If it's true that kids being together in a room is such a biohazard then all schools, music venues, churches, mosques, and gyms should be shut down immediately and never opened again. The buildings would be either demolished or converted into single-bedroom housing. After all, there will be more infectious diseases in the future.

Omicron is the second most contagious virus in the world. It has the ability to poof out of the labor pool 10% ~ 20% of teachers, aux staff, nurses and doctors for somewhere between a week and a year (long covid), in any given week.

This is the case here in Canada in my sibling's hospital right now, and in my sibling's kid's school.

Omicron also has the ability to overflow hospitals even when they've pre-planned with a solid buffer of excess capacity. Most hospitals here in Canada didn't have any such buffer to begin with. For 2 years they've been run ragged, so today the backlog is worse than ever.

Omicron is a new problem we didn't have to deal with before.

With Flu, you can get away with letting some % of the population get it in any given flu season, because it won't deprive your hospital system (or your school) of 20% of its staff for weeks or months on end.

This is all independent of who does or doesn't end up dying from the virus.

In NYC you must be vaccinated to...

* Work at any private company

* Work at any public company

* Work at a public school

* Visit a public school

* Attend a public school

* Go to a restaurant, bar, gym, etc

This is the law. The "30 people in a room for 8 hours" have a vaccination rate near 100%.

So... what are we worried about, again? Why do teachers need to quarantine just because they may have been exposed to someone who may (confirmed or not) have had COVID-19?

For all intents and purposes you must be vaccinated to live in NYC. Which is probably why 95% of all NY residents 12+ have at least one dose and 84% of NYC residents 12+ are fully vaccinated.

With omicron 2 doses still don't give you much protection. (25% effective) One booster is good, but still ~55% effective. (UK stats) Then you get immunocompromised people and older population where breakthrough infections are still very dangerous.

I don't know if reducing the contract would change anything anymore. But in terms of spread via kids, don't think of just the working / school / bar-going population.

Much protection against infection or against hospitalization?

"Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic diseases". I got the data from the UK's "Technical briefing: Update on hospitalisation and vaccine effectiveness for Omicron VOC-21NOV-01 (B.1.1.529) 31 December 2021" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-...

No vaccines protect against infection. Maybe you mean does it protect against asymptomatic infection? Or asymptomatic transmission? (I don't know how effective it is for either.)

The polio vaccine doesn't protect against polio infection? I guess I'm not familiar with the technical meaning of infection.

I think the problem is that you imagine "infection" to mean "disease" or something similar. Infection means that the pathogen gets in your body and starts to grow. There is no vaccine that can prevent that. What a vaccine can do is to cause your body to respond to an infection more quickly and more effectively. If you're lucky, the response comes so quickly that you never knew you were infected.

So that aside, what did you mean exactly? When you said

> Much protection against infection or against hospitalization?

Did you mean to say: "Much protection against asymptomatic spread or against hospitalization?" Or maybe you meant to say something else?

No, I meant symptomatic spread. I don't care much about getting sick. I worry about winding up in the hospital. As far as I know, the 3rd dose of Moderna and Pfizer are both effective at keeping me out of the hospital. I don't know the exact rates, but I've met plenty of people who had mild illness recently.

I wonder how many parents/family members would still support the lockdowns if you told them that they were for their safety, not their children's. "We're shutting down the entire school system for your safety, even after you've had many chances to get vaccinated"