One of my children is at university here and masks are optional in lectures but he says all the students are wearing them but the lecturer isn't - obviously it's hard to give a lecture in a mask. Also no more than 100 people are allowed in a room together and they are asked to leave an empty seat between them. 

It must be a complete nightmare for you. Personally I wouldn't want to be in a crowded classroom right now.

AandEM wrote: We've now changed to optional masks and optional quarantines. We are leaving it up to parents. Many teachers are sick again. Dozens of students sick, multiple student hospitalizations. Two parents in their 40s have died. Multiple parents currently hospitalized. The small local hospital is full.

I think there's always going to be problems in any environment where numerous people are together in a small space. It must be a nightmare for teachers and parents alike. So many classrooms are overfull as it is, so social distancing and adequate free flowing ventilation must be very hard, if not impossible to achieve.

roni3470 wrote: I feel like a civil war is very likely here in the US.  The problem is that the people that got the vaccine seem to be pitted against the ones that didn't.  I am not sure how your own personal medical choice makes you enemies.  I am fully vaccinated and I don't care if others get it or not, but they care that I got it and are mad at me.  Makes no sense.  They think I am a sheep for getting it and now want to start a fight with me.  Its so crazy.  I don't care what anyone else does with their body so why do they care what I do with mine?!?!  Its nuts!

I couldn't agree more. Science has proven that the vaccines only give a benefit to the person receiving it so why are people so angry if someone doesn't have it? Why the mandates? What possible benefit does a mandate bring to the party? 

We are honestly seeing an end to the "my body, my choice" era. When a local shop can insist on seeing your vaccine status before they allow you in, it's outrageous.

Live and let live.

I feel like a civil war is very likely here in the US.  The problem is that the people that got the vaccine seem to be pitted against the ones that didn't.  I am not sure how your own personal medical choice makes you enemies.  I am fully vaccinated and I don't care if others get it or not, but they care that I got it and are mad at me.  Makes no sense.  They think I am a sheep for getting it and now want to start a fight with me.  Its so crazy.  I don't care what anyone else does with their body so why do they care what I do with mine?!?!  Its nuts!

Hey all! I have been gone a bit because I had trouble getting into my account.  I wanted to give you an update from Colorado.  We have 75% of our population 12 and up that have had at least one dose of the vaccine, yet our hospitals ICU's are filling up more and more and we have less than 10% capacity left.  Now of course, a lot of these are ailments other than COVID but the COVID ones are taking up enough space that the other ailments can't get into beds in some places.  I feel like none of this has been on the news so I think that is crazy.

I also think the amount of teachers that have died in Florida is crazy.

I am not sure if I understand whats going on these days.  No one seems to believe anything that is being said.  People are also super angry and on edge.

I just want to isolate because the world seems crazy right now!

CNN: 13 Miami-Dade school employees have died of Covid-19 since mid-August.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/us/miami-school-employees-covid/index.html

This incident happened just a few miles from our home in Arizona....

https://www.kold.com/2021/09/04/vail-principal-receiving-death-threats-following-incident-with-upset-parent/

We often have armed "school resource police officers" in our schools, due to all the problems with gangs, drugs and active shooters.  I train with some of those folks as well as FBI SWAT teams. 

 If I had seen some big sweaty & angry guys storming into my principal's office with military zip-tie handcuffs, well....

Masks are still voluntary in staff and students. I have class sizes of 36 in each period. There were 20 cases in 5 days in my school, 4 in my classes. Vaccination rates are below 50% in the county. We are doing nothing. Quarantine is optional for kids who are close contacts. It takes 7 days to get PCR tests back.  Hospitals are full and turning people away. I have no idea what happens now. Neighboring school have gone online or mandated masks. 

Thank you.  All teachers deserve praise for what they do during this hell. 

Hi, I teach at a local college.  I have been allowed to teach online instead of in person due to my long COVID recovery.  I teach history, law and geography classes.  I work with disabled students thru the special ed COOP.   My experience is not typical, however it is instructive.  In August, we were told to check our options. First, you could come to teach on campus.  Second, you could teach pod classes with small groups. Third you could teach online.   Today,  I got notice from the college that they have given students the option to switch to online education.  SO I guess that means that the school is going to prepare for a return to online education.   i almost died from COVID so my opinion is to take whatever steps you deem reasonable to protect yourself.  

