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I read one article about a guy who owned a restaurant franchise that required his in-person presence virtually every day. He wasn't anti-vax at all, but he knew that each shot carried the risk of several days worth of side effects and couldn't risk missing work for that long.
If a person doesn't even have weekends or days off and couldn't time the shot for close of business on the last day of work ... that's kind of extreme.
OTOH I got my booster late on a Friday, had nothing more than a sore arm all weekend, thought I was out of the woods and then felt too ill to function on Monday. Its hard to anticipate. It was just one day lost in my case.
It isn't living up to hopes. That's separate from inherent safety. For some reason - likely lack of experience with the medical system or innate aversion to needles - people conflate vaccines with medications (actually the subset that are taken for a while). Granted, it's a new type of vaccine but it's still a vaccine of sorts and not a drug. The track record of drugs is full of safety issues, in part because many drugs turn into poisons at high levels. Vaccines hardly - if there's no quick bad reaction, a negative reaction ever is very unlikely. Let me put it this way - to almost anyone who has had allergy shots, vaccines aren't worth much worry, rather like a painful version of a nibble of a strange or allergenic food.
This does not inspire confidence. A vaccine, sorta kinda. New technology first time used on humans, no long term data.
...As the current system functions, businesses want to be open which means they want employees back regardless of covid-related safety issues, which means employee's children have to be in school. So it ends up being that the demands of business for operational continuity (and really, in our system, continuous growth) is effectively the main input to children returning to school. ...
One could argue that the physical congregation of kids together in one common space, dedicated to learning, is essential for learning. Computer-screens in the family-home are for video games, Facebook or video-calling grandma. To learn, we need a blackboard and a teacher, in a room, with desks arranged for the kids to see the blackboard, adjacent to one another, in rows. Take that away, and both physical learning (multiplication tables) and soft-learning (sharing is better than selfishness) wither.
In hindsight there will likely be done a calculation, estimating how many man-years of productive life were lost worldwide, to this dearth and deficit of education. Those man-years need to be compared with the literal man-years lost through Covid deaths (number of deaths, times putative remaining life-expectancy in the absence of the virus).
I occasionally work with students at the college-level (undergrad and graduate). Almost unanimously they bemoan the decline in quality of their education, especially in the 2020-2021 academic year (last year). Even the dry mechanics of formal lecture, where the professor “lectures” into his/her laptop camera, were much inferior to those in the classroom. Labs, group-work and so on, suffered even more. By a quirk of personal good fortune, I was invited to teach a class by Zoom, as an adjunct. For me the logistics worked well… 3 time zones away from physical campus, I could present the material and earn my paycheck remotely, no commuting required. But for the students? Did they really get their money’s worth? My lectures are now online somewhere, maybe even U-tube. That being so, why even bother going to college? Why even have college? Wouldn’t it be oh-so-efficient, to obviate the hoary tired institutions of our past, careening into a new utopia of efficiency?
I wasn't talking about the vaccine technology (which isn't universally used), and I say worry more about how the virus is affecting things and whether that someday leads back to lockdown or society that's only nominally more open.
I wasn't talking about the vaccine technology (which isn't universally used), and I say worry more about how the virus is affecting things and whether that someday leads back to lockdown or society that's only nominally more open.
There's a big difference between the two. Lockdown is official and hard to reverse without phases, step-by-step, etc. "Nominally more open" societies can and do come back to life quickly, by individual decisions. Bureaucracies move slowly. Individuals can wake up in the morning and decide "I'm back to work."
If a few industries have restricted operations and only a small portion of the population is affected, is that lockdown? I say no. Of course in that case not many people will fear it. Actually, people would have more to worry about with zero restrictions but many businesses closing due to understaffing. Many recreational and social activities rely on businesses being open.
The problem with lockdowns is that they only make sense if you are using them to buy time to implement a less intrusive way of controlling the virus. If you just lock down for a few weeks and don't do anything else, then once you open back up you'll be right back in the same situation again and will have achieved nothing. And, obviously, you can't lock down forever.
