tshile

It has not been said. I’m going to guess that since we’re 8 days in that number is low or 0. people just shoved in vacations this year cause they couldn’t do anything last year. I can tell you last year we went back to part time school in November (student body split in half, each group goes 2 days a week) with a mask mandate, ‘full time’ 4 days a week for all that wanted in January, and we had 0 case of in-school transmission at his school. i didn’t follow county wide. My life was a mess. I had no capacity to follow that at that time.

To give you an idea of where I stood - somewhere around 10-15 years ago I decided: we need to leave. or, dedicate us 100% meaning tons more troops, tons more money, and a potentially a lifetime commitment. Cause anything else was going to be what is happening now. 10 years. 20 years. 30 years. Doesn’t matter this is what the ending of our strategy looks like.

I understand that there is a point at which giving the vaccine to other countries is better than the N-th booster for us. I get it. And I’m capable of understanding an argument that actually puts some numbers behind it and makes a lead attempt and explaining where the line is. I am vehemently against the thought that at all times it is better to give them to the rest of the unvaccinated world over any booster for us. for example - at any time we could completely shut down our borders such that the rest of the world doesn’t matter and only worry about ourselves (not saying we should do that either) but the tug on heart strings “vaccine equality” stuff does absolutely nothing for me. show me some numbers make a case and there’s a solid chance I’ll agree with you where that line is. otherwise…

Nah I’m good. I think we agree for the most part. i took issue with the exact euphemism you used. It implies they were smarter than us. They weren’t. if I were forced to use it in some way I would have flipped it: we were playing chess, they were playing checkers; unfortunately the game was checkers. there’s a lot of things we did wrong. but one of them was our level of commitment as a public. if we wanted to control that country with military presence for eternity, working with a government we installed, we absolutely could. the taliban was as war with us for 20 years and we have the lowest death count of any war we’ve been in. Except for the Spanish American war in the 1800’s which lasted all of one year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war I just disagree with that one aspect of your criticism

5 more cases today. Up to 38. I realize in a district of just over 11,200 students that’s not much. but we have contact tracing that quarantines other students. When we had 4 cases at one school in a day, 44 students were quarantined the next day. When we had 11 cases 244 total students were quarantined. Haven’t heard an updated quarantine number in a few days. Also, one case did cause 60 students to be quarantined, until it was revealed some were wearing masks, and as such only 30 students were quarantined. the number of cases isn’t all that matters. I wish they’d publish the quarantine numbers. Cause that’s the number of students who’s educational situation is suffering. 38 positive cases out of 11,200 students way undersells what’s going on. There are hundreds of kids impacted so far. it’s day 8.

I’d say new classroom with new teacher, and parents limited to phone call and zoom (or whatever) for conversations….. but yeah I agree with the sentiment

The Afghan people? they didn’t take control so quickly because of their military prowess. they took control because they negotiated the Afghan warlords/army to not fight them. I could take over anything I want too, if I could convince the people defending it to not defend it…

Both tests negative. I honestly think it’s norovirus. Makes more sense. He wears a mask everywhere. He just started school. Norovirus outbreaks are in the local news… just lines up easier than covid. so, monitoring. Think we’re good though. Appreciate the good thoughts unless it’s an actual car in which case hell no

We have a really good testing center. We don’t have home kits doing rapid because wife said to and I’m convinced this is noro virus and not covid - few reasons I think that, symptoms overlap. I’m aware rapid isn’t great and has false negatives but it’s what she said to do. my wife is pretty high up in healthcare and dealing with covid (was meeting weekly with cdc for a while at the start) so, I kinda just shut up and let her drive.

I’m not against the booster but I need to do some more looking before I take it. my current understanding is this is being driven by the Biden administration. not the cdc, or other reputable health agencies. I have a problem with that. The whitehouse should be advocating what the cdc/fda put out - not using political pressure on them (which is what a public statement is, cause they could have easily had a closed door meeting on the manner if it was purely concern/interest)

School called. 6 year old is sick with headache and stomach. We’re at a covid testing center now. I’m getting tested too. I’m vaccinated. wish him luck. I don’t know his school numbers. But I believe there are ~11,000 kids enrolled in the public school system here.

Both. They have a public dashboard that breaks it down by current cases and total cases. and each of those has a breakdown for each school - which each of those breaks it down by students vs staff 5 of the confirmed cases are staff. Rest are students. staff includes everyone. Not just teachers. it doesn’t break down community vs in-school transmissions. But, they do tend to reveal that data at the school board meetings (as it’s part of the “these mitigation strategies obviously work” discussion)

I will also add my county was the first to open free public covid testing. To the point they had to have the sheriffs run traffic because people from all over Virginia were coming here to get tested they eventually started requiring ID and making people out of our health district pay a pretty steep price for testing. This cut down on traffic immediately. It also allowed our health district, and our residents paying for this service that wasn’t yet available elsewhere (it was a donation-funded service from our more well off residents), from paying for a bunch of people outside the health district. so, we’re not completely ass-backwards ****ing morons out here. We’ve done a lot of good things and a lot of things right. but… we’re far from perfect. Lots to be desired overall considering we’re a Trump county, we’re doing better than lots of areas. Even our liberal NOVA friends in some areas

