Hoping to see a post here about OpenCPC. I just read about it and it sounds very cool.
I come back to this post from @augieray regularly because, with increasing frequency, I find that people I know in life and on social media are testing positive with less and less time between infections. I've seen multiple co-workers getting sick, and testing positive for COVID, just 2-6 weeks apart now.
I don't know if that's because of immune system damage, a viral soup of variants out there that isn't conferring any protection between them, or a mixture of both, but I can't see how this is sustainable if it continues.
Stay safe out there and get healthy.
My wife still keeps up with some of the brick and mortar teachers she used to work with after she went 100% virtual. They all report that they "push through" and teach while sick. Of course, here, there's no masks at all, either, and many of them legitimately believe that COVID doesn't exist anymore, so there's no testing. They think they're doing something noble "for the kids" because of teacher shortages and just won't hear otherwise.
I can't imagine being part of that anymore. It's all so backwards, but I certainly wish you all of the best in educating them!
I completely agree and have found the same thing. At the beginning of the pandemic everyone I knew reached out to me and my wife to help decipher the latest science and help them stay safe. There was a point in 2021 where it started falling off, and by 2022 the same people who were blowing up my phone for info previously were openly telling me that I'd fallen for a hoax, or I wasn't informed of the latest COVID news.
I've told them all that the worst case scenario, for me personally, is that I "missed out" on a few things in life and they all end up just fine and maybe I have some regrets about how I handled it down the road, but if they're wrong they're going to have far more than some minor regrets. In the end, I just don't try anymore and I quietly wish them all luck out there.
Me too! I try to remember to @ their accounts when I talk about them, hoping they'll see it and realize they should be active here.
Yes, it really should have! Everyone knows schools are virus spreaders. On top of that, though, just sitting in high CO2 all day isn't good for kids, nor their ability to do school work. Cognitive performance is proven to decrease with increasing CO2.
I only found out after my kids started doing virtual school, from another parent who sent their kid in with a CO2 monitor, that the new school building classrooms that my kids were inside of for years were over 3,000 ppm and often over 4,000 ppm every single day.
I tried explaining this to our local school district and got absolutely nowhere with it. Hopefully they figure it out someday.
I don't want to be ghoulish about this, at all, but in reading Politico's statement(not a story just yet) about Diane Feinstein's death it says:
"Her death, confirmed by a person with knowledge of the situation, brings Senate Democrats’ functional majority to 50 votes, with Republicans holding 49 votes. Two other Democratic senators tested positive for Covid this week..."
Whether or not she had COVID, with such a slim majority, and all that's going on in Congress this week, it's still just let it rip time in DC? How is this intelligent? Rather than fighting over a stupid dress code, how about we try and keep a healthy group of Senators to try to get some stuff done(or add masks to the dress code)?
Anyway, carry on with let it rip, I guess. Let's see how that shoots us in the foot next.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/feinstein-dies-at-90-00119040
I was just going to say "Says everyone with ME/CFS, ever." Thank you for pointing it out.
Update:
Basically everyone in my wife's work group is out sick. She reports that Teams is silent and her boss's boss asked her into a Zoom call first thing this morning where she asked my wife to "hold down the fort." Of course, that was proceeded by "I'm not sick like everyone else. I just have laryngitis and my doctor says I need to stop talking, but that's not going to happen. I'm practically the only one here this week."
Throwing out all regard for employees and their health from the discussion, why do businesses think that getting together for a few days is worth this? There really needs to be a reckoning across the work culture where we all agree to acknowledge it's not a good idea.
@undefined @amaditalks
The psychology at work here has been one of the parts of the pandemic that's really blown my mind.
If I wear a mask in public where I live, I will almost certainly get questioned, if not berated.
If I wear a mask, cough a lot and say "Sorry, I'm so sick" then people will run to get away from me.
Clearly they don't want to get sick, but they still find preventative masking to be offensive.
