Question for those who are opposed to school closures because of the potential (inevitable?) disruption to healthcare due to nurses not having childcare:

What do you think of those who can keeping their children home? Do you think they have a responsibility to do so? Do you think it would make a difference?

Anonymous wrote:So this is a week old but here is an explanation of what South Korea has been doing to get their cases under control.

They did close schools but are providing emergency child care for those who need it.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/south-koreas-drastic-measures-coronavirus-offers-glimpse-us/story?id=69383034

Since this virus isn't that dangerous to our youngest adults, I could see us putting something together like that.

Close schools officially so no usual curriculum, testing or IEP requirements. School is closed.

However, students may register at their NEAREST local school (by appropriate age -- elem, middle) within walking distance (usually) for emergency child care. They are cared for in groups of no more than 10 per classroom.

teachers who volunteer for assignment receive double or triple pay hazard. Pay for this with reduced gas consumption.

So everyone is still out mixing except some teachers. You are really grasping at straws here.

Anonymous wrote:So this is a week old but here is an explanation of what South Korea has been doing to get their cases under control.

They did close schools but are providing emergency child care for those who need it.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/south-koreas-drastic-measures-coronavirus-offers-glimpse-us/story?id=69383034

Since this virus isn't that dangerous to our youngest adults, I could see us putting something together like that.

Close schools officially so no usual curriculum, testing or IEP requirements. School is closed.

However, students may register at their NEAREST local school (by appropriate age -- elem, middle) within walking distance (usually) for emergency child care. They are cared for in groups of no more than 10 per classroom.

teachers who volunteer for assignment receive double or triple pay hazard. Pay for this with reduced gas consumption.

I am really concerned about our reliance on chinese data alone comes to the safety of the kids.
We believe their stats, but how accurate they are?
We compare their total hermetic lock down and complete isolation to our zero prevention and business as usual?..

They closed all schools immediately, they isolated kids with their families in their apartments and there was ZERO contact or transmission between the kids. STILL ... if they claim 0.2 % mortality for 9 to 19 group, that is 2 kids per each 1000 cases. So if they had 80 000 cases in total in China and mostly Wuhan,

then they must have lost 160 children age 9 to 19

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Closing schools is total stupidity/insanity. At risk people should quarantine themselves. Lighting the entire economy & culture on fire so that an 80 year old can make it to 81 without quarantining themselves is the height of stupidity.

Your theories are so fantastic. I would love to hear many more. But for now...

Close to 40% of maryland residents are in the risk groups due to the age alone, add to it younger people with asthma, hypertension, smokers etc... and you go easily over 60%.

Pray tell how this will work in your world when all the parents, teachers, doctors and nurses self isolate onlu to avoid exposure to their kids bringing virus from school and taking it to school being secret spreaders...?

Closing schools is super easy and effective method comparing to the hot mess you are proposing.

If your plan were a chicken, it would have no head and no legs.

Nurse here. If schools close, I will either have to not go in or send the kids to the grandparents until the schools re-open. I have local "backup" for occasional weather days, not weeks. Since you are such an expert, which do you advise that I do?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What if? What if we are making wrong assumptions regarding kids safety?

Here is why..we all tend to question chinese data.

However we tend to rely on the reports that kids are safe and mortality in the up to 9 is zero and 2 per thousand in 9 to 19 group.
But have you seen Wuhan? All sealed. From early on. People completely sealed at homes. So yes and perhaps if you kept kids religiously isolated then you sure could have some good results. But we are NOT doing any of this and not as early as they did it.
Can we and should we expect the same results???

And even they admit to over 1500 kids with the most severe cases.

Where are you seeing this? Are you sure you're getting correct info?

Last I checked there was exactly 1 death in the 9 to 19 group and the death rate in that age group is probably vastly inflated because of all the undiagnosed and asymptomatic cases.

Anonymous wrote:What if? What if we are making wrong assumptions regarding kids safety?

Here is why..we all tend to question chinese data.

