The dire consequences of COVID school closings

Personally.. I think the far edges of both sides are being obstinate and stupid.
Did our leaders go way too far in response to CoVid? No doubt. We learned pretty early that children were not a high risk factor for Coavid and we knew pretty early that the lock downs and school closing were harming kids terribly… but too much pressure from teachers Union and others that refused to say they made a mistake.
At the same time all those acting like the answers were always easy to see and the path was clear are revisionist with an agenda.

 

Maybe we should have chosen a moderate course, just moderate mass-derangement.

 

I’m going out in limb here and guessing you have zero idea of what moderate means.

 

I was being facetious. But full disclosure: I would have gone all-out for letting people decide how to negotiate the ginned-up hysteria.

 

Over 1,000 Educators Died From COVID. Here's the Story of One

It is worthwhile to keep in mind that while the risk to students was low the risk to school staff was higher and thousands of school staff died. Is that a sacrifice that we should be willing to make, perhaps, but it should be noted that there was a real cost in terms of lives, and just saying it didn’t hurt kids much is an incomplete picture.

 

It's interesting to me; the first closures before anybody knew what was happening (2020 - Spring) made sense. I get it; take a cautious approach until you know what you are dealing with. Once people learned that how they treat their body had a huge impact on their susceptibility to the virus; where was the emphasis on behavior modification? We focused WAY too much on things like masks and social distancing and not nearly enough on emphasizing healthy activities.

One of the things I'll be forever grateful for DeSantis for is re-opening the schools and forcing Alachua County to not be as restrictive as they wanted to be. I won't go into detail, but that was important for our children's needs. And I'm not a fan of nearly everything he's done in office. People had PLENTY of time to make life style adjustments. Nobody wants to hammer home the idea that our unhealthy habits are causing problems. I'm still somewhat frustrated that this consistently gets glossed over.

I'm down with protecting the elderly and those who no longer have the ability to make lifestyle modifications that can impact their long-term health, but we completely whiffed on the opportunity to tell people that they're doing things wrong.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

This is misleading; 451 active teachers vs. 857 retired. Why are the retired teachers mentioned in the same sentence?

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Are You Ready for the “No One Could Have Known” Routine?

 

It also says that 332 staff died. Do they count?

 

It’s the MTG ubermensch philosophy.

But who am I to judge? I engage in the same. I tend to be intolerant of society’s indulgence of the undereducated and incurious. They can’t make lifestyle modifications and stay unhealthily stupid.

 

Based on the data there is no evidence that “those in schools” died at higher rates. Using their deaths to peddle the propaganda and agenda is really disgusting in my book. Shoot alpha was known to infect very few kids. And the story you used decide to use a tragic death in March of 2020. All deaths are tragic. Regardless of whether it is with Covid or the profession one might have been in. But spare us the classroom was somehow too dangerous compared to so many other places (the home being number 1).

 

The article was pure propaganda. Using deaths to push an agenda.

 

Yes, but I thought the concern was for teachers and their exposure to the children? The reality is, many(most?) of these folks who had COVID didn't get it from the children; it's an incomplete statistic and shouldn't be use for shock and awe value. Just my two bits.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

They should have used 783 - the active teachers and staff.

 

Shock and Awe was used to great effect. And by far, the most disheartening aspect of 2020ff was learning how vulnerable Americans were to such. Even now, 3+ years on, I have friends who are terrified of “getting Covid.” It’s like they think it’s a uniquely malevolent organism, lurking silently inside them, gradually filling their lungs with fluid and melting their organs. And that it’s symptoms and a positive test that marks them for destruction.

 

I withdraw my initial comment as a criticism of the article. That article appears to just be an attempt to honor school employees fallen from COVID. It does not appear to be an indication that said school employees were put in a more dangerous position than anybody else or that it was otherwise an unacceptable risk for anybody to assume. I believe @l_boy is misrepresenting the intention of the article. The risk to staff was necessarily higher due to age and other factors including in some cases lifestyle choices; this is true across the board whether we are talking about schools or any other business. Children were generally always safer than adults.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

I think this study is the best one when it comes to school community COVID spread, and what can be done to mitigate the spread and keep schools open. From the conclusion:

Throughout the course of the pandemic, the issue of how to keep schools open safely has been a consistently contentious and complicated issue. Unfortunately, the discussion has often centered around numerous false dichotomies and limited ambition on how to truly tackle this challenge. For instance, many discussions pit ostensible direct harms to children from mitigation measures against the direct harm to children from COVID-19 infection. Other discussions pit student mental health against protection from in-person transmission of disease. Framing the question in these ways creates what appears to be an impossible dilemma. Here, we argue that many of these dilemmas are not really dilemmas: children are inextricably a part of the community, and the harms from in-school transmission extend to the entire community and impact the trajectory of the pandemic; schools enable disease transmission and it is possible to curb transmission; children often do better learning in person and it is possible to keep them safely in school in the midst of the pandemic with appropriate mitigations.

“Learning to live with the virus” is not synonymous with permitting rampant viral spread. Bringing the crisis phase of the current COVID-19 pandemic to an end is a goal that we all aspire toward, but it will take work on our part to make it come to pass; at present the disease is nowhere near achieving endemic conditions. The first step in that process is to limit disease spread, and focusing on limiting in-school spread is critical for limiting transmission. Fortunately, we are close to the point where science-driven interventions make the goal of limiting in-school spread achievable. We should make it a public-health priority to keep schools open without accelerating the pandemic.​

 

We have no idea if that person got covid while teaching. The data was conclusive that covid didn't spread in schools anymore than the surrounding community. We knew this by July of 2020 and people are still trying to say we couldn't open schools safely. It's complete BS.

 

No such thing as “rampant viral spread.”

Only viral spread of fear.

 

Tin hat…

We knew pretty early that CoVid didn’t spread any more in schools than in the community. Teachers were at no more risk at school than the grocery store, protests, church, etc…
Look There is also ALOT of data missing… how old were the teachers, who did they live with, what other issues (I’ve weight, diabetes, etc did they have. But Nationwide, 400plus teachers seems to be at or below the average for adults in most mainstream occupations. School didn’t cause their deaths.
There are still many people walking around outside with masks on.. have we seen any mass media calming the fear it stirred up? Have we seen anyone letting the sadly and grossly misinformed that they don’t need a mask (especially outside). Have seen anyone going on national tv telling people that the mask doesn’t protect you.. it might protect others FROM you? If everyone is t wearing a mask… you wearing one doesn’t help.
I haven’t seen that.. instead it seems we quietly want to keep an ember of fear smoldering…just in case.