Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[BobbyPhil1781]

33 minutes ago, Xenos said:

I’m sure your coworker is a good person and wouldn’t lie. The person conducting the testing, on the other hand, sounds off. Not sure why they want the #s to be as high as possible in VA seeing as how no one wins. Controlling the spread means being able to reopen and get things back to somewhat normalcy. Do you also trust your coworker’s wife to not misconstrue information?

100% trust her. We're a very small company so we get to know each other's families very well. I don't get it either but, again, I want to state I'm not saying what they're telling us is true but I don't know why they'd lie to me. There's so much damn misinformation out there and it's so stupid. Numbers are all over the damn place. The .05% of me that's a conspiracy theorist has some thoughts but I don't put a whole lot of weight into them..... obviously. How this thing is politicized absolutely shows how gross our country is though. Not everyone, just those doing it.

[Xenos]

40 minutes ago, theJ said:

Health care is the big one.  By the time you buy health insurance, a lot of that $900/week is gone.  Most people don't consider it because their employer pays for it.  Check your pay stub.  It's expensive.

Yeah I’m glad that my current employer is paying for the healthcare during this furlough, and I can pay the premiums after tax. 

[vikesfan89]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/24/trained-dogs-sniffed-out-covid-19-infections-with-high-accuracy-study.html

The dogs are going to save us all 

How hard is it to train a dog to sniff out disease?

[MookieMonstah]

I am watching our school board meeting tonight about re-opening. Our "Task Force" has laid out some of the issues with the schools possibly re-opening.

1) We only have one school in our district that can meet proper air ventilation requirements, running this system during the school days would add $15,000 in electric bills to ONE school per MONTH.

2) During the winter, it obviously gets freezing here, this system would pump out the heat. To the level that students and teachers will need to wear coats in the building. This would obviously add a ton of money to the heating costs since you're essentially pumping heat outside.

3) To keep up with cleaning demands, the custodians have asked for two additional hires to keep up with proper bathroom/classroom cleaning.

4) Our middle school classrooms are roughly 300 square feet, and would allow 8 students to safely socially distance and thats if we removed all shelves, book cases and teachers desks. The average classroom size is 23 students.

5) Bathrooms are going to need extensive renovating to meet even the basic guidelines.

6) At the High School, we don't have single student desks. We have 6 foot long tables that generally would fit 2-3 students. Now we will need to either order single student desks for a one year solution, or order plexi glass dividers for every single desk.

This doesn't even dive into the fact that the state is refusing to mandate anything because that will force them to be responsible for funding it. This just isn't feasible or possible. They didn't even get into transportation issues, cafeteria issues, etc.

[naptownskinsfan]

Our food courts closed on Friday at 5 pm and there were a ton of people standing at tables and sitting at benches despite them being closed.  Of course, where was security to chase people away?  

This is the problem.........without any sort of oversight, businesses can just do what they want.  The sad part is, in our food court, there are 16 stores and that are a lot of livelihoods for workers at stake if the mall gets it shut down because they aren't doing their job and keeping people away.  

[naptownskinsfan]

9 minutes ago, MookieMonstah said:

I am watching our school board meeting tonight about re-opening. Our "Task Force" has laid out some of the issues with the schools possibly re-opening.

1) We only have one school in our district that can meet proper air ventilation requirements, running this system during the school days would add $15,000 in electric bills to ONE school per MONTH.

2) During the winter, it obviously gets freezing here, this system would pump out the heat. To the level that students and teachers will need to wear coats in the building. This would obviously add a ton of money to the heating costs since you're essentially pumping heat outside.

3) To keep up with cleaning demands, the custodians have asked for two additional hires to keep up with proper bathroom/classroom cleaning.

4) Our middle school classrooms are roughly 300 square feet, and would allow 8 students to safely socially distance and thats if we removed all shelves, book cases and teachers desks. The average classroom size is 23 students.

5) Bathrooms are going to need extensive renovating to meet even the basic guidelines.

6) At the High School, we don't have single student desks. We have 6 foot long tables that generally would fit 2-3 students. Now we will need to either order single student desks for a one year solution, or order plexi glass dividers for every single desk.

This doesn't even dive into the fact that the state is refusing to mandate anything because that will force them to be responsible for funding it. This just isn't feasible or possible. They didn't even get into transportation issues, cafeteria issues, etc.

This is why it is easier for them to buy Chromebooks for everyone and have everyone do remote learning..  Those HVAC costs at one school alone are astronomical (and any degree variation in those units costs hundreds or even thousands.). 

Hiring two more full-time custodians, plus health care and benefits, is at least $100k per school.  

And that's not counting the other expenses like desks you are talking about, and then, where do you get the amount of desks this short notice across the country?  What about the fuel and upkeep on busses to have them socially distanced?  More cafeteria workers to sanitize surfaces in the kitchen, too.  

This is a losing battle expecting everyone to come back in person.  

