It seems our district is offering a bit of a choice this fall. Either full online classes or semi-limited in-school sessions. We've currently opted for the latter. Our state still mandates masks in pretty much all non-dining situations (which only recently started), and my neck of the woods is surprisingly compliant about it, or at least compared to what I've heard of other locales. This is one of the reasons (I'm telling myself) to hope this won't be a disaster. To their credit, the district, like our governor, is strongly warning they may switch up on a dime if the situation changes.
What are your plans looking like this fall?
Hitting the road back home again today. We've had a productive week, and it was great hanging with parents and "baby" brother's family. Dad turns 90 in September and any opportunity to visit is gift. Thankfully we've all been taking pandemic precautions seriously or this trip wouldn't have happened.
my neck of the woods is surprisingly compliant about it
If the Dells is any indication, the rest of the state isn't at all.
per GrampaS, in his neck of the woods, the compliance varies by venue. In Grand Rapids, he says, mask wearing is very common in grocery stores and Target, but not so much in Walmart.
It remains to be seen how Walmart's corporate decision to require masks will change things.
I ended up in a Walmart and a Target today, both in Minnetonka. Can confirm higher compliance in Target, but both were high.
For you Deep Space Nine fans out there, Death By Troggles is finally starting another countdown. Today, the worst episode of that show.
oooooooh I despise this episode.
Come on over then!
Today's sandwich entry ---> jalapeno pimento cheest, smoked ham, shaved green apple, and watercress on hearty whole grain white bread. Yeah, lunch time can't get here fast enough.
Name?! It needs a name!
(and no, meat sandwich is already taken)
I can not overstate how good this sandwich was. This is in the hall of greatness, fo sho.
That does sound awesome. I'm quite jealous, but may be inspired enough to make pimento cheese sometime soon.
Today I had a chicken salad sandwich, with grilled red peppers and some of the spicy brine from the jalapeños I fermented a few weeks ago. It was good, but no hall of greatness level.
We won't know our options for another week or two, but we had a long conversation after the kids were in bed last night about where our thoughts are and talked about what options for in-school could even look like. Half-full classrooms, shorter days, etc. Seems like there are easier solutions for elementary ages, since they stay in a single classroom for most of their lessons (will PE, Music, and other 'specials' happen though?) but what do you do for High School where kids have a wide variety of schedules?
Personally, I'm hopeful for a hybrid of some sort but mentally preparing for full-time remote being a reality. It's such a dispiriting thought to think of how much worse the situation is now vs. when everything shut down initially, I'm struggling to contain my anger about it all.
My scheduled office re-opening is about a month and a half away, how can that move forward if kids aren't in school?
I've been thinking that it would be good for high schools to switch to like a "study hall" model where you assign one teacher to a group of students -- hopefully with relatively similar classes -- and give them laptops, etc., and have the homeroom teacher supervise. I haven't taught high school, but my experiences teaching in grad school were that preparing for lectures, putting together lessons, and grading homework were the most time intensive parts of the job -- I think most HS teachers would be able to nudge kids along enough in the right direction on an arbitrary subject such that interpersonal contact between a student and each of his/her teacher's isn't strictly necessary, plus you could have a discussion board and email available for really specialized questions. Basically, it would be online learning but supervised by a teacher rather than a parent.
And ideally each of the study hall/home room groups would be in a completely different building to reduce interactions between groups of students and teachers who otherwise wouldn't ever see each other, but that would require something like some families volunteering their house, or districts going out and buying/leasing space all over.
It's not entirely clear to me that this would be a safe enough compromise in places where the outbreak is totally uncontained, but in places where things are relatively under control, I would think that risk to teachers from being exposed only to the same group of 15-20 (presumably asymptomatic) students would probably be reasonable.
We're in an incredibly lucky position where TLO is only 3 and doesn't go to school, and both our jobs are still WFH full time. We feel like we're skating by pretty easy not having any tough decisions to make.
Though all of this has us evaluating a potential move, once our passports are worth a damn again. If I can do my job from anywhere (and they'll let me is the big one) might as well move somewhere with a) lower CoL and b) lower COVID rates.
Assuming we're given the option, Newbish will be headed to school this fall. Hybrid would be fine, but full time distance learning will involve us leaning on a lot of help from Grandparents.
We've got the benefit of very small classes - 13 kids or fewer in each of our kids' classes - which is helping put me at ease for them returning. I'd like to see more plans from our school re: masking, staying in one room, no shared recesses, etc. I trust that is all coming, but I haven't seen it yet. My kids did pretty well with distance learning, so I'd have no objection to starting that back up again.
