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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So far all signs point to this thing being mildl. Sorry forever lock downers [/quote]

You act as if people are rooting for this to be bad instead of recognizing it likely is.  Can you not tell the difference?[/quote]

DP. People were absolutely hoping Delta would be bad. I remember pages of gleeful posts from last summer predicting dead children in every school by Christmas if kids went back. You can't deny there is a group of disaster fetishists on DCUM that are overtly hoping for a disaster. That isn't everyone, but there is a solid group that seems to hope for mass death.[/quote]

Putting them aside, as I don't think there are hardly any people truly rooting for mass death - my question is how do we keep schools open with something causing massive outbreaks?  Will people be willing to have kids wear medical grade masks?  I know one district that provides this for all students and hospital grade air filtration, but of course not all districts have the resources.  Seems a lot of the federal funding should be directed at this during Omicron.[/quote]

The point is that the people on DCUM who were predicting extremely dire consequences if kids went back to school with Delta were abjectly wrong. There weren't dead kids at every school by Christmas. There weren't massive outbreaks in schools. Schools were not shut down because the majority of the school was out with covid. But all of that was regularly predicted on DCUM/Twitter/etc. for Delta in Summer 2020.

I find it hard to credit the people who are saying the same thing about Omicron. And I'm no covid denier; actually my family has frontline workers who have been treating covid patients since March 2020. But these calls to put impossible-to-meet school conditions in place that are realistically unachievable seem like little more than stepping stones to justify school closings.

Take hospital grade filtration. You seem to be saying all school buildings need this for Omicron. How would you even make this happen? There isn't time to get the supplies in place, let alone the labor. Are you saying that schools should shut if they don't have hospital grade filtration? Because that is tantamount to saying we should shut all schools for two years.

It is very, very frustrating to watch the hysteria spinning up about Omicron, when we do not have enough information yet to really understand the impact on vaccinated and unvaccinated populations and at the same time, we do have a great deal of hard evidence of how harmful school closures were, especially to the most vulnerable kids. I don't understand how school closings are even considered remotely realistic at this point. It sounds like unscientific hysteria to me, and yes, like people are actually hoping for a disaster.[/quote]

If you were in the DMV you were sheltered from seeing the dire consequences, but more kids got sick, hospitalized and died during Delta than other time during the pandemic, so it's not exactly a win.  There is no reason to assume Omicron will be more mild and with more people getting sick, that includes more risk to kids.  The people saying there would be dead bodies everywhere sounded just as crazy to most of us who are on the more cautious side and were clearly a vocal minority, but on the other end of the spectrum you now have people normalizing just letting their kids get sick saying it's zero risk.  Both are wrong, and yet more people act like we all should just let our kids get Covid, which is risky on both individual and population levels.  Several virologists now theorize that Omicron possibly originated in the UK or Netherlands which were practicing "let it rip herd immunity", but of course we don't know yet.

Most of us aren't crazies trying to "justify" school closings.  There is a hierarchy of needs when you have a dangerous virus, and places like the DMV controlled that risk really well during Delta to keep the cases down so that outbreaks were rare and schools stayed open. Schools did have to close for periods in other areas, including the south last fall and now upper Midwest.  Many solely attribute that to the high vaccine rates here, but that is only part of it.  Mask mandates and personal behavior also meant less virus circulating in the air and dramatically cut down on the spread.  The real issue is that Covid is airborne and the more transmissibility it has, the more the air has to be cleaned and/or proper PPE needs to be in place to prevent outbreaks.  Omicron makes that far more challenging than Delta from all indications, so we can't just rely on what we did before.  We have forgotten the hammer and dance analogies and instead think we've solved the open schools problem with what worked the last variant.  If we up our game, hopefully we can stay open, but with this level of spread, we need to be ready.  Cloth masks aren't going to cut it, and crappy HVAC won't either.  We have to hammer hard to keep Omicron cases down, and then we can dance again.  Sounds super cheesy.  But anyone saying "learn to live it" is just prolonging the pandemic.  If Omicron spreads freely with no mitigations, be ready for another variant that adapts further against us.

In terms of solutions, there are schools that purchase KN95s for all kids, and that is something that can be done now.  New Zealand just announced that they are buying air filters and CO monitors for every class, and that isn't crazy expensive.  I just think people in this area have thought "game over" for needing to do anymore, and that's right when you get bit in the butt.  It's time to up the game again, but it can be done.

[twitter]https://twitter.com/venessb/status/1467322013962276864[/twitter][/quote]

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