outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

happened in nisd, too (sa's largest district with >100k students covering a pretty economically diverse area)

https://www.the74million.org/article/educators-wanted-vulnerable-students-to-return-first-for-in-person-learning-but-a-racial-divide-spoiled-their-plans/

in NY state, at least, teachers are in the group that can currently be vaccinated.

Aimless otm that the feds role in this should have been to prioritize and hand down edicts based on a comprehensive reopening plan but the prior administration simply did not care if america lived or died and the current one is mostly making this shit up as quickly as possible... though not fast enough to address low hanging fruit of this variety which is how you end up with movie theaters opening before schools. wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee it is all horribly fucked but the upside is that vaccines appear to actually WORK which is amazing and will hopefully ultimately mitigate everything else, though a bunch of people are gonna get sick and die and 99% of the US will continue to suffer something between serious inconvenience and sophie's choice decisions for no reason except mismanagement in the meantime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/23/vaccine-distribution-pfizer-moderna/

i should prob post this in the other thread but i've had a week of MODERNA COVID ARM which i wasn't aware was a thing but actually is a thing. for me it has presented as a raised red welt surrounding the injection site that is sore and sorta itchy. didn't show up until 10 days after the shot! fwiw it has been annoying but not a big deal. My partner's GP prescribed amoxycillin assuming it was an infection and as soon as she got off the antibiotic, she promptly had a red and swollen face and a rash of raised welts all over her body. She took benadryl for three days and took a steroid and it disappeared but it was a weird reaction to an injection she had taken two and a half weeks ago.

neither of us are having any second thoughts about the second shot but i wouldn't blame someone who is not search savvy or able to readily see a doctor if they did after that.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/27/covid-arm-moderna-vaccine-rash-harmless-side-effect-doctors-say/4277725001/

the important word there is "can," NY teachers (and yes i do mean administrators, lunch ladies, what have you) have to go through the same byzantine "sign up on the internet at 4 in the morning when the new shoes drop" bullshit as everyone else. Not every teacher has hi-speed internet and strangely a lot of them don't have the time to blow on this and still show up for their zoom classes. I'm arguing that the board of ed should have worked to have a separate system with their own supply rather than just throwing them in with everyone else and then pretending that the problem's been solved.

I mean, ok, but you can get it. Lots of teachers I know, including my own wife, were able to do it without that much trouble - yes, it took waking up early, and it was postponed once, but not by very long. Why *shouldn't* teachers have to go through "the same bullshit" as everyone else? Some of that "everyone else" is actually at a proven much higher risk for COVID complications, hospitalization and death than the median teacher.

It's nice to say in theory "let's create a separate priority system for teachers" but that might have literally meant making it take longer for a 65-year-old person with heart disease to get the shot.

didn't you suggest months ago that restricting the vaccine to just specific age groups was a bad thing?

and those are allowed to be open?? wtf!

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, February 23, 2021 8:59 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

My roommate teaches music at a private religious pre-school in Brooklyn that hasn't closed at all this whole time. Her employer did get all their on-site ppl on the vax list though so she's had both shots now. -___-

Lots of teachers I know, including my own wife, were able to do it without that much trouble

Why *shouldn't* teachers have to go through "the same bullshit" as everyone else?

that might have literally meant making it take longer for a 65-year-old person with heart disease to get the shot.

Why *shouldn't* teachers have to go through "the same bullshit" as everyone else?

This is some race to the bottom bullshit. "We made it terrible for some people, why not make it terrible for ALL people!" "Err, do we have the ability to make it not terrible?" "Sure, but why bother!"

It literally is an "either or" - there are x number of vaccines to distribute, you have to decide how to distribute them, and I prefer people in the categories who make up the vast majority of deaths in this country get them first.

That fine...then schools don't open until that problem is resolved.