The Mrs is continuing to plan for reopening her pre-school in the fall. She has procured face shields and boxes of masks for the teachers, as well as disinfectant equipment and air purifiers. But it is also quite tenuous.
An aggressive 4 weeks or so of mask adherence could have a dramatic impact on transmission rates across the country. And yet....
Mrs. Hayes’ grandfather died last night. He had been “sundowning” in the last year, speaking much more frequently in Spanish than English. He was born near Camagüey, Cuba, and lived there on a farm until he & his brother, Ramón, were in their teens. The family moved to Habana to give León & Ramón access to better education. Both brothers eventually attended university; León became a doctor, while Ramón became a lawyer. In Habana they came to know the Castro brothers, who would come over to study or borrow books. León left Cuba before the revolution to practice medicine in the US. He went back only once, after his mother died following an operation. Somehow, he ran into Fidel, who recognized him and invited him to stay and “help build the Revolution.” León said he left the country in a hurry the next day. Ramón stayed behind.
León and I bonded over baseball. He was a fan of the Habana Leones growing up, and the Cubs after moving to Chicagoland. I knew enough Cuban players who crossed over to the majors in the Fifties & Sixties to break the ice, and he would comment on their play in Cuba, or other players who’d passed through the Cuban League during the winter. We’d watch games and chat together when we were down for visits. I also knew he had spent time in the Air Force, but details weren’t forthcoming for years. It wasn’t something he discussed with his grandchildren. Eventually, he opened up a bit. At one point, he mentioned providing medical care for refugees; another conversation brought out the detail — refugees from Vietnam. Eventually, he told me where he’d been assigned for part of his tour — Eglin AFB, one of four sites for Operation New Arrivals. A Cuban immigrant doctor providing care to refugees from a fallen republic...I don’t know his exact thoughts, but he carried that experience with him for a long time.
Baseball’s given me a lot over the years, but I never expected baseball to be the key that allowed my wife to hear her own grandfather’s stories about growing up, his departure from his homeland, or his time in the Air Force.
I'm glad you were able to have that connection with him.
I'm trying to do a better job of asking my dad questions. He's only 72 but nothing lasts forever. Last year, I asked him whether he'd ever seen any big name bands at the Surf when he was growing up. He shared that he'd seen the Yardbirds. He'd never told me that!
Condolences on the family's loss. My wife's father died about a year before we met so I never got the chance to know him. I'm glad you made the most of the chance you had.
Sorry for your and Mrs. H's loss. It definitely sounds as if his memory is a blessing.
My condolences. Sounds like a full life with many experiences, impacting many others lives - glad you got to hear about them.
Thanks for sharing his story, CH, and my condolences to your family.
Yes. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful story.
no kidding. I love the part about getting out of dodge when Fidel asked him to stick around and build the revolution. Sorry for the loss Mr. Hayes.
Condolences. What a wonderful story. Thanks for telling it!
It sounds like he lived quite a life. You and your family will be in our prayers.
I'm very glad my kids are grown and we don't have to make a choice about sending them back to school or not. I don't envy those who have to wrestle with that dilemma. I'm very uneasy with the math that says 56,000 children dying from COVID-19 is just the price of doing business.
Where does that number come from? I haven't seen anything remotely close to that.
Yea, that number seems out of line with what I've seen.
There is some evidence of Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome in young children with coronavirus infections. It seems likely that there will be thousands more such cases than would have been true in the absence of the coronavirus, and hundreds will die.
A recent Lancet piece suggests that the case fatality rate for COVID in children is under 1 percent (4 deaths out of 582 confirmed cases in the study and a 95 pct confidence interval of 0.2 pct to 1.82 pct on the CFR; all 4 were over age 10). Under the assumption that a large share of cases will never be laboratory-test confirmed, suppose the case fatality rate is between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent. There are about 25 million US children aged 0-5, another 25 million 6-11, and another 25 million 12-17. In the absence of a vaccine, imagine that 10 percent are infected over the next year. That's about 7.5 million kids, which projects to between 7,500 and 37,500 deaths. That is a very crude ballpark guesstimate, but it does imply thousands of deaths.
Another strange twist in the Covid outbreak: Unexplained reduction in preemies.
I saw that story. Truly weird. Way too soon to know what it means or if it is generalizable.
Cocktail napkin math. There are 56.6 million K-12 students in the US. The White House cited a .1% mortality rate among those under 25 years of age when calling for a full reopening of schools nationwide. Did I misplace the decimal point?
