skydriller wrote:
Home tele-schooling worked for you?
Ok, my daughter is in kindergarten, therefore I can’t really comment out of my own experience. From close friends who have people in school they said it worked ok’ish after the initial shock and awe. They did do classes online and got used to it pretty fast. From what they told me, most of those I talked to said after the initial confusion and organisation, it worked ok for something improvised.
Interestingly, in some cases it was the kids who came up with solutions for online classrooms on zoom and other stuff and had to tell the teachers how it works as they use this stuff all the time. But no, I have not heard of any such stuff as you say, apart from the marking and exam things which also went into this direction here. Reason being,they simply did not have the technology to do something fast enough.
That however has changed by now, also from the business world, where MS Teams, Zoom and other IT solutions has become from “WTF is that” to “Let’s do it via ….” and already some folks get in trouble for not knowing what these apps are :) My 4 year old knows how to video-call her grandmother on skype and they talk for hours at time. (She lives 700 NM away from us, so not caused by corona.)
At work, we have been home office since March, some came back in between, right now it is strictly homeoffice again and those who have to be here, need masks all day. We use MS Teams for any meetings and instruction events and it works just fine, a darn sight better than sitting in sticky sweatbox meeting rooms, where in the years before, the flu spread like wildfire. Again, I can easily do without that for the rest of my working life. At work I am also an instructor/supervisor who has to do skill tests with my people all the time, since March we have started to do these online. Apart from some people who need reminders it works very well indeed, actually better than face to face, as you can find out what people really understand and what not. I don’t think we will ever go back to face to face tests.
Kids do usually adapt much faster than adults, so I would say that unless the school boards have been sitting on their arses since spring, they should now be in position to do this properly.
What I heard is that the bigger problem was that parents were not willing/able/capable of dealing with having their kids at home all the time… well, we took our kid out of day care this spring and spent time with her, which she enjoyed. Kindergarten is imho not such a vital part yet that they can’t overcome a month without it. School clearly is a different thing, but the older kids get, the more they should be able to cope with new circumstances.
Peter wrote:
That’s a very interesting graph, and probably right all over Europe. One has to wonder why the change… is it just old people being more careful / different care home procedures, or is it the young being careless and forming the majority?
I suspect in the early days there was limited knowledge of the extent to which the virus was already establsihed in the community and the spread was pretty homogeneous. If you recall back in March most countires already had probably a far highr incidence that was realised and no body were taking any limiting measures.
Furthermore the problem was exacerabted by people being returned to rest homes and nurising homes without proper testing and a lack of effective PPE in these settings, and just about every other setting.
Today the secenery has changed.
Young people have been lead to believe they are largely not at risk. It is a message so far as young people are concerned which is statistically true. They are therefore much more reluctant to comply strictly with the new measures in all sorts of ways.
More elderly people on the other hand are both more worried about the virus, and probably less inclined to engage as widely socially as young poeple.
I think it is this combination that accounts for the graph ans seems entirely logical, although, as I said before, that is just my hunch and very diffirent from hard science.
The real issue is that I suspect the current measures are not limiting in terms of preventing the spread becoming more homogenous as time progresses and we will naturally drift in this direction without further intervention. Why? Simply because as the rate increases in young people the number of events when there is an opportunity for cross infection with the wider population grows, so the rate across the whole population grows, and although the absolute numbers in older people may remain lower, they never the less reach a level where they are more dangerous to society because they result in far more people being hospitalised. Unchecked I beleive you would now see the spread of the infection following this thread with the absolute numbers in older people never becoming as high, but the absolute case requiring medical intervention in older people becoming much higher than in the yound and with a very long tail. In short a one way route to disaster I am afraid, and an experiment which, as I said earlier, is doomed to failure if this were used as another excuse for the continuance of a three tier policy.
Regarding home schooling. A couple of observations from here in the UK.
1. It depends on age. My two secondary school (GCSE) children are fully autonomous and they need no supervision. All the schooling has been google classroom based. They each have a laptop and their own rooms so everything works well [I appreciate we are in the fortunate situation of having these types of resources, as I understand much of the country did/does not]. My primary school child lacks of the self initiative and needs to be managed in the process, and helped with the work. That is what is time consuming for him. Younger children, of friends, are even more difficult as they really need management or babysitting.
