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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That’s yesterday’s number.  Today’s is likely to be higher.

That said, is there evidence of omicron transmission in schools?[/quote]

Please don't start that again. Studies cannot separate school and community transmission. No study about school transmission has been able to withstand scrutiny because of confounding factors. It stands to reason that unmasked, elbow-to-elbow seating during daily lunch are super-spreader events with Omicron, which is 10 times more transmissible than Delta. So please just stop with that question.[b] Schools can safely open only when cases are low[/b]. They will have a hard time staying open now when positivity is over 20%. Whether it's system-wide, individual school closures, or granular classroom closures, we will have a very rocky January.

All parents can do is send in their children with KF94 masks, or N95 masks if their faces are adult-sized. 
If they are worried, they need to pull their children from lunch, or pull their children out entirely - unfortunately, that's reserved for people who can afford it.

[/quote]

Are you genuinely arguing for permanent school closures for months every winter? That is what the bolded means in practice. Covid is permanently here.[/quote]

Not at all, and this is what's irritating about people like you, whose ulterior motive is to confuse the issue. We managed to keep schools open in the fall. We should have opened schools for a good portion of the first wave. We should agree as a society to enforce mask mandates and close indoor entertainment and food venues before restricting schools. We should have test-to-stay permanently in place, and a real contact-tracing system (useless now in our current surge, of course, but very useful at other times).

There are so many things we can do to keep schools open that we are NOT doing. The consequence is that now, cases are at an all-time high, and schools will be forced to close in some manner.

It's infuriating beyond measure.

[/quote]

What you said times one million. Every time we try and interject some sanity into the discussion we get a barrage of trolls demanding no masks and screaming about teacher's unions. If you guys don't work for Cato or Heritage I have to say you probably should apply. You're obviously doing their job. [/quote]

I understand your frustration, but PP's post is not aligned with our reality. We didn't open schools during the first wave. The experience in Montgomery County and many other places is that once schools were closed, the bar to reopening was always impossibly high, until the vaccines came. You say it will be a couple of weeks, but in two weeks we'll have people (yes, MCEA members) screeching that cases haven't gone down enough, that they can't possibly teach in KN95 masks, that they need their fourth booster shot first before the elderly and the child care workers etc. etc. etc. Nobody believes MCPS is capable of reopening after a "temporary" systemwide closure. It is concerning that many if not all schools may have to close temporarily, but hopefully if it is at the individual school level it will be easier to reopen them. Or maybe not, maybe students are in for another couple months of virtual "learning", which I think will be awful.[/quote]

The thing about success in a pandemic--someone said this early on, I forget who--is that it doesn't look like anything. It is invisible.

We kept schools closed until we had vaccines last year and a lot of people didn't get sick and die.

How do you quantify that? How do you cut through the noise of people shrieking about unions and lazy teachers and people who just really want schools closed because unions and lazy teachers? The people repeating those drumbeats are so loud. So unrelenting.

Other places kept schools open last year and people did get sick and die. Ended up disabled. Maybe not by the millions, but by the thousands. We are still losing a thousand plus Americans a day to this virus. Children are orphaned. In my head I've started calling it "the Great Winnowing." I don't know what else to say. It is mostly a winnowing of the poor, the sick, the old, the working class, the people a lot of you never see. It's a freaking tragedy and you're not even willing to test your kid or use the imperfect tools we have to stop it.

No one wants kids not to go to school.  No one. We just want a plan. [/quote]

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