Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

For months we fell all over ourselves rushing to post the latest dire case updates . . . from opening-too-soon red states. "Aha! See? SEC Values! Trumpists gonna Trumpist!"

One year after all this started, six of the seven worst states in per capita COVID deaths are blue.

 

I appreciate a lot of what you've been bringing to the discussion. So when I say "fuck off" for saying the bold thingy there, don't think it applies to everything you say. Far from it. But for that? Yeah. Fuck off. Teachers are underappreciated. And I know a lot of them and I don't know any who don't want their school opened and haven't wanted it opened from the get-go of this. That number includes my wife and her highly compromised immune system. She has been in her classroom since late-August, taking all the precautions needed. She has had multiple students and two staff members in her room contract Covid during the year, all most likely at home. Thanks to an abundance of caution she hasn't had a whiff and Friday will get her second dose. There has been an undercurrent since last March, when schools were closed, that somehow teachers were enjoying a "paid vacation." In reality, they never worked harder during that time. At least the ones doing it right didn't. This year has been crazier than last, with some students opting to "learn" from home, meaning teachers had to double-dip lesson plans, work Zoom or Google classroom or whatever app they use, performing for a live audience and a remote one, the latter often accompanied by know-it-all parents chiming in in the background (if you want to teach your kid, Mommy, fucking do it; it's called home-school. Otherwise, shut the fuck up). They're underappreciated because society us full of people who either loathe education or think they know everything. Often both.

It's not a general beef. It's a fucking fact. Underappreciated, undervalued and vastly underpaid.

 

Exactly

 

Three of my closest friends are teachers and a fourth used to be.

Calling them underappreciated is right up there with dogs biting people and the sun rising in the east. There's no doubting the truth to this statement. Worse, all three are in challenging situations where education is not emphasized. Worst of all is how behind so many of the children are, meaning that the state is all over them and, instead of teaching stuff that really counts and will mean more to them in life, they're teaching to tests and other such stupid crap. And that's before you throw in all the issues connected to the pandemic.

Bad enough that education and education curriculums are politicized as well as the pandemic. Throw it all in one pot and you have one toxic brew.

 

Feelings of being underappreciated and disrespected fueling a rejection of expert scientific guidance on the pandemic.

Which side are we talking about again?

 

Fair or not, society typically "appreciates" professions proportionally according to how difficult it is to become a member of said professions.***

And while it's damn difficult to become a GREAT teacher, it is not difficult to become A teacher. And there's the rub.

***Exceptions being those that involve risking one's life (military, police, firefighter, etc.)

 

I bet you think it’s a lot easier than it really is.

 

It's almost as if the country's highest levels of population density would make it far easier for the virus to spread more quickly and thoroughly in New York or New Jersey or Rhode island or Massachusetts than, say, Wyoming, the Dakotas or Alabama.

 

I should go to bed.

But first:

Pediatrician and epidemiologist Jonas Ludvigsson of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute has been a staunch defender of his country’s unorthodox coronavirus policies. Among them was the decision in the spring of 2020 to keep preschools and schools open for children through grade nine, despite limited understanding of the virus and with few precautions to prevent school outbreaks. But Ludvigsson’s research, which suggested that policy was relatively safe—and has been widely cited in arguments against school closures—has repeatedly come under fire from critics of Sweden’s approach.

The latest example is a research letter, published online by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on 6 January, that looked at severe disease and deaths among children and teachers in Sweden between March and June 2020. Critics—including the authors of two lettersNEJM published on 1 March—have said the study was beside the point and a distraction. It’s well known that children are less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19; instead, schools worldwide have shut down to slow the spread of the virus in the wider community.​

This is a fantastic job of burying the lede, Science editors. Be better.

Here’s the nut grafs and more details:

But Science has learned that another complaint sent to NEJM makes a more serious allegation: that the authors deliberately left out key data that contradicted their conclusion.

The complaint comes from Bodil Malmberg, a private citizen in Vårgårda, Sweden. She used the country’s open records law to obtain email correspondence between Ludvigsson and Swedish chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, the architect of the country’s pandemic policies, that shed light on how the paper came about. Malmberg says she requested the emails because the data in the NEJM paper “did not add up.” Ludvigsson does not dispute the content of the emails, but stands by the study’s conclusions. However, he says the barrage of criticism and personal attacks has made him decide to quit COVID-19 research.

