The immunity gap

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/health/rsv-immunity-gap

Nobody can really know for sure, but there's a growing consensus that RSV and flu-like illness in general are spiking much earlier than normal this year because we largely avoided those illnesses with covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.

Now, I'm not saying that all restrictions were a bad idea, per se. What I am saying is that the idea that we can decrease over-all net cases of viral illnesses in the long term is unrealistic, unless we plan to keep restrictions in place forever.

We can decrease incidents of respiratory pathogens for a year or two with restrictions, but sooner or later, we have to pay the piper. These viruses are too widespread and transmissible. High levels of immunity is the only thing that limits the surge potential.

Again, I'm not saying it's irrational for individuals to try to avoid getting sick. But from a policy perspective, long term restrictions don't make any sense unless they're permanent. If they're temporary, all you're doing is postponing the infections until the restrictions end when all the people who restricted are now primed to get infected.

In fact, from a healthcare capacity standpoint, it might even make sense to keep infections at consistent levels rather than restrict and have empty clinics, only to see them fill instantly when you stop restricting. It's like yo-yo dieting vs. a consistent lifestyle. Unless you're serious about long term change, you might as well just stay consistent.

Yes, in the Spring of 2020 and maybe until the vaccine was ready, some restrictions might have made sense because of the unique threat. But at this point, there's nothing unique about the threat from covid or other ILI. We might as well hunker down for a tough winter as our population immunity gets normalized by a very tough winter and hopefully by next year, the ILI season will be normalized.

@sh76 said
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/health/rsv-immunity-gap

Nobody can really know for sure, but there's a growing consensus that RSV and flu-like illness in general are spiking much earlier than normal this year because we largely avoided those illnesses with covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.

Now, I'm not saying that all restrictions were a bad idea, per se. What I am sayin ...[text shortened]... ets normalized by a very tough winter and hopefully by next year, the ILI season will be normalized.

@sh76 said
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/health/rsv-immunity-gap

Nobody can really know for sure, but there's a growing consensus that RSV and flu-like illness in general are spiking much earlier than normal this year because we largely avoided those illnesses with covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.

Now, I'm not saying that all restrictions were a bad idea, per se. What I am sayin ...[text shortened]... ets normalized by a very tough winter and hopefully by next year, the ILI season will be normalized.

@sh76 said
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/health/rsv-immunity-gap

Nobody can really know for sure, but there's a growing consensus that RSV and flu-like illness in general are spiking much earlier than normal this year because we largely avoided those illnesses with covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.

Now, I'm not saying that all restrictions were a bad idea, per se. What I am sayin ...[text shortened]... ets normalized by a very tough winter and hopefully by next year, the ILI season will be normalized.

@shavixmir
"The extremists like to think there was some sort of conspiracy or exaggeration to the measures, there wasn’t really"

There was a conspiracy to profit from selling gene vaccines by fear and exaggeration of the dangers. It was dangerous for diabetics and other people high at risk, but for most people it was like the flu. Sweden did fine despite all of the fear mongering people like you repeated.

@shavixmir said
That’s correct.
That is why there are no more restrictions in place now.
Just like the flu, you can get your shots and boosters.

When a fast spreading new disease rears its ugly head, you have to take measures.
The first measures in any epidemic is washing hands, social distancing and covering the face (hence the go-to reaction when Covid came along).
When it keeps ...[text shortened]... Somehow, that’s actually very reassuring. It is possible to work on a global scale (to some extent).

@Wajoma
You really need to go over your meds, you are babbling now.

@sonhouse said
@Wajoma
You really need to go over your meds, you are babbling now.

@sonhouse said
@Wajoma
You really need to go over your meds, you are babbling now.

@shavixmir said
That’s correct.
That is why there are no more restrictions in place now.
Just like the flu, you can get your shots and boosters.

