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
In one large, long haulers group that I have followed closely for years they are fairly convinced that a lot of the 3+ year long haulers are suddenly dying in larger numbers than ever before. I fear what that looks like in a couple more years. I certainly *hope* nothing bad, but I wouldn't bet my life, or my kids' lives, on it.
That's the thing, even before COVID it's not, and even if you ignore viruses, period, it's not a good learning environment.
Given the resistance to even acknowledging the whole COVID thing in schools, I tried lobbying my local school district around the idea that they could improve their all-important test scores with lower CO2, all while having better attendance. Unfortunately, they still squandered their federal ventilation money.
Not everything is COVID related, but I still find it odd that no one seems to ever consider the possibility these days.
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/07/1198084041/bruce-springsteen-peptic-ulcer-disease
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/springsteen-tour-covid-new-jersey-e-street-band-17901807
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9280505/
"Globally, recent studies have revealed a significant correlation between COVID-19 and peptic ulcer disease."
@moirearty@mastodon.social
You hit on a lot of good points in your posts, so I just want to expand on the timeline for vaccines a little. First off, here's the latest update on the pan-coronavirus vaccine that I've seen from earlier this year:
So, unfortunately for us all, as far as I understand the government's pushing everyone back to the pre-pandemic timeline on vaccines and treatments going forward, particularly now that the emergency declaration is over. That means every one of these things is likely to take 5-10 years, or longer, from now on. No more project warp speed.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/timeline
I'm always glad to see new work on pan-coronavirus or nasal vaccines, and believe me, I'm eagerly waiting, too. Unfortunately I do think we're going to be waiting for a while before anything "better" comes along.
I think it's bizarre(good bizarre) that suddenly major media outlets are discussing the fact that you can't compare so many COVID statistics across different waves. First CNN and now this NBC News article discussing the differences in hospitalization data.
I've decided I'm going to throw in the towel and stop responding to all of the over sensationalized stories about Florida taking money away from public schools and giving it to private and homeschool students. The story's blowing up, again, today because a journalist whom I previously respected doesn't really write fully factual stuff. I figured this out a couple months ago when he wrote an article that gained a lot of traction about the county school district I live in and know a lot about the inner workings of. When I pointed out that his story wasn't exactly correct, and gave fully sourced information explaining the full and true story I was blocked. This journalist's stories are based in fact, but then go off the rails.
Beyond that, the anti-homeschool hate on this platform is absolutely wild. Let me tell you something else. I once posted Department of Education data showing that religious homeschoolers are making up a smaller and smaller portion of homeschooled students, and non-white student numbers had been going up since pre-pandemic and I got called a "Koch shill" and blocked by over a dozen people. For posting federal government data...
https://nces.ed.gov/nhes/homeschooling.asp
I knew this years ago, long before I decided to homeschool my own kids during the early days of the pandemic. My wife, still a public school teacher, had a side hustle as a tutor outside of school hours. A LOT of those kids were homeschool kids who needed a little more help. Very few of them were conservative at all. In fact, more often than not, they were non-white students from liberal families who felt safer outside of the public school system.
So, onto today's problematic reporting. Homeschoolers buying Disney passes and 55" TV's is bound to cross your timeline today. Outrageous, right?!? How dare they! But, it's not as bad as that, and I'm struggling as to why people need to keep blowing it up into this. The truth is bad enough. This is a money grab for rich private school families from their local public schools. That's literally what it's for.
As a slight aside, I think it's honestly because people feel the need to keep hammering away on Florida right now. To a point I really do get it. I've been telling friends from California and Oregon for a decade about how bad it is. But this has taken a really dark turn. For reasons that are really no one's business, we couldn't evacuate from Idalia recently. It was going to be uncomfortably close, at best, and a disaster at worst. We rode it out and it turned out fine for us, but I sat here, up all night watching the weather ready to grab my kids out of bed if needed, reading the great people of my personalized Mastodon timeline talk about how much Florida "deserved" it. The block button got a lot of use.
Anyway(I know....get to your damn point, no one's reading all this), the story as reported isn't *really* true. The first, and most egregious issue with it is that you literally can not be a homeschool student to participate. The first step is withdrawing from your county's homeschool program and submitting to some random organization's oversight and doing a bunch of things that aren't, actually, homeschool at all.
https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/18379/urlt/PEP-FAQ.pdf
The second question in the actual program's FAQ states:
"Will my student still be considered a home education student?
