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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

Thank you for the summary, PP, which I really really hope is accurate![/quote]

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

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. 
[/quote]

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"?[/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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." [/quote]

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