It’s ridiculous. The solution is so obvious and clear: require that all faculty, staff, and students at a university be vaccinated. You can get the vaccine for free — here in Minnesota, they now pay you $100 to get vaccinated. So fucking do it already. It’s for the kids.
The number of kids contracting the coronavirus is rising. In the week that ended with July 29, more than 70,000 children got COVID-19, representing nearly a fifth of all cases. Though a vanishingly small number of kids have died of the disease—358 since the start of the pandemic, as of July 29—some states, like Florida, now have dozens of children hospitalized. Few parents want to hear that their little ones may get COVID-19, no matter how low their odds of death.
The problem, of course, is that kids under 12 can’t be vaccinated yet. Until they can be, the best way to protect them is simple: Vaccinate all the eligible adults and teens around them. “The single most important thing parents can do is to get vaccinated and to vaccinate all their kids who are 12 and older,” Yvonne Maldonado, an epidemiologist and pediatric infectious-disease professor at Stanford Medical School, told me.
Kids spend the majority of their time around adults, and existing contact-tracing data suggest that adults are the ones getting kids sick. “There is with Delta, we think, a reasonably high household attack rate, meaning that one person in the household gets sick and other people are at risk of getting sick,” says Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Look at the stats.
Very rapidly increasing hospital admission for children age 0-17 in the US (CDC data), exceeding previous record. Over 1,200 admissions this week.@Meir_Rubin pic.twitter.com/XbT15RVEmd
— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) August 7, 2021
The public schools here haven’t opened yet. But next week there will be an influx of adults for the county fair (I guarantee that very few will be masked, and a large number will be unvaccinated), and a few weeks after that we’re going to be bringing in young adults from all over the region to attend the university, and then we add kids from all over the county coming in to mingle at the public school. The proper microbiological analogy for this is not a petri dish — it’s a great big flask of growth medium, constantly stirred and agitated.
That steep surge in under 17 infections is not going to plateau or even slow, given these conditions. The least the university could do is get as many adults vaccinated as possible. To do otherwise is insane. Criminally insane. I’ve lost any possibility of trusting my employers ever again.
I get to visit my grandkids one last time this summer before I get thrown into the churning flask that is Stevens County, Minnesota, and then I think I’m going to have to quarantine myself from all children for a while.
I’ve been carrying my vaccine card with me since March. Nobody asks for the damn thing. I think I’m going to have it laminated and put on a chain I can wear around my neck. Ya know, to own the cons.
(This is a reconstructed partial cross-post from poopyhead’s current Infinite [Pandemic and Politics All the Time] Thread, with some added emboldening.)
Fauci Backs Vaccination Mandates for Businesses, Universities:
Not only is the step (mandated vaccination) obvious, it’s being publicly recommended by undisputed experts.
You’d think that “conservatives” would admire anyone with the political will to issue a mandate.
fishy@1, Here in France, starting tomorrow (Monday 9th August), a Health Pass (paper or app) showing you are either fully-vaccinated or recently tested negative, etc., MUST be shown to visit (both indoors & outdoors) a restaurant, bar, or café; ride a long-distance train; and so on. Whilst there have been some protests — by the nazis (e.g., Le Pen’s mob), loonytarians, anti-vaxxers, some very confused “far left”, and some of the anti-Macron “yellow vest” rioters — the demonstrations are a nothing by French standards (despite the implications in some press reports). And polls consistently show a majority in favour of the measures. (The targeting of cafés, etc., was quite clever, as they are very much a part of French life.)
President Macron was very clear and explicit when the measures were announced a few weeks ago, it was to encourage people to get (fully-)vaccinated. At that time, only around 40% were (fully?-)vaccinated and the vaccination rate was in free-fall; in the week after the announcement somewhere around 4m people made vaccination appointments and the current fully-vaccinated rate is around 60%. (Other measures were also announced, such as mandatory vaccination for certain health-care workers.)
In addition, as I just discovered, the app’s statistics section is now giving at least two new stats: Positive rate for teh unvaccinated, and for the vaccinated (both per 100,000 people): Currently 960 and 35, respectively. And also ICU rate for unvaccinated and vaccinated (per 1m people): Currently over 9 and less than 1, respectively. (No breakdown by age in the app’s presentation, as far as I know.)
An OP-related opinion column in the Grauniad, America shouldn’t be sending unvaccinated kids back to school:
It’s now very hard to take seriously any science degree awarded by any branch of a university that does not require vaccinations.
If I were your colleague there, I would be tempted to enter the first day of each class wearing only sandals, a Speedo, and a couple of masks. I would tell the students that we are here to focus on the essentials. I would also stress that those who understand science are vaccinated, and that grading is based on demonstrated understanding of science. Then show everyone where the closest vaccination site is. Then say: that’s it for the day – we have covered the top essentials. Next time, I will see those of you who survive. Any day I see anyone without a mask, that day’s class will end, and you will have to learn the info for the test from our book. Bye.
