StrangeSox

Ultimately, curriculum and school functional decisions are determined by administration. That is why they are paid large sums for a lot of typically useless positions. Teachers should be supported to do better in online education, which will still be sub-optimal.

I'm not sure intentionally deepening the ongoing economic crisis and punishing people for not quickly adapting to an entirely different job overnight thanks to a global situation out of their control is the smartest policy right now.

Speaking of safely reopening schools:

That sucks, but even if the CTU fell flat on its face, that doesn't make in-person learning during an uncontrolled pandemic safe. Being indoors with people for long periods of time while talking is looking like the worst possible scenario for the spread of this thing. There are already long-running sub shortages in IL. Subs are typically retired teachers i.e. high risk for COVID. What are districts gonna do when multiple teachers are in 14-day quarantines, or worse?

No, because in a sane and functional society, we would be fully supporting everyone to stay home until we got the pandemic under control. Implementing policy that gives strong incentives for increasing risk is dumb. Vindictively taking money from already underpaid professionals is bad.

LMAO Try 30-35+ for most middle school and high school at a time, with 3-5 class periods per day. So even if you do an A/B schedule, the teacher is exposed to 90 or so students every day, 180 every week. I'm sure there have been reckless individual teachers engaging in risky behavior (that was stupidly allowed by officials). Personal hypocrisy doesn't change what reasonable and safe policy is, though. Of the half a dozen teachers I know, none have gone to restaurants or bars or big gatherings at all, aside from one who marched in a BLM protest. Teachers and administrators were left to scramble and figure out band-aid solutions in a matter of days in the spring. It wasn't good. Hopefully, districts have made at least some improvements. I know at least my wife's has some whole online platform they've purchased that'll be teacher-supported for students who opt for at-home learning. It's still a daunting task, and it's still going to be subpar compared to normal times. But that doesn't change the dangers of shoving dozens of students into thousands of classrooms across the country in the middle of a raging pandemic.

I'm sorry that online learning sucks but if we go ahead with in-person schools, well, just take a peak at Israel. It won't last long anyway because too many staff and students will have to be regularly quarantined. Oh, and some will die. e: something else to consider is what quality the in-person teaching is going to be anyway. The best practices for at least a decade now are lots of group work and interaction and one-on-one guidance. None of that is really possible. Lecturing, especially to younger kids, is the worst thing you can do. But that's the only real option for in-person right now.

All indications are that length of exposure is one of the biggest factors. It takes a minimum amount of virus to infect you, so the longer you talk to an infected individual, the more you're getting from them. You could always catch a string of bad luck and talk to a bunch of infectuous people for very short periods, but being in the same room for long periods of time is riskier than the grocery store.

Dr. Anthony Fauci joins TWiV to discuss SARS-CoV-2 transmission, testing, immunity, pathogenesis, vaccines, and preparedness. e: if anyone wants to read the og Communist Manifesto, it can be found here. It's a short and important historical document written as the revolutions of 1848 were heating up.

Gov. Kemp, R-Georgia, *just* issued a ruling forbidding any local governments from mandating masks.

The article discusses exactly that reason as to why this is a controversial move. The trial group for the challenge study is only a few dozen, but the problem is exactly what you point out: there's no known highly effective treatment, so this could kill you. And if you don't test the older age cohorts that are more at risk, you're not learning about potential complications and efficacy in those target groups. Ultimately, the scientists and researchers including a number of Nobel laureates argue that the potential good here outweighs the risk given the scale of the COVID-19 crisis around the globe. I know I wouldn't be signing up for it. The larger Phase 3 trials are still going to take place in the current hotspots where there's enough natural viral exposure to test efficacy. Sadly, the US will be a major part of that. The reason why the original SARS-cov-1 vaccine was eventually abandoned was the the spread was stamped out so effectively that by the time it came for efficacy trials, it just wasn't out there in the wild anymore.

