As someone who's battled with that last point, it's not only the 'intake' side of things (it can be weeks or months before you can get an evaluation, then weeks afterwards before any results can be tabulated)—but even if you do get any kind of evaluation, good luck finding counselors.

Only about 10% of the counselors we called would even call back, and of that 10%, almost all of them said they would not accept any new patients, indefinitely. A couple had openings within a year or so, and one or two had any availability in a shorter time frame.

Not sure what all the reasons are, but I'm guessing it's the perfect storm of more kids needing more services in this unprecedented time, more counselors on the older side retiring early, and funding for these programs being a continual battle.

A local response from some child psychiatrists is that they're swamped by existing patients, as the pandemic changes have been very harsh on kids already having issues with e.g. self-harm or being shut-in so relapsing patients are returning and not leaving much space for new ones.

Yes, for sure in that situation the staff shortage and backlog of students have made a system that is difficult to navigate in normal times essentially intractable.

> Not sure what all the reasons are

It is undesirable work for undesirable pay with undesirable volatility, to many people.

Call me jaded but these are first world problems. Anyone who has access to the internet reads on average more words per day than those who do not. You cannot use the internet and not be literate. No one is going to die from not having a particular type of education. Cramming 500-2k students into box sized class rooms 2-3 feet apart was an idiotic assumption that nothing like this would ever happen (again).

Call me naive but society needs to evolve and entirely redesign itself around this new problem because it is not going away and it will almost certainly not be the last time something like this happens.

Other people use the internet differently. As long as you know what the TikTok icon looks like, you're good for hours.

Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most of last year.

Kids come first. Until this summer the chance of them getting sick or transmitting was super low, with delta it’s a little higher but with sane precautions most of the risk can be alleviated. In a few years time you’re gonna see real disparities between even religious private school kids (which don’t necessarily have better education standards) and public based solely on who was in person.

If you’re trying to win one over your political opponents get out of this, it’s not game.

> Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most of last year.

Teachers' unions are so weak in my state that they're nearly worthless as far as contract negotiation & enforcement goes, yet every district I know of in my city had a well-attended online option last year, if they weren't fully online, and in-person was largely "hybrid" (in-person some days, remote other days). The unions had nothing to do with it. Parents and teachers—not their unions, just teachers, directly—drove most of the decisions.

I'm sorry but that's not been my experience at all, in my state the union refused to work in person even after they were vaccinated.

That's fine—my experience was very similar outcomes without a union involved. You asserted that unions were a major part of the difference in behavior between public and private schools, but our public schools behaved much the same way without union involvement. They may not be as major a factor in the outcomes as you expect, or, to put it another way, they may be an instrument of a will that was (apparently) present whether or not the union was.

My understanding is that the data indicate that children do not transmit Covid as easily as adults, so the situation is a bit more subtle than you seem to suggest here.

Only true of Covid classic, the Delta variant negates that.

Was in person schooling shut down before or after the delta variant? Imputing a risk to behaviors/decisions that occurred before the risk manifested is a logical error.

I'd also note that an even-more-infectious variant of SARS-2 (Delta), in which children transmit just as readily (I haven't seen proof of this whatsoever but let's accept it for the sake of argument), and which largely-but-not-completely bypasses vaccine immunity (this is definitely the case; the Israel data confirms that the approach of vaccinating against just the spike protein was an incredible failure given that a couple point mutations on the spike like we saw with Delta was enough to drop vaccine efficacy to <=40% against infection), should tell us that trying to run away from this virus or wage war on it is folly and that, yes, your kid is going to be exposed to COVID, and that's okay.

This is a bit of a side tangent but it never ceases to amaze me that the supposed asymptomatic spread of COVID (which was never proven; pre-symptomatic was but asymptomatic appears to have been a myth) was used as a justification for the necessity of lockdowns and the like, when really it should have been a screaming indicator that we should stop trying to aggressively contain the damn thing and just focus on population health and focused protection of the severely vulnerable.

By the same logic (this is me basically restating my first paragraph), the idea that a variant that infects kids more easily or as was argued above that kids can transmit more easily, is a sign that we should stop trying to close schools, not that we need to double down. And regardless it seems like people seem to have forgotten that we're now in late September 2021. It's almost been two years of this now.

