Because we have to prove every obvious thing in the world, because people are stupid, and our leaders are psychopathic morons:
A new study supported by the CDC shows that in 2021, there was more COVID-19 in US schools than the general community (see lines on the left).
But when masks were introduced at school, cases in schools plummeted (see lines on the right).https://t.co/PbWR8thV4e pic.twitter.com/8YqlrtcbPi
— Dr Zoë Hyde (@DrZoeHyde) March 9, 2022
She goes on to note:
Both students and staff members were more likely to have COVID-19 than the general community, as shown in this graph (depicting the ratio of school to community cases). The closer the curves are to 1 on the horizontal axis, the closer schools matched the general community.
Oh, who would have guessed that children and schools are petri dishes for disease? (Every parent, except the ones with sloping brows, raises their hands).
Kids in schools during a plague is stupid. Kids in schools without taking precautions like masks and fixing the ventilation is a crime. I mean that literally. The people in power who pushed for this, or implemented the decision, should be charged with something like mass negligent homicide — and in places with the death penalty, hung from the neck until dead.
And remember, kids get it, and they spread it to their families.
(Oh hey, there goes grandma! Well who needed her anyway, she was old, and old people should just hurry up and die. Am I right? Or am I right?)
Keith in Modesto
I’m getting the impression that Ian is losing patience.
Ché Pasa
Proof doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters anymore is feelings.
Lex
I remember teaching in Korea and wondering why I felt like shit, then I’d notice that 75% of the class had snot running out of its nose. The disregard our leadership has shown for the lowest level of human decency is appalling. So it’s pretty hard to imagine that they actually care about Ukrainians.
On another note, many of the defense threat reduction agency / DoD / contractor labs around the world appear to have amazing pieces of equipment capable of testing aerosol dispersion in tea world situations. I find it odd that apparently none of them were tasked with testing the various measures we might use to combat Covid. I wouldn’t expect that to be done openly with statements that it was happening, but these labs are plugged into NIH so the work could have been done and the information disseminated. Most of the testing on mask effectiveness has been lab based and so only partially helpful. Either we had the tools for real world research and didn’t bother or we did and decided not to tell anyone.
I’ll also repeat that filtering ventilation could have been installed in schools without massive investment in renovating the original mechanical systems.
someofparts
Well, according to Hillary this is Putin’s fault.
anon
I went into a public school yesterday and the conditions were appalling. No updated ventilation system, most windows closed even though the weather was nice enough to let in fresh air, and half of the children either not wearing their mask or having the mask down to their chin with their nose and mouth exposed. Mask wearing works but it also needs to be enforced along with teachers allowing windows to be open for fresh air to enter a classroom of 20+ people. It’s a disaster and more people will die from COVID. Americans have become desensitized to death around them to really care though.
NR
It should also be noted that Republicans across the country were swarming school board meetings trying to get mask mandates repealed, and generally being awful people in other ways too, such as shouting “Heil Hitler” for example.
https://michiganadvance.com/2021/08/20/nazi-salute-insults-hurled-at-chaotic-birmingham-schools-meeting-over-mask-mandate/
This is just one example, there are countless others from across the country. Republicans are objectively pro-sickness death for children (yes COVID can and has killed children even if it’s rarer than for adults).
Mark Pontin
It’s never hers, or any of our dear leaders.
Mark Pontin
Lex: ‘…many of the defense threat reduction agency / DoD / contractor labs around the world appear to have amazing pieces of equipment capable of testing aerosol dispersion in tea world situations. I find it odd that apparently none of them were tasked with testing the various measures we might use to combat Covid.’
You raise an interesting, valid point.
(I assume you didn’t mean http://www.teaworld.co.in/)
The technology isn’t magical. It’s stuff like this —
https://tsi.com/products/particle-sizers/supermicron-capable-particle-sizer-spectrometers/laser-aerosol-spectrometer-(las)-3340a/
— so there’s lots of scope for failures and missing aerosolized microbes floating through the atmosphere. Nevertheless, the CDC couldn’t even get it together to tell us (i.e. admit) that COVID was transmitted as an aerosol for the longest.
different clue
What the governators and the Overclass hope and intend is that all the kids get an early start on getting covid over and over and over again, in order to get successive waves of silent organ damage so that they will live long enough to pay FICA taxes, but then die just before they live long enough to actually collect Social Security and Medicare. That is the government’s hope and intent here. And in every other country where kids are sent into school without forced masking.
someofparts
Unless they are in North Africa or Afghanistan. Those kids will just starve. But they were never gonna pay FICA taxes so, no problem.
Ian Welsh
Lots of posts about Ukraine. If you want to talk primarily about that, please comment there.
Ché Pasa
It’s hard to escape the reality that They want a lot of us disabled or dead, in great numbers, as quickly as possible.
Not all of us. Not yet. But plenty. I saw a statistic the other day; 1500 or so are recorded as dying every day from the Covid, and who knows how many are becoming severely ill or disabled for life? No one knows, right? Is this the equilibrium state? Is this where we’ll stay with the Covid for the foreseeable?
There are mitigations, treatments, and vaccines, but it’s all a matter of choice, personal feelings, political inclinations, and so forth. Where you live seems to matter, your kids’ school board’s membership, who has had it and survived, who has had it and died or become disabled.