Applying the death rate of 24 year olds to 5 year olds is not a misplaced decimal point.
Um, infant to 25 years. And yet that’s the data the White House cited in its rationale.
Okay, I found my mistake. It’s .1 percent of infected within the population segment, not .1 percent of the population segment itself.
Right. Case Fatality Rate.
Seasonal flu gins up on the order of 20 million to 45 million symptomatic cases per year in the U.S., which is roughly between 5 percent and 15 percent of the population.
With about 1 percent of the US population already (known to have been) infected in around 5 months, it seems highly plausible that another 1-5 percent of the population will be infected by this time next year. My back-of-envelope math above assumed that 10 percent of kids got infected in the next year, which is much higher than the confirmed cumulative cases we have seen so far.
You have to assume that there have been between 4 and about 14 undiagnosed cases for every confirmed coronavirus case to date to get infections to the equivalent of CDC estimates of annual seasonal flu cases. So there is a LOT of room for disaster still.
If we "only" get another 4 million cases between now and next July, with only, say, between an eighth and a quarter of those cases being kids, then we are talking between 500,000 and a million cases amongst children in the next year. A CFR of 0.1 percent of that would be between 500 and 1,000 deaths.
All-cause deaths among US children and adolescents is about 20,000 per year, some 60 percent of which are injury related (20 percent are due to vehicle accidents). So, even 500 deaths per year from COVID would count as a major cause of death for US children and adolescents.
Speaking of back of the napkin math -- there are now four states with more than 0.1% of their population dead from COVID-19. Not 0.1% of infected individuals, 0.1% of everyone. New Jersey is up to 0.177% of its population dead. NYC has 0.28% of its population dead, along with six other counties in NY/NJ with a population >200K and deaths >0.2% of the population. And that's with not everyone getting infected, and relatively strict measures put in place to slow the spread of the disease.
I think the US data we have supports pretty well that of confirmed cases, roughly 3% eventually die. It was consistent for cases from April and May and deaths in May and June, and it's still essentially spot on for Florida and Texas.
3,267 -- Florida new cases, 6/22, rolling 7-day average
106 -- Florida new deaths, 7/20, rolling 7-day average
~3.2% CFR
3,940 -- Texas new cases, 6/22, rolling 7-day average
114 -- Texas new deaths, 7/20, rolling 7-day average
~2.9% CFR
That will probably start increasing if death reporting remains accurate, since late June is when test positivity starting going through the roof in Florida and they are likely not detecting as many cases relative to how they were testing April through mid-June.
These are great, terrible observations.
But, you know. It's just the sniffles and will go away on its own.
I don't know about how many children would die--I worry more from a societal standpoint that especially young adults 13-18 (and maybe younger kids) would wind up accelerating the spread of the virus throughout our communities and health care systems could wind up completely overrun -- a lot of what we might consider relatively routine care depends upon short stays in the ICU, but if ICUs are at capacity for long periods of time, those procedures will not be completed in a timely fashion. Also, drug manufacturers may struggle in the short term (or even medium to long term) to ramp up production on drugs which are required both in COVID care and other care, and even providers in non-impacted regions could be scrambling to alter treatments based on drug availability.
I think the "flatten the curve" messaging was somewhat helpful when it came out, but now looking back at it, I think it gave an unrealistic long-term vision of how this might play out. With a highly contagious virus, you are either winning or you are losing. Even if it was the goal, there is precious little hope that you could enact policies that would precisely maintain a level amount of cases per day -- essentially you need to precisely average 1 new infection for each existing infection. If you go over that even a little, then you're going to get screwed by exponential growth.
I have seen people on the internet express skepticism that severe outbreaks in places like NYC have really been as bad as advertised, but I just really don't understand that line of conspiracy theory. In the US, hospitals want to make money. They make the most money on elective procedures. During spikes in COVID cases, they have had to cancel elective procedures. Hospital administrators aren't just going to do that for shits and giggles.
We need a strong federal response and we needed it by the time China shut down Wuhan province. By any reasonable inference, NYC had hundreds of cases in February that went completely undetected because there were no checks in place at airports and no widespread early testing. But since we can't change the past, it would help to have a strong federal response today.
Also, since I'm on the subject anyway, I think facial coverings make all the sense in the world as a reasonable precaution, but they are only one tool in the fight. If you have a small outbreak, it could be the difference between 1 asymptomatic carrier shopping for groceries and infecting 2 other shoppers or infecting 0 other shoppers on a given day. If you have a large outbreak, it might be the difference between 100 asymptomatic carriers shopping for groceries and infecting 200 other shoppers or 110 other shoppers -- you've improved the situation but you're still gonna be screwed by exponential growth.