2. It depends on the school. My primary school child received little or no work. We were able to complete it in less than an hour. It was not really learning, but babysitting work. Even then, it was considered optional. Other primary schools have been more intensive.
My children are in state comprehensive / voluntary aided church of england schools. I have friends with children in paid-for private (independent) schools. Their experience is different as they rightly expect a level of service, and the schools have delivered it mostly online and continuing to provide home activity / exercises and even zoom based PE classes. Some of these schools have offered minor discounts, not more than 5-10%.
However, I had a very interesting discussion with a family friend who is a teaching assistant at a private school here in London.
She was furloughed at 80% of salary. The school topped it up by 20% so she continued to receive full salary. Other staff also furloughed in this way.
However, the school continued to operate and deliver online, so collected full fees. They were considering offering a 5% discount.
That seems a bit disingenuous, to continue obtaining full income but to have the state pay for an array of your operating expenses.
Presumably margins are up and profits are higher … that is probably all within the technicality of the scheme, but certainly not within the spirit of it …
Thanks Matthew for your experiences.
What I heard here is that the teaching personnel is more or less working the same hours than before, even some more in the initial phases, as they had to get ready and learn about the new tools and convert their material into forms which can be used for that. Consequently, they never went onto short time work or furlough. It is also weird that some of the schools would do that when there is plenty of work to be done.
the other thing is about cost. Basically no school was prepared for this in March, so none of them had infrastructure, software or anything in place. I am not sure what the license fees for MS Teams and similar products are, but the general cost of converting from presence to online teaching on a hop must be substantial, at least initially. So I am not surprised that not a lot of reductions or other discounts are offered at this time. This may well be a question asked once this is established procedure.
I guess in the end home school and home office are quite similar in problematic and cost. Also home office requires a degree of supervision, there were many cases in the press where people sitting hat home watching youtube e.t.c. on home office unless their activities were traced and checked. I guess by now people got the message that home-office is not simply paid days off, but in the beginning, lots of folks did their home office on the deckchair of their gardens doing exactly nothing.
What happens here now is that schools have become mask territory but only for kids from 12 up. Personally I think one could also get smaller kids to wear masks, which would make presence in school more tolerable. Apart, they could transform the classrooms into cubicles with PVC walls between each student, as it has been done e.g. in parliaments and other offices. In the end, they will have to come up with something, as we need to be clear that this IS the new normal and is not going away for the forseeable future. I guess for office work, home office will be the new thing, for schooling however, permanent solutions need to be developed.
we need to be clear that this IS the new normal and is not going away for the forseeable future
Do people really think that? Maybe I’m being naive but I imagine a vaccine approved before the end of the year, healthcare workers and most at risk vaccinated in Q1 with a start on everyone else in Q2 or Q3 2021. By the middle of next summer I can imagine few people dying from covid in Europe, travel being ok for those vaccinated and offices with mild restrictions where some staff still have to be vaccinated.
But I don’t imagine screens between people in offices, or work from home for the majority beyond next summer.
By this time next year I imagine everyone who wants to be vaccinated will be (a sizeable proportion of the population does not want to be) and all but minor restrictions will be lifted (maybe still some hand sanitisers around the place and masks in high risk environments such as nursing homes or hospitals).
Those who refuse vaccinations will be left to manage their own risks.
Am I being naive? Do others see this lasting years into the future?
There is NO vaccine for SARS and MERS, none for AIDS and only a very limited effectiveness even for the flu.
Vaccines are a pipe dream which won’t happen and if so, then with a limited duration. Possibly we will be able to get Covid down to Summer levels, but to go back to pre-covid lives, not in our lifetime imho. Apart, many will no longer be around by that time, at the rate Covid is taking over now, we will loose quite a few people this winter and have millions of handicapped survivors to take care of in the future.
Home office, cubicles, screens, masks, essential travel only if even that, yes, that is what I expect for at least the next decade. The best scenario we can hope for is the one we had in summer. Covid is here and it will stay.
