From what I have been hearing children are still more protected than adults even with the delta variant. I don’t have any specific sources to share though. Sorry your relative did that. J&J May be a one and done shot but it still takes two weeks to be fully vaccinated.
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From what I understood from have read-
Even though delta variant seems to impact kids a bit more than previous ones, it still seems heavily driven by vulnerabilities- the same things as make adults at risk (diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, immune compromising conditions). A non medically fragile kid is overwhelmingly likely to present just as a mild cold, perhaps a brief fever, from an infection. Very low rates of needing hospitalization, vanishingly rare deaths.
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Thanks BJ and haypug. I appreciate you.
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I hope it all feels better
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Interesting thought as we try to get back to “normal”:
Opinion | Post-Covid Happiness Comes in Groups - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
In a nutshell in case people hit a paywall - emotions are somewhat social, research has found people laugh five times as often when they’re with others than when they’re alone.
That definitely feels true, after our first gathering with friends at someone’s house a few weeks ago even though the reason for the event was sad (someone had passed away, we did this to support his widow) we were all joking and laughing while we were together and it made me feel better in a way I hadn’t in the year prior. Several of the people are part of my weekly gaming group but they’re just voices in my headphones, seeing them in person was different and better.
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Life is just snapping back to looking like pre COVID. Grocery store dividers have come down at my Trader Joe’s and my fred Meyer (Kroger fam). Hardly anyone masks anymore. The zoo isn’t requiring masks suddenly, which now I need to decide if we’re keeping our zoo reservation Wednesday- maybe I’ll just try to get Latte to wear a mask for the inside areas we can’t avoid 
I can’t even get her to let me comb her hair most of the time though so… 
really sad the zoo dropped the mask mandate, it’s one of the few public places that was relatively safe for little kids and medically fragile kids.
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It’s wild to me that people are concluding that remote school “doesn’t work” after this one, very poorly organized trial, which was thrown together out of pure necessity and without parental buy-in during a time most people found very stressful/traumatic.
IDK if anyone else read the Times newsletter today but here’s an excerpt. I just feel like stuff like this will be used as evidence for why disabled kids can’t possibly have a remote option. There is already the attitude that everything remote is always worse, and that’s why getting remote work options is so freaking hard and why medical places absolutely refused to do telemedicine before now.
Now it’s like, “well we tried this one time, it’s clearly terrible and impossible to make better.” Ugh, such wild defeatism!!! Like, really? NONE of this was good? None of this shows potential? None of this could be better for kids in like, shitty education systems, underserved areas? Nothing? It pisses me off, honestly. I hope people aren’t surprised when all this remote stuff that has finally made things more accessible goes away completely. It’s this type of impossibilist thinking that does it, and also…when are we going to stop treating educational institutions like they are natural and unbiased bastions of good? They have an obvious interest in in-school only options! Like HELLO?!
Summary
The problem with remote school is that children learn vastly less than they do in person, according to a wide range of data about the past year and a half.
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Rand Corporation, a research group, found that students attending remote classes learned less English, math and science than students attending in-person school.
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An analysis by Opportunity Insights, a group based at Harvard, found that student achievement lagged with remote learning — and lagged the most for lower-income students.
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A study in the Netherlands found that “students made little or no progress while learning from home.”
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Individual teachers also say they notice the difference. As Meghan Hatch-Geary, a decorated high school English teacher in Connecticut, told Education Week, her students who struggled the most last year were those who remained fully remote.
Remote schooling, in other words, may be more akin to dropping out than it is to attending in-person school. “Many education experts say in-person instruction is the best way to help hasten an academic recovery for those who fell behind and to address emotional and social consequences after two disrupted school years,” Erin Richards of USA Today has written.
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The Iowa State Fair just released their covid guidelines.
“Stay home if you are sick, we have some hand-sanitizer”.
No masks, no distancing.
Iowa does have decent vaccine rates for a red state though.
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My kids go to an all-virtual school and they’re constantly tinkering with things based on parent and teacher feedback. They were already well regarded when we started there and have changed things (usually for the better) every year we’ve attended.
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I’ve read about kids in developing nations using online resources to pass standardized tests, too. It’s so silly to compare a shitty in school experience, that was already bad, to that same school then going remote. Like…of course that will also be bad, and it will be worst for kids who live in total chaos. That doesn’t mean online learning is the problem, though! Plenty of people do it successfully!
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My state has virtual school and my county has an online school option also (doing the county online option has the students still count towards the county’s overall enrollment numbers, the state-wide virtual school does not). We did the county’s online option and they had several hundred times more students enrolled last fall than in prior years, then over the course of the school year some families shifted back towards brick and mortar schools but the year ended with eschool still having substantially more students than they had ever had before. (There was also a third online option called Digital Academy but funding for that came from the state and will not be happening next year because our Trump-wannabe governor has decided the pandemic is over. 
