous
I would recommend ignoring the Stationery Lady, Lunch Petitioner and the few others. It's literally like 5 to 10 local screamers, and everyone has tuned them out at this point. |
Anonymous
My son was the only one in his class today but I think that's ok. |
Anonymous
So you’d happily send a kid with Covid to school. To potentially spread to classmates and teachers. I just don’t get it. |
Anonymous
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Heck no. We are all still masking and adults are vaccinated, so we’ve definitely taken precautions. But i understand the risk to vaccinated adults and children under 12 is very low.
The main reason I see people citing as justification is so that an asymptomatic child doesn’t somehow lead to spread of the virus to an elderly or immunocompromised person. But a) it hasn’t been proven that schools are a significant source of community spread to begin with and b) why is it ok to place the burden of preventing community spread on young children? I mean we generally aren’t asking adults to get tested for screening purposes. Bars are open and packed. Football games. Flights. You name it. Society has moved on as a whole, but my six year old needs to take on this burden? Nope. We will keep our kids home if sick and of course get tested and report any positive result. But that is the end of children’s’ responsibility to protect society as a whole. Kids already lost 12-18 months of live learning. That was plenty from them, time to put the burden on adults if we’re not happy with current COVID rates. And btw, no way would I trust the “algorithm” not to cause my kids to end up quarantining while healthy because someone in their “pool” tested positive. |
Anonymous
I would agree with this generally although I'm not sure who Lunch Petitioner is, but I also think PP "the Democrat" poster above is using stats that aren't taking Delta into effect above. PP says that Covid is less deadly than the flu, but this simply doesn't match the actual flu vs. covid facts. Over the last twenty years, the flu has only killed from 37 to 199 kids per year. See https://www.cdc.gov/flu/highrisk/children.htm. However, Covid has killed 355 kids already just in the last year, from 9/10/20 to 9/9/21, and the AMA and APA are noting that given Delta's higher transmittability, including among unvaccinated children, hospitals are admitting more children than ever before and more children are dying of Covid than ever before -- because of the much larger number of children that are becoming infected. See https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2030?utm_campaign=tbmj&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=trendmd&utm_term=usage-042019&utm_content=consumer and also https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP%20and%20CHA%20-%20Children%20and%20COVID-19%20State%20Data%20Report%209.9%20FINAL.pdf. This current rate is significantly higher than child deaths from flu per year, and it seems clear from the trend that pediatric deaths from covid will only get higher in the near future given that the Delta variant is making covid spread more quickly among children and sending more and more children to the hospital. A few weeks ago the week ending 29 July “saw the largest week-over-week percentage increase in paediatric covid-19 cases since the start of the epidemic." If you look at the recent child mortality rates from Covid that I linked in the AAP article, over the last five weeks we have been seeing ~20 kids die per week across the US, whereas back in 2020 it was unusual to see more than a few child deaths from Covid per week. So this idea that Covid is less deadly than the flu is a cute talking point but it's pretty outdated and does not reflect current stats of the 355 actual children that have died of covid in the last year. If the flu has been killing 20 kids a week over the last month, be sure to let us know. |
Anonymous
+1000 (a) and (b) above are so correct! |
Anonymous
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I'm at the point where I'm totally losing patience with people who refuse to make small sacrifices for the greater good. This is a lack of morality, pure and simple.