[kingseanjohn]

Quote

Taken together, the two studies, published Monday in JAMA Cardiology, suggest that in many patients, Covid-19 could presage heart failure, a chronic, progressive condition in which the heart’s ability to pump blood throughout the body declines. It is too soon to say if the damage in patients recovering from Covid-19 is transient or permanent, but cardiologists are worried.

One study examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19 and compared them to heart images from 100 people who were similar but not infected with the virus. Their average age was 49 and two-thirds of the patients had recovered at home. More than two months later, infected patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group: 78 patients showed structural changes to their hearts, 76 had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60 had signs of inflammation.

These were relatively young, healthy patients who fell ill in the spring, Valentina Puntmann, who led the MRI study, pointed out in an interview. Many of them had just returned from ski vacations. None of them thought they had anything wrong with their hearts.

Source

Note that the study included non-hospitalized patients. So it isn’t just the symptomatic hospitalized people having issues. 

Edited July 28, 2020 by kingseanjohn

[LETSGOBROWNIES]

To state the obvious with these schools, how many have anywhere near the type of budgets to actually do these things?  It seems like schools are constantly requiring increased funding as they’re asked to run lean at all times.

Like, how much of this stuff is actually going to be feasible?

[August4th]

I think only the really well off schools could pull some of that stuff off...that's insane

[MWil23]

19 minutes ago, LETSGOBROWNIES said:

To state the obvious with these schools, how many have anywhere near the type of budgets to actually do these things?  It seems like schools are constantly requiring increased funding as they’re asked to run lean at all times.

Like, how much of this stuff is actually going to be feasible?

0% can adequately and/or realistically address those issues. Even if a school could get the appropriate funding to more that triple the size of the building and staff (Tripling the payroll), for likely just a 1-2 year solution (every school in the district no less...we have 6 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, a 9th grade building, and a HS), it takes 4-5 years to pass the bond issue, secure the permits, and build the buildings.

Throw in concerns about how many you can have in the cafeteria, bathrooms, athletic facilities, etc., and it’s impossible solely from a social distancing perspective.

[MookieMonstah]

Yeah, it’s impossible. If we’re going back to school, it won’t be safely as well have to essentially ignore a majority of the recommended guidelines.

[naptownskinsfan]

2 hours ago, LETSGOBROWNIES said:

To state the obvious with these schools, how many have anywhere near the type of budgets to actually do these things?  It seems like schools are constantly requiring increased funding as they’re asked to run lean at all times.

Like, how much of this stuff is actually going to be feasible?

Probably close to none of it.  We've seen how some businesses have crumbled like a house of cards without reserve cash flows, and I don't think schools are going to fare any different. 

[-Hope-]

8 hours ago, MookieMonstah said:

I am watching our school board meeting tonight about re-opening. Our "Task Force" has laid out some of the issues with the schools possibly re-opening.

1) We only have one school in our district that can meet proper air ventilation requirements, running this system during the school days would add $15,000 in electric bills to ONE school per MONTH.

2) During the winter, it obviously gets freezing here, this system would pump out the heat. To the level that students and teachers will need to wear coats in the building. This would obviously add a ton of money to the heating costs since you're essentially pumping heat outside.

3) To keep up with cleaning demands, the custodians have asked for two additional hires to keep up with proper bathroom/classroom cleaning.

4) Our middle school classrooms are roughly 300 square feet, and would allow 8 students to safely socially distance and thats if we removed all shelves, book cases and teachers desks. The average classroom size is 23 students.

5) Bathrooms are going to need extensive renovating to meet even the basic guidelines.

6) At the High School, we don't have single student desks. We have 6 foot long tables that generally would fit 2-3 students. Now we will need to either order single student desks for a one year solution, or order plexi glass dividers for every single desk.

This doesn't even dive into the fact that the state is refusing to mandate anything because that will force them to be responsible for funding it. This just isn't feasible or possible. They didn't even get into transportation issues, cafeteria issues, etc.

a friend of mine has a sister who is a 5th grade teacher in colorado and made a video of herself reorganizing her classroom in the way she's expected to for their planned in-person return. it ended up going kind of viral because it highlighted just how crazy these expectations are, particularly point 4 on your list- there was quite literally no way for her to properly distance the amount of desks she had in the amount of classroom space she had. just crazy.

[MookieMonstah]

13 minutes ago, -Hope- said:

a friend of mine has a sister who is a 5th grade teacher in colorado and made a video of herself reorganizing her classroom in the way she's expected to for their planned in-person return. it ended up going kind of viral because it highlighted just how crazy these expectations are, particularly point 4 on your list- there was quite literally no way for her to properly distance the amount of desks she had in the amount of classroom space she had. just crazy.

Yeah, its not doable. Basically schools that are going back, which I think will include mine, are going to ignore most of the basic safety guidelines.

[BobbyPhil1781]

Interesting....

https://c19study.com/

Maybe if we didn't politicize things............