No. To be able to apply for the FTC scholarship the parent or guardian of a home education student must first file a Letter of Termination to end the home education program with their school district home education coordinator along with the annual evaluation required within 30 days of termination."
To apply there's, literally, a link(https://go.stepupforstudents.org/hubfs/Scholarship%20Info/Home%20Education%20Letter%20of%20Termination.pdf) to terminate your home school agreement with your county's school district, below a section titled "Who's Is Eligible?" that explains you must be "enrolled in full-time private or public school."
Under that section, it again states as a requirement:
"Withdraw as a full-time public or private school student or terminate a home education program with their school district and enroll as a PEP student with Step Up For Students."
The law was specifically crafted to *avoid* changing anything with Florida homeschools by creating a "personalized education program" that is *not* homeschool. The idea is that private school students can take *up to* $8000 that otherwise would have gone to their local public school and apply it to tuition or other stuff.
The program is designed to be a drain on the public school system and to give that money to private school families. Period.
But what about all of the 55" TV's, you say? Well, that's borderline correct...you see, to get something like that your documentation is regulated by the "Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities" which is a students with disabilities program(The reporting conflates a few different programs and pretends like they're the same thing). Your personalized education plan has to state the reasons why you might need such a thing. The example being for this one that you have a visually disabled student who would benefit from a large screen, and then you have to submit paperwork from a medical professional justifying the purchase.
Trips to Disney? Yes. I know all of you from outside of Florida think about the Magic Kingdom. There's a lot more to Disney and every school from hours around does a field trip there pretty much every year for one reason or another. My kids went to Animal Kingdom a few years back in school, for example.
That journalists story today shows a bunch of quotes from Facebook and whatnot. I'm sure those are legit. Do people abuse every government program across all of history? Yes, in fact they do. Is it illegal to use the funds they way some of those people are trying to? Yes, 100%. The only real question that journalists should be asking is whether the state is going to do something about it, or let them have the money to spend on whatever they want.
One of the first lines of the spending guide is the following for a reason:
As per Florida Statutes ss. 1002.394 & 1002.395 Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options (FES-EO) and Florida Tax Credit (FTC) Scholarship (including Personalized Education Program (PEP)) funds must be used to meet the needs of an eligible student. Using a student’s scholarship funds for other purposes is a crime.
It makes sense, though, because western medicine is all about treating symptoms for long periods of time. It's the most profitable system.
@TheMemeticist@mas.to
I'm both glad to see, and surprised that CNN chose to discuss, how little data we have, and, more importantly, how comparing what we do have to different waves is a poor idea. I see so many well meaning people(many of whom should really know better) posting wastewater concentrations and hospitalization data across different years without realizing that it's all apples to oranges.
I don't allow my kids unlimited time on anything other than books. They're at an age where they spend as much time as I allow on YouTube right now. I'm pretty savvy about it, we talk a lot about what's allowed and what's not and, honestly, they do a good job of sticking to content that we all agree to. They just can't have unlimited time on it.
Maybe a year ago I set up a little system in which every 2 hours of YouTube time their devices require a passcode to keep streaming. If you fail the passcode a few times, you get locked out. This has been working quite well. They don't get it until they're done with school and it gives me a chance to talk with them about whether or not they've done their chores, or whatnot, whenever they want to watch more.
Today I take a look and my 10yo has somehow logged almost 8 hours without a passcode. I go to ask him, and he tries to put his tablet face down real quick so I can't see that he's on YouTube....and he starts giggling. He tries the old "I don't know what you're talking about" but I threaten to block the internet from him entirely until he tells me how he did it...but it's obvious he kind of wants me to know anyway.
So he relents and, I kid you not, he tells me(gleefully) that he looked up details of my past addresses and phone numbers online and he's been trying them, two at a time so as not to get locked out, for a year. Once he cycled through everything he could find, he decided that I was using a one of them as a template, and adding or subtracting numbers from it, for him and his brother's passcodes. So he kept trying them, just one off of the number he'd found online, until he found one that worked.
I didn't know whether to give him an award or a punishment, so I just laughed and walked out. Kid totally hacked me. Gotta up my game to a random PIN generator or something, like I do for banking, with this kid around.
