Not having kids in schools, I wondered if this satirical letter from schools to parents resonates with any of you parents of school-age kids:
A NOTE OF REASSURANCE FROM YOUR SCHOOL DISTRICT REGARDING OUR UPDATED OMICRON POLICIES found in https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-note-of-reassurance-from-your-school-district-regarding-our-updated-omicron-policies
BY KARA BASKIN
Dear Parents,
Hope you had a wonderful, relaxing break with family and friends. We’re delighted to welcome you back to school as we celebrate a return to normalcy. We want to assure you that schools are open, safe, and operating completely as usual. However, we did want to alert you to some policy changes to ensure a robust learning environment for all.
Your child’s classroom will have no teachers. Understandably, many of our educators have been reluctant to return to school, with COVID cases and hospitalizations reaching an all-time high and emergency rooms on the brink of collapse.
We want to reassure you that our approach is pedagogically sound and has been studied in-depth by our wonderful homebound college interns over the past four days. We are eager to offer them a timely learning opportunity while also supporting the higher-ed community.
Depending on age and local funding, your child’s classroom will be staffed by:
- A small robot with lifelike emotions on loan from NASA
- YouTube and TikTok (please refer to our “Healthy Social Media Policy” on page 391 of the school handbook for an FAQ)
- Reruns of Disney’s Bunk’d
- A local middle-school student who is on the tail-end of quarantining
This strategy will allow us to keep schools operational and enriching. Feel free to contact us with any specific questions.
Your child should report to school no matter what.
To read the rest of this article go here: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-note-of-reassurance-from-your-school-district-regarding-our-updated-omicron-policies
@saibh I am so sorry you have ended the old year and begun this new year in this way. I am sending you a great big hug.
I can't help but feel that by doing everything right for 2 years, you ended up getting covid only after being fully vaccinated and then with a variant which is not as severe. This is a blessing. Colleges have options for students with covid unlike years past with students caught the flu or had a major medical crisis, This is excellent news, he will not be penalized for missing class and there will be understanding from his professor and perhaps a virtual option. Light has also been able to shine to allow you to see that your daughter has been cutting instead of is issue being kept in the dark. You have a better understanding of how she is managing her stress.
You are doing so much to keep your family healthy and safe.
Trust that that is enough. Know that you and your family are being guided by a higher power or simply that you are surrounded by love and light even when it seems so dark.
We can all pray and send healing light for the highest and greatest outcome regarding the procedure your daughter will be undergoing next week.
May she have doctors who are guided for the highest and greatest good. May she and all of your family know they are loved and may your fear be replaced with hope. May you all feel peace and comfort.
May you feel that this year is a most blessed one for your family.
@saibh I’m so sorry to hear this. Unfortunately this is happening everywhere. I do pray that your daughter can relieve some of the anxiety. I know with my kids and grandkids we’ve been really stunned when they reveal how hard this is on them. Just like @dannyboy relayed about the twins. I think we all are trying to internalize and articulate what we are feeling and our fears. Some are better at it. I’m sending you love, healing light and peace for all, especially your daughter.
@saibh Sending angels to surround your daughter and you throughout this ordeal. You are a good mother. So many let down their guard during the holidays. You just wanted to celebrate and be close to others. Omicron is milder so this wasn't the worst thing to do. You were careful back when it really mattered.
My son got Covid, as I mentioned above. He works in a hospital and they had a surge of covid patients on his floor. He also has been careful except when he would remove his mask to eat lunch or drink some tea. As of today, a week after he first tested positive, neither my husband nor I have tested positive. So, @raincloud, you were right that we don't all get it when one person gets it. Also my son has recovered. He still tests positive but apparently that happens even after you recover. We are still being careful though and he is keeping his mask on and spending nearly every moment in his separate quarters in a barn loft attached to the house.
I was wondering how we would ever avoid endless mutations and variants of COVID. These researchers may have created a path toward a manageable endemic.
@raincloud Thanks for the NPR article. So those folks have created a cheap vaccine that can reach more people.
Pros:
"The real beauty of the CORBEVAX vaccine that Drs. Hotez and Bottazzi created is that intellectual property of this vaccine will be available to everybody," Keith Martin says. "So you can get manufacturers in Senegal, and South Africa and Latin America to be able to produce this particular vaccine."
By contrast, the makers of Pfizer and Moderna, for example, are not sharing their recipe.
Cons: It can't be modified as quickly as the mRNA vaccines can to adjust to new variants.