I still sometimes get people responding to me saying "Ha! You think masks work???" and then they link to some article about cloth masks. The messaging has been atrocious.
My wife reports this evening that no less than a dozen other people reported into Teams that they feel awful today. Don't worry, though! It's all "not COVID" for sure.
My wife's company had a mandatory conference for all of their over 2,000 employees last week. She did not attend, thankfully. Even though it was mandatory she rolled the dice on a Telehealth appointment and the doctor she got thought it was wonderful that she hasn't gotten COVID yet, and wrote her a note suggesting that she be exempt from all in-person meetings for the next 365 days. Surprisingly, to us, HR at her company accepted it. We went camping while everyone else went to a packed, zero COVID precautions considered, conference.
No surprise at all, she's covering for many people out sick today, including the person she works most closely with who texted her to say she's "down with the worst bout of COVID yet."
She just got off of a zoom meeting with her boss, who also has COVID today, and is suddenly COVID cautious curious, let's say. She said it's her 7th(yes, seventh) known COVID infection, she has a "bizarre autoimmune disorder" that her doctors have spent a year trying to help her figure out, and she's come to believe that it *might* just be COVID related.
She asked how my wife has managed to stay COVID free, and my wife went ahead and listed out all of our precautions, and here's where watching this secretly from across the room blew my mind....The hangup was restaurants. She kept coming back to "You haven't been inside of a restaurant in 4 years?" Over and over. At least 4 times in the next 20 minutes she repeated that. Like it was some Herculean feat that couldn't be accomplished by the average human being.
I just don't get it...
Anyway, it was a bridge too far, and so she will continue getting COVID.
#Historian question.
My son was taking notes for his Civics class today and came upon the requirement that the President must have lived in the US for fourteen years. He asked why, and we discussed the founder's fear of foreign influence, but fourteen is so specific that I feel like there must be a story behind it. For instance, was it meant to exclude someone specifically?
A quick search online didn't come up with any answers, so I thought someone out there might have some knowledge, and that person would probably be on Mastodon if they exist.
Thank you for saying that! I've mentioned multiple times that I had multiple family members decide *that* was the moment to ditch all precautions, because NPR wouldn't lie to them. One died from that advice.
"They forgot how to drive" is the car equivalent of "immunity debt." I feel like certain people will still be saying both a decade from now.
My wife was just telling me the other day that for the first time her school was unable to process all of the IEPs for the incoming students and get them to the teachers. They're implementing a system where they're doing them in order based on how well the student's doing in class. The worse the student's grades, the higher up the list they move so they can get accommodations to them more quickly.
Hard to tell without being part of that team whether they're behind because there's just more of them or something else. Have to let it play out and see if the numbers have increased by the time my wife sees them all for her students.
Spot on, but just to be clear I remember that second quote, but somehow I think I missed that first article previously. Thank you for sharing it!
The quote about shedding of SARS-CoV-2 RNA comes from:
The backlash to get everyone "back in" is really a lot deeper than most people realize. It's not relegated to positions that went virtual recently.
I've worked from home since 2015 and there's been a push to get me "into the office" this year, for the first time ever. My wife teaches at a school that's done virtual teaching since the late 90's, never had in-person events before, but has been pushing them on both teachers and students beginning this school year.
I wish you luck finding, and keeping, a virtual teaching job. They're out there, but becoming more and more rare, unfortunately. The real irony is that they're becoming more rare as the statistics seem to show more students and parents looking for virtual schooling than ever before.
This post immediately came to mind this morning when my wife and I looked at each other and said, nearly simultaneously, "You won't believe what I just heard." Both of us had a co-worker mention this morning that they have had COVID 4 times *this year* alone.
Are we beginning to see faster reinfections? Or do each of these people have a longterm infection that's allowing them to test positive multiple times over weeks or months? 4 just seems like too many, at first glance.
Insanity, either way. Stay safe out there people.
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.