Ludvigsson, whose prepandemic research focused on gastroenterology, was one of the 47 original signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial document published in October 2020 that argued that pandemic policies should focus on protecting the vulnerable while the rest of the population builds up immunity through natural infection.

Ludvigsson’s research seemed to support those ideas. In a review about children’s role in the pandemic, published in Acta Paediatrica in May 2020, he reported there had been “no major school outbreaks in Sweden,” which he attributed to “personal communication” from Tegnell. But as critics noted, Swedish media had reported several school outbreaks by then, including one in which at least 18 of 76 staff were infected and one teacher died. (Children were not tested.)

His NEJM letter sounded another reassuring note. It reported that in all of Sweden, only 15 children, 10 preschool teachers, and 20 school teachers were admitted to intensive care units for COVID-19 complications between March and June 2020. The authors noted that 69 children ages 1 to 16 died of any cause in Sweden during that same period, compared with 65 between November 2019 and February 2020, suggesting the pandemic had not led to an increase in child deaths.

But the emails obtained by Malmberg show that in July 2020, Ludvigsson wrote to Tegnell that “unfortunately we see a clear indication of excess mortality among children ages 7-16 old, the ages where ‘kids went to school.’” For the years 2015 through 2019, an average of 30.4 children in that age group died in the four spring months; in 2020, 51 children in that age group died, “= excess mortality +68%,” Ludvigsson wrote. The increase could be a fluke, he wrote, especially because the numbers are small. Deaths in 1- to 6-year-olds were below average during the same period, so combining the age groups helped even out the increase, he noted.

It wasn’t clear what caused the jump in mortality in 2020; Ludvigsson asked whether Tegnell could help track down the causes of death, which Ludvigsson said would take too long for him to do because of ethical restrictions. Ludvigsson told Science he and his colleagues still have not been able to determine how most children died in the spring of 2020; he says those data were requested from the National Board of Health and Welfare but aren’t available yet.

He says a peer reviewer for NEJM suggested the comparison to deaths in November through February, and that he combined the numbers for preschool and school children because of NEJM’s length requirements. As part of his 1 March response to the published critiques, he updated the paper’s supplementary data with the monthly deaths from 2015 through 2020, but did not flag the 68% increase in school-aged children.

The emails “cast a serious shadow” on the research letter, Malmberg wrote in an email to NEJM. (The journal declined to comment on her complaint.) Epidemiologist Jonas Björk of Lund University agrees that the time comparison used in the paper was unusual. “I can see no good reason to compare with previous months,” he says. “It is standard to compare with the same period in previous years” to account for seasonality and to decrease statistical uncertainty.​

Critics slam letter in prestigious journal that downplayed COVID-19 risks to Swedish schoolchildren

 

I teach in a private HS. We've been open all year with many safeguards. Masks & distancing all day in all classes. 1 of 4 grades Zooms each day (Fridays they have the whole school and manage to avoid some of the large classes). Some summer constructions to create and extra hallway and large classroom at the expense of communal space. Early on, lots of outdoor classes. No eating in the building until winter, then only in the gym (big with high ceilings), seated 8 feet apart, so different lunch periods and breaks for each grade (I am lucky to have my own office, so I can unmask when no one else is there). Assigned seats for contact tracing purposes. Any time we're in a setting other than our normal class (mostly programming), we take a picture. We've had cases and quarantines, but haven't had to keep even a whole grade home yet. I'm 3 weeks past my second vaccine and feeling much more comfortable. All of my kids are in private schools that have had similar experiences. One had 4 different quarantines which drove him crazy, one had none. It's doable. It's not easy. The teachers union stance has embarrassed me and I think confirms the worst stereotypes of teachers.
Teaching over Zoom is really, really hard. No matter how well you do, the students are suffering.

 

By “symbol” I mean that people know that when the masks go away, it is a signal that it is “safe to go in the water again,” so to speak. It will be a psychological “hurdle.”

 

As GOP Governors abandon Covid protocols willy-nilly, the vaccine rollout should be expanded. Here in Arkansas, for example, bars and restaurants can now go to 100-percent capacity - yet working at one doesn't get you in line for a vaccine. That's despite the fact school system employees were given early priority for them. I guess the teacher's union played a role in that, given there is no service industry union to speak of here.