School notes
Sep. 3rd, 2021 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potofsoupWell, I've been back in person since Aug 11, but school officially started with students on campus on Aug 23, so it's been 2 weeks of teaching full classes with everyone masked but not distanced. At least our campus is 98% vaccinated, which is good. The bad news is that we still had a few students test positive, which lead to quite a lot of anxiety and furor. The students who tested positive were asked to stay home and not return until confirming a negative COVID test, but the entire campus of ~500 people are considered "close contacts" because between 8 classes and no distancing rules, it was easier than doing contact tracing. And the guidance has been that vaccinated close contacts merely have to self-monitor. This has, naturally, made people who have unvaccinated children at home super nervous.
I think part of the issue is that testing is a, well, nice-to-know after-the-fact sort of thing. Like, if we get tested on Thursday but don't get results until Monday, that means that Thurs-Sunday we don't actually know whether we're passing COVID to our unvaccinated family members. The students who were escorted off campus on Monday for testing positive were still on campus on Thursday (when they tested) and Friday as well. Which means that reacting to tests is kind of a moot point, and what's more important is considering daily mitigation tasks.
The other part of it is the difficulty of estimating the actual COVID risk involved. Here are some rough numbers -- for adults, vaccinated people have ~2.5% chance of getting COVID, of which there's a ~20% likelihood of getting Long COVID, so that's ~0.5% chance, which is not too bad. For unvaccinated kids, however, I don't know what the % chance of getting COVID is. Our county dashboard has the unvaccinated case rates at 6x that of the vaccinated case rates, so maybe we can say that it's a 15% chance of getting COVID, and there's ~10% chance of getting Long COVID for kids, which is 1.5%. Which... I guess is... okay??? :/ There's just so many numbers I don't know. For example, how does the surrounding vaccination rate affect the likelihood of spreading to unvaccinated people?
And I guess, part of the problem is that I don't know how much more risk I'm adding to Miss Rutabaga by being in person in a "cohort" of 500 people. If I remove that aspect, her current kindergarten cohort is 20 students, which isn't bad, and not a big change from what she's had for the past year. But then you add me. And sure, the 500 people are vaccinated and all wearing masks, but vaccinated people can still carry the Delta variant even if they don't actually get sick from it. For the time being, what I've been trying to do is to treat it like the supermarket -- if I'm wearing a mask and staying 6 ft distant from students at work (even when the students themselves are <3 ft), that should add some extra levels of protection, right? And I've started doing nasal cleanses and quarantining my clothing, which should add a little more.
What frustrates me is that my school doesn't seem ... very supportive or understanding about these types of concerns. There isn't a COVID testing dashboard. The admin response when a teacher asked about the plan if a teacher tests positive was "well let's assume that that's not going to happen" which is ... disconcerting. :/
Anyways, in other school news, I'm teaching 4 classes with 3 preps, which is kinda "yikes" -- Tuesdays are my long day, and I need to slowly build back my stamina for being out of the house and "on" for 11 hours a day. But Miss Rutabaga seems to be really enjoying the school, which is good. :)
ETA:
Wait, I feel like my numbers for unvaccinated and COVID is wrong, but maybe I can figure out the right ones.
1.5 million people in the county who have been vaccinated, which is 87% of the people age 12+
There are 2 million residents in the county, so that means 75% of total population is vaccinated.
The fully vaccinated case rate is 10.8 per 100,000 and the unvaccinated case rate is 59.1 per 100,000...
... yeah okay I think my numbers are fine.
I think part of the issue is that testing is a, well, nice-to-know after-the-fact sort of thing. Like, if we get tested on Thursday but don't get results until Monday, that means that Thurs-Sunday we don't actually know whether we're passing COVID to our unvaccinated family members. The students who were escorted off campus on Monday for testing positive were still on campus on Thursday (when they tested) and Friday as well. Which means that reacting to tests is kind of a moot point, and what's more important is considering daily mitigation tasks.
The other part of it is the difficulty of estimating the actual COVID risk involved. Here are some rough numbers -- for adults, vaccinated people have ~2.5% chance of getting COVID, of which there's a ~20% likelihood of getting Long COVID, so that's ~0.5% chance, which is not too bad. For unvaccinated kids, however, I don't know what the % chance of getting COVID is. Our county dashboard has the unvaccinated case rates at 6x that of the vaccinated case rates, so maybe we can say that it's a 15% chance of getting COVID, and there's ~10% chance of getting Long COVID for kids, which is 1.5%. Which... I guess is... okay??? :/ There's just so many numbers I don't know. For example, how does the surrounding vaccination rate affect the likelihood of spreading to unvaccinated people?
And I guess, part of the problem is that I don't know how much more risk I'm adding to Miss Rutabaga by being in person in a "cohort" of 500 people. If I remove that aspect, her current kindergarten cohort is 20 students, which isn't bad, and not a big change from what she's had for the past year. But then you add me. And sure, the 500 people are vaccinated and all wearing masks, but vaccinated people can still carry the Delta variant even if they don't actually get sick from it. For the time being, what I've been trying to do is to treat it like the supermarket -- if I'm wearing a mask and staying 6 ft distant from students at work (even when the students themselves are <3 ft), that should add some extra levels of protection, right? And I've started doing nasal cleanses and quarantining my clothing, which should add a little more.
What frustrates me is that my school doesn't seem ... very supportive or understanding about these types of concerns. There isn't a COVID testing dashboard. The admin response when a teacher asked about the plan if a teacher tests positive was "well let's assume that that's not going to happen" which is ... disconcerting. :/
Anyways, in other school news, I'm teaching 4 classes with 3 preps, which is kinda "yikes" -- Tuesdays are my long day, and I need to slowly build back my stamina for being out of the house and "on" for 11 hours a day. But Miss Rutabaga seems to be really enjoying the school, which is good. :)
ETA:
Wait, I feel like my numbers for unvaccinated and COVID is wrong, but maybe I can figure out the right ones.
1.5 million people in the county who have been vaccinated, which is 87% of the people age 12+
There are 2 million residents in the county, so that means 75% of total population is vaccinated.
The fully vaccinated case rate is 10.8 per 100,000 and the unvaccinated case rate is 59.1 per 100,000...
... yeah okay I think my numbers are fine.
