Comments on: Opening the schools, Plan B

By: Tyvor Winn

Tyvor Winn — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:01:12 +0000

In reply to MikeN.

Re MikeN “The fear is getting out of hand. Kids are very low risk, particularly elementary and middle school.

Fear getting out of hand? Low risk? If an out-of-control pandemic is not worthy of fear and great caution, what would be? Zombie apocalypse?

Item > Some recently opened schools in a number of states have already had to close because of Covid-19 found among the students and/or staff.
Item > We now know that younger school-age children have larger amounts of virus in their nasal passages than adults and we know know that older school-age children have the same ability to transmit the virus as adults.

Considring the above, if your intent is to facilitate orphaning large numbers of school-age children along with killing some of them, you couldn’t do better than to send them to school.

And keep in mind also that, contrary to babbling of the sociopathic Impeached President, children are definitely not immune to Covid-19 and we already have dead children of a variety of ages.

Item > Furthermore, it seems likely that school-age children will be prone to the same kinds of lingering damage already seen in adults. So whole lives may be blighted by early return to school.

Item > And just to make opening schools and other “opening” even more hazardous, U. S. testing lately has been decreasing rather than increasing and rapid-results-testing is still only a dream for the vast majority of us.

Fear is the only intelligent response to what is going on now in the Trump-crippled U. S. and fantasy-sourced Pollyanna-ism will just exacerbate an already dire situation.

By: MikeN

MikeN — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 22:13:59 +0000

The psychological impact of seeing teachers in hazmat suits will do more damage to high schoolers than COVID-19.
The fear is getting out of hand. Kids are very low risk, particularly elementary and middle school.
Strangely, where I am, majority of parents voted against sending their kids back to school, but parents of high schoolers voted in favor, the exact opposite of the risk.

My expectation is that some parents are just going to go to work and leave kids to themselves for the day.

By: David F

David F — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 21:30:41 +0000

Folks have been focused on the kids dying, but with the strong differential in mortality based on age, it looks like COVID-19 will make more children into orphans than the number of children it kills.

20-, 30-, 40-, 50-somethings have a much higher chance of death than the kids, especially if you use the super-low mortality numbers that the Plan A folks push. With their near-zero numbers, my 50-something self could have a 500x larger risk of death than my kids, and I normally catch every bug my kids bring home from school.

By: dean

dean — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 14:30:16 +0000

Many non-core classes in districts here are already planned to be shit-canned, although not for purely safety reasons: huge budget cuts are here, and MI schools were not back to pre-2008 funding levels yet.

Local districts are putting out plans: some are going back in-seat, some are offering up to three options, with different sets for k-5 and 6-12. Our district has one of the most confusing sets of options, and they extend through the end of September then will be reassessed.

Some of the ideas here are good, but too late to be implemented I’m afraid. The one question I have is this: our district has a fair percentage of rural students, and many smaller districts here in SW Mi are mostly rural, with high dependency on bus transportation. If social distancing inside school buildings is a nightmare, how would you describe it on buses?

By: RickA

RickA — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 13:59:47 +0000

Not bad. I would also get rid of gym and all sports until after COVID-19. Although that could be considered in your only core requirements already. I really like the one classroom idea to keep the kids in a group and isolate the groups from each other. Makes sense. Not sure about the hazmat, as that would be pretty uncomfortable for the entire day – but I get the idea behind it. Maybe just a mask and faceshield would work.