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?