It seems quite likely that grandparents saw more not less, of their young grandchildren when schools were closed due to the parents’ need for childcare. In any event, it is unlikely that elderly victims interacted solely with very young relatives-there would be many other potential vectors, including the children’s parents
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'Feature BMJ Investigation
Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial
…
Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. Paul D Thacker reports
Concerns raised
In her 25 September email to the FDA Jackson wrote that Ventavia had enrolled more than 1000 participants at three sites. The full trial (registered under NCT04368728) enrolled around 44 000 participants across 153 sites that included numerous commercial companies and academic centres. She then listed a dozen concerns she had witnessed, including:
Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff
Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events
Protocol deviations not being reported
Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures
Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and
Targeting of Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems.
Within hours Jackson received an email from the FDA thanking her for her concerns and notifying her that the FDA could not comment on any investigation that might result. A few days later Jackson received a call from an FDA inspector to discuss her report but was told that no further information could be provided. She heard nothing further in relation to her report.’
That’s fantastic that your teachers went back to work and kept schools open (hopefully, for in person learning). Props to them.
However, there are hundreds of thousands of kids at many urban school districts that were not allowed in-person learning due to the teachers not wanting to go back in the classroom. (see Chicago, LA as exeamples)
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Of course, nearly anything is possible but does that mean we shut down K12 for a ‘possibility’, however small?
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And the follow-up scramble to save a narrative after the revealed Pfizer data problems…
'“Missing context” has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient. As Thacker notes in the Q&A below, “They’re checking narrative, not fact.”
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Yep, my wife’s district did a hybrid approach where she taught in person and remote at the same time (It was 50/50 split 1st semester and more like 70/30 split with more in-person for 2nd semester during 2020-2021 school year. But for this new school year 2021-2022, 99% of the kids came back in person at the high school and over 95% of the elementary school kids came back in-person.
My wife and I grew up in urban K-12 districts and my wife taught in one for years and our teaching contacts in remote learning situations without fail are telling us some scary things about the lack of learning and not getting through nearly as much material as they should. School was an escape and a safe space for me as a child and I don’t want to imagine what some kids are enduring by not physically going to school. That toll will never be properly captured.
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Since the virus doesn’t recognize state borders, just masking levels and vaccination rates, I don’t really need to know where you live. Biology is biology, immunology is immunology, and virology is virology.
So it doesn’t really matter where you live - masking and vaccines reduce the spread of the virus.
Masking in college:
Re: masking in elementary schools.
On the other hand, at least prior to Omicron, so long as faculty and staff are vaccinated, and masks are being worn, in person is safe.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01826-x
That being said, this is all 20/20 hindsight (or, more correctly 2021 hindsight). I can understand the teachers who did not feel like being the guinea pigs in an uncontrolled experiment.
Too many parents in this country still treat teachers as disposable servants. People don’t want teachers to be paid a decent wage, have decent benefits, demand to get rid of any teacher who does not keep parents happy, and, when a pandemic hits, parents believe that the teachers should be risked so that parents won’t be inconvenienced.
So, understandably, teachers said “no, we won’t potentially endanger ourselves for our $50,000 a year, for which we work 70 hours a week, AND suffer abuse from parents who don’t think that their little Tommy should get disciplined for peeing in the hallway on a dare”.
It is ironic, though, to read (not here on CC, but elsewhere) people who are writing, essentially, “all of these teachers are selfish, corrupt, lazy, and stupid, and don’t care about the children!! I demand that these awful people be responsible for my kids for at least 8 hours a day!!”
Yes, it was bad for kids, but blaming teachers for merely wanting to be safe is ridiculous. Teachers are not police or paramedics, and they should not be asked to risk their safety, health, and lives on a daily basis, especially when they get so little support and consideration from parents.
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I think the point many of us were making is that teaching in person did not pose a risk to teachers’ health, safety or lives anymore so than any other activity teachers engaged in. I appreciate teachers’ service, but this lockdown measure did not make sense by summer 2020.
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Depends on what “any other activity” is. Other activities that involve being in a similar size indoor room with 20-30 other people for an hour or several would be similar risk of COVID-19. But other activities with different characteristics (indoor / outdoor, density, etc.) would have different levels of risk.
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Except that the starting pay for teachers in Chicago and Los Angeles is more than $50k. We have a lot of teachers making six figures in our SoCal suburban district.
But how safe is safe? Where is the data that shows that kids are bringing in COVID and hospitalizing teachers? How many teachers got COVID directly from their students in the EuroZone which kept many schools open for in-person learning?
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This is a Sept 2021 article. I’m sure there have been more since. At least now there are vaccines.
" Our memorial gallery has 1,045 names now, as of Sept. 1. That’s a big number. A big number that falls short. It doesn’t capture everyone. We err on the side of caution before adding another name to the list. Not everyone has an obituary or a local news article to confirm they died from COVID.
Others, too, are bearing witness to this mounting death toll. School Personnel Lost to Covid, known as @losttocovid on Twitter, keeps a daily record. Their count exceeds 1,600."
Exactly why we need to increase vaccination rates in the US!!
%fullyvaxxed/%boostered
US 64/27
UK 73/56
Ireland 79/55
France 77/49
Spain 81/47
Portugal 90/51
Belgium 77/57
Netherlands 71/48
Germany 74/54
Switzerland 69/40
Italy 77/57
Germany 74/54
Austria 76/51
Norway 75/51
Sweden 73/40
Denmark 81/61
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This “just” does Georgia and just for this school year:
And seriously, if anyone is curious how many have died out there, google is quite helpful.
Knowing someone who died, it’s a bit irritating reading some folks’ thoughts, so I’m just going to leave it at that.
I might go back to school, but if so, it will be next school year - not this one. It was a bit unnerving seeing everyone unmasked while talking about the mother and uncle of students who died of Covid over Christmas. I don’t know if they caught it from their students, but plenty of students had it.
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Very moving, but how does it compare to the number of doctors, lawyers, or accountants who got covid and died? It may not be disproportionate.
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No clue, but I know pre-vaccine, some doctors and other health care workers died too. It’s why most are so pro-vaccine TBH. And they still mask in health care places I’ve been in too (except for our local pharmacy).
Kids tend to be safe. Adults - not so much. I don’t blame folks for not being willing to put themselves on the line for others. If they want to, great, but not all of us want to.
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Just diagnosed breast cancer in an 88 year-old woman today. Been getting yearly mammograms. Will have surgery and chemo/radiation later this month. She is otherwise healthy and fit.
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God bless her. It’s a tough road.
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Yes, of course people have died from COVID in ALL industries, but that is not the question, which is how many teachers died/got sick bcos they contracted covid directly from their students?
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Of course teachers, doctors, lawyers, bus drivers, wait staff, etc. - and a whole lot of others - have gotten Covid. The question would be who contracted Covid at their workplace (as opposed to family gatherings or other means). This question also came up for the flight attendants as some were hesitant to go back to work once the airlines began to return to more normal operations. There were citations about how many flight attendants had died from Covid but none about contracting Covid while working a flight.
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This happened to my mom at the same age! It was also her first mammogram! She had surgery but didn’t need radiation or chemo, and the hormonal therapies weren’t tolerated well so those were stopped. She’s 91 and in excellent health and yes, she does get regular mammograms now.
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