So your point about how we an tackle the endless variants...
I was wondering how we would ever avoid endless mutations and variants of COVID.
My intuition keeps popping into this question, so here's what I keep getting:
Early on in the pandemic, before Delta came along, I read that the likely evolution of Covid would be increasing variants that would be more infectious, but less virulent. I keep seeing that. That is what has occurred with Omicron. The data so far indicate a milder virus. (Although I'm unclear if it is milder among the unvaccinated middle aged, elderly and immune compromised. So please correct me if they have that data yet.)
But I am concerned that virologists continue to be permitted to experiment with these viruses in the labs. My feeling, although not proven, is that Covid-19 was created in the Wuhan lab. There are other labs doing the same research here in the US and somewhere else in the Western Hemisphere.
@jeanne-mayell I've been following Dr. John Campbell on Youtube.
A couple of days ago he discussed a new, peer-reviewed paper which hypothesizes that Omicron was descended from the original virus via an evolutionary pathway completely independent of the other variants (i.e., Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma), that it had been evolving for over a year in order to pick up so many mutations, and that this evolution had taken place in mice, which is why it was not detected earlier on its evolutionary pathway. The paper postulates that the virus jumped from humans to mice in 2020, spent time evolving/mutating in mice, then jumped back to humans.
Dr. Campbell has been very optimistic about the effect of Omicron on the pandemic, and believes it likely that Omicron infection will serve to inoculate so many people worldwide that it will be difficult for other variants to get a foothold.
In a followup video, near the end of it, Dr. Campbell mentioned that some of his viewers were wondering if Omicron was actually a laboratory product of "loss of function" research, deliberately engineered (in lab mice) to mitigate or end the pandemic. But he notes there is no research on this that he knows of.
Here are the links to the videos. At the end of the first one, Dr. Campbell muses philosophically about how a seemingly random process (the jump to mice and back) could pull us out of this mess and how that is quite an humbling thought.
Video 1 (discussing the paper) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH1u1GIPU2A
Video 2 (followup) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA-fvyGw-cc
I asked in a past post for healing light for my 89 year old brother Ronald who fell and injured his head. He is now in rehab. I got my booster Moderna shot two or three weeks ago. He said it was a half dose. Is that the normal booster? Now they say we need a fourth shot. Will it also be a half dose? Maybe if I had gotten a full dose, I wouldn't need a fourth.
@jeanne-mayell so the end game to creating these virus is to thin the herd? Could there be any other motivation?
Yes, half dose Moderna is the normal booster. I don't know about Moderna but Israel seems to find that a fourth Pfizer dose substantially increases immunity. At least the Prime Minister is asserting so: https://www.newsweek.com/israels-fourth-covid-shot-shows-five-fold-boost-virus-antibodies-prime-minister-says-1665877
I would guess they will find the same for Moderna.
@jeanne-mayell @iridium
My first hope was that the vaccine created by the NPR-referenced-researchers could cheaply vaccinate the world and then variants would no longer have human petri dishes in which to develop. However, that is naive; obviously, more but not all humans will get vaccinated so, while the Omicron variant may dominate and out compete other variants, a new variant could develop in an immunocompromised person and spread.
If the Omicron's transmissibility ensures widespread infection rates, we have a shot at a certain level of acceptable endemic presence of the virus with the help of annual vaccinations. But you are right Jeanne, without an updated vaccine that is distributed to the world annually, won't variants remain a risk? Although, since there hasn't been a repeat of the terrible 1918 flu pandemic, perhaps Dr. Campbell's optimism about Omicron is warranted.
Still, to Jeanne's point, unless we shut down the experimental laboratories that did/can create this pandemic, this won't be the last viral scourge. I wonder what federal agency is responsible for such labs and how one should advocate for their closure?
Whew, my brain is tired. I will retreat from this topic on which I am loquacious but not especially knowledgeable and employ quantum mechanics to picture it gone (along with climate change.)
@jeanne-mayell so the end game to creating these virus is to thin the herd? Could there be any other motivation?
No, the end game of experimenting with the bat virus was never to harm people but to better understand the virus and see if it could jump from bats to humans. The end game was to save lives by isolating the source of the SARS virus, which the Wuhan virologist Shi Zhengli and her team discovered could come from bats. They then experimented with the virus found in bats to see if it could jump to humans.