I asked my twelve year old child about testing and she WANTED TO DO IT because it would help others at her school and their families. I'm just losing patience with people who won't get vaccinated, won't vaccinate their families, won't volunteer for testing, won't mask up in public indoor spaces because FREEDOM. I don't see that much difference between all of these decisions. You are not doing your part and you suck balls. |
Anonymous
The already old "delta changes everything" refrain. Rachelle Walensky on September 3rd on Delta and kids: “Although we are seeing more cases in children and more overall cases, these studies demonstrated that there was not increased disease severity in children,” Dr. Walensky said. “Instead, more children have COVID-19 because there is more disease in the community.” 355 kids have died with COVID since March 2020 (how many from COVID is not known). Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins did a study when it was 300 and they couldn't find any of the 300 without major pre-existing conditions like leukemia. If a child has serious comorbidities, then watch out with COVID. Fortunately, all but a few children do. Hospitals are admitting many children with COVID because of RSV. Texas Children's Hospital recently had 25 of 45 kids with COVID actually there because of RSV. The CDC's study has shown 40-45% of kids hospitalized with COVID are there for other reasons and incidentally test positive for COVID. Not a talking point about healthy kids and the flu vs. COVID. It's a fact. |
Anonymous
Most of the parents I’ve spoken to have not opted in for surveillance testing for the reasons the PP above laid out. We are all vaxxed, kids will be vaxxed when it’s their turn and I wear a mask indoors. I do wish my kid didn’t have to mask indoors but I’ve accepted that won’t happen anytime soon. I’ll be patient with masks at school until all school age kids can be vaxxed. After that, get the masks out of school. Breakthrough infections for this age group will be just fine and their older family members will be vaxxed too. |
Anonymous
Talk about anti-vax craziness with "I don't see much difference between vaccines and masks". They're not similar whatsoever. There are people, especially in the African American community, not getting vaccinated because they think masks protect them. Nikki Minaj said something similar yesterday. Vaccines have proven themself repeatedly in random control trials. Masks have never done so. And please don't say the Bangladeshi mask study, which showed that only medical masks provided slight protection for those 50 and above in a pre-vaccination environment. It's not about freedom. It's about moving on to the next stage of COVID being an endemic and living with the virus. The Beltway has done their part by getting vaccinated. We're done. If you want Zero COVID and Australia-style COVID camps, then move there. Maybe you can volunteer to shoot the dogs at the rescue shelter like they were doing in Australia to prevent the spread of cases. |
Anonymous
| I haven't opted in because there is no explanation of what the supposed algorithm is and how it works. I was all for testing when it was individual and not pooled. I realize the test shortage is not APS fault, but the lack of transparency on how exactly the algorithm works gives me pause. |
Anonymous
Someone here has their facts wrong and it isn’t me. Just look at the pdf I linked of the APA/Children’s Hospital Association showing child mortality from Covid since the pandemic began, with the 2021 stats around page 23, appendix 2C — there have been 355 child deaths from covid from 9/10/20 to 9/9/21 — merely one year and mot since back to March as you claim, and in particular the numbers over the last five weeks have risen to about 20 child deaths per week (btw if THAT rate holds up we will be at a rate of over 1,000 child deaths from covid per year by August 2022 but I’m sure you are fine with that too). I agree with you that the CDC is saying this increase is not because Delta is more fatal to children (though it has also noted that covid child Mortality has increased from 1% to 2% of kids hospitalized from covid, which I suppose it considers a negligible difference) — but CDC says more children are dying now because more children are catching covid due to Delta’s higher transmissibility. Strain yourself for a minute to consider why this might mean that early detection through testing in schools might be a really helpful tool to prevent wide spread of the virus through our student populations. Have you figured it out yet? I will wait. |
Anonymous
I’m not equating agreeing to get vaxxed with agreeing to wear masks. I’m equating REFUSING to do these things. You decide that getting yourself and your family vaxxed should — sooner rather than later — obviate anyone’s need to wear a mask? What new nonsense is this? Completely amoral and a failure to look out for the people around you because of mere inconvenience to you and yours. Blech. |
Anonymous
And what % of them are actually healthy children? Likely very, very low (probably less than 1%). If your child has comorbidities, watch out as they should have already been doing so. The UK's medical authority (where delta has been around for much longer) wasn't even recommending vaccinating healthy kids under 15 because the risk of COVID is so low to them. As for testing, we already know the risk of a young child spreading COVID asymptomatically is so low. The harm of children missing school is much higher, which is why many European countries aren't even quarantining close contacts any longer. Health is much more than avoiding 1 respiratory virus. Please stop with the uncontextualized death numbers. How many children died of drowning on average in the US? 800. That is with all of the precautions being taken. 4,000 died of car wrecks in 2016 with all of the precautions taken. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754 School in the UK and Scandinavia is maskless. How are they all not dead yet? |