Are you kidding? There are hundreds of nurses and doctors who have gotten sick and that's when wearing full PPE. Do you think teachers and kids are going to be wearing PPE in class?? This is a troll comment.
Proper, full PPE? Low. Proper PPE requires diligence and training, but for medical professionals it’s pretty reasonable to expect them to wear it correctly.
The issue is that “proper PPE” is a bad assumption in America. Normally PPE is one time use stuff; you’re supposed to destroy the N95 after use. But we don’t have nearly enough of the stuff, so doctors have been reusing them for a while. This increases the risk of it failing, which is a huge issue if you’re going to interact with known COVID positive patients.
It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term.
Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, teaching, and food-working staff MANY of which skew older.
If a school system in a rural town doesn't have enough workers to bus kids, clean up the school, serve lunch, or teach (there's already a teaching shortage because it's a shit job that doesn't pay what it's worth), then schools will be defunkt before long anyways.
What do we do then? It'll be decades before we can replace all those teachers, so we'll have to speedily move to online teaching... what then do we do about parents who need school as daycare so they can provide?
We're beginning to see how intertwined everything in society is, and it's all seemingly crashing down and most people don't even see it happening... it's just a a flu... it'll be over soon.... someone said on FB yesterday that it'll go away as soon as the election is over the only reason it's so big is because of the election....
No. December the election will be behind us, flu season will be upon us, and the 3rd wave will decimate us worse than this one is. Because it'll be cold, we'll be inside, Christmas will come and families will get tired of quarantine again and it's the perfect storm for another explosion of cases.
>There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
And most of them are wearing full PPE when possible for many hours a day, if anything your numbers point to the effectiveness of masks.
>Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open.
I really don't understand your point of view at all. The US had more cases yesterday than the entire EU combined. We had roughly 1/3 of Germany's total cases over the past 4 months in a single day. How can you actually point to them and think we can do the same things they're doing here in the US?
The US has bungled it's response so badly it boggles the mind. We have by far the most cases and deaths and even on a per capita basis we have by far the most cases and deaths in the developed world and more than most of the developing world. The idea that we should just open up and let potentially thousands of kids, tens of thousands of their parents countless others die so they can sit in a classroom and have a blue haired liberal arts major blather at them for 8 hours a day is simply ridiculous.
>Death rates are not surging in proportion to cases.
Deaths have a 4-6 week lag and are steadily increasing, at the same time a larger fraction of cases are young people(who are less likely to die) flouting the rules and getting infected in large numbers at bars and social events.
You can't honestly be saying that we're overreacting to COVID?
I would hope someone in full PPE everyday has a much lower rate of COVID deaths.
The US alone has more than 25% of global cases - comparing Europe to the US doesn't really make sense. They largely beat covid, the US obviously hasn't (see 70k new cases yesterday)
More people die in car crashes than the flu - doesn't mean we don't spend trillions on road safety, seat belts, etc.
Death rates are surging in proportion to cases, with the expected 2 week delay from infection to death. Yesterday Florida had 116 deaths.
CFR isn't the metric that informs policy... its deaths and potential deaths? IE 141,000 Americans dying this year, which were largely avoidable.
There is no science behind the lockdowns. There is no logic in keeping Walmart open but closing Sears for safety. Yes I believe it is absurd the level to which we have locked down the country.
Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
The purpose was never to stop the virus but to slow it.
Growing cases does not concern me. Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
> Some of the states that had the strictest lockdowns, NY, NJ, also had the worst outcomes.
NYC metro ordered lockdowns after it was hard hit, because it was hit early on before there was a real understanding of what was going on.
A lot of other places still haven’t peaked, the reopening push in response to overall national case decline was driven entirely by NY being past it's peak while the rest of the country combined was still on the upswing.
> Growing cases does not concern me.
The growing list of places at or near ICU capacity should, though.
> Death rate has blipped up a little but no where near in proportion to the cases.
Since the peak death rate was when almost all the cases were in NYC when the NYC health system was overwhelmed, that's unsurprising, we shouldn't see similar death rates in proprtion to cases unless almost all the cases are in similarly overwhelmed locations, which because it hit different places at different times will, even with uncontrolled spread, take a little while.
But with enough cases, you can get a pretty apocalyptic total death toll without going back to the peak death:cases ratio.
> Reporting that they are at capacity intimates that they are packed full of Covid patients and overflowing.
No, it suggests that if the COVID numbers go up, someone who should get ICU treatment, whether COVID or not, won't get it because there won't be capacity. Which is kind of an important fact in places where COVID numbers are trending upward.
If your ICU is at 80% capacity, with 20% COVID and 60% everything else, that means you can DOUBLE the number of COVID patients there before running out of space, whereas if all of the patients were COVID patients you could only accommodate an increase of 25%.
Yes, hitting 100% is bad no matter what percent of patients are there because of COVID. But what percent of patients are there for COVID informs how large an increase of cases can be managed.
I’ve never understood this argument. Places in Europe are opening because they think they’ve got the virus under control. It’s an outcome, not a cause.
Before accusing me of denying science, you should actually read the underlying material and try to think about it critically. The AAP guidelines the article is referencing were written more than three weeks ago, when most states were in the middle of a lull between the first wave that we had in March and April and the second one that is starting. It also contradicts CDC's own, current guidelines, which state that remote learning is the safest option for people of all ages.
Furthermore, the AAP guidelines don't say anything about teachers or school staff. It is written purely with kids in mind. When asked about this in an NYT interview, Dr. Sean O’Leary, who helped write the guidelines, said:
"We’re pediatricians. We’re not educators. We don’t want to tread in space where we don’t belong."
In other words, they don't give a shit about teachers or school staff. Well, maybe we should? At least a quarter of American teachers are over 50, and more than third of them have pre-existing conditions. Reopening schools for in-person instruction will decimate them.
Lastly, even if kids themselves are not strong vectors for transmission, there is literally tens of millions of them in the USA that are of K-12 age. What do you think is going to happen when they go on to infect their parents and grandparents?
> There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals.
The person you are replying to is talking about frontline healthcare workers. But you ignored that and ran your math to include everyone who works in a hospital, and then you go on to ridicule the OP based on your incorrect math.
> They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population.
This is based on your incorrect math and I'm quite sure is the incorrect conclusion.
> Schools across Europe have opened.
This isn't Europe, though, it's America. The situation is different here.
> Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID.
I'm not sure how to interpret this, but COVID did not start to spread until November/December last year and obviously the numbers were small to start. What do you mean to imply with this stat?
> The CFR of this disease does not meet the threshold for a pandemic
The definition of a pandemic has nothing to do with CFR.
> nor does it merit the level of fear engendered by the press.
I haven't seen any fear-mongering from respected press. Most of the fear mongering I see about COVID is from Fox or similar telling us that the masks are something to be afraid of, due to government overreach or something.
But the normal press mostly just reports the facts. If those facts create fear in you, then I'm sorry, but it's not the press causing that fear.
