Dr. Patty Hayes: "The reason why we're not recommending school closures is because CHILDREN have NOT been shown to be high risk groups"
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Posted Mar 4, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC · locked
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From an infection control point of view, that is just mind-boggling nonsense.
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They best hope and figuratively pray that children won't fall ill. Imagine the panic if a school worth of children had 20% (even 5%) of them needing intensive care.
I don't even want to think about it but have to keep the possibility open.
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I dont think there were any cases of young kids that were in critical condition. They seem to show hardly any symptoms and their rate of infection was lower then normal
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The babysitting role so people can go to work is I guess more important than the risk of letting the kids spread it to their families at home.
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Who the fuck would want to babysit right now?!?!
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The school systems that depend on daily attendance for funding.
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bs
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That's cool, my kids get to go to school so that I can go infected at work. If I'm lucky they'll pick up the other strain and I can have both.
It would be pretty cool to have some hard data! Are the two strains similar enough to avoid secondary infection, and are kids vectors?
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Hard data would be nice, but that isn’t something this nation seems to want anymore.
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WHAT ABOUT THEIR PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS WHOM THEY GO HOME TO AT 3:30 YOU NUMBSKULL?!?
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Many faculty and staff are in their 40s, 50s, 60s ... I've had university professors in their 70s. What happens when the teaching workforce becomes sick? Who will watch the children then?
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The CDC said this morning that children are very asymptomatic, meaning that they can be infected without showing any symptoms at all.
So it should go without saying, but children can spread this pretty fast since they seem to be perfectly fine as they run around coughing on shit and grabbing door knobs and hugging grand parents.
I guess King County Health Dept didn't see the update, which was hours before the presser.
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As an adult currently sick with some kind of virus who has interacted with barely anyone besides an "under 4" mommy and me type group, I concur. My 1 year old seems slightly ill but she's nursing so I'm giving her antibodies. My 4 year old seems like he has a cold but he stinks at articulating his symptoms. He did have diarrhea and had accidents in his pants a couple times yesterday which is NOT normal for him.
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Key word there is "may" be asymptomatic. You left out that part.
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You "may" die from this, and it "may" be due to semantics.
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There's a 99.8% chance that you may survive.
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I get sick from being around my nieces. Its not how bad it effects them, its that they are little carriers.
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What if the children have high risk care takers?? This is an idiotic stance imo.
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Simple. Then keep them home.
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I’m curious how schools react to parents voluntarily keeping their kids home. If they’ll work with the parents or encourage them to stay in school.
Schools get funding based on attendance. I know in most circumstances they push to keep the kids in school.
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I agree they should close schools, but I do acknowledge there are valid reasons to leave them open.
High risk caretakers includes medical personnel and other professions you need working to help fight the disease. Sure the city could run daycare centers for those kids specifically, but that basically means putting the children of medical staff at higher risk. I dunno.
Some hard decisions ahead.
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Yes but they will spread to their parents or grandparents who are. They are perfect carriers.
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That press conference was a mess, then she started with that crap and it sealed the deal for me that they have absolutely no clue what they are doing. Today they recommended not gathering in groups of 10 or more people. What the hell do they think schools are?
Yesterday when Hazen H.S. in Renton had a student confirmed to have the virus, public health told them not to cancel school. It was only later that they changed their tune.
They have failed the public health part of their jobs. And it is going to cost more lives.
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Children can spread it to their parents, who go to work and spread it to coworkers, and then it just goes from there.
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yes it is not logical at all.
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It’s insanity.
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My take on all of this is that they intend for it to spread so they can say closing schools or businesses won't help so keep business as usual and don't hurt stocks. As far as testing etc, I think it is like the hurricane in PR. If we don't test, people just die of respiratory failure, not covid19.
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I've been thinking lately about how often I used to get sick when I was raising my thumbsucking stepson.... (He's grown and moved out now. Still a thumbsucker.)
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As Dr Duchin mentioned the kids have to go somewhere. During the 2009 H1N1 issue where schools closed, they found kids out and at the malls. Obviously, that is counter to what the goal would be.
The government officials right now have to weigh economic impacts. If a kid stays home, most households (with children) would have to have one or both parents stay home to take care of them. Meaning, said parent couldn’t work. A non working parent doesn’t bring in income or contribute to society (through production). This doesn’t even touch on the kids that receive meals from school (which might be their only real meal that day).
Most jobs offer very little sick days and vacation days. People just cannot afford to take off time right now. Because they are asking themselves what if I really do get sick. I mean say they take a couple weeks off now, and then they get sick in a couple weeks. You would be talking a month of missing work. People have to pay for health insurance, mortgage/rent, car insurance, food, etc.
In our society with almost no social safety nets this is what occurs. I am not advocating either way on this issue. I just don’t think it is as simple as people like to think it is. Not everyone is doing as well as everyone else.
1 in 5 will require hospitalization from this virus (across all age groups). It’s important to take this seriously but not overreact. As Dr Duchin expressed, people that can stay home and work should do that.
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Good alternative perspective; wish I could sticky this to the top.
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That’s genius logic.
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End product of public school education making calls like this
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But they are fantastic vectors.... I also understand that schools closing for weeks can have a massive impact for those that can’t work remotely or find alternate care BUT there are steps that can limit this from jumping school-to-school.
Pasted from a similar thread: There are steps short of closing schools that I personally can’t believe haven’t been taken. There is a National History Day event at a LWSD middle school this Saturday. As far as I know that’s still on. I haven’t seen any updates that sporting events or other field trips are canceled. These are great places for pathogens to cross pollinate between schools. I’m not particularly worried about kids dying from this but they seem like an ideal vector to spread it around.
Depending on the district, we’re 10-14 days after midwinter break. That’s a lot of travel and mixing too. We’re about a month out from Spring Break. Pardon my yelling but, THERE ARE SCHOOL-SPONSORED INTERNATIONAL TRIPS THAT HAVE NOT BEEN CANCELED! That’s right: LWSD hasn’t canceled international travel for students even though companies and government agencies have. It’s straight up irresponsible to send students from this area on trips this spring break. It’s a great way to spread out to places that aren’t effected. If I’m a public heath official in a country that isn’t impacted yet and a bunch of kids from Kirkland, WA show up, I’m likely to ship them straight back home. Realistically, if someone does bring it in, I’ll only find out a few weeks later when I’m seeing one of the WAx strains in my country. It’s also a great way to bring back disease from other places and mix back into the student population.
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But highschoolers are getting infected?
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Yes
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Maybe not in terms of infection, but I imagine transmission is a whole other story. Couldn't one student theoretically infect a large portion of let's say, an elementary school, and it would spiral out to their parents/immediate family members? This seems like a dangerous call to be making.
My thoughts exactly. Children can spread it onto their parents.
It's arguably what kids are best at
Yep. Does anyone know if there's been any good research into if asymptomatic transmission is more/less common in children?
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this article goes into some detail
And grandparents.
or their older teachers who are in the demographic for it to be very dangerous
Seriously. Schools are petri dishes in the best of times. Kids are snotty gross germ machines and it would easily spread like wild fire in any school. I have kids, I love them, but they bring home every cold and flu imaginable.
And the funny thing is a lot of parents are proactively asking for school closure. There are a lot parents they don't mind the disruption that comes with school closure. Yet the gov decided why bother.