Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I think you mean Arizona, Florida and Texas are lower than NY. That said ...

New York's estimated Rt first fell below 1 around March 20 or so. That was a good thing, but a helluva lotta New Yorkers have still gotten infected between then and now.

 

For “experts”, there are no real timeframes and guideposts at this point short of a vaccine. They have jobs. They have the mic. They’re comfortable in that role.

Even after there’s a vaccine, there will doubt, concern, a looming threat, ever looming.

 

Oops. You're right. Edited to fix.

 

I'm not going to defend the fuck you

but just because C19 doesn't strike someone else (yet) as the equivalent of the Great Depression or the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the fall of Rome, doesn't mean the emotional losses to these children are somehow less real.

These kids - whether we're talking about a 5-year-old or a 20-year-old - are suffering genuine disruptions and a complete failure of their perfectly reasonable expectations.

It's a slow-motion disaster. It's not a hurricane or a tornado or a forest fire, but for many of us (and our children) it might as well be.

So be kind.

 

Well, that's the way vaccines work. The announcement of an approval doesn't mean by itself that the problem is solved. For one thing, people have to be willing to get the vaccine. That's not an insurmountable obstacle these days.

 

Which is partly why I've suggested upthread that we just hit a universal pause button on all things education for 12 months.

 

Liking this post doesn't cut it. Don't you dare erase this. I won't even try to match it, but I will say that DQ would probably put me on the high five side of the equation and he can kindly go fuck himself.

Wanting to hold the people who are fucking this up accountable is not high fiving. It sure as hell doesn't mean we want it to be this bad and I am fucking exhausted with jackasses like him implying or flat-out stating otherwise.

I want my fucking life back. I want my wife to get her fucking life back. I want that for my friends and family. I want it for this whole damn country. I want every business open and I want every child and young adult to be able to go back to school. I want it all yesterday and that isn't soon enough.

Most importantly, I want my daughter to have her life back. I watched her struggle with seeing nobody but her parents for way too long. At one point, she told me she just wanted to see her boyfriend for five minutes so she could hug him the whole time. Anybody who thinks that didn't break my heart needs to shut the fuck up. Anybody who thinks I'm enjoying this can go fuck themselves right along with DQ. My daughter already lost a season of track. She lost the performance of a play she worked like hell to get ready for. She had to wait three extra months for her road test and she has had the SAT cancelled out from under her twice. She has no assurance that she will get her first shot at in next month as scheduled, either, which just adds extra stress to the college application process. Those aren't particularly big things when you look at the suffering going on around us, but they all hurt. They are all things taken from her and that isn't even close to the worst part. The worst is we don't know when it is going to end. We have no idea what her senior year of high school is going to look like. She is supposed to be vice president of a club at her school that runs blood drives. She is supposed to be president of a singing club at her school and captain of the throwers on her track team and she has no idea if she will get to experience any of that. It is out of her hands and it is out of mine. And hanging over all of us is the threat of a potentially-fatal virus that could do some serious fucking damage to the people it doesn't kill.

I'm sad and angry about every experience being taken from my daugther. I'm also smart enough to know we aren't even close to the end of this pandemic yet. DQ is smart enough to know that, too. Maybe he should stop worrying about how people on the other side of the political aisle are talking about this shit and start focusing on the people who are making it worse.

My apologies. That rant doesn't rise to the level of what I'm quoting, but I'm really tired of the situation and I'm exhausted by the people fucking it up and the people making excuses for them.

 

Becky lives in a South Alabama county, down by the gulf.

 

There's going to be a plethora of studies of the US response of this pandemic and how we got it so wrong. Among those studies about how we are approaching education and the reaction of the kids. I wonder what the results are going to be. This whole time people are either on the side of send them back because they think the outbreak won't be bad but in reality it's about freeing up parents for the economy. Exceptions of course for those who are watching their children's reactions. The other side is don't return because of a fear for the health of teachers and students and that we need to slow down. Of course this comes at the price of the mental health of students. In either scenario, we are doing little for the mental health aspect of all of this. The cost of seeing a friend get sick or the cost of missing out on socializing.

So what do we do? Israel suggests we go slow because reopening will give Covid life. They learned this the hard way. Germany suggests we reopen because the disease travels slow among children. This based on few kids testing positive for antibodies. So possibly true except the study was conducted in one German state where cases were already low and the spokesman for the study said it only represents areas with low case numbers. Plus more studies have come out that says older children pass it as well as an adult. So low grades might be fine, upper grades not so much.

What do we do? Chance the opening or chance kids dealing with mental health problems?

Will be an interesting autopsy done on this whole experience.

 

I was on a video chat with a couple of friends last night and one of them brought up a poll that had most people saying they would refuse the vaccine if the government said it had one, at least at first. Obviously, in those numbers, it isn't all anti-vaxxers. You've got people who don't trust the government. They don't trust pharmaceutical companies. They don't want to risk being first. They have all heard about how it normally takes years to get a vaccine approved, so why would one be ready in less than a year or even less than two years?

One of my friends, an opthalmologist, reminded us that part of the reason it normally takes so long is red tape. Some of the hoops the FDA makes people jump through to get something approved may not be necessary. Then again, they also protect us from a drug company cutting corners testing. Even if they don't, how would we know the long-term effects of a vaccine without waiting to see them develop? The bottom line is she wouldn't be lining up to be the first to take a vaccine and she wouldn't have her 13-year-old daughter doing it, either. My other friend on the call is a two-time cancer survivor. He may not be a doctor, but he knows all about a cure that can be as bad as the disease from personal experience after fighting through chemotherapy twice in his life, once as a teenager and once just a few years back. As you can imagine, I didn't understand all of the conversation. My opthalmologist friend is much smarter than I am. Hell, they both are. (I know. Low bar.) The entire conversation left me feeling even less optimistic about the near future.

Of course, now I've got this scene from The West Wing running through my head.

I know I wouldn't want that job and I wouldn't know which one to pick, but one of the few bright spots of this thing is it got the three of us doing those video chats just about every week.

 

Damn. Did you really have to use the word autopsy in that post?

 

I felt dirty after hitting send.