A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
Thanks for posting your thoughts. I'm finding it a particularly strange time to still be COVID cautious. Even the few people I knew who were still holding on as late as this past winter now openly wonder if my wife and I have gone mad. The same people who understood that we weren't going to attend holiday celebrations and didn't push it are now demanding that we give it up and join their BBQs and other events and talk about how we must be the only people left in the world who haven't thrown away our masks.
I posted this elsewhere, but on the one hand I get it. Our county quit testing and reporting at the end of last summer and it's been 10 months since there's been a single "official" COVID case at all here. The emergency declaration ended. There's no wastewater testing here. You couldn't buy a test or a mask in a store if you tried. It's really all testing the theory that if you can't see it, does it really exist?
Of course it does, but, you have to be actively looking for it, reading the scientific literature, and no one else is. You're not going to get that info without seeking it out, and obviously that's by design.
Personally, we're still hanging on, but, I admit to wondering whether the world will allow it for much longer or if we'll be forced to give it up before there's better vaccines and treatments. It seems to be trending that way recently and I find it pretty disheartening.
Signs of the apocalypse...
"Believing" that COVID still exists has reached conspiracy levels of disbelief where I live. The hospitals quit testing last year and "officially" there's been zero COVID cases in our county for closing in on a year now. I don't know of a single person, locally, outside of our household, who acknowledges that there's such a thing as COVID any longer. The local TV news and newspaper haven't mentioned it once in months. It's easy to understand why so many believe it simply disappeared. Out of sight out of mind.
I know you know this, but rest. Recovery is all that matters. Stay focused on it.
It's a mystery!
If we're talking exclusively this data set, it's all available online at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov
In short, there's zero evidence that schools that were closed longer have had greater declines than schools that were closed for less time. Forbes, actually, did a good piece on that when the 2022 data set came out at https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2022/09/24/did-closing-school-buildings-cause-test-scores-to-drop-looking-for-evidence/?sh=20f6d77a24c4
For whatever it's worth, the local public schools where we live were fully closed for exactly 3 weeks in 2020, after they had already finished state testing, during which time they would have largely been watching movies and whatnot in class, and everyone's raging about how that ruined the kids forever. It's obviously, absurd that essentially adding 3 weeks onto their summer vacation damaged them forever, but, the unfortunate reality is that no amount of data will ever make most people believe differently, so it's kind of pointless at this point in time.
The article says no such thing?
I also suspect you're confusing "home schooling" and "virtual schooling" as they are not the same thing, but it's really irrelevant to the point I believe you're trying to make. This is testing of public school kids(and some private, but if you actually read the data "private schools" as a category didn't encompass enough tests to be statistically relevant and reported). There's no "home school" component to these numbers at all.
I believe what you're trying to say that is that parents and virtual teaching somehow ruined learning for students, for years and it has nothing to do with the current, raging, pandemic. Am I correct?
Personally, I'm so glad to see you posting here. Having gone cold turkey from reading that other site in November I haven't seen what you've been up to.
We're all just trying to navigate all of this craziness the best we can with limited info. You'll find the whole spectrum of people here, so boost, favorite and block liberally. Curate your own timeline. Enjoy!
Good for you for still trying to follow the science. Frankly, I got tired of being the "Well, actually" guy to so many well meaning posts and just gave up. There's such a minimal amount of real data anymore that most of what's out there just isn't, scientifically speaking, worth sharing at this point and because of the small sample sizes people are jumping to claims that are dubious.
If you are suffering from #LongCovid consider sharing your story with the Denver Post at the link below. The more it becomes "news" the better, frankly.
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/06/05/long-covid-survivors-denver-colorado/
@TheMemeticist@mas.to
While the usual quirks and limitations of the VA system data remain from prior studies using this data set, and should be stated again(skews older, male, etc.), there's an awful lot to take in from this paper. I'd highly recommend anyone who's still paying attention gives it a read.
A few pieces that stood out to me on the first read:
"We developed a definition of long COVID consisting of 323 ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes grouped into 143 ICD-10-CM functional groups that were significantly increased in our 367,148 patient post-COVID population. We define seventeen medical specialty long COVID subtypes including cardiology long COVID, neurology long COVID, and pulmonary long COVID."
...
"COVID-19 test positive patients were assigned novel signs, symptoms, or diagnoses included in our definition of long COVID at a rate of between 59.7% (percentage based on COVID positive patients tested at the VA) and 76.6% (percentage based on all COVID positive patients with diagnostic history and follow up diagnoses one to seven months after test)."
...
"Our data did not indicate that vaccination was protective against the development of long COVID. However, vaccination resulted in significantly lower rates of novel ARDS in the post-covid period (13.2% CI: 10.4%-16.9%) as compared with the unvaccinated population (19.6% CI: 18.1% - 21.2), p<0.001."
...
"We found 143 upregulated diagnostic groups, with odds ratios as high as 23. We also found seventeen upregulated medical specialty groupings containing between three and twenty-one signs, symptoms, or diagnoses. This provides strong evidence for a broad definition of long COVID."
...
"Our definition shows that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are associated with damage to numerous body systems including the kidneys, heart, eyes, and nervous system. Our results are corroborated by other studies. Cognitive dysfunction (brain fog) is often associated with long COVID and can be difficult to diagnose and treat."
@augieray @froukehe9@mastodon.world
I did a little digging into this when that article came out and what I decided was that because cancer rate data tends to lag 2-4 years, and I was getting pretty different data from journals than this article was discussing, it's hard to really nail this one down at this point. For instance, this article on cancer statistics from 2022 doesn't seem to show the same increases the New Scientist article is discussing, but does show an uptick in prostate cancer.
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21708
I think it's just one of those things that is, unfortunately, going to take a long time to tease out.
And so many teachers are going on FMLA right now. My wife is constantly getting new students as their old teachers go on family or personal medical leave mid-semester. She's been teaching for closing in on 20 years now, nearly 5 at her current school, and never seen anything like it before.
They seem to be well within the forecast range.
From 2020:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-when-might-the-world-exceed-1-5c-and-2c-of-global-warming/
From 2023:
@CassandraZeroCovid @biorxivpreprint
Also:
"Conclusions: Our data support the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 infection in the Central Nervous System triggers downstream effects altering Tau function, eventually leading to the impairment of neuronal function."
Read through the study and it sounds an awful lot like what SARS-CoV-1 did to the unfortunate few who got it.
I think your reporting on this issue is correct and important, but I think you're leaving out the larger context if you don't explain that the school district in question got on the radar of Moms 4 Liberty and the right wingers because of the transgender teacher being removed from the classroom, and then reinstated, story(https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/04/18/florida-transgender-teacher-makes-threats-story-goes-viral/).
They're now combing through social media histories of teachers and students from the district looking for any improprieties, going back years(https://www.hernandosun.com/2023/05/12/school-board-members-ask-for-better-communication-on-major-school-incidents/), trying to create a scandal to remove the superintendent and the liberal leaning members of the board(https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/foxchapelteacherthreat).
Without the first story I don't think this one ever sees the light of day because you don't have people looking through everything happening in the district with a fine tooth comb.
I've been warning people about this in Florida for years(and most people still don't vote in the school board elections...), but the speed at which it's happening elsewhere is alarming.
It's always a mystery....
Yeah, our local hospitals have all, very vocally and proudly I should say, stopped testing for and reporting COVID at all. There's, officially, been zero COVID deaths in my county of over 200,000 people for at least 8 months now. The last reported COVID death that I can find is August 31st, 2022. Obviously that's because that's when they stopped testing and collecting the data.
There's already zero data locally for me and I suspect that will be the case for many more people soon.
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
