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Comment by errcorrectcode | Hacker News Reader

Dayam. What a sh*t show.

1. It'd be nice if they held classes outside, when it's not freezing/windy/snowing "bomb cyclones" and where it's not concrete Manhattan.

2. Forcing kids back to school during the middle of a 600k-1M+ infections/day national peak seems absurd. Heck, the FAANG company I'm interviewing for cancelled all in-person interviews for 2021-2022. If the teachers are too worried and/or are getting sick, it's insane to "power through it" by getting more people sick. As much as people want "normalcy" because they're pandemic fatigued, it's not worth killing another million people. Heck, if lockdowns were done strictly similar to authoritarian countries like China or even resembling France's new laws, this pandemic wouldn't have reached endemic community spread. But no: must have no-mask "mah freedumbs".

3. Positive-tested non-symptomatic teachers should be setup with the technical capabilities to teach from home to school.

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I believe it's hard to appreciate the frustration and costs that closing schools causes, at least for children to be too young to be left without supervision.

I can't think of any other measure that gets even close. The effects of restaurant closures can be mitigated by throwing money at the problem. If you have to stay home and take care of children, your career will suffer even if you are compensated for lost income.

There really isn't an easy solution to it. Maybe getting creative on the local level would help: taking turns among a (small) group of parents, or hiring a single person to take care of maybe 5 or 6 kids. Maybe getting the older children to watch the younger ones, etc. But everything comes with its own drawbacks, usually by reintroducing pathways to spread.

One measure that seems to be missing, and that I cannot find fault with right now, is changing structures to keep classes fixed, possibly with only a single teacher (per week?). For younger children, it's quite possible for, say an English teacher to also teach biology. Having fixed classes is also common in many countries. It means you can't accomodate electives, of course.

> at least for children to be too young to be left without supervision

Maybe school openings should just focus on that age group instead of being all-or-nothing? They could give extra focus to preschool & kindergarten, reallocate teachers from higher grades to decrease student-teacher ratios and help spread the infection risk thinner.

When schools move online, the higher grades teachers keep teaching higher grades - except online.

But I agree, it should be perfectly possible to close higher grades and leave lower grades open.

The teachers might not want to move from the "Almost definitely not going to shit themselves" grades to the "Might still shit themselves" grades. The massive change in responsibilities between grades likely means that the schools can't just reallocate teachers without negotiation.

Slightly off-topic, but how are children dealing with non-fixed classes? Thinking about 7 year old children (or even adults), getting on time from one to another classroom according to an indvidual schedule would not be an easy task.

Are there provided with extra help, like single-purpose classrooms according to subject? Do teachers announce where the next lessons take place? Are students split into sub-groups sharing the entire schedule, so they can team up and not lose track of it?

> If you have to stay home and take care of children, your career will suffer even if you are compensated for lost income

Not that big of a deal. Most people don't even have careers really, having children is already a career disadvantage, careers are mostly zero-sum competition so it balances out, etc.

Regarding 2, France is still not in lockdown despite having a much higher number of cases per capita than the US (400k cases for 66M people last monday), and schools are run to the ground in a similar manner than what is described in the reddit post, if not worse (they relaxed the isolation and testing rules very recently). edit: maybe you were referring to the "vaccine pass", but since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else).

Lockdown is not being implemented because "omicron is mild". We have a somewhat good vaccination rate despite the strong antivax movement, but that is still leaving millions at risk, not in small part thanks to our asinine so-called leadership.

> since vaccinated people can have and transmit the virus, it is not helping at all (the stated goal being to annoy the non-vaxxed people to death and nothing else).

This is a very partial view. Vaccinated people can have the virus and transmit it, but they will have it less, transmit it less, and anyway have lesser symptoms if they catch it from someone else.

The third is why a vaccine pass helps the healthcare system more than a "vaccine or test" pass, in a situation where vaccinated people can have or transmit the virus.

This was a partial view, yes, the viral charge is lessened when the vaccine comes into play, which is a good thing, but it does not help much that much the several hundred thousand people for whom the vaccine is useless, nor the ones who got scammed with a fake vaccine pass (and are now in limbo since they can enter places where the pass is required but not get protected).

Instead of a stupid pass, make the vaccine mandatory and work on transmission (better ventilation everywhere, which will be beneficial in any case, N95 masks, good planning to avoid spreader events, adapted plannings, burn openspaces, etc). Not working on transmission means the virus is free to mutate in he humongous pool of contaminated people (which is, due to statistics, a large majority of vaccinated), or even recombine with the delta strain which is still peaking in cases at the same time.

The virus is not going away and will be able to mutate forever, yet sooner or later we'll have to go back to normality (though I hope that some degree of masking and remote working will remain).

Vaccination is the only way to get there as fast as possible, but even if you make it mandatory you would have to check it somewhere for people to actually get the vaccine. Even if you add a 100 euro/month fine, there are plenty of people that have been spending more than that in tests to go to work.

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