Well, I’m not going to guess. I will say that only 15% of the student body had parents fill out this ridiculous mask exemption form (which the school board actually said was designed to make it so any parent could exempt their child for any reason they want - and that they could do this because the governors order was so open to interpretation) if I had to guess I would have guessed it was at or over 50%. So, that obvious bias I have means I shouldn’t be making guesses on how many are testing…. I will also add that supposedly we have the highest vaccination rate in the entire state for the 12-18 age group and supposedly the lowest transmission/case rate in the state so it’s kind of hard to get a grip on this because all this information conflicts with what I would guess - so obvious I have some strong biases here. which, are driven by a lot of things, but one clear thing is that the school board meetings are likely only having the more extreme ends of the spectrum show up and speak…

33 confirmed positive cases in the school district as of this morning. And that’s not counting however many came in yesterday, or how many are still waiting on their test results.

this book is very good on the subject Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invas ion to September 10, 2001 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000P2A43Q/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_5S9M5TA1TF0N38H6XJA0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 i… I have trouble with the names so who did what specifically is very fuzzy for me, but I was able to track the general ideas of what was going on. Great book. His sequel is also apparently very good.

I believe it’s always been 12-18, 6-11, 2 months - 5 years. I think that because I remember constantly following the ETA for the middle group because I wanted to know how it lined up with my child turning 6. i, personally, do not think you should fudge your child’s age. They broke these brackets down this way for a reason. And maybe that reason is mostly red-tape related as opposed to being purely driven by the science, but I’m not qualified to contest it. And I firmly believe fudging or lying about your medical history to medical professionals is a bad idea - no matter the case. Just my opinion though. it’s possible I’m confusing moderna and Pfizer timelines and the fda request for a larger pool. I do know the chief medical officer of a top tier hospital and he said he didn’t expect any until December. He’s a little more plugged in than most. But, it was just his opinion. WTOP said the other day they’re still enrolling for trials around here

the original estimates were september my understanding is the fda just kicked the submissions back to Pfizer (and moderna?) requesting they increase the trial pool size (add more kids) new estimate is December. obviously you’re curious so I’m adding some additional information for you to consider (I have a 2 year old and 6 year old) - our board certified pediatrician and my wife (high level nurse running all the departments related to covid (icu/picu/Ed/etc)) both said we need to wait for the AAP (American academy of pediatrics) to give their blessing before giving it to our kids. The fda will approve it, the aap will review everything and release an opinion, and they both think they aap’s opinion is what we need to wait for. - the data for 6-11 so far is “very similar” to the data for adults. Which is a good thing. - they are still accepting children for clinical trials. You absolutely can get your children vaccinated right now - if you’re willing to put them in the clinical trial. I tried to have a conversation with my wife about putting our children in the clinical trials last night. I’m not saying we should - I simply wanted to discuss it. She shut it down immediately citing the AAP thing I mentioned. our pediatrician would undoubtably have the same opinion based on previous conversations. I consider both women highly intelligent, and know first hand they operate solely on evidence-based medical methods/advice. both highly value the AAP and the work they do. Not all doctors that see children are board certified in pediatrics - ours is, it was a requirement of ours. im not telling you what to do. Especially with your children. I’m just sharing the info in an effort to help you make your decisions.

You’re just way off base. you are trying very hard to keep up your overly harsh criticism of our country, thinking you’re providing some sort of nuanced/meaningful/insightful opinion or description of what went on here when you’re not… It works sometimes. You’ve missed big time here.

Yeah, it’s sort of a recurring theme It’s frustrating because I want to be a good person that cares about the well-being of others and helping in bad times but damn if it’s frustrating that time and time again the responsible get nothing but a bill for others

“Because if our goal, again, is to keep kids safe and in schools, we have to do whatever we need to do to make that happen. So I’m asking for your help. And here it goes. First, whenever possible, please have your child wear a mask, please.” seriously. This is the level of ridiculousness that has to be catered to pretty please with a cherry on top

244 is the number the super intendant released on his video today. It’s not in that link. It’s additional information. I’m fact everything I posted is additional information to that link Thank you @bearrock 😂

I think this is off base. I think it’s fair to say we were arrogant about how we would be received or arrogant in not understanding how little we understood the people there, the history, and their devotion to (what they believe is a correct interpretation of) their religion we also had a whole revenge thing going on that was basically unchecked. We were pissed. And rightfully so. There’s a lot of ways you could critique us. Especially if you want to dive into all the various strategies over the course of 20 years. We could spend a whole evening discussing drones, droning weddings, and our prioritizing checking off a box on a kill list over all else (at times) i think saying the taliban outsmarted us is way off base. We destroyed their organization and took their entire country from them for 20 years and left because we were tired of its they survived the way ****roaches survive. they didn’t outsmart us.

Yeah… and I’ve got that stuff too. Not… hard core… but I’ve got some of it.

I think the driving thing was a joke