Gonna steal your thunder on the daily reports a bit! The new IDPH regional map, linked in the twitter link you posted, looks helpful. But per Rich, the data is currently 3 days behind. Hopefully they fix that soon. http://www.dph.illinois.gov/regionmetrics

The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which seems to be the earliest good shot, is going to move into "challenge" trials. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jul/16/coronavirus-vaccine-oxford-team-volunteers-lab-controlled-human-challenge-trial They're already ramping up production so that they can provide the UK and the US (and others) with hundreds of millions of vaccine stock by the end of this year. It sounds like Phase 3 trials and then approval won't be ready until early next year at the soonest, but they are fairly confident in a positive outcome. It's a big risk to start production this early, but we'll be months ahead of schedule on a global scale if it works out.

Oh not the White House deliberately obfuscating data and cutting the CDC out of national health care authority in favor of political hacks. I'm talking about the breathless "Russian intelligence assets stole COVID vaccine test data!" reporting. Ok, good. Maybe they will use that data to assist in development of their own vaccine. That information should be being shared globally and publicly anyway. This is a pandemic. Unless they actually damaged or destroyed the original Oxford vaccine data, I don't really care if more people now have access to it.

It's such an absurd argument when you consider the risks of the different paths. Let's say that the covid denialists are right, this thing is completely overblown, nearly every government around the world has been hoodwinked along with the overwhelming majority of the world's virology and epidemiology experts. Democrats in this country are intentionally hamstringing the economy and overhyping this in order to damage Trump/GOP. So in that case, what possible harm does wearing the mask actually do? Best case, you wore an extra piece of clothing while out in public for a little bit as a show of consideration for your fellow citizens who were naively scared. This whole thing would be under control without masks, but they didn't cause any harm. Worst case, you're wrong, the actual experts are right, and you wearing the mask helped get this thing under control that much quicker! Or, you don't wear a mask, and you're right. Ok, what did you gain? Smug satisfaction, but not much else. Or you don't wear a mask, and you're wrong, and now you've increased the danger for everyone's health and our economic capabilities that much more. Maybe you even directly kill someone by spreading the infection to them. It's the ultimate display of a completely selfish ideology. Minimal personal inconvenience for very high potential reward (greatly reduced illness/death/economic damage), or selfishness with very high potential negative consequences.

Unless they're messing with the data, not sure why I should care. Make all COVID data fully publicly available to every researcher everywhere.

Another good episode of TWiV Michael Mina of Harvard comes on to discuss the idea of using cheap, quick, less accurate tests but at a much higher volume to test everyone regularly (as frequently as daily). The current PCR tests are very sensitive and very specific-they can detect the virus at very low levels and be highly confident in the results, limiting false positives. This is fantastic, but these are the "cadillac" of COVID tests and we're seeing big and growing backlogs. Over a week now from Quest/LabCorp, and not enough people getting tested anyway. He defends the Abbott ID NOW tests that were touted early but then found to have low sensitivity on the grounds that we don't actually need to detect virus at super low levels. At higher viral loads, they're perfectly fine. It's at the detection limits that they're marginal. If everyone could have a research-grade PCR test frequently, that'd be great! But we're not there, maybe can never be there, and it'd be hugely expensive. So use the less-sensitive tests on everyone over and over and over again, and you're going to be able to catch true spread much more accurately and, importantly, very quickly. He estimates you could get the tests down to $1/test pretty easily with huge production numbers. If we were testing every student and teacher every day, heck even every few days, we could instantly smother outbreaks.

Yes making sure people can make ends meet while we go into a pandemic shutdown is good, actually. Many countries successfully did this. Otherwise we're left with... the position we find ourselves in today. Raging epidemic and another 1.4m unemployed the previous week, marking 17 straight weeks over 1m new jobless claims. People are also starting to tighten up a bit themselves as we can see from this like mobility data, restaurants traffic etc. The damage to the economy is inevitable, and the worse we let this epidemic get, the worse it'll be.

The coverup continues

Doing it in the summer vs. doing it with a full course load for 40+ hours a week for limited pay. Not sure how many takers you'd have. e: not saying it's a terrible idea just there's some hurdles/limitations to think about. could be helpful even if not a full measure.

hmmm https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3666