However we tend to rely on the reports that kids are safe and mortality in the up to 9 is zero and 2 per thousand in 9 to 19 group.
But have you seen Wuhan? All sealed. From early on. People completely sealed at homes. So yes and perhaps if you kept kids religiously isolated then you sure could have some good results. But we are NOT doing any of this and not as early as they did it.
Can we and should we expect the same results???

And even they admit to over 1500 kids with the most severe cases.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Say whaaaaat? When did we get to that many cases so fast????

USA 729 cases!!!! In how many days from the initial 19?????


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

DH works at a hospital and at least 3 people seem to have it. The hospital is freaking out about exposure to doctors and staff. This has not hit news yet. Numbers are going to explode once those million test kits are out and used.

Are you local? MD, DC, VA?

NP. That’s interesting. I work at an MD hospital and haven’t seen any cases that I suspect are the Coronavirus. In fact, I’ve been surprised how few patients I’ve seen with respiratory symptoms.

Scary.. did they died already?

Anonymous wrote:So this is a week old but here is an explanation of what South Korea has been doing to get their cases under control.

They did close schools but are providing emergency child care for those who need it.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/south-koreas-drastic-measures-coronavirus-offers-glimpse-us/story?id=69383034

Since this virus isn't that dangerous to our youngest adults, I could see us putting something together like that.

Close schools officially so no usual curriculum, testing or IEP requirements. School is closed.

However, students may register at their NEAREST local school (by appropriate age -- elem, middle) within walking distance (usually) for emergency child care. They are cared for in groups of no more than 10 per classroom.

teachers who volunteer for assignment receive double or triple pay hazard. Pay for this with reduced gas consumption.

Good ideas here.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am okay with closure (in fact think it is prudent) but I really wish the pro-closure posters on this thread didn't sound so much like they do not give a crap about anyone who isn't a suburban mom holing up in her giant house. They leave the impression they don't care about janitors, or restaurant workers, or bus drivers, or really anyone who faces eviction, loss of health insurance, or bankruptcy if they can't pay their rent.

Because they don’t.

so janitor and restaurant workers must work to pay rent but when they die then what happens?

No OP read all the thread, many caring people. Most of as is brainstorming how to make it work with everyone in mind. Closing cold turkey hurts a lot of people, keeping open potentially hurts everybody.

Ever since the discussion begun there has been a progress made. It is clear this is a national scope. Big gov needs to step in and they are doing it. Some packages and stimulus and such are in the works to protect jobs and provide funds for everyone to survive hardships. Schools are working how to keep families feed by different means including pantries and local centers.

We are in this together. We all depend on each other in an ordinary time and even more so we need to stick together to avoid loss of life either by the means of the disease, the inadequate prevention, lack of preparation, mutual exposure or starvation.

Closing the schools is important first step and easy way to cut the gigantic amount of cross exposure of everyone. However it is also easier said then done as we all are just learning the mountains of logistics and how seemingly simple acts affect so many.

Every solution comes with problems just like every problem can have a solution...

We are all learning the ropes here. We are also learning to be patient and wait for everyone to jump the boat before boat sails away.

Again, lots of caring people.

So this is a week old but here is an explanation of what South Korea has been doing to get their cases under control.

They did close schools but are providing emergency child care for those who need it.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/south-koreas-drastic-measures-coronavirus-offers-glimpse-us/story?id=69383034

Since this virus isn't that dangerous to our youngest adults, I could see us putting something together like that.

Close schools officially so no usual curriculum, testing or IEP requirements. School is closed.

However, students may register at their NEAREST local school (by appropriate age -- elem, middle) within walking distance (usually) for emergency child care. They are cared for in groups of no more than 10 per classroom.

teachers who volunteer for assignment receive double or triple pay hazard. Pay for this with reduced gas consumption.

Anonymous wrote:For the kids safety, parents and community alike

Regardless of low mortality and mild manifestation of coronavirus in children, there are many children with underlying condition that will be in the high risk group.