To tie this back to sports--look at sports which have enacted intense testing, quarantine, distancing, and masking protocols -- most of them had some infections on initial testing, but in areas with little community transmission and with good protocols in place, they've largely been able to go on without any major problems. But if you look to MLS, FC Dallas had to withdraw from participation in the MLS tournament because they had too many positive cases from when they were in the middle of Dallas' rising outbreak. I think there is some hope there--that we know we have tools to take care of this--but the catch is that it requires some central leadership to coordinate.
Two weeks ago we were informed that our kids' school would start a week late (which still means starting August 10), and that we would have two options. Either the kids go in-person for half days Tuesday through Friday, or fully online learning where they meet with their teachers remotely on Mondays. With the high numbers going on here, we opted for keeping the kids home. It just didn't seem safe to send them at all.
Then, last week, the district shut it down, with everyone online to start the Fall. (The state then said no in-person schools in our county two days later anyway.) So, we are all still teaching or learning online for the foreseeable future.
The NBA announced today that none of the 340+ players in the bubble tested positive for COVID. It looks like we are gonna get the completion of this NBA season. I sure hope so.
I thought Westbrook had tested positive. Was he not "in the bubble" yet?
He tested positive before getting on the plane to Orlando.
Originally, they had two positive cases, who were quarantined. Subsequently, they tested everyone and had zero positive cases.
My question is: what happens if all the nearby ICUs are full? Are they really going to chance it that someone has a freak injury but they can't get them timely medical help? Otherwise, it seems like following protocols recommended by infectious disease experts can keep you at minimal risk of getting sick. Go figure.
How quickly can a learjet fly to a location with an ICU?
Money solves a lot of problems.
On the subject of school, we don’t have a concrete plan, but if there is an option for Miss SBG to stay home, she will. She’s 13, wants to stay home, and did well with the distance learning this spring. Plus I’m here everyday now.
Honest Abe is supposed to start kindergarten. We were very fortunate in the spring that our day care never closed because I technically counted as a mandatory worker (or whatever that term was). The kids kept on going when pretty much all the others weren't there (I think they went from 24 in Honest Abe's pre-K class (one of two pre-K classes) to about 25 kids in the entire program from infant through pre-K.
I'm hoping for some sort of hybrid model because i would love for him to a) get out of the house once he ages out of the day care/summer camp program in a month, b) keep socializing and making new friends even if in a small bubble, and c) allow Sheenie and me to continue to mostly be able to work relatively normally (she's worked from home since March). Still, we're planning for stay-at-home because we have eyes and ears.
We participated in a focus group with our school principal last night. He indicated that there would be a remote learning option. We will be doing that. Listening to him discuss the three options on the table generally (5 days a week, a hybrid model, and all remote), it was apparent to me that they will in all probability will not have a full 5 days of school this year. He was asked on more than one occasion whether they would keep, say 25 kids together all day. His answer was no, we can't do that because kids have individual schedules and therefore they will be moving from classroom to classroom. There are 1300 kids in this middle school. They are not going to be able to contact trace. Basically, if one kid comes into that school COVID positive and infectious, they will have an outbreak. Even if it's hybrid, there will be about 650 kids milling around several times a day. Our daughter will stay home.
It seems like a flimsy excuse to me that the students each have individual schedules. I know it would be an expense, but if kids have to use computers for online learning at home, give them a computer in their classroom and have them do their specialized classes on the computer. I could see an argument for where maybe there isn't enough benefit to that type of remote learning to justify having any contact with teachers or students in the first place, but just throwing out the idea because kids have individual schedules seems ridiculous, kind of like saying you can't have study hall because not all the students will be reading the same books.
Just realized that I was supposed to see The National at Surly tonight.
time is a flat circle.
Yesterday was supposed to be the finale day of my first live elimination game. I had people coming from eleven different states. Pandemics suck, man.
I had a reminder pop up on my calendar today for that concert. Booo.
We plan on sending the oldest two (2nd and K) to school in the fall. The state and school have released preliminary plans that are essentially isolating the classes as much as possible, masks, and increased outside time. I'm sort of confident it can actually happen because Connecticut has the lowest transmission rate in the country. I'm less concerned about the younger of the two being in school (it's kindergarten), but the oldest needs a structured environment to participate in school and it will be hard to create that for an entire year at home.