And also for your children to get out of your hair, forcing teachers into indoor contact with them and each other unnecessarily?

xp Or, e.g., healthcare workers. It's one thing to be in a roomful of masked kids, one of whom might be asymptomatic but contagious. It's another thing to be in constant contact with people who are literally spewing virus all over the place.

man alive more like child dead, boom roasted

Like...? If we were going to prioritize schools opening safely, we had to do that work long before now. Instead we're about to start packing people into movie theaters together to gasp and breathe all over each other, and NYC schools that are doing in-person are doing it with windows open in below-freezing temps because they don't have any ventilation systems.

Arguing that schools should be open (regardless of vaccination) and then:

Why *shouldn't* teachers have to go through "the same bullshit" as everyone else?

is fucking incredible.

100% agree on movie theaters, restaurants, etc.

It is, in fact, fucking ghoulish. FP if you want; fuck that fucking shit.

many xps dude, NJ was giving out vaccines to smokers at one point. we'd all like the help to go to the people who need it the most and you know i'm not suggesting that the guy with one lung should wait behind the fourth grade teacher. there's been inventory available and teachers should have gotten their poke the moment it was feasible through a separate channel where it could be more reasonably administrated as scale and tracked for research purposes. Same is true for frontline workers of all kinds but teachers have ostensibly got a strong union and a major federal footprint so it's doubly stupid this wasn't enacted.

as far as i can tell, the biden administration is approaching this with a "we're gonna prioritize numbers over specific target populations" which is an improvement over "it's a fake disease" but is still flawed.

in orbit basically otm in my opinion; asking teachers (plenty of whom have seen colleagues and family members die or be grounded with longterm covid) to cope with the risk if they can't access the vaccine or to start back in class immediately after their first poke because the numbers won't be "that bad" suggests a lack of awareness of human behavior.

the prior administration simply did not care if america lived or died and the current one is mostly making this shit up as quickly as possible

We get it, yes, there is a global imbalance that fucking sucks. Everyone itt is powerful to change that, unfortunately.

"powerless"

Arguing that schools should be open (regardless of vaccination) and then:

Why *shouldn't* teachers have to go through "the same bullshit" as everyone else?
is fucking incredible.

― Rocky Thee Stallion (PBKR), Tuesday, February 23, 2021 5:27 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Pretty sure I said I was fine with making vaccination of school staff a condition of reopening? At least vaccination for all who want it - you are going to have refusers.

right, so i'm suggesting that the feds should incentivize taking the vaccine for the good of public health / speed of assimilating semi-immunity into all communities / effective hazard pay and should set up the remaining staff that can't or flatly won't get vaccinated with distance learning/hybrid programs for the foreseeable future. but i'm not seeing anything along those lines happening either.

Covid poop coming back

Stay frosty folks

😬

Boston-area MWRA SARS-CoV-2 wastewater update today.

Looking a lot less like noise now. pic.twitter.com/qMkq4WN2K3

— Nicholas Bauer, PhD 👨‍🔬🔬 (@BioTurboNick) February 24, 2021

because we're asking them to be stuck in a room with a group of unrestrained potential virus carriers who are not being tested on a regular basis and who are coming in from different neighborhoods with different levels of infection! because a number of teachers and staff died behind this shit before schools shut down! because getting the kid out of the house so mom and dad (mostly mom) can go to work and earn the rent is a massive priority! because it is a relatively highly skilled job that people have built into lifelong careers that now comes fraught with genuine danger in a way that was never presumed or expected!

hand down, man down, mama there goes that man alive

Coronavirus vaccine skepticism has come way down for Black and Hispanic people since last fall. Where skepticism remains high is among white Republicans. Nearly 60% of white Rs will either not take the vaccine or are unsure.@Civiqs tracking: https://t.co/lLKHxCP3IM pic.twitter.com/O1NT9xB4ZF

— Drew Linzer (@DrewLinzer) February 23, 2021

republicans! what a world!

not the first time their asses are gonna get saved by everybody doing the right thing but them.

sad to say but the best case scenario now looks to be that come april or may an enclave of q types are gonna all get sick and die while numbers keep dropping and vaccine availability increases and that's gonna scare the holdouts into finally getting a jab and bitching about it all the way

or gates throws the switch in June and all us rubes turn into lizard people running on windows 386, who can say which is more likely

if q-ers and q-adjacent holdouts get sick and nobody else does, they'll dig their heels even deeper into their conspiracy-fueled denialism

"This is ridiculous! It's just the flu!"

