My hospital allows us to refuse treatment to patients ( without legit disabilities) who don’t wear masks. In accident and emergency there is always a security guard available to call on to escort people out.
That’s how, in my experience, teachers are different to other essential workers.
What about the gas station/convenience store workers, mail persons, truck drivers, delivery people, Walmart employees, farmer workers, police, fire fighters, EMTs, bus drivers, train workers, bank tellers, etc, the list goes on. Not all essential workers are in healthcare with security. Many have worked this entire time and are only really protected by the vaccine and their person PPE.
Most of those people either work for private businesses who can mandate masks on their premises or work predominantly outside or low population areas like individual houses where the risk of transmission is lower than a classroom with up to 30 people.
I am sure that if a police office with a gun told most sane people to put on a mask, they will put on a mask.
Thankfully many essential workers go to work every day and keep the country going. Thankfully they have access to good vaccines and good PPE. We should all be grateful.
The same can be said for grocery store workers. They are essential but you don’t need a mask of vaccine to enter.
We do need to make collective sacrifices to defeat a pandemic. However, if we ask teachers and professors, and other essential workers, to do their parts, shouldn’t we, including the students, all look at ourselves in the mirror and ask whether we made similar “sacrifices”? For example, by not going to parties, concerts, games, bars, other crowded spaces and other large gatherings? The pandemic wasn’t over and we acted like it did.
It is highly likely that covid will be around, in some variant form, for years in the future, and your employer’s willingness to accept your remote work will lapse. You do have an advanced degree and are qualified for other work, I expect, so it might be best to look for remote alternatives sooner rather than later.
Your current strategy of simply ignoring your employer 's mandate is unlikely to be successful long-term.
I definitely disagree. In many areas of the country, there is low compliance with mask mandates and vaccines. If the heads of the companies and/or HR thinks it’s no big deal, then masking requirements, etc isn’t going to happen.
My employer (local govt which covers fire, police, etc) falls into this category. I had to return into the office june 2020. We only had to wear masks “if we wanted to,” which meant it was rare to see a mask. Social distancing supposedly was required, but often not followed and enforced. This was happening even when our daily case rates were 100-150 known cases per 100K each day. And I would say all the localities around us were similar.
So I do understand not wanting to teach in person. I think the issue is not being in control of your own choices based on perceived risk. That being said, I think a college professor teaching a few classes a day where almost all students are vaccinated and masked and the professor is also vaccinated and masked and the windows are kept open - that would be a very low risk.
But it would also IMO depend on the daily case rate too. If it’s high (50-100 new cases a day per 100K) I could see being even more cautious. I’ve started to feel a bit squirrelly now even though I’m vaccinated. I’ve declined two meetings. The first I wasn’t needed, but the second was more important. But they were having 25 people in a room that was supposed to have 8 during the social distancing requirements. Nobody would be wearing a mask and the meeting was to be two hours. I don’t know how many are vaccinated. My employer says only 25% took it when offered back in Feb. I went to the last meeting under those conditions, but now our daily cases rate is ~ 30 per 100K and our percent positively fluctuates between 10-20%. And complaining to the heads of the organization would be useless since they would be in the meeting and unmasked themselves
I understand your concern. You will need to balance that against your employer’s willingness for you to work remotely or miss meetings. Some employers are more flexible than others, so it is important to find one that is a good match for you.
Parents and students too will be trying to match with a college or school offering the same degree of precautions and risk tolerance they like.
I assume you don’t see college profs/adjuncts as essential workers.
Can you change jobs and work for a college that provides online instruction as their business model? I imagine one can live anywhere and teach for Western Governor’s, ASU, SNHU, et al.
That seems like it could be a better fit for you, and you won’t be disappointing students and their parents of the current college you teach at who likely have an expectation for in-person classes.
I have another suggestion. Since Bennty seems to understands what her prospective symptoms from long-Covid are likely to be, she should begin all that paperwork and red-tape now before she becomes too foggy-brained to complete it properly. Run it by a legal expert just to make sure it’s airtight and won’t get denied. And talk to a financial advisor now to establish a prudent retirement plan so that she doesn’t blow through her savings and spend her kid’s college money (which, by the way, can be protected now by placing in a trust account with her kid named as beneficiary). It might be a good idea to do this anyway regardless of fears of Long-Covid specifically, since the risk of any sort of disability can result in the same spiral into poverty. It’s always best to prepare for those sorts of contingencies.
I question whether Bennty would actually end up with no health insurance given the existence of ACA, but that’s a conversation for another thread.
@bennty If you suspect you have Covid, do not wait. Go get tested so that you can be treated with monoclonal antibodies. Anyone age 12+ with any risk factors is eligible. They’ve even been approved for prevention in case of exposure to Covid.
Here are the qualifying risk factors:
Note that BMI over 25 and hypertension are both very common. Monoclonal antibodies are incredibly effective (they have been tweaked for delta). We don’t have the studies yet, but the risk of long Covid in someone who is fully vaccinated and receives antibodies has to be low because the virus will barely get a toe in the door.
Also, keep in mind that whatever data we have on long Covid is predominantly pre-vaccine.
Yes - unless it’s a hands-on type of class, teachers/professors CAN set the social distancing standards in their own classroom/lecture hall and instruct students not to approach the desk area. That, combined with vaccinations, masks on everyone and windows open should follow the science and be very low risk for everyone involved. If all those things are in place, I can’t understand why there is still reluctance to return to in-person teaching.
Our HS offered in-person learning from day one of fall 2020 with all those safeguards in place (except the vax, which wasn’t available yet). Only ONE teacher got Covid and by his own admission, got it from an infected weekend visitor to his home (his symptoms were mild and he recovered.) Small clusters of students tested positive throughout the year, mostly traceable to unmasked, non-socially distant weekend activities with other students. Contract tracing and quarantining kept the spreading at school to a very low number (parents were diligent in reporting symptoms to administrators.)
I agree. Our high school was back part time in person most of the year and full time by the end. Not one case of Covid tied back to in person classes. Kids got Covid from hanging out with friends or maybe sports practices outside of school when unmasked. No one caught Covid masked up in school and they weren’t even six feet apart, more like three. I worked in our middle school and we didn’t have windows open either.
Most followed the emergency executive orders put in place here in my state. Those have now been lifted. Our governor is not telling us to stay away from concerts, games, bars etc. One should use common sense, obviously, but other than that it’s really up to our public health experts to advise us on what is “ok” and what is not.
Was there asymptotic screening of all the students multiple times a week? If not then you don’t know the true Covid rate in the school.
The same was true in our HS…I believe no cases were attributed to in class instruction. And yes, we were doing weekly saliva testing for 4,000 students plus hundreds of teachers and staff.
Nope. There’s not asymptomatic testing going on outside of school either. No one is ever going to know all of the asymptomatic cases. I don’t understand what you’re implying. If no teacher caught a case of symptomatic Covid all last year, isn’t that the goal? Why would it even matter if a teacher had asymptomatic Covid if they never knew and still don’t know. Please don’t tell me that it’s going to turn into long Covid somewhere down the line. I don’t think that’s a thing. If that’s what you’re saying then every single one of us could have had asymptomatic Covid and we are just waiting to see long Covid symptoms present themselves.
Politicians almost always take politics into consideration in every one of their decisions. They respond to political pressure and do what they believe will get them the most votes in the next election. That’s one of the reasons we gave CDC some extraordinary power in national health emergency, and unfortuantely, it failed to exercise some of that power. We may have to revisit this issue post pandemic.
UF sent an email to students (after 5:00 pm, lol) to expect classes to be online the first 3 weeks.