In other words, there’s no common belief or effort underway to curb or control the disease; personal opinion and preference matters much more than common good. Once it was discovered that Covid affects mostly (not exclusively) those who are already sickish, poor, old, brown and black with few resources, “let ‘er rip” — so called herd immunity — became the preferred response in the West, and those who tried to control it were deemed oddballs or fascists or worse. Hitler!
Kids are not only allowed to spread it, they’re almost encouraged to. Those who have tried to prevent that are shouted down, shunned, attacked. If you don’t want to get it from kids, don’t be around them, but don’t you dare try to control what kids do. Even if it is a danger to you or the community.
And so it goes. Those of us who can simply stay away from others, maintain as much physical distance as we are able to when we have to be out and about, do not interact with children or strangers, mask up whenever we must be out in public, and hope that if we get sick, we can get prompt and effective treatment. There’s no guarantee about that of course. Treatments are in short supply, not easily obtainable, and in order to receive them, you must fit certain criteria which are closely held secrets in many cases.
And this seems to be the permanent state of affairs as there are now other, more important matters for Our Rulers to deal with. Forex how to stay on the brink of nuclear holocaust without actually tipping over the edge…
Lex
Mark,
TSI makes fine equipment which I use regularly. Much of the tech that produces the monitoring results is calculated rather than direct measurement though. Traditionally, lab investigation into aerosols is done in chambers. One of the problems is that to make the chambers work the environment is modified and the particles are introduced in concentrations that are impossible in the real world.
My reading on those labs is that they have full-scale, outdoor and indoor research areas that can literally recreate real world conditions. Most likely, the monitoring after dispersal is done with TSI or similar equipment. Settling plates and older tech that physically collects particulate are probably used as well. That older tech is very good but is rather complex and bulky.
It’s that real world dispersion that’s important because it’s almost impossible to recreate actual airflow patterns and environmental conditions in a lab/chamber. Simply too much complexity and variability. Although it would be possible to do some research in closed buildings, though it can get tricky if you’re using stand-in particles rather than the actual contaminant.
different clue
@anon,
Americans still Just Can’t Believe that the ruling authorities want to stealth-kill tens of millions of them over the next few decades. If they all came to believe it, would they lash out in some way so overwhelmingly violent as to lead to the physical extermination of the couple or so million ruling authorities and obedient minions who carry out this slow rolling domestic extermination program against the tens of millions scheduled for slow rolling extermination over the next few decades?
I don’t know.
different clue
@someofparts,
The ruling authorities in America want to kill tens of millions of Americans in America slowly enough that they ( we) will live long enough to pay all our FICA taxes and then die when we get old enough to start collecting Social Security and Medicare.
I don’t think the American ruling authorities are really thinking about the Afghans at all in this context. They are thinking about how to slow-kill tens of millions of Americans here in America over the next few decades.
And they don’t want to kill you personally or me personally by name. They don’t care “which” tens of millions of Americans die before collecting Social Security, just that tens of millions of Americans die before reaching the age of Social Security eligibility. They just want to reach their ongoing rolling body counts. As they say in the mafia . . . . ” This ain’t personal. Its business.”
different clue
@Che Pasa,
You can’t save someone or something that does not want to be saved.
Some Americans are Covid Carefuls. Some Americans are Covid Zombies. The Covid Carefuls will try finding out how to recognize eachother and help eachother survive like the early Christians during Peak Roman Empire. Perhaps some religious denominations will be much more biased towards Covid Carefuls than others will. I can’t imagine there are very many Typhoid MAGA Jonestown Trumpanon Covid Zombie pro-covid plague spreaders in the Unitarian Church or the Universal Church of Christ, for instance.
Those two denominations can set up their own Parochial Schools for their own children to be covid-safe in while going to school. That is the form which passive defensive covid-zombie resistance will probably take in this country. Such Covid Careful Parochial Schools might let in children from other Covid Careful families if those families can show they shun the Typhoid MAGA covid zombies as much as possible in the wider world beyond the Covid Safety Denominations.
If the Covid Safety Culture and Movement grows bigger, perhaps Covid Safety Seekers can find parts of the country where the Covid Safety community is a politically and economically and culturally preponderant majority. Those outside those areas can move to those areas. The people of those areas can try creating low-covid or even covid-nearly-free mini-societies within those areas and create survival lifeboat lilypad survival economies inside their low-covid areas and decouple those economies as much as possible from the Typhoid MAGA Trump-Country plague and death leper zones all around them.
js
I don’t think that cloth masks, including whatever single layer cloth mask anyone might wear, would reduce cases that much is self-evident. So studies are good. That kids are petri dishes is self-evident yes, and continue to be so, all the more so being vaccines are barely working on kids at all apparently. It’s like it’s pretty obvious guessing that offices would be petri dishes, when who that has ever worked in one, hasn’t had a cold spread across the whole office because noone dares to take a sick day, even if they have sick days.
different clue
I have noticed something about mask-wearing and when I raise it with people, others have noticed it as well. More hand-washing and other things may be feeding into this.
And here it is. Every year I get a few mild colds and at least 1 or 2 bad ones. But I am into Year Two with no colds at all so far. And so are others.
As much as I suffer from colds, I find a lifetime of wearing a mask is worth a lifetime of way fewer colds. So I think I will stay masked up for personal cold reduction. If any random members of the self-appointed No Mask Freedom Police give me a hard time about it, I will tell them it is for common colds.