Re: fishy @ #1…
Don’t laminate it. You may need it a condition for additions if booster shots come to pass.
Find a 3×4 vinyl name badge holder (aka “pin back”). Remove the pin. Put your card in it. That will protect your card and still make it accessible for updating.
I live in an extended household. Me, my wife, our daughter and son-in-law. Their 13-year-old son. All FIVE of us are fully vaccinated. The last one to complete the series was our grandson and his second shot was on 17 June. (He was, by the way, quite enthusiastic when told he was eligible. No vaccine “hesitation” here.)
So…we’ve done our bit to help.
Xpost from the infinite thread
Florida’s disaster is now at 23,000 cases of Covid-19 and 200 deaths per day. A record.
So how bad will it get and when will it end? Who knows.
The mathematical models say the daily case total will be 41,000 a day in early September. It’s going to be a long and dismal August for Florida.
They are likely to go way over their hospital capacity, which means patients aren’t going to be receiving the best care available.
Related to @5, a snippet from Fears as more children falling ill in latest US Covid surge and school approaches:
So when will this fourth wave of the pandemic peak?
The models say in early September and the peak will be as large or larger than the previous one, which was just a few months ago.
Well models, I suppose we will just have to wait and see how accurate this one is.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was later than that or there is a high plateau.
The children will be going back to school and the college students back to their universities in September. Plus, the weather will be cooling down and people will be spending more time indoors as Fall and Winter approach.
Add that in with the highly contagious Delta variant, low vaccine coverage, and you have a path for a new wave of the pandemic.
So when will this pandemic finally be over with?
I’m not seeing an end here.
A few scientists are starting to wonder if it will ever really be over with. Or it may take years to be over with.
5.9 billion of the world’s population still aren’t vaccinated against Covid-19 virus. That is a huge petri dish for spawning new and better adapted variants. We are up to lambda already. It is likely we are going to eventually run out of Greek alphabet letters.
One curse is that we, the reasonable and vaccinated, can’t protect the unvaccinated as much anymore, given Delta. We were relying on our own status to protect the kids, and now much as 30% (perhaps even 60%) of the population are denying it, that just isn’t true any more. Yeah the odds are greatly reduced, but they’re still too high. If we go out, we can take it home, no matter how much we ourselves are protected.
Never mind ,here is some news that might raise a smile .
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/08/rightwing-radio-host-dick-farrel-anti-vaxxer-dies-covid
Death isn’t the only issue. There was a study that suggested that covid lowers the IQ of children, or whatever way you want to measure intelligence.
That should also matter.
An opinion column in the Las Cruces Sun News (New Mexico), New Mexico universities right to require vaccines:
The author is US Senator Martin Heinrich, and the column goes on at great length about congressloon Yvette Herrell’s antics; e.g., “she signed onto a truly wild letter to Dr Anthony Fauci calling on him to promote and the use of drugs that are totally unproven in fighting COVID-19 like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin”.
markmckee@14, I presume you’re referring to Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from COVID-19 (July 22nd, The Lancet, not paywalled):
@#14, markmckee:
We couldn’t fix the lead in the drinking water in Flint, which has the same effect, and everybody agreed on the cause and that the effect was undesirable. Why would we be able to do anything about coronavirus?
(In case anybody is unaware: no, Flint’s water still isn’t fixed. The pipe replacement project was supposed to be done by 2019, which would have meant that fixing the water supply would have taken 5 years, but work fell massively behind, and then stopped because of the epidemic. Only some of the corroded lead pipes have been replaced, and blood lead levels are still noticeably high among residents. The government has been telling residents that they should be paying utility bills for the water even though there is a moratorium on using it which is entirely the state’s fault. But the whole thing has dropped out of the news regardless.)
But on another heading, apparently roughly 10% of symptomatic Covid-19 infections have permanent health effects other than lowered IQ, so this is just par for the course.
Why am I imagining a web site selling Chickenshit University sweatshirts with a stylized coronavirus in the center of the artwork?
fishy wrote:
Funny thing, antivaxxers complain it’s like being forced to wear a yellow star 24/7 if there’s a remote chance they might be asked for a vaccine certificate on some occasions. Some of them even wear an actual yellow star (at least some of the time) in protest, which makes sense, because otherwise almost nobody would notice the humiliating social stigma they’ve been burdened with …
The obsession with guns means kids in some places must endure metal detectors. And do drills about what to do in a spree shooter situation.
Adults think it is awful to have to wear masks inside stores, or having to take a vaccine shot to get access to some activities. Fuck those big snowflakes.
That is actually a thing. It’s 95% of US public schools.
When I was a kid in school, we had duck and cover drills. This was so we could survive an atomic bomb attack. Then we were supposed to go home and wait for our parents while gathering survival supplies for the evacuation. There was no discussion of what we would do if our parents were vaporized by the nuclear attack.
Long covid is a thing and hits 1/3 of those hospitalised with delta. I’m not sure how that varies by age group.