And don't presume to claim that masking children is necessary to protect adults. The adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months.
The only kids I know that have a problem with masks are kids with parents that have a problem with masks. It's not a kid problem its an adult problem. Kids are adaptable but adults are whiny little assholes that are set in their ways.
What if they'd been invented hundreds of years ago to stop the spread of disease, and prevented millions of deaths since then? Curious that you use a weak and hyperbolic analogy when the reality is so readily available.
Go to any store, chin-maskers are with maskless kids, while parents with N95 masks are without kids or with fully masked kids.
And yes, I am in contact with kids. Masks don't bother them all that much.
B. In general, being vaxxed keeps you from getting badly sick but you just can’t say.
E.g., say you’re in a group of a hundred people with a thousand guns trained at your group. Just one gun out of the thousand has a live round while ten others have blank which don’t kill but can injure. Would you be willing to face those odds? Would you be willing to ask others to face the same odds?
These are roughly the odds what you are asking teachers to take on.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
Fortunately the vaccines and other therapies are quite effective at preventing deaths.
What's worse, is a lot of people have long-haul COVID where they suffer severe symptoms that never seem to go away. We have no idea why. Maybe if you get COVID in 5 years we will have figured out why and you get to avoid ruining your life.
Also. COVID is not one and done. You can get it multiple times. People have gotten COVID twice, the first time they were fine, the second time they died.
Not only are you totally misinformed for wanting to "face those odds" you are risking the lives and well-being of those around you.
While reinfections can occur (just as with any coronavirus), symptoms are typically mild. The number of deaths due to reinfections are so low as to be statistically irrelevant from a public policy standpoint.
This panel discussion by several leading physicians provides a good scientific overview of the current situation. It's long, but worth a listen.
This will be endemic, just like the 1968 flu is. The sooner we can get to that point, the better.
But people are so eager to go back to exactly how things were.
What morbid insanity. In the US 850,000 people are dead. That's more dead people than all US soldiers who have died in combat in all wars in history.
Wear a mask, get vaccinated, socially distance, and stop risking your life and that of the people you love.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I've had exactly the same, and still haven't got my taste or smell back 100% yet. It sucks, but I still can't imagine being so selfish as to expect millions to endure endless global restrictions over some minor personal inconvenience.
If we don’t like to live with global restrictions at someone else’s say so, why should we expect teachers to go out to teach at our say so? As a group, they have chosen to stay home and that should be that.
It’s not war where the price for not wanting to face the enemy is a cowardice charge and a court martial. These teachers don’t want to teach in-person. End of story.
But this thread started with the observation that many private Catholic schools ARE just getting on with the job, and as a result parents are voting with their feet and heading there in droves. These are not teachers being forced; it's just their ideology leads them to make a different risk/benefit calculation to others.
And yet this thread is full of comments arguing that the system of endless global restrictions "works for the vast majority of people". To me and many others, that just seems like wilfully ignoring the harm to our children rather than seeking a way out.
I'm sure I don't need to link to the many MANY studies that have shown how damaging lockdowns have been to our kids' outcomes, and these negative effects hit the poorest kids the hardest. We should be doing everything within our power to undo the damage, and yet so many are willing to stick with restrictions for the foreseeable future with no exit strategy. THIS is why parents are looking for a way out for their kids, and why private schools like those mentioned above are seeing enquiries sky-rocket.
Why the hate for those who seek a return to normality? I don't understand it.
You get what you pay for. Your kid is your responsibility, not your teachers. If your kid "is fucked" its because you weren't willing to take their responsibility seriously - not underpaid teachers.
Your expectation that teachers should expose their families to a pandemic for 40K pa is absurd.
Poorly, in a normal environment.
Laughably, with what you are demanding they do for you.
There's a whole lot of "other people should endanger themselves for me" around this topic and it deserves some introspection.
https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.ht...
And that is in normal times. Not when rich computer-toucher randoms want them to go into COVID hotboxes Because They Said So.
Yeah what if that happened in medicine and related fields:
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/physicians/more-docs-consid...
https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2021/08/california...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ems-workers-retiring-higher-rat...
Unless one lives in a walled community and there is no movement in or out of that wall, what happens in one community affects everyone.
I don't believe anyone has tried to literally force any restrictions down your throat, nor do I believe that the feds are killing people who don't conform to restrictions. I wouldn't associate your writing with disbelief or skepticism if it didn't contain this type of hyperbole.
I know teachers who are very supportive of mask mandates and that the schools and teachers are generally doing ok, and people who I work with who send their kids to schools with masks are very happy for the kids to have socializing opportunities.
Your friends and community are free to find a solution that works for them. But it is not the only way, and it does not make sense to condemn a system that works for the vast majority of people.