FCPS Masking Update

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02/21/2022 16:41

Subject: Re:FCPS Masking Update

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Anonymous

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Cruzado wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For anyone who cares about kids, this is a must read by: Shelli Farhadian is an infectious disease physician and an assistant professor of medicine and of neurology at the Yale School of Medicine who is studying how Covid-19 affects the brain. Shira Doron is an infectious disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and an associate professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine.

https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/14/controlled-studies-ease-worries-widespread-long-covid-kids/

In two other studies that included scientific controls, the rates of long Covid symptoms were nearly the same in children who had tested positive for Covid-19 compared to those who didn’t. In other words, other factors were to blame in many or most of these cases.

Indeed, children who had not had Covid-19 reported higher rates of many symptoms, including difficulty concentrating and muscle pains — nearly every long Covid symptom except the loss of smell and taste. Similar findings have also been reported in controlled studies in adults.

To be sure, debilitating Covid-19 symptoms persist for weeks in a small number of children, likely due to lingering effects of infection and the body’s immune response to it. But the studies that include control groups tell us that the odds of this occurring in a child with Covid-19 is low, lower even than the odds of getting seriously injured while playing sports.

Controlled studies like the CLoCk study in England, published in Lancet Child and Adolescent Health on Feb. 7, also offer crucial information about the mental health toll the Covid-19 pandemic has taken on children, regardless of whether they had personally been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19. An alarming 40% of teens surveyed — those who had Covid-19 and those who did not have it — reported feeling worried, sad, or unhappy. These mental health symptoms are real, but the data indicate that, more often than not, they are not a consequence of direct Covid-19 infection. Among those who did have Covid-19, poor mental health before getting Covid-19 was an important risk factor for having multiple long Covid symptoms after three months, highlighting the importance of accounting for mental health conditions in studies of pediatric long Covid.

Framed this way, restrictions on children should not be maintained in the name of preventing long Covid.

Fear has had a strong hold on Americans for more than two years, and it is a hard thing to let go of. But we owe it to children to follow the science: Children are more likely to suffer from pandemic-associated symptoms than from infection-associated symptoms. School policies should reflect this reality.

Thanks for posting. It’s good confirmation of what many of us have been saying—based on the science—for over a year now: COVID is not a serious threat to children; it’s less of a threat than many other risks to children that we accept and live with every day; and many of the mitigation measures may be worse in terms of unintended consequences.

Remember folks—your child will get COVID if they haven’t already. Common sense tells us that we can’t stop our children from catching a highly-contagious coronavirus that’s endemic to the population at this point. And if common sense isn’t enough, the CDC has already admitted that “essentially everybody” is going to get COVID. So what, exactly, are all the potentially harmful mitigation measures for? To delay the inevitable? To what end? Hospitals are not overwhelmed and children hospitalized because of COVID are an immeasurably small percentage of hospital patients.

Long COVID may or may not present issues for all of us; none of us are going to be able to avoid it over the long term. We have to go back to living normal life and letting our children do the same.

I think mitigation measures are there, for the most part, to protect the adults who keep the school open and running. If you want school, you sort of need to protect the people who are, essentially, “school.”

Actually the kids are the “school”. The role of adults is to educate them.

It’s not the kids’ job to make sure you have a job.

If the role of the adults is to educate the kids, then the adults are the school. Otherwise, “school” would be just a warehouse for children.

Also, although I am a teacher, I was speaking from the the point of view of “management” when I said the super-cautious mitigation measures are there to keep staff illness and absences minimal.

Job security, by the way, is low on my list of concerns.

And if there were no kids it would just be a warehouse of adults with nothing to do.

Put your sacred N95 mask on and teach. The kids stayed out of school and then masked up for your safety long enough.

It's your own responsibility not the children's. Do you believe vaccines and masks don't work? If you're vaccinated and you're masked, then move on.

Wow, that’s a lot of hostility toward the teaching profession bubbling up. You must have been a terrible student and now, unfortunately, you are unconsciously training your kids to be as unpleasant as you.

DP. Anyone Very Online has seen some pretty nasty posts by both parents and teachers the past few years, leading to more hostility.

The problem is that the ones who suffer from these hostilities are the kids. Parents and teachers need to work together. That’s why I think this mask brouhaha is problematic. It makes what I think is a trivial issue a rallying point for divisiveness.

I think some teachers care about masks and others don’t. If your teacher is pro-mask, I would think accommodating the person who manages and maintains the classroom, works with your child, and evaluates his/ her work, would be the best decision to make in the interest of community harmony. When I took cello lessons as a child, my teacher was a fanatic about students taking off their shoes in the foyer before entering his home. To ignore his request would be a needless gesture of disrespect - and he was a superb cello player and instructor - so we went shoeless.

Go over to the ESSER funds thread and read the post about from the teacher who worked in a school where half the class was in a room with a monitor and virtual teacher and the other half was in class with their in person teacher.

Saying that teachers get to dictate which classrooms wear masks and which don't is beyond overreach. Teachers need to follow the rules too, not just make them up as it suits them.