Also considering demographics reality most of middle and high schoolers have parents and grandparents in 60+ group that is now in CDC stay home for preventive measures recommendation group.
These parents and grandparents live together with kids often in one household, many has lots of other risk factors at this age. Continued possible exposure of kids at schools put their caregivers at extreme risk for contraction and complications and possible death.
Kids can bring it home.

New CDC guidance says older adults should 'stay at home as much as possible' due to coronavirus
Early data suggests older people are twice as likely to have serious illness from the novel coronavirus, according to the CDC.

This ought to be top of mind for people over 60, and those with underlying health problems, such as heart or lung disease, diabetes, or compromised immune systems," Schaffner added. "The single most important thing you can do to avoid the virus is reduce your face to face contact with people."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/06/health/coronavirus-older-people-social-distancing/index.html

I also posted about quarantining in another thread:

It’s more complex than that. Automatically quarantining people without knowledge of the mode of transmission, and without considering the psychological and social effects, which impact on compliance, may be ineffective and it may be unwarranted.

The example of SARS and the attempt in Toronto to control it with mass quarantine - 100 people for every SARS case. It didn’t work in the case of SARS because it was being transmitted mostly at hospitals, not in the community, it was infectious only when the patient was clinically ill, and only about half the people complied. It was health care workers providing care for these patients, before PPE became standard, who were at risk. SARS led to the now mandatory practice of PPE in care facilities.

BUT, this is NOT to say that it shouldn’t be done for Coronavirus. All I’m saying that we should NOT jump to the conclusion that mass quarantine will stop an outbreak.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2094974/#B6

An outbreak should meet the following three criteria for quarantine to be a useful measure of disease control:

first, people likely to be incubating the infection must be efficiently and effectively identified;

second, those people must comply with the conditions of quarantine; and

third, the infectious disease in question must be transmissible in its presymptomatic or early symptomatic stages.

The use of quarantine in the Toronto outbreak failed on all three counts.

SARS quarantine in Toronto was both inefficient and ineffective. It was massive in scale. Toronto public health authorities quarantined approximately 100 people for each SARS case, while Beijing public health quarantined about 12 people for each SARS case. An analysis of the efficiency of quarantine in the Beijing outbreak conducted by the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that quarantine could have been reduced by two-thirds (four people per SARS case), without compromising effectiveness if authorities had "focused only on persons who had contact with an actively ill SARS patient" (2).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Say whaaaaat? When did we get to that many cases so fast????

USA 729 cases!!!! In how many days from the initial 19?????


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

DH works at a hospital and at least 3 people seem to have it. The hospital is freaking out about exposure to doctors and staff. This has not hit news yet. Numbers are going to explode once those million test kits are out and used.

Are you local? MD, DC, VA?

NP. That’s interesting. I work at an MD hospital and haven’t seen any cases that I suspect are the Coronavirus. In fact, I’ve been surprised how few patients I’ve seen with respiratory symptoms.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Say whaaaaat? When did we get to that many cases so fast????

USA 729 cases!!!! In how many days from the initial 19?????


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

DH works at a hospital and at least 3 people seem to have it. The hospital is freaking out about exposure to doctors and staff. This has not hit news yet. Numbers are going to explode once those million test kits are out and used.

Are you local? MD, DC, VA?

Yes, we are local in the DMV area.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am okay with closure (in fact think it is prudent) but I really wish the pro-closure posters on this thread didn't sound so much like they do not give a crap about anyone who isn't a suburban mom holing up in her giant house. They leave the impression they don't care about janitors, or restaurant workers, or bus drivers, or really anyone who faces eviction, loss of health insurance, or bankruptcy if they can't pay their rent.

Because they don’t.

so janitor and restaurant workers must work to pay rent but when they die then what happens?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Say whaaaaat? When did we get to that many cases so fast????

USA 729 cases!!!! In how many days from the initial 19?????


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

DH works at a hospital and at least 3 people seem to have it. The hospital is freaking out about exposure to doctors and staff. This has not hit news yet. Numbers are going to explode once those million test kits are out and used.

Are you local? MD, DC, VA?