When a fast spreading new disease rears its ugly head, you have to take measures.
The first measures in any epidemic is washing hands, social distancing and covering the face (hence the go-to reaction when Covid came along).
When it keeps ...[text shortened]... Somehow, that’s actually very reassuring. It is possible to work on a global scale (to some extent).

@sh76 said
I don't disagree with any of that except that we need to learn from this and be enormously super-careful before closing schools next time. Hand washing and staying home when sick and all of that jazz is fine, but school closures had devastating consequences and, save perhaps for the first several weeks, was unnecessary and counterproductive in retrospect, especially into the Fall 2020 school year.

@wajoma said
After the masks proved to be useless, after the seizure syrup proved to be useless, after the lock downs caused more harm than good, after the lies are there before every ones eyes, there are still people in NZ and Aus mandated out of life long careers.

Not only that some of these industries are experiencing manpower shortages.

Yet sonhouse celebrates and revels in the ...[text shortened]... ough force and fraud, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force"[/i] Orwell

@no1marauder said
No they didn't have "devastating consequences" esp. compared to the lives and misery saved.

A few months later, however, school districts began to make different decisions about whether to reopen. Across much of the South and the Great Plains as well as some pockets of the Northeast, schools resumed in-person classes in the fall of 2020. Across much of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, school buildings stayed closed and classes remained online for months.

These differences created a huge experiment, testing how well remote learning worked during the pandemic. Academic researchers have since been studying the subject, and they have come to a consistent conclusion: Remote learning was a failure.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll cover that research as well as two related questions: How might the country help children make up the losses? And should schools have reopened earlier — or were the closures a crucial part of the country’s Covid response?

-snip-

On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

-snip-

But students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse. On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

-snip-

The findings are consistent with other studies. “It’s pretty clear that remote school was not good for learning,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and the co-author of another such study. As Matthew Chingos, an Urban Institute expert, puts it: “Students learned less if their school was remote than they would have in person.”

One of the most alarming findings is that school closures widened both economic and racial inequality in learning. In Monday’s newsletter, I told you about how much progress K-12 education had made in the U.S. during the 1990s and early 2000s: Math and reading skills improved, especially for Black and Latino students.

The Covid closures have reversed much of that progress, at least for now. Low-income students, as well as Black and Latino students, fell further behind over the past two years, relative to students who are high-income, white or Asian. “This will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,” Thomas Kane, an author of the Harvard study, told me.

-snip-

Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were. Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020.

In places where schools reopened that summer and fall, the spread of Covid was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed. Schools also reopened in parts of Europe without seeming to spark outbreaks.

In October 2020, Oster wrote a piece in The Atlantic headlined “Schools Aren’t Superspreaders,” and she told me this week that the evidence was pretty clear even earlier. By the fall of 2020, many people were no longer staying isolated in their homes, which meant that reopened schools did not create major new risks.

The Washington Post recently profiled a district in Colorado where schools reopened quickly, noting that no children were hospitalized and many thrived. “We wanted it to be as normal as possible,” Chris Taylor, the president of the school board, said.

Hundreds of other districts, especially in liberal communities, instead kept schools closed for a year or more. Officials said they were doing so to protect children and especially the most vulnerable children. The effect, however, was often the opposite.

Over the past two years, the U.S. has suffered two very different Covid problems. Many Americans have underreacted to the pandemic, refusing to take lifesaving vaccines. Many others have overreacted, overlooking the large and unequal costs of allowing Covid to dominate daily life for months on end.

This is from an author whose bias was rated as "Lean Left" by allsides.com

https://www.allsides.com/news-source/david-leonhardt

@metal-brain said
@shavixmir
"The extremists like to think there was some sort of conspiracy or exaggeration to the measures, there wasn’t really"

There was a conspiracy to profit from selling gene vaccines by fear and exaggeration of the dangers. It was dangerous for diabetics and other people high at risk, but for most people it was like the flu. Sweden did fine despite all of the fear mongering people like you repeated.