)
From what I’m seeing on local Facebook groups, a lot of families that never would have chosen the online option were pleasantly surprised and some will be continuing to do it next fall also, but the biggest problem for the local disability community is that teletherapy sucks. It’s just not a good format for doing PT or OT or speech so the therapists are working with one or both hands tied behind their backs. Parents can drive their kids to the physical school and do the sessions in person but that requires a parent who can take an hour per session during core business hours, even setting aside if someone in the family is immune compromised.
Overall I think this has been good PR for online school options, it hasn’t worked for a lot of people but it has worked for a lot of others, and people have gotten more exposure to what it might be like rather than going off what they imagine it to be. I think doing online school/homeschool is going to be more normalized, though still a much smaller percentage than traditional school. I’m curious what enrollment numbers will look like in 2-5 years.
One big problem locally is that the principal of the online school option was so burnt out by this past year that, upon having his VP reassigned to another school and not replaced (which, wtf school board?) he decided to retire. I really don’t blame him. Last August alone probably aged him by a decade. But between him retiring and his VP being reassigned, it’s shaken peoples confidence in the eschool as a whole to the point that messages had to be put out saying “eschool is not going away! It will still be here in fall!”
I think internet connectivity being treated as an essential service is also crucial, some kids nationally that have “disappeared” from schools just don’t have good internet. As I heard somewhere, a lot of the kids in areas that don’t have good internet connectivity just don’t feel invested in the future, they feel like the world of tomorrow is all online and that doesn’t include them so why bother even trying in school in the first place? Might as well drop out.
As has been said before, this pandemic really has highlighted all the ways that American society is failing its citizens. I really, really hope we get some substantial changes out of this.
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I’m passionate about internet inequality and I feel like it’s not talked about nearly enough. It almost never comes up in discussions of access or equity, which is wild. I have tried and tried to pitch articles about it but bias is so strong against rural areas and the people who are perceived to live in them. The attitude in news rooms is overwhelmingly disbelief that it’s an issue followed by a quick, “well if it’s so bad they should move”.
I agree with what you said re: remote PT and OT, though. I tried a remote PT session and it was a total waste of time. Most of what I do in PT is hands-on manual adjustments and myofascial release stuff and there’s no way to remote that…yet. Haha! I’m glad the pandemic has gotten some good PR for online schools, though. I am so cut off from the parent experience so that’s heartening to hear! I think a lot of good can come out of the last year or so and I hope we are able to keep the baby and toss the bath water. I think we saw a lot of progress happen, if we can just stop ourselves from retroactively declaring it impossible to continue, lol.
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Update from Portland, Oregon: pandemic is over, according to like, everything and everyone. Masks are worn… by people inside very specific stores still requiring it, and inside doctor offices.
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lol. But also I’m not surprised.
If you’re into podcasts you might like this episode of On Point, I’m in favor of internet access for everyone but I learned a lot from this episode - for example, a small town that prioritized excellent internet service now has people from out of town buying houses so they can work remotely and then do rock climbing on their off time, it really set them up to be in a great position when the pandemic shifted a lot of people to telecommuting. Kind of the opposite of "well they should move [out of rural areas]:
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I had to do school from home in seventh grade due to my general health just disintegrating and it sucked hardcore. I do not recommend learning algebra over the phone. I literally had my assignments mailed to me and I had to call into my classes at the designated time. Which meant that sometimes class got interrupted by telemarketers and my folks couldn’t use the phone while I had class. Tests meant me being driven to an exam site.
How kids have it these days is incredible.
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We are headed in this direction too. Went downtown to the aquarium on Saturday and hardly anyone masked indoors OR masked their too-young-for-vaxx kids. I get that younger kids may not be good at keeping them on, and others might have sensory issues that make it tough, but I was still surprised to see so many naked kid faces indoors in a not packed but fairly populated building.
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NBC News: A professor with a heart condition claims she was told she could no longer teach remotely. Now she’s suing…
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I had to do that also!!! 
We had to threaten legal action to get the school to agree to “let” me do it. I didn’t have any instruction though, I had to self teach and then my parents had to ferry my homework to the school. It was absurd. And they would send someone to observe me taking tests in bed…to prove I wasn’t cheating. That wasn’t awkward at all. Also lol that they sent someone for that but refused me a tutor because my problems were “only” physical.
Eta: and I’ll check that out @meerkat ! Thanks!
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I’m pretty stoked to see what happens with lawsuits to this effect. Like, I wish we didn’t need them, but I’m extremely eager to see businesses argue it’s an “undue burden” to have WFH for disabled employees when they’ve been doing it for 1.5 years…
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My best friend had to do the second half of 6th grade from home because she was in a wheelchair for 10 months and our school wasn’t wheelchair accessible for the 5th and 6th grades (but was for the lower grades?) Why this was allowed was baffling to me even at the time (she was in a wheelchair for much of 7th grade, as well, but the jr high was wheelchair accessible so she attended classes as normal). She was very far ahead in math and was in all talented & gifted classes and I think they functionally just didn’t care what she did - she was going to pass the year regardless.
I was her homework courier back and forth…she was completely able to go to school within a week or two of surgery, she wasn’t contagious, yet it was okay to just…give her worksheets way below her skill level? It never made sense to me. She wasn’t getting any instruction, just sort of wrote some book reports.
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