Am I being naive? Do others see this lasting years into the future?
No; I think you are spot on. A vaccine will come. Won’t be 100% effective but it doesn’t need to be.
In the UK and evidently other places, the biggest issue has been utter stupidity lack of compliance among certain sectors of the population. You don’t need a PhD to work out how to not catch CV19. Right now there are huge parties in the north, on the expectation of a clampdown next week.
There is NO vaccine for SARS and MERS, none for AIDS and only a very limited effectiveness even for the flu.
That’s because
The above is merely an observation on research funding so don’t shoot the messenger, or the observer! “HIV research” does remain a good title for getting research grants (read: putting bread on the family table) however, even if the actual work done is on something else.
She was furloughed at 80% of salary. The school topped it up by 20% so she continued to receive full salary. Other staff also furloughed in this way.
However, the school continued to operate and deliver online, so collected full fees. They were considering offering a 5% discount.
That seems a bit disingenuous, to continue obtaining full income but to have the state pay for an array of your operating expenses.
Presumably margins are up and profits are higher … that is probably all within the technicality of the scheme, but certainly not within the spirit of it …
Fraud has been huge. The last figure I heard was 4BN. One of the reasons it has been very hard to find a builder is because most of them took the 80% but continued to work, doing cash jobs. So you get 10 builders turn up to quote, and 9 of them never get back to you, because the job involves hiring a digger which can’t be done for cash.
i am with dp.
All the evidence points towards a vaccine being successful, and the reasons why far more so successful than with other respiratory viruses, is because of the characteristics of COVID which have been well rehearsed here and elsewhere. COVID does not behave in the same way as flu.
It is true, it would seem the evidence is as yet far from clear how long the vaccine will continue to impart immunity. It may well be an annual vaccination will be required, but we dont know.
It is also true, there is very little evidence this virus mutates substantially, or that the mutuations that do occur will make a vaccine ineffective. It is a relatively stable virus. moreover if it does mutuate, it would seem it should be possible to respond with a modified vaccine far more quickly that the initial development period.
In short I dont think it will become the new norm, certainly so far as COVID is concerned. I think dp’s timeline is pretty reasonable and I dont think we have a life behind masks and social distancing to look forward to, at least not this time around. At the moment I think it will be quite surprising how quickly life returns to normality.
Mind you, I dont think COVID will go away. It will become endemic in the population and people will become infected and die, and inevitably in poorer countries there will be a much higher mortality rate, but it will no longer have a substantial impact on Western countries.
At least I am not aware of any scientific eveidence at the moment to suggest another course.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
COVID does not behave in the same way as flu.
You are aware that SARS and MERS were Covid virusses too?
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Mind you, I dont think COVID will go away. It will become endemic in the population and people will become infected and die, and inevitably in poorer countries there will be a much higher mortality rate, but it will no longer have a substantial impact on Western countries.
quite a few western countries have shown a much worse reaction to it than some which are considered inferior by the West. Honestly, from what I have seen regarding the reaction by European countries alone, I would not bet on it.
Mooney_Driver
My understading is that the main reason development of vaccines for SARS and MERS did not come fully to fruition was not because of evidence they would be ineffective, rather there was insufficient motivation because the diseases have not caused a significant problem.
I should add clarrity to the second comment you quoted. I meant that I beleive the “West” will control COVID by the successful implementation of a vaccine program, but this will be more of a challenge for some countries in the world where the cost will be a significant fact as well as implementation through the whole population. I accept some will not be vaccinated, but I beleive sufficient will to achive herd immunity and this will mean the virus is laregly inconsequential for society as a whole where these programs are affordable and posible.
Of course this assumes a vaccine is successful and the virus doesnt significantly mutate or if it does the change can be quickly incoporated in the vaccine – all ifs, but this position seems to me to be representative of the scientific position at this moment.
and from a population ooint of view it should be said if vaccines reduce the moratlity rate to around .2% or whatever is similiar to seasonal flu, then it will no longer be considered as disruptive to society, which is all the politicians car about (understandably).
