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[McTraveller]

Guess I get to be a teacher this fall.  Wife and I are going to have to tag-team blocks of our schedule for "sorry we can't work during this time because we have to make sure the kid is attending their mandatory online class."

I suppose in the long run it's not that big an inconvenience, as we are fortunate enough to be able to work from home and have flexible employers.  But there are many many families that are going to be screwed.

[Frumple]

Not like they wouldn't be also screwed by their kids cosplaying typhoid mary at their school's insistence, so... one of these choices is inconvenient. The other is nurgle worship :V

[McTraveller]

Eh, dunno. This whole thing has me pondering the question, "just what is an acceptable level of public health risk in the first place?" 

Zero is an infeasible answer, but other than that I'm still working through it all.  Education is a tender spot for me - having educators in my family, it makes me very sad that society is essentially sacrificing education for short-term changes in life expectancy. You will not be able to convince me that quality of education will be maintained with this mandatory remote learning.

Although to be fair, in the school board meeting they rightly pointed out that in-person learning would be impacted too due to the massive burden of just dealing with all the protections they would have to deal with like masks, cleaning, and the like.  My assertion is that is less an impact that forcing everyone home, but I suppose it may indeed be splitting hairs at that point.

[scriver]

"Somewhere in between 0 and Sweden's 'as long as the hospitals don't have more patients than equipment'-stance", probably.

[NJW2000]

Ignorance is curable. Brain damage from covid... less so.

[Il Palazzo]

(there's known, persistent organ damage and aftereffects (chronic fatigue syndrome) of having this virus)

What is the risk of developing such complications?

[McTraveller]

Sending your eight year old to school where even one immunocompromised child (never mind teachers, janitors, grandparents, bus drivers, etc) may die in continuation of a presently untenable status quo is not an acceptable public health risk.

Not to you personally - but this is a good example of a statement with unfounded certainty - "if one child dies, it's unacceptable".  It's difficult yes - but is it unacceptable?  You can't reduce risk to zero - so what's the threshold? 1 in 10k? 1 in 100k?

I mean I'm looking at statistics for CA right now because it came up first in my search.  Out of 48,500** cases in the 17 and younger age group, there is one death*.  This means it's outright dishonest to say "think of the children.***"  The data just doesn't support that conclusion - so at least be honest and say it's about the adult staff and family.

I can appreciate the argument that it's more about the staff and family - the mortality is much higher as age increases, so if kids do "bring it home" then is a more broad secondary impact.  Isn't there a way to both have school and protect the more at-risk groups?  If not, then so be it, but I just find that sad that we can't "make that work."

*I refuse to comment on any potential "long term" health complications.  I just can't (as an engineer) accept the claims that "the disease has severe long-term effects" when we have only seen effects for 8 months; I don't have enough data or understanding to let such things affect my short-term (1-5 years) decisions. I do believe that there are real instances of severe complications - but are they enough to sway my views on risk?  Not yet.

**Yes, yes, "so far".

*** There are a total of 60M people in the US aged 14 or younger. This would suggest 1255 total deaths in that age group if every single one of them caught the disease.  I actually am confused by my local school board on this one; they claimed that in our elementary school of 600 students the data shows that we would expect 13 student deaths and 2 staff deaths. This is goofy; my state's official numbers are that there are 0 (yes zero!) confirmed or probable deaths in the 0-19 year age bracket. The staff may be correct though; I don't know the staff demographics or count.

[Zangi]

Drastic increase in school funding so less class packing and more hygienic supply availability.  Among other things to address the reality of the situation.

Is such a nice dream, the hope for actual competent implementation.

[McTraveller]

This is bordering on Ameripol, not Covid... but in my state, the average K-12 per-pupil funding is almost $15k/year*.  I don't understand how the schools can't make that work.  My suspicion is most of it is spent funding new buildings and other obligations instead of actually paying teachers or buying school supplies.

*Well, it was up to that in MMIX. Who knows what it will be in MMXX....

[Reelya]

You're vastly underestimating the amount of money it costs to run anything.

For a start, the school needs various types of insurance, they need everything checked out for OH&S certification, they need to audit things like security, safety, they have a range of IT and reporting requirements, they have equipment to maintain, they have support staff. And I didn't even get to their utilities bills: electricity, phone, gas, internet. It's a lot more than "paying teachers" and buying boxes of "school supplies".

