sabotabby: (teacher lady)
sabotabby ([personal profile] sabotabby) wrote2021-08-06 08:48 am

Long tails, Delta, and disposability

All this week, I've been ruminating over September.

Our All-Knowing Overlords have made several declarations about the new school year. Vaccinations will not be mandatory for staff and students. Families will be free to kill or cripple others because God forbid we should trample on anyone's deeply held beliefs (that they acquired from reading Facebook). They're instituting a bizarre timetable for high schoolers that combines the worst parts of the semester schedule—jugging four courses at a time—with the worst parts of the quadmester system—condensed time frame and extra-long classes—with alternating weeks to maximize how confused the kids can get. I bet you're confused just reading that. Add to this that teachers will be required to simultaneously teach to the virtual kids at home and the live classes, with zero instruction as to how to do this and I'm sure zero technology to assist with it, and you've got another year where students will learn nothing. Masking is mandatory, except for the 40-minute period where students will sit in underventilated rooms and expose each other and their teachers to covid over lunch. There will also be sports and wind instruments to ensure that outbreaks happen. In theory, there's an attempt at cohorting with the alternating schedule, but in practice everyone's together for lunch, recess, extracurriculars, and the bit at the end of the day when all the kids get out of class and immediately start licking each other's faces.

The emphasis continues to be on hygiene theatre and fomite transmission. Cleaning surfaces is much cheaper than reducing class sizes, but doesn't actually make much of a difference in covid transmission.

At the same time, our new provincial chief medical officer of health has issued a call to "normalize" covid in schools.

Basically, the authorities—who, I might add, haven't set foot in a high school since their own school days, and many of them were "educated" at private schools or homeschooled—have thrown their hands up and said, "let's just infect all the kids."

I've been reading a lot of about Delta, Delta+, and especially Long Covid. Long Covid can occur in up to 2% of children, whether or not these children were asymptomatic or seriously ill. It's been linked to an average 7-point drop in IQ.* It's linked to neurological problems, lung and heart issues, chronic fatigue—and no one knows if it's permanent.

This morning, I was talking to a teacher on Facebook who contracted covid in March from a student who lied on the self-screening that is also part of the hygiene theatre we were required to perform. Five months later, they remain ill with constant headaches and exhaustion. They have no idea how they will function in September. This is not an uncommon story. It is unlikely that anyone responsible—be it the school, the board, or the government—will be held accountable for deliberately giving this person a chronic disability that they may need to manage for the rest of their lives.

It boggles my mind that workers can be injured at work, entirely due to the negligence of the employer, and have to muddle on with no compensation or support. It's not just teaching, of course, and this isn't a new issue. I believe our discussions around health and safety would be very different if every time a worker was injured by employer greed, that employer was responsible for providing for them. But workers are disposable—teachers especially, since there are more teachers than jobs—and so we'll be chewed up and tossed out.

Do parents really want to risk sending their kids to school, knowing that they may come out physically or cognitively damaged? I suspect parents are just tired, more than anything else. The US has normalized the risk of school shootings, so there's definitely precedent. Apparently it's an acceptable balance of rights. Some kids will get shot so that gun hoarders can continue to hoard guns. Some kids will be permanently disabled, and a few will die, so that anti-vaxxers can continue to peddle their conspiracy theories and the province doesn't go into deficit spending.

I want to go back in person too. I loathe teaching online and I desperately want to return to normal. But I'm terrified. Unlike the people making these decisions, I know what it's like to have your life curtailed by chronic illness and disability. It's made me unkind. It's made me wish brain fog and shortness of breath and heart palpitations and chronic pain on the government that has decreed our lives and our kids' lives to be worthless, and to their accomplices in the medical field who've provided a smoke screen for the impending atrocity.

* Obligatory reminder that IQ is a eugenics-inspired bullshit measure of intelligence. That said, normally if you take two IQ tests, you should score better on the second one, because one thing IQ tests are very good at measuring is one's ability to take IQ tests. If you do worse on the second, it's an indication of cognitive decline, which is a very real thing.
agoodwinsmith: (Default)

Re: Tired Exasperated Horrified

[personal profile] agoodwinsmith 2021-08-06 10:01 pm (UTC)(link)
This.
kore: (Default)

Re: Tired Exasperated Horrified

[personal profile] kore 2021-08-07 12:15 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, that was crappy at the beginning of the pandemic, when obesity was seen as a condition that could worsen covid BUT WAS NOT something that could get you the vax! And I'm seeing it come up again now, with "The vaccines are so wonderful, you won't get sick, and if you do it will be like getting a bad cold!" Like, maybe for someone in completely normal health, pal, but those of us with chronic illnesses are a little wary of the happy talk.
kore: (Default)

Re: Tired Exasperated Horrified

[personal profile] kore 2021-08-07 12:52 am (UTC)(link)
This is something I just grump about with T, because it's depressing, but I think the breakthrough infections are being way, way under-reported, because the CDC, in its infinite wisdom, ONLY tracks those when they end up in hospitalizations, not maybe people getting mildly ill (that depends on the person being notified, or testing on their own). I just read an article by a guy who's an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins who went to a party with 15 other people, all fully vaxxed, and they all thought they were fine! Spoiler: they were not fine. The hostess started feeling sick a day after and phoned everyone and said they might want to get tested. She was positive, and so were 11 other people. Out of 15. If the hostess hadn't informed her guests, they might not have gotten tested at all, since they had all been vaxxed for months and assumed there was basically no way they could get it. And then of course it turns into the "don't do X for you, do X for the sick neighbors around you" which so far has done absolutely ZERO in the US.

So right now I'm really skeptical about the whole "You will totes not get covid! 97-93% chance! and if you do it's just MILD illness!" line because there is NO research so far on long covid and how it affects people in various risk groups, hospitals and insurance cos are now starting to NOT COVER long covid like they do with a lot of other nebulous chronic illnesses, and masking mandates aren't going to come back, lockdowns aren't going to come back, and fuck widespread testing and contact tracing for forever, I guess. I mean it looks like this is the variant that can get through vaxxes, is more virulent, and is way, way more transmissible. And everyone still wants to just put their heads under the blankets and pretend it's all gone away? IDEFK.

(And if we hadn't fucking had "mask discourse" and "mask theatre" and fucking Trump, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people would likely not be dead, because even fucking cloth masks are better than nothing! Even if someone's vaxxed! How, HOW did everyone start thinking "vaxxed" meant "immune"? Was it all those 97% numbers flying around?)

//rant rant rant, sorry
kore: (Default)

Re: Tired Exasperated Horrified

[personal profile] kore 2021-08-07 01:21 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I think it's twofold, they don't want to admit infection rates are rising ("but hospitalizations are down so that's okey-dokey!"), and they don't want to admit the vaccines aren't absolute miracles like absolutely everyone in power billed them as. Which is FINE, the vaccines are fucking amazing, but at this point, pretending that people who are fully vaxxed can't get infected and can't transmit the disease is a recipe for utter fucking disaster. (But how could you fix that? Contact tracing! Which nobody is doing!)