Also I should be clear that I do not have proof that Covid-19 initially leaked from the Wuhan lab. I just feel intuitively that it did. And because the Chinese have not allowed a credible open investigation, the origin remains suspicious.
Shi Zhengli, at the Wuhan lab does not deny that she and her team have spent decades trapping and taking blood, urine, and fecal samples from bats and comparing them in the lab to antibodies from humans for possible transmission from bat to human. In fact, she admitted that when the outbreak happened she was worried it came from her Wuhan lab. But she has claimed that it did not. Should we believe her? Certainly the Chinese do not want the world to think their lab caused the outbreak.
From the New York Times: "In 2017, she and her colleagues at the Wuhan lab published a paper about an experiment in which they created new hybrid bat coronaviruses by mixing and matching parts of several existing ones — including at least one that was nearly transmissible to humans — in order to study their ability to infect and replicate in human cells."
This work is not just happening in China. There are labs conducting this virology research in North Carolina and I believe in Costa Rica. This is not a China issue. It's an issue about what kind of lab work is safe, and what kind is not safe for human health. Lymes disease has been credibly traced to a Department of Defense-funded lab on Plum Island off the coast of Lyme CT. The US Government denies it.
Even if covid was produced in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, I hope we don’t find out soon because such a disclosure now would probably lead to a new wave of anti-Asian violence.
I'm agnostic about the origins of the SARS-COV-02 virus. Whether it originated in a lab or in nature, the lesson is the same—respect nature. If it had a natural origin it still probably has its genesis in the bushmeat or wildlife trade.
Even if covid was produced in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, I hope we don’t find out soon because such a disclosure now would probably lead to a new wave of anti-Asian violence.
I hear you, Coyote, but my point is that there are similar labs in the US and elsewhere doing this kind of research. It's not just in China.
Interesting news out from Pfizer today. CEO Albert Bourla said an Omicron-specific vaccine from the company will be ready by March.
“We are working on a new version of our vaccine, a version that will be effective against Omicron as well, it’s not that it will not be effective against the other variants, but against Omicron as well,” Bourla said. “The hope is that we will achieve something that will have way, way better protection, particularly against infections, because the protection against the hospitalizations and severe disease, it is reasonable right now with the current vaccine, as long as you are having, let’s say, the third dose.”
I wonder if this new addition to the vaccine will help any other new mutations which may develop from this Omicron specific strain. Omicron has evolved very differently than the others such as Delta. I also wonder if in fact it will be available and actually used in March.
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/omicron-variant-coronavirus-news-01-10-22/index.html
Promising news:
“The thing that might happen in the future is you may see the emergence of a new variant that is less severe, and ultimately, in the long-term, what happens is COVID becomes endemic and you have a less severe version. It’s very similar to the common cold that we’ve lived with for many years,” Dr. Mike Tildesley, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M) and a University of Warwick professor, told Times Radio on Saturday.
Spain suggest to tread Covid as an endemic:
I think that is the next step, but we need to be careful. I hope that masks will stay forever, also during normal flu seasons..
@tbs
Interesting that Spain has now expressed this thought.
This Quote from the article stood out to me:
The U.S. National Institutes of Health says a virus, such as the one that causes COVID-19, transitions from a pandemic to an endemic phase when a virus does not go extinct but merely drops in prevalence and severity over a long period of time.
The U.S. is not near ready to call this a an epidemic if this is how they judge how the transition works. Way too many states are currently dealing with numbers at or higher than their highest peak recorded. Our hospitals in AZ are beginning to near capacity again.
Today my daughter who is an elementary school teacher in Texas said that she was told by a staff member at a high school in her district that there are 35 staff members there were out with covid currently. At her school there are now 5 staff members out with confirmed Covid.
None of these numbers are showing up on the district covid graph page. Her school and the High school don't show any staff out with covid this week and she knows the 5 at her school were all tested and out with covid.
She feels her district needs to go to virtual for the next 2 weeks if for no other reason than for staffing issues. Nobody is willing to sub and schools can not remain open with a staffing crisis. Non of the teachers at her school who are choosing to wear masks have gotten covid yet. She is one of a handful who wear one. Additionally, it is too cool (per state law) to have students do P.E. or have recess outside so they can't even be outside for part of the day.
As per usual, her principle is in denial about the severity of the problem and does not have any viable contingency plan.
*Adding that her superintendent told the media today that under no circumstances who mask be required and there would be NO virtual learn options. Other nearby districts went virtual this first week back from break.