Hell, I remember catching major flak here (on a different account) in early-mid 2020 for saying that we were going to stay locked down until they coerced everyone into being vaccinated, and at the time I was called a conspiracy theorist; nowadays people act like I'm crazy for not wanting vaccine passports, and will turn around and act as if we all collectively knew they were going to happen from the beginning! More than 18 months of this, a third-world child starvation / missed medical appointment crisis, a massive worldwide uptick in missed preventative care like cancer screenings, a >30% rise in y/y fentanyl overdose deaths in the US alone, and yet people still insist on more of these ineffective and outright authoritarian measures?!

I was going to ask whether "largely-but-not-completely bypasses" was an exaggeration, but the Israeli data really does suggest 39% effectiveness[0]! Everywhere else seems to be at least 70% or higher, so I wonder what's going on? Should the Israeli variant still be considered delta if it's much more effective at getting around the mRNA vaccines?

[0] https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safet...

There was a version of the Israeli data that used the wrong denominator to calculate vaccine efficacy against Delta, and made things appear much worse than they were. I am unsure if this is that though, I have sort of lost track.

Yep, looks like it[0].

[0] https://twitter.com/dvir_a/status/1420059124700700677

Maybe it’s me but I’m having trouble understanding their argument. It seems like they’re arguing that the vaxed cases came from cities and therefore the VE is not a reliable metric? (VE has many problems btw but we need to apply that standard both when the VE favors and disfavors the vaccine)

Why is it that our important institutions are no longer run by serious people? These aren't the same people who won WW2. I don't think the US has ever had a leadership class that was more corrupt, incompetent or arrogant.

Our experiment with government-by-hysterical-outrage-mob continues.

How do you think WWII was run? For one, the government gave an order and mostly people followed. If the gov in WWII said to vaccinate, you would.

Two, WWII was mostly run by letting others (Europe) take most of the heat and then simply outspending everyone when nobody had any money left. America is slow to act, but builds incredible momentum. Same playbook here. We delayed, but when we did act we put so much money on the table that we leapt ahead of Europe in vaccinations.

Today is nothing like WWII. The government can’t do anything without massive pushback. Also things are way more complicated and the level of care we expect from the government is 10x what it was 70 years ago.

I completely agree. The interesting thing is that if one focuses on the CDC’s research data instead of their media side, he sees a vastly different picture over the last 18 months. Increasing the achievement gap is part f the objective. It creates greater dependence on government. Why are the mask/vaccine mandates not applicable to illegals? Why are the “elites” routinely photographed without masks, including prior to the vaccine? The examples are plentiful.

Source?

The teachers can vaccinate if they want to now so that's a moot point. Even before that the likelihood of suffering any severe outcome from COVID was extremely low and no higher due to being a school teacher. Students are at very low risk of contracting it and/or spreading it.

The average American thinks if they catch covid their chance of death is around 10%.

People are horrifically misinformed on the risks of covid. It has made it impossible to have a reasoned discussion on public policy.

Source: http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/

I always catch flak for saying it, but we need to be honest about the fact that long COVID is largely a psychogenic illness. It can be a real thing, in the way that any infection can leave a sort of malaise that persists for years or even decades for the unlucky, but such reactions are incredibly rare. Yet based off the self-reported surveys, you'd think the rate of long COVID was like 10% among progressive twitter users in their early 20's...

I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance), but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all things that happened before COVID and will continue to happen long after...

Most ‘long’ Covid cases aren’t that long. It’s entirely common for people to still feel symptoms 8-12 weeks after a respiratory infection; by most studies that’s ‘long’ Covid.

What gets reported however are the extreme outliers, people who are reporting Chronic Fatigue-type symptoms 6+ months later. Some of these people genuinely have a delayed immune response, while others were probably psychosomatic cases (turns out having to live with the fear of a deadly virus does a number on people’s mental state if they actually do get sick). But either way, these cases are likely a minority of what’s included in the ‘long Covid’ umbrella.

It’s irresponsible reporting, and I’m not sure if it happens through ignorance (scary news is fun to talk about) or an ulterior motive (if we can convince our readers that they’ll likely to have long-term effects from getting Covid maybe they’ll mask up and vaccinate). Either way, it’s proof that even ‘mainstream’ media often can’t be trusted to report the facts.

> as evidenced by my immediate negative comment score.

I don't like commenting on internet points (it isn't usually productive) but you'll note that the person you replied to has been downvoted and flagged into oblivion.

I’ve been called “dangerous” multiple times for posting screenshots of the state department of health covid dashboard. It’s crazy…