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/percentage-expenses-should-payroll-be-30772.html

Here they say employee compensation generally makes up 20-30% of a business' expenses. The Average salary for a teacher in the USA is about $60K, and there are about 1 teacher per 15 students. So that means about $4000 a year per student just in direct teacher salaries. The link also states that direct wages only make up about 70% of employee compensation (consider payroll taxes, health insurance, parental leave, other overheads), so that brings just teacher employment costs to around $6000 per student per year (about $90K per teacher on average, split over 15 students). But then you need to add in all the other costs for running the school, it can easily blow out to over $10K. For capital infrastructure like new school buildings, I actually doubt they're even including those costs in the per-student figures they release.

[Dostoevsky]

What is the risk of developing such complications?

As McTraveller notes it's too early to definitively tell, but some (not all) of the studies thus far have been pretty concerning. There was a Reuters article about a months and a half ago that I posted in this thread that discussed some of the results; resharing some parts of interest:

“We thought this was only a respiratory virus. Turns out, it goes after the pancreas. It goes after the heart. It goes after the liver, the brain, the kidney and other organs. We didn’t appreciate that in the beginning,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.

In addition to respiratory distress, patients with COVID-19 can experience blood clotting disorders that can lead to strokes, and extreme inflammation that attacks multiple organ systems. The virus can also cause neurological complications that range from headache, dizziness and loss of taste or smell to seizures and confusion.

. . . .

Studies are just getting underway to understand the long-term effects of infection, Jay Butler, deputy director of infectious diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters in a telephone briefing on Thursday.

“We hear anecdotal reports of people who have persistent fatigue, shortness of breath,” Butler said. “How long that will last is hard to say.”

While coronavirus symptoms typically resolve in two or three weeks, an estimated 1 in 10 experience prolonged symptoms, Dr. Helen Salisbury of the University of Oxford wrote in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday.

. . . .

Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious diseases at Northwestern Medicine, reviewed current scientific literature and found about half of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 had neurological complications, such as dizziness, decreased alertness, difficulty concentrating, disorders of smell and taste, seizures, strokes, weakness and muscle pain.

Anecdotally there have been individuals who have had symptoms like shortness of breath last for months after getting sick, but that's just anecdotally. Given that there are a fair number of significant physical damage (e.g. scarring of the lungs, scarring of the heart), I think it's fairly safe to say that some people get badly damaged in a long-term way, but we can't tell how widespread that is yet.

(Just like we still can't really seem to get a consistent death rate number, I assume.)

[Reelya]

Those nations which opened up in order to save the short-term economy may in the end falter due to the increased burden of people who have developed chronic illness as a result of exposure.

In Sweden for example they went for the herd immunity response however their economy is still faltering because how many people knowingly expose themselves to a widespread plague. Just ignore the plague and keep working and shopping and partying and playing like normal. It didn't work.

They're reporting that Sweden isn't quite as far in recession as other European nations, however this is less convincing when you compare before and after in a relative sense:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53664354

They're not really doing a whole lot better that Germany, despite Germany being in a much deeper lockdown. That's because the more virus there is around the less people decide to engage.

[Frumple]

I can appreciate the argument that it's more about the staff and family - the mortality is much higher as age increases, so if kids do "bring it home" then is a more broad secondary impact.  Isn't there a way to both have school and protect the more at-risk groups?  If not, then so be it, but I just find that sad that we can't "make that work."

I mean, it's distance learning (either via online or homeschooling). That's your one option that doesn't more or less inevitably lead to "grandma's little typhoid mary". That's it. There's no option two. Bunker down, stay the fuck away from the plague pit construction that is in-classroom schooling, and cool our collective tits until a vaccine shows up or something besides staying away from people manages to mitigate the effects of the plague to something below "one out of every hundred or so people die". This may take a year or two or three, which sucks, but sucks much less than the seven digit death toll we're looking at if the US doesn't goddamn mitigate the spread of the plague.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I should mention that treating blood clots in children is also noted as difficult, due to how dangerous blood thinners are without strict behavioral monitoring.

[ChairmanPoo]

*shrug* DOACs are less of an issue than traditional AVKs. But of course experience of their in children is fairly limited because its not exactly common to have children with clotting disorders. Which is of course the point: if we are talking about how many children will need anticoagulation and how many teachers will end up in ICU, maybe we should rethink before reopening?