Oh, I didn’t read it that way at all. Not to say you’re wrong, just not where my mind went.
I saw like, some are more affected by Covid and the market right now, others can be there and they are taking on more work by doing so, you (customer) is lucky the store /business is even open, so be kind and polite or GTFO.
Without knowing the business/manager it’s hard to tell the intent.
I think we can all get behind being kind to overworked service workers though. Even if the grocery line is a mile long.
We are asking close contacts of positive cases to work in many circumstances now (close contact here now is someone who spent at least 4 hours indoors in a home like setting with a positive case, so far every close contact I know under that definition has caught covid.
Also covid positive meat workers are being told to work…
Just got an alert from our local hospital system that they are temporarily shutting down certain locations due to staffing issues because of COVID. So far it’s 3 stand-alone blood draw places and the small animal hospital is limiting their ER to local cases.
Our current county health guidelines are vaccinated individuals who had an exposure but haven’t(yet?) tested positive don’t have to quarantine (tho it is confusing and people are interpreting differently) Fully positive people going to work is something else tho…
This is an interesting take on things. I do think at a certain point in time(idk when that is) we have to decide that COVID isn’t going away and we have to deal with it the same as any other seasonal illness.
I agree as well but I think we need to wait until there is a vaccine for everyone. How many children have younger siblings at home in the under 5 group who cannot be vaccinated yet? I’m also confused by his line that this variant is milder for everyone, including children. From what I’ve read the children’s hospitals have more cases than ever before and this variant affects unvaccinated kids at a much higher rate than other variants.
I just want my kids to be able to be vaccinated. It is impossible to measure risk. People dismiss unvaccinated as having made that choice. There is NO VACCINE for kids under 5.
Yeah! One challenge I’ve seen is that school closures also unfortunately have real, measurable negative impacts on kids too. There are some very dark outcomes out of California, where school closures happened for more time than in most other places. I really feel for parents, kids, and anyone who works in education: it’s a hard time for sure.
Yeah that NPR piece seems to be “Be like Florida!” which, no. Don’t be like Florida.
That piece mentions a reddit post from a NYC high schooler about what a school day is like, which I found very interesting and slightly horrifying. There’s also this Slate piece as a follow up.
In my area, where there is no weekly testing or mask requirement for students, the week before winter break the whole county had only five students out and no employees out due to covid, then on January 4th they already had 50 students and 18 staff testing positive. I posted that part before, now there’s a follow up email from Monday saying the county has more than 400 students and 100 staff who have tested positive since new years.
At my child’s school in particular (475 students overall), the last time we got a covid update email before winter break was 11/17. So far this year there have been:
Jan 5th - 1 reported case
Jan 6th - 5
Jan 10th - 7
Jan 12th - 2
I always put a mental asterisk by these numbers, I know there’s local parents sending their kid with “just the sniffles” or from a covid-positive household to school - they talk about it on Facebook. I hope we can get this to a point of treating it like any other seasonal illness but I don’t think we’re there yet.
Oh i absolutely agree. I have 2 kids under 5 and want so bad for them to be vaccinated. I dont know that I agree with doing nothing just yet. Once vaccines are widely available to the under 5s though I do think we need to figure out how we deal with COVID like other normal viruses each year.
I mean, yes, but I am REALLY tired of seeing opinion pieces about covid in schools that are simply not facing reality that you can’t have schools when there aren’t staff. Either the staff are out sick, or they don’t want to work in schools because the pay sucks and you’re treated like acceptable collateral damage.
I have seen NO ONE suggesting closing schools as a precaution. I’m sure this opinion is out there, but I’m not seeing it. Schools that are closing are closing out of desperation.
My kids’ school is doing remote learning tomorrow. They have had about 100 kids per day out this week, out of fewer than 500 students, plus 10-15 staff and tomorrow were expecting to be down 30% of the staff. Yikes.
I have ordered a twin-size mattress and a HEPA air filter in case I wind up deciding to isolate myself in the soon-to-be-nursery. Plus 8 rapid tests so that hopefully (if they come) I can preventatively test the boys. Possibly all this will come to late to be useful, but I’m sure it will be good to have anyway. Fire season will come again, after all.
Wow, that CA awkward piece about made me cry…and I am a stoic lol. I’ve been doing ok with all the recent think pieces about how people with kids under 5 are being forgotten/ignored but to have the emotional angst spelled out so plainly by someone who doesn’t have kids is just…I feel very seen.
Excerpt
Your brother and sister-in-law are caring for children who are too young to be vaccinated yet. Plus, even if it were theoretically possible to ensure robust compliance, masks are not recommended for kids under two years old. That’s two lines of defense that are available to you –gone. This means that your niblings’ lives depend a whole lot on other people making safe choices, and that means your brother and his wife have a completely different risk calculus than you do. Look around. Do you see large groups of people making good choices that prioritize protecting society’s most vulnerable people? Do you see institutions trumpeting the importance of protecting vulnerable people and doing all they can to make protecting them as easy/seamless/safe/automatic as possible?
Right now, especially with Omicron surging,everywhere your sister-in-law takes those kids, every time someone outside the bubble crosses the threshold of her home, she’s got to run a calculus around who is reliable about vaccination and masking, who will test, will there even be tests, who would be honest and actually stay home if they felt sick, is this a worthwhile risk given other risks from going to work/buying groceries/having home repairs done/going about the non-optional parts of daily life. All of the pre-pandemic things she could safely and enjoyably do to handle life stuff and get the kids more social interaction, like having Gam-Gam and Pee-Paw come over, putting the kids in daycare, having playdates, having grownup friends over to hang with the kids and have some adult conversation after bedtime, or hiring babysitters so she and your brother can get a break, all of that is GONE unless she’s willing to say “fuck it, might as well get COVID!” or unless she’s very, very careful about who she trusts.