Yes! This is a very underreported phenomenon. Metallica learned the hard way:
https://www.indybar.org/?pg=YoungLawyersNews&blAction=showEntry&blogEntry=85867
And now every cancelled event will forever pretend it's not COVID, when it all likely is.
Onto athletes...
I know a guy through a friend of a friend situation from the town I grew up in who is currently in his 20's and was a pretty successful NFL starting player for a few years. He came into the league before COVID, was a starter as a rookie, got COVID in 2021, and just statistically speaking you could see the downturn in his young career. By all accounts, within the organization they knew he never came back to pre-COVID levels, but along with him they decided not to say "COVID" out loud hoping that he'd get another contract with another team eventually.
He's out of the league now and still won't say "COVID" because, from what I've heard second hand, he's been told that there's fear across the league of giving millions to someone who doesn't have a clear path back to full health. He's still hopeful that someone will take a flyer on him and he'll get one more contract signed.
In short, you're spot on. The people who control the money aren't spending it if you say "COVID" out loud.
@philip_cardella@historians.social @lhgmk2
Yeah, sadly, this is the conclusion I've come to, and it's the exact same conclusion that I've come to with climate change. Unless there's one thing they can do that won't change anything else in their lives, they're just not going to go along with the necessary changes to their own lives.
I've had minor variations of the conversation about COVID with multiple people that I know that ends with:
I got vaccinated. What more can you do? *cough* *shrug* *cough*
With the corollary from the last few decades of:
I recycle. What more can you do? *drives off to the mall to buy more stuff*
And the more recent one:
I put solar panels on my roof. What more could I possibly do? *drives off in an SUV*
There's simply layers beyond that wish for deus ex machina that the average person isn't willing to consider. I think that's why click bait articles of "One simple thing you can do!" are successful. Everyone will consider "one simple thing" but after that probably not.
That's why the lure of "take a shot and pandemic's over for you" was so enticing for people, even though you probably realized it was never going to happen if you thought critically about the science behind it. I'm still upset about all of the people I know who vaxxed and relaxed because they fully bought into it. "Biden and NPR said so, so it couldn't possibly be wrong."
The latest HHS guidelines for federal reporting on this(linked below, page 15) changed "Hospital onset" COVID reporting to optional from required in June, just FYI. Not sure what the state of Massachusetts is requiring, locally.
Not from New Zealand, so not being sure what you have access to, check out @joeyfox, and in particular his "How to pick an Air Cleaner" article here:
https://itsairborne.com/how-to-pick-an-air-cleaner-31c238bcd91f
Yes to all of this. For different reasons, but my kids are thriving in online school as well. I've been very vocal about how great it's been for them. We've become such believers that my wife moved from brick and mortar, into a hybrid system and then into exclusively virtual teaching as she saw the potential, and can't imagine ever going back into the brick and mortar classroom now.
Huge congratulations for your kid and their success!
Yes, I too remember Donald Trump saying that it would go away when the weather warmed up...
Our local courts banned masks for jury duty for a while, too. They eventually allowed them, but only if they're clear. They seem to be outlawing them in some places from a facial recognition standpoint, at least officially. I'm sure it's largely just anti-maskers doing what they do.
At the time it was pointed out to me that there is a transparent, NIOSH-approved N95 mask. Might be worth looking into whether that would be allowed there.
I hate that I do this, but after a few times of trying to explain myself I took to just barely croaking out "I'm REALLY sick *cough* *cough*" and so far every one of them has run, not walked, away from me.
@TheMemeticist@mas.to
So many mysteries! Yet, somehow, they actually all have the same answer...
Depending on how far into the weeds you want to get into it @joeyfox has a ton of info if you just scroll through his posts a little.
If you want to get straight to recommendations start here:
https://itsairborne.com/how-to-pick-an-air-cleaner-31c238bcd91f
In case you feel like refuting this article to anyone you know today, or telling USA Today where to shove it(letters@usatoday.com) I'll do the leg work for you.
An opinion by "doctor" Pierre Kory. Who is this Pierre Kory? You can start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Line_COVID-19_Critical_Care_Alliance
Yes, the president of a COVID misinformation and grifting campaign. So egregious that he has already had his board certification revoked:
I'll solve this great mystery from the article for you all. It's COVID.
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
