For better or worse - San Franciscans are done with masks in schools

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Mar 11, 2004
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I think you guys guys are vastly underestimating the impact on kids. All pediatric cancers kill an estimated 1000 kids per year in total. Covid has killed 1000 kids in the last two years and remains a top 10 cause of death. Kids under 11 have had access to vaccines for less than 3 months and kids under 5 still fucking don't. I live in an extremely high vaccination area and we haven't even hit 50% for kids 5-11, and obviously none under 5.

Masks are trivial. You can argue all day they make teaching more difficult and im sure they do. They're not nearly a burden as you guys are portraying them, and for more than half the kids under middle school age theyre basically the only mitigation they have.

You both keep minimizing the effects of covid on kids and say it doesn't hit them as hard. No shit. Theyre kids, they're more resilient than adults. You're both also discounting the other adverse outcomes that impact health outside of death, which is disingenuous. Currently more kids are being hospitalized now than at any stage in the pandemic. Should mask mandates go away in a month? Maybe. Now? Not a chance. Case rates are still double what they were at the peak of the back to school surge, and theyre already down by 75% from the current peak.

And just wait for their bullshit excuses for why they couldn't possibly have known it would have such longterm impact when in about a decade a bunch of teens and 20 somethings start having serious health issues due to their COVID infections.

Further, teaching kids to mask up will pay huge dividends in the future, as more of them do that for non-COVID (or future coronaviruses) situations. On top of that, masks will help with other issues (respiratory especially), which are becoming a bigger issue due to pollution and climate change.

Any argument being made about masks being worse than spreading COVID is so incredibly fucked up and stupid that its mindboggling anyone would make it. The ones that are in this thread, well they maybe should notice they're in with Greenman and stop and think what that means.
 
Mar 11, 2004
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Sort of really back to the politics of this OP.

What Pundits Don’t Understand About the San Francisco Recall – Mother Jones

All politics is local. And that’s especially true of the San Francisco school board recall. Last night, SF residents overwhelmingly voted to oust the only three board members eligible for recall, including the particularly divisive Alison Collins (79 percent voted for removal), board President Gabriela López (75 percent), and even Vice President Faauuga Moliga (72 percent), the first Pacific Islander elected to citywide office, who tried belatedly to distance himself from the others. Within minutes of the results being announced, national news outlets and pundits of all stripes began breathlessly trumpeting this as a blow against excessive wokeness, a vote to “return to normal,” a “three-alarm warning for Democrats,” a “parental backlash for pursuing the renaming of schools and other progressive policy changes.”

Kinda/not really. If I had to boil it down, it was a for vote to put performance over performativeness.

Yeah what is happening is that, because of the rampant disinformation and bullshit propaganda campaign being waged by right wingers, that there was enough antagonism built up that when a significant (but on its own likely not enough to have led to this) other issue happened (when they pissed off the Asians by changing how school options are levied), when combined was enough to cause such upheaval. And that's why groups like Nazis and modern Republicans can get their way when they have like 30% of support, it makes it so that if any minor crisis happens, things can suddenly sway.

And its why Americans consistently get facts wrong, and then it fucks us over for decades. It takes years to see the idiocy, years to look at what actually happened, and even then, most Americans refuse to change their opinions no matter what the facts show, and while keeping at it can get some of them to eventually, that takes fucking decades, and by then the harm is near irreparable (see war on drugs), where to undo the damage requires spending billions to address the multitude of negative consequences, and on top of that would required taking that money from ingrained interests.
 
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Bitek

Lifer
Aug 2, 2001
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CDC finally caught up and posted updated guidances for masking recommendations which include schools, tldr: they are dropping universal masking recommendations, and are now factoring in risk of severe medical outcomes (hospitalizations and hospital capacity...)

San Mateo county (San Fran) is rated as Low.

New CDC guidelines only recommend masks for schools at High.

I look forward to @abj13 and @MichaelMay derailing, name calling, and getting distracted by meningitis (?!) in a thread about making in schools, instead of getting up to date on the science.
 

abj13

Golden Member
Jan 27, 2005
1,071
902
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CDC finally caught up and posted updated guidances for masking recommendations which include schools, tldr: they are dropping universal masking recommendations, and are now factoring in risk of severe medical outcomes (hospitalizations and hospital capacity...)

San Mateo county (San Fran) is rated as Low.

New CDC guidelines only recommend masks for schools at High.

I look forward to @abj13 and @MichaelMay derailing, name calling, and getting distracted by meningitis (?!) in a thread about making in schools, instead of getting up to date on the science.

Well golly, didn't I predict/state this 10 days ago???

I think when the dust settles from omicron, if I was school policy maker, there would be very much a tiered approach. The response should not be a binary decision, masks yes or masks no. First, now that the Pfizer vaccine is available, it would be COVID-19 vaccines are required for public school entry. During times of high circulation of virus, masking and social distancing as much as possible dictated by the facility should be implemented. When the virus is prevalent but not absent, these measures can be relaxed, with consideration of stopping all measures if the local infectivity rate is very low (not using Bitek's definition of very low lol). If a school district doesn't implement mandatory vaccination, then I think the threshold for enacting mitigation efforts shifts and becomes lower. Very much what drives these decisions is the local/regional prevalence rates, availability of mitigation strategies etc.
I have no problems with regions (e.g. states) using local numbers to determine when to or not implement public health interventions. The CDC recommendations are of course going to lag behind because they have to think about Kentucky, as you cited in your post, in addition to places like the Bronx.
 

quikah

Diamond Member
Apr 7, 2003
4,104
672
126
CDC finally caught up and posted updated guidances for masking recommendations which include schools, tldr: they are dropping universal masking recommendations, and are now factoring in risk of severe medical outcomes (hospitalizations and hospital capacity...)

San Mateo county (San Fran) is rated as Low.

New CDC guidelines only recommend masks for schools at High.

I look forward to @abj13 and @MichaelMay derailing, name calling, and getting distracted by meningitis (?!) in a thread about making in schools, instead of getting up to date on the science.

San Francisco is in San Francisco county. But that doesn't really matter, as I said MANY pages back, this recall had NOTHING to do with masks.
 
Last edited:
Mar 11, 2004
23,280
5,721
146
CDC finally caught up and posted updated guidances for masking recommendations which include schools, tldr: they are dropping universal masking recommendations, and are now factoring in risk of severe medical outcomes (hospitalizations and hospital capacity...)

San Mateo county (San Fran) is rated as Low.

New CDC guidelines only recommend masks for schools at High.

I look forward to @abj13 and @MichaelMay derailing, name calling, and getting distracted by meningitis (?!) in a thread about making in schools, instead of getting up to date on the science.

Dude, you'd think you'd prefer to let a thread where you consummately showed yourself to be an idiot fall off instead of trying to stick out your tongue complaining about nonsensical shit (when you were arguing nonsense from the get go).