Another School Year About to Begin

It’s really interesting to me. The news really seems to be sure that our hospitals are at maxed capacity in the Medical Center. My wife works not in the med center, but in a high risk, lower income area and they are “pushed a little”, but by no means doom and gloom. She gets these updates from the HCA CEO every few days and the update last night showed a graph detailing all the covid cases since the start of this thing at the 4 “Gulf Coast” hospitals. We’re definitely in an uptick, but what I’m being told (again…isolated to these four hospitals) is that there are more people, but the ones who are vaccinated recover easy and in most cases are sent home.

The ones who struggle are not vaccinated and have underlying issues…same as before. I’m not saying the news is completely full of it, but feels definitely like fear mongering a little bit. That said, I’m definitely team “get the shot”.

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Looks like we’re back where we were at the start of the year, before we had vaccines. The outlook was pretty sunny this spring when two million people a day were getting vaccinated and total cases were dropping.

Now we’re back where we started. And yes, it’s mostly a problem for the unvaccinated, but for many of us that includes our children under 12. This explosion of infections is happening without kids in school. What happens next week when kids return to school and start paying around viruses?

It’s a frustrating situation because we shouldn’t be here. We’ve got the tools to defeat this with the vaccine. But the longer we let it spread around, the more variants will evolve. At some point I expect a variant will evolve that our current vaccines don’t protect against.

The unvaccinated are putting our economy at risk again, as more and more people go back into hiding. Get the shots, put on the masks, and we can get this back under control and soon after we can put the masks away again.

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Does your wife’s low income area hospital have an ICU unit? Probably not. That’s what’s getting full. So the sickest of the sickest might not get the care they need to survive. That’s not fear mongering, that’s just the truth. ICU beds are expensive, high skill units. Lower income area hospitals won’t have them, any patient that needs it will just be transferred to a bigger hospital that has them. Lucky for Houston that we are home to the biggest medical center in the world and we have more than your average city’s count of ICU beds. But even those are filling up.

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Phoenix area schools began 3 weeks ago.

Zero problems with COVID outbreaks.

Tucson area started last week. Same situation.

Yup. It absolutely does. HCA Hospital in Pasadena.

My brother is a coordinator for Methodist. He sends me the Methodist updates. Multiple of his organ transplant patients are dealing with Covid.
As of Aug 9: Methodist TMC email
646 confirmed Covid
97% Delta
83% unvaccinated
42% age 25-50
16% ICU
Harris County average new cases last week 4,445/day; week before that was 3,318/day
Thank goodness counties and school districts now taking action to protect the public/school populations.

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Just got back from a Tomball ISD elementary school meet and greet.
No social distancing being practiced, no 6 foot distancing floor placards, 4 kids at
small tables with no plexiglass dividers, only about 20-25% of parents, students, and teachers
wearing masks. But Texans know the right thing to do. The pandemic is over.

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Unfortunately there are just too many WoodMarks to NRG’s especially in Tomball. Hopefully your kids stay safe, and for that matter the other kids too.

Edited for obvious fighting words.

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I hope this thread remains open.

I am involved in these discussions on a daily bases.

Although it might have its origins in politics something has totally changed in the last couple of weeks.

It is no longer politics. It has changed into something that I have never seen before.

People are lining up totally differently across the spectrum. Politics are not mentioned.

On all ideas (not sides) of getting schools safely started it is truly about the parents, kids, and staff with dozens of different opinions.

No alliances on this one.

Have a relative who has a child in the Montgomery
ISD elementary school. Last week per the child "the teacher told the class that there is no virus in their school. "

And that is probably true.

I have 2 Grandkids in Conroe ISD. No Covid at their Elementary schools.

Check the District website: Conroe ISD COVID-19 Impact

I didn’t look at every elementary school, but looked at the first ten elementary schools in the list, and 10/10 have positive Covid cases. Multiple cases at all ten schools I looked at

150 new cases reported in the District just today. And the trend is not encouraging.

Over 350 students and 91 employees isolated with positive tests, and another 150+ untested students isolated due to symptoms.

Not a good first week…

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I don’t doubt your data and thanks for looking and posting.

For me it’s a troubling statement for a teacher to make. On the one hand,
many kinders are scared and cry on the first days of school in a normal year. Throw scary covid
on top of that and you could have very frightened young children.

But kids know something is going on. And it’s not a teachers job to explain
Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, or the tooth fairy either.

To give knowingly false information to a child about a real thing , is it ever justified ?
Perhaps ? If the teacher senses her kids are at a breaking point ? To try and ease the
tensions and anxiety’s ?

But giving false information that may result in kids being less careful and vigilant about
wearing a mask, a simple device that may save a life of someone in their world or themselves,
may not be very wise either.

You decide what is right or wrong.

What snow-flake school do your kids go to? My second grader goes to a school with a full mask rule. It hasn’t bothered him in the least bit. No more so than all the other rules he has to follow when in school.

Yeah it’s never the kids who are bothered. They just go with the flow on it and move about their day. It’s the titty-baby adults who need strong backhands with the rings on.

Per what the teacher said.

We are hearing this now third or fourth hand.

Teacher, child, your relative, you, us.

That is not to say that the teacher did not say that, that is not to say the child did not hear that (two different things).

A teacher saying that may be very silly or absolutely correct depending on the circumstances.

Is the teacher indicating at the moment there is no positive reports in the school. That might be absolutely correct and public information depending upon the rules in the State and District.

Parents and employees should know the positivity rate per school daily in my opinion. Young children knowing that information may cause unnecessary complications.

For sake of discussion , let’s assume statement as given is fact and child reported it accurately.

A teacher saying that may be very silly or absolutely correct depending on the circumstances.

Agree and Agree

Is the teacher indicating at the moment there is no positive reports in the school. That might be absolutely correct and public information depending upon the rules in the State and District.

Here is where it gets tricky and precise words matter. To say “there is no virus in our school” vs
saying “there has been no reported cases of covid in our school based upon reports that are turned in weekly on Friday as required by state of Texas (and which I could not yet have possibly seen)”

Parents and employees should know the positivity rate per school daily in my opinion. Young children knowing that information may cause unnecessary complications.

Agree 100%. Unfortunately that is not a requirement in Harris County Texas and Tomball ISD.
From the TEA site for 2021 see below. Haven’t seen 21-22 statement, but state seems to going in
direction of less of these overly burdensome bureaucratic regulations in everything.

The data is reported by public schools using an online form on a weekly basis. Schools report by 5 p.m. each Monday any test-confirmed cases they had on campus for the prior Monday-Sunday timeframe and is then reported out publicly two days later. As a result, the posted data report has a lag and is not real time.

Agreed with everything you say.

If I were to advise a teacher in these matters (Which is my exact job responsibility) I would tell them to refrain from discussing these matters with children as much as possible . To only give information that is directly dictated (in writing) by their administrators.

I will not bane the Elementary School the Grands attend but their parents tell me there is no Covid.

What would be scary is children being hospitalized. The CDC says that rate is .0001 and even zero in some areas.

So far a non-event but scare stories will continue since that sells Newspapers.

So this is from American Academy of Pediatrics

Hospitalizations (23 states and NYC reported)*
Among states reporting, children ranged from 1.6%-3.5% of their total cumulated hospitalizations, and 0.2%-1.9% of all their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization

So that data is less optimistic,but the data set is of course incomplete because it’s 23 states and NYC. But the CDC report I saw was totally out of date maybe you have seen a more up to date one.

But really the point is this is almost entirely preventable at this point. And we’re going to sacrifice children to an entirely preventable fate for adults own stupidity

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