"Nah, it's 20 times worse!"

"Who cares? Are you gonna live in FEAR?"

"Well, millions of people will die and hospitals will collapse"

"Fuck you, I'm still doing what I used to"

"Well ok, we'll reopen slowly, but can you wear a mask? That'll mitigate risk"

"No, fuck a mask, fascist! Reopen everything!"

"Well hey there's a vaccine now that should actually allow us to actually do that eventually, want it?"

"Fuck you, I have already compromised enough!"

Bit of a very specific San Francisco note but a welcome one that I hope is more broadly the case: at the hospital where I work, the worst of the holiday surge meant something like almost 70 patients in ICU or close to it at one point. Per today's mailout, after a notable decline over the recent weeks, we're down to just 11. Would love to see if we can go back to single digits again by tomorrow or early next week.

SFGH claimed to have discharged their last COVID patient yesterday (I think? maybe the day previous) but with indoor dining reopening, that should fill some beds back up in a week or so.

We'll have to see -- we're at 20% of the city population with at least one shot at this point, and that's bound to have been a big part of this, especially with well over half of the 65-and-up populace falling into that category.

I work for a healthcare system with hospitals in Oregon, Washington and Alaska and our ICU numbers are declining at a very similar rate.

we're at 20% of the city population with at least one shot at this point

Wow, that's incredible!

i believe we're at 13% nationally?

14%, at least according to the NY Times. Chicago is at 11.9%.

My GF is taking her mom to get a vaccine shot (Pfizer?) at this very moment... Fresno County Fairgrounds yee haw

this is pretty unrigorous eyeballing rather than causal analysis, but this thread makes an uncontroversial observation point:

cases have bottomed out are starting to rise in some countries (continental europe, brazil)

the thread then argues this:

this is happening becuase those countries are either not able to vaccinate as fast as israel/uk/us, are not doing very rigorous lockdowns, or do not have herd immunity to the extent of, e.g. south africa, uk, usa, etc.

... which wouldn't pass peer review without more work, but makes total sense.

NEW: it’s a while since I’ve done a big international Covid thread, but this one feels important.

The first six weeks of 2021 have gone rather well in terms of humanity’s fight against Covid.

As well as the rollout of vaccines, global cases halved(!) between Jan 11 and Feb 18 pic.twitter.com/bnoxNkUZsu

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) February 25, 2021

yeah that passes the smell test

The worst part is, as vaccination increases through spring and early summer, the anti-vaccers will have their asses saved by herd immunity.

I don't know - I wonder about certain ruby red pockets of the US. Will COVID be a constant in some rural areas, slowly become less lethal and eventually be renamed Hillbilly's Cough or whatever?

can we plz not use hillbilly as a pejorative, tyia

point taken

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/K2pB2wVpL3v.9SGh8YUYDw--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTUwNC42MzA3ODg0ODU2MDc-/https://media-mbst-pub-ue1.s3.amazonaws.com/creatr-uploaded-images/2020-11/55a82d50-2dce-11eb-9dbf-e504b1a1bd51

SFGH claimed to have discharged their last COVID patient yesterday (I think? maybe the day previous) but with indoor dining reopening, that should fill some beds back up in a week or so.

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Thursday, February 25, 2021 9:33 AM (one hour ago)

you're gonna go to jail for not calling it ZUCKERBERG San Francisco General Hospital