I am close to living my pre-covid life again. I’m doing it while wearing a face mask as required and practicing social distancing, of course. My schedule is lighter because I am not driving DD around the planet, but as she got her license earlier this month, that was a change I was expecting anyway. DH is enjoying his WFH covid schedule; he is productive and effective at it, so, covid concerns aside, he would be content staying WFH. Next week his company will announce their plans to start calling people back to the office. I think it will be a hybrid office/home deal, and it will probably work out fine. We both have our own offices, a luxury for which we are grateful, as it will allow us to work without masks when alone.
Illinois is moving to Stage 4 (of 5) on Friday. Getting to Stage 5 will require a vaccine or herd immunity or no new cases for a substantial stretch of time, so I think of Stage 4 as our “new normal”. Summer camps are opening. Restaurants open for indoor service at reduced capacity. Gatherings up to 50 allowed with masks and SD.
The state just shared it’s guidelines to allow schools to open, but it is up to individual school districts to decide on the logistics that will work for them while meeting those safety guidelines. It is complex, but workable. Much of the plan is what you’d expect: masks and social distancing required whenever possible. Assigned seating. Frequent cleaning. Smaller groups for lunch, which might mean eating in a classroom instead of the cafeteria. One way hallways, if possible. No lockers, or minimizing their use. Suggest students do not change cloths for gym (which could perpetuate ongoing shortages in N95s as teachers and students alike buy them up to avoid the stink!). Lots more suggestions specific to various age groups.
L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer has said that although it is impossible to track the origin of spread in a public setting, it is “highly likely” that the overall increase is related to mass protests that erupted over the death of George Floyd, as well as clusters of social gatherings at restaurants and private parties.
NY, NJ, MN, and many other states protested, but they are not seeing a spike. Everything I am reading hot spots seems to be where people were confined in a close space without wearing masks. I read when 2 hairdressers were infected and wearing mask, their clients didn’t get infected.
Interesting report from a Canadian children’s hospital with recommendations for reopening schools.
Note that they do NOT recommend masks, at least for younger children, because they do not believe they will handle them properly, potentially increasing their risk.
In general, it advocates for a pretty full return to school, with measures like distancing, reducing switching of classes, etc imposed to the extent it is feasible. But they are clear that they think the risk of depriving students of an education outweights the risks associated with COVID–including for most children with underlying health conditions, who they deem not to be at significantly higher risk of severe complications.
A number of players at high risk or with high-risk family members are exempt from playing (and rightly so!), but given the degree to which this virus is contagious and the fact that players (and umpires, it’s worth remembering that they’re an issue here, too) will be only minimally if at all protected from second-order contacts, I can’t see it actually working.
What I don’t really understand is why can’t we look at other countries that were ahead of us to see what they have done to prevent and open their economy to come up with a guideline for the whole country to do. Some people may not like Cuomo (I didn’t really have a view about him before the pandemic), but you have to give him credit to open up the NY economy based on numbers, not just it’s the same across the whole state. NY is a big state and so is the US - use the numbers to determine when and how to open up.
I listened to Dr Gupta on TV earlier this week. He said we should have guidelines on how to open various business/facilities. He said most younger people are asymptomatic when it comes to Covid, so it doesn’t really make sense to do temperature taking to determine if they are infected, whereas older people in nursing home tend to be more symptomatic, therefore it makes sense to use temperature as a determination. He said guidelines for a movie theater is very different an outdoor venue, therefore we should spend more effort on determining different kind of guidelines for different business. It would help us in keeping our economy going while living with the virus until we have a cure/vaccine.
I really don’t see the value of one way hallways in school - at least - not for high school. Suppose we all opt to go clockwise around a square. If your next class is two or three classrooms down counterclockwise is it really helpful to walk all the way around to get there? I’d think the best way is the shortest way - and that’s the way students are supposed to take anyway, but of course that depends on if they’re meeting their sweetheart or best friend between classes along a different route! (Or visiting their locker or the restroom.)
Went on twitter earlier to find a series of furious posts by our mayor and city health director about “large and uncontrolled gatherings” leading to more Covid cases, and threatening to close businesses, etc.
There was the usual pile on in the comments about protests, but the city health director says there have been no spikes they have found from protests (but there have been -from bars, graduation parties and DJ parties, all indoors).
So this state DOES ask about large gatherings, including protests.
The article mentions an academic study that also found that the nationwide protests have not significantly added to positive cases. It would be a huge quote here so I will look for the original. But here’s this:
Americans tend to think we are special snowflakes - we have a lot of conditions that warrant special treatments and our personal rights trump all else (no pun intended).
https://www.statnews.com/feature/coronavirus/covid-19-tracker/ has case loads by county, so you can try to see if changes in county case loads can be attributed to various events like protests, holiday crowds, changes in county health orders, testing availability and reporting, etc…
California counties are huge. To find out if the people who are testing positive were in protests, you have to go to a much smaller scale, zip code at least. (or you could ask them)
My take on the paper. No effects 3 weeks after? Too early to tell. We are just beginning to see a spike in Covid cases locally. The protests happened 2-3 weeks ago. Restaurants (not bars!) and barbers have been cautiously open for not even 2 full weeks… bars are still closed… there have been no non-essential retailers open until last week. Tell me please our spike is due to anything but the mass crowds… shaking my head.