Plenty of Idiots Screaming, Not Enough Nuance.

People screaming about one the schools no matter what vs some odd zero covid stuff that seems to say vaxxes don't work ( yeah breakthrough cases are possible but vaxxes are important too, right?). Anyhow, more trust ripped from the fabric of our society. But good to hear from a teacher friend stating that it's very level headed. Many understand how bad remote learning is but are also testing and shutting down if need be. 


[Above, the state of the discourse. Just absolute crap]

This here from a student at the NYC, talking about just how bad it is. Ends it with:

"I've been adamantly opposed to remote learning for a while, and thought that it was overall an unmitigated disaster for the learning and mental health of students. At the present time, however, schools cannot teach and function well enough in person. We must go remote. 

I should note that I wrote this on Wednesday. 

Edit: I’ve removed the name of my school as it made me uncomfortable sharing such information, but I’ll say that it’s a specialized high school. This is occurring everywhere. I’ll probably reveal it on comments but I’d prefer for it not be in the body of the post. 

Edit 2: NOTE — NOT TRYING TO BE DAMAGING TO THE SCHOOL FACULTY AND TEACHER STAFF. THEY ARE DOING THEIR ABSOLUTE BEST WITH THE CARDS THEY’VE BEEN DELT, AND ALL STUDENTS ARE APPRECIATIVE. ITS DIFFICULT FOR EVERYONE AND TEACHERS AND STAFF ARE REMAINING SAFE AND SUPPORTIVE."

Of course, the screaming on both sides doesn't help anyone, but man, I think it will help the right (and certainly the powerful) if they get distrust in public education up, just so they can strip that as well. 
And what about "normal"? Or being normal again. Well, for one I hope that never comes true in terms of the systems of oppression and iniquities we have, but as far as living your day to day, I think perhaps this virus is more tricky than many thought. Even if we can combat it pretty well (vaxx, and even treatment-wise), it can overwhelm our systems pretty easily. 
Will there be a normal? This thread gets into it, specifically from the medical POV:

I have accepted that COVID-19 is endemic and will be with us for the long haul.. but are we just going to be dealing with surge after surge until the end of time? Do any of you have hope of us getting this under control so we can get some semblance of normalcy again? I’m sick of this and scared I am wanting something (normalcy) that we will never see again.

Read it. Plenty of places haven't had a respite (other things besides COVID doing that) and another wave will start breaking the systems (already fragile from being attacked by Neo-liberalism) we have here to protect us.
And another point made on that thread:

Likewise - 18 months ago my one hope was that we would learn from this and recognize we need to be vigilant and aggressive with contact tracing up front, quarantine effectively at the start and follow our public health leaders. 

Instead, we've seen how selfishness and anti-intellectualism has won. 

The next pandemic - which is a matter of when, not if, will be worse because the right wing wingnuts across the world are going to dig in their heels even quicker. They will say, "look at how wrong Fauci/WHO/etc... were with covid, so we should not listen to them." 

And so with the next pandemic, if it is something that has a higher case fatality rate, we are going to be thoroughly fucked.

Yeah, I agree. People might just be burned out from the current minimal measures that a real virus will burn through everyone. Oh, but this story is something to behold:

I had two unvaxed, COVID existence deniers patients. They are a couple. They wanted to be able to wander back and forth between rooms to visit each other. They wanted us to MARRY THEM immediately in the hospital before one was intubated. MARRY THEM! I told the nurse to call Meredith Grey to arrange it. I’m OVER it. This is it. This is peak COVID for me. All out of sympathy. 

I'm thinking with each successive wave, people get more tired and want things to go back to normal, want contact with other humans not to be some death warrant, but that doesn't matter. The virus is not a moral agent (TVINAMA) and I can see how pandemics (over years or decades even) in the past really weren't usually an "all at once thing" but something that just beats at the population over a long period of time. Like a siege. 
This thing really is spreading like crazy. 
And some good points in that thread:

What's to say that immunity from Omicron infection will provide adequate protection against a future variant?

In my opinion, it won't. Same behavior is to be found in pre-existing endemic coronaviruses. COVID should be expected to behave similarly, and in my opinion should be treated similarly either now or very soon in the future (like when the % of delta variant reaches zero).

Does Omicron have sufficiently high seroconversion rates? 

In my opinion, it is reasonable to assume asymptomatic infections may not seroconvert. Again, this is known behavior in other common respiratory viruses. Functionally, it doesn't really matter.  So long as someone is regularly exposedthen by the time they are old enough or morbid enough for the virus to begin to be a problem, they will develop symptoms and seroconvert. This is the common cold model as I was taught.

Another issue in my opinion is the question of how durable will antibodies actually be? I know there are promising studies on SARS/MERS but this is a different virus and we know humans don't reliably make durable antibodies to this family of viruses (one of the reasons coronavirus vaccines have been difficult to produce in previous decades).

I also wonder about antibodies to other common URTI viruses? As mentioned, we don't make reliably make durable antibodies to rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, or coronaviruses. If lockdowns and isolations are lifted, will be face a significant respiratory disease burden as we again share all these viruses with each other?

I do not think omicron will immunize enough of the population to prevent future waves. 

I do think that omicron is now transmissible enough that the only realistic option is clean-up. A fully airborne virus with an R0 > 5? Already widespread in a population either locked down to the maximum tolerable amount in democratic society, or outright refusing to lockdown? Achieving widespread vaccine penetrance with no updated vaccine already on the roads to our clinics and hospitals? In my opinion this is game over. The only option left is triage existing resources. If medicine is your job, it's just a job, go home at the end of the day and take care of yourselves, so you can come back tomorrow and help pick up the pieces.

All my opinion. Hopefully omicron is not a surprise nightmare.

Be safe out there. 
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