Since we are now two years into this mess, there are no justifications for a lockdown - if you are trying to buy time to do something, it's your own fault - you had two years to do whatever it was and didn't do it (or you tried, and it didn't work.)
One could argue that the physical congregation of kids together in one common space, dedicated to learning, is essential for learning. Computer-screens in the family-home are for video games, Facebook or video-calling grandma. To learn, we need a blackboard and a teacher, in a room, with desks arranged for the kids to see the blackboard, adjacent to one another, in rows. Take that away, and both physical learning (multiplication tables) and soft-learning (sharing is better than selfishness) wither.
In hindsight there will likely be done a calculation, estimating how many man-years of productive life were lost worldwide, to this dearth and deficit of education. Those man-years need to be compared with the literal man-years lost through Covid deaths (number of deaths, times putative remaining life-expectancy in the absence of the virus).
I occasionally work with students at the college-level (undergrad and graduate). Almost unanimously they bemoan the decline in quality of their education, especially in the 2020-2021 academic year (last year). Even the dry mechanics of formal lecture, where the professor “lectures” into his/her laptop camera, were much inferior to those in the classroom. Labs, group-work and so on, suffered even more. By a quirk of personal good fortune, I was invited to teach a class by Zoom, as an adjunct. For me the logistics worked well… 3 time zones away from physical campus, I could present the material and earn my paycheck remotely, no commuting required. But for the students? Did they really get their money’s worth? My lectures are now online somewhere, maybe even U-tube. That being so, why even bother going to college? Why even have college? Wouldn’t it be oh-so-efficient, to obviate the hoary tired institutions of our past, careening into a new utopia of efficiency?
No one is talking about eliminating traditional classroom learning. I'm talking about inputs to the safety of children in a pandemic.
It is a moot point anyway. Schools, particularly primary schools, were neither ready, nor helped particularly, to transition to remote learning. It was pretty much a disaster, not because it was unworkable, but because it was bungled, lacked funding, teacher training, etc. and was exacerbated by the generally substandard ISP service to homes in this country.
We are pretty much incapable anymore of putting together an emergency / crash project; heck, we weren't really adequately funding schools before the pandemic. So ... at this point, parents either want their kids out of the house or they have no choice because their employers want them at work and we don't provide much in the way of childcare support in this country, apart from the defacto childcare provided by schools and latchkey programs, where they exist.
None of this is to say that classroom learning / socializing should be cavalierly and permanently discarded. It should have been a finite problem.
There's no basis to say on the other hand that students have learned zilch during the pandemic, either.
At this point, selfishly, my youngest would have been out of public school for some 18 years now, if he weren't dead anyway, so whatevs. Except of course that sick kids bring infections home to grandma in many households, to parents, to extended family and friends, to teachers with comorbidities ... so unfortunately it still effects me, in a hundred indirect ways, even if I didn't give a fig.
I know a parent with a 15 year old daughter in school in Oregon who is pretty much agitating for keeping schools open, to the point of election campaigning on the issue. She's not a covid denier or anti-vaxxer , doesn't think masks are necessary but is fine with people who want to wear them, so ... I get the impulse. I still think it's misguided, but at this point we've screwed the pooch to the point that I'm not sure it really matters.
A narcissist I know is losing it - the sources are drying up. The narc doesn't like any disrupitions in attention seeking or routines that were regularly feeding it, and this thing sure blew that up. The person depends on physical attraction as a source and the mask obscures its "beauty", now it looks like everyone else. This person hates not having control of everything, including environments and other people in them, so the poor thing is having a hard time.
I know a parent with a 15 year old daughter in school in Oregon who is pretty much agitating for keeping schools open, to the point of election campaigning on the issue. She's not a covid denier or anti-vaxxer , doesn't think masks are necessary but is fine with people who want to wear them, so ... I get the impulse. I still think it's misguided, but at this point we've screwed the pooch to the point that I'm not sure it really matters.
How long does a lockdown have to be to make its end not "misguided"
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