Two weeks in, and the numbers are staggering. Many nearby schools have moved online after 2 weeks due to 3% or higher of the staff and students testing positive. Most went from no masks, no tracing, no distancing directly to building closers. I have no idea what happens now. I wear a mask and keep showing up to a building full of unvaccinated teachers and students too young to get it. Im exhausted and demoralized. We lost a close family friend who did not get vaccinated after having had the virus 9 months ago, and believing that was enough. There seems to be no one in charge. School boards are afraid of angry antimask parents. They are living in a fantasy world. 

Same here in Virginia   We teachers are also not being allowed to take admin med leave if we are not vaccinated and get COVId we have to take our own personal leave!!!

carbon20 wrote: CNN: There's never been a worse time in the pandemic for US kids. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/25/world/meanwhile-in-america-august-25-intl/index.html

Thanks, Carbon!  I'm an Arizona US certified STEM teacher, grades 6-12, and have no interest in walking through the doors of any school for a long time, if ever.   This CNN article says:

"As millions of kids flock back to school, child hospitalizations for Covid-19 are at record levels. Some schools have already opened and then closed in the South, where infections are raging due to a comparatively low vaccine rate and the extra-infectious Delta variant. Thousands of children are quarantined."

This pandemic is nowhere near finished!!  I understand that parents wish to shuffle their kids back to school so that they can go back to work, have the kids socialize etc. but this only puts everyone at grave risk. 

Here in NL first (elementary) schools will open august 23...with as good as no vaccinations in the under 12 y/o, no masks, no social distancing, bad ventilation...Most of the teachers/staff proberbly will be vaccinated...

NL government sticks to the idea "children only get mild disease in the worst case"...based on "science" from the NL-CDC...(science paid to agree with the government...). 

We by now import more then a 1,000 cases from mostly southern Europe...This will include variants within Delta...maybe even newer variants...

Lots of independent experts (we have a "red team" here in NL ([url]https://www.c19redteam.nl/[/url] or https://www.c19redteam.nl/ in Dutch..google translate...) but they have been ignored...The economy is #1 for the present government (and we do not have a new government since the march elections...I expect it is more likely we may see new elections then a new government...). 

So schoolreopening in NL will bring an increase of cases both in children and in (vaccinated) staff...Again "medical experts/politics" will be surprised that what is happening elsewhere did not stop at the NL borders...

Can't fix stupid...even when stupid is killing you !

I am heartbroken as we are losing a very close family friend to Covid. School has opened with nearly 0 mitigation strategies. No masks, no distancing. There are many unvaccinated teachers. I dont know what to do or say at this point. It is like watching a slow motion nightmare. 

Technophobe wrote: Spanish flu was a variant of flu.  Flu is endemic.  If there were no circulating flu, there could have been no spanish flu.  If there were no circulating flu there would not be deaths from even the milder strain every year. Delta is a variant of SARS2.  SARS2 is being allowed to become endemic.  If it circulates endemically, there could be another "spanish flu type" variant - and there most probably will, as this virus seems to love mutating into new nastier strains.  I am not sure it can be wiped out now, as too many governments failed to take it seriously enough at the start.  But we have to try!  Otherwise our descendants may face horrors far beyond what we have seen in the last 18 months.

I don't think it can be wiped out now that it has spread to domestic cats and dogs - even some tigers have it at a zoo in the US. So we will have to live with it.

My X rays were worse than that guys.  I had a full sheet of white on my lungs.  The doctor called it a blizzard of death.  Vicki almost died the second night in ICU.  There is a reason why I zoom teach this year.  I am going to get the third shoot soon So will VIcki and Jill and  Becky and their families.   I still can't walk more than 100 feet and Jill has to bring the oxygen tank with her.  I guess that our lives are still enjoyable, however I have to be careful when I shoot my guns.  Neil is a 20 year vet of the US army rangers, He was a medic, So it is a blessing to have him working with us.  We enjoy shooting, it is one way of forgetting the hell that we are going thru.  Vicki is still having heart issues, Jill and Becky have prepositioned everything so Vicki will be able to be transported within 4 minutes of her alarm going off.   We brought a used ambulance and updated it for our transfers to the medical center.  We can be at the ER in  9 minutes flat.   We had the van engine swapped wiht a 700 HP  Wildcat engine.  It will  beat anything ot the police, State police have given us a free pass to the medical center.  The minute we are on the road, Police block off the side roads  we have a police escort and they have extreme problems keeping up with Neil.  what's even better is that once the engine is started and we are out of the driveway, the ER is notified.  The sound of the sirens are so loud that it sounds   like a jet engine.    So , you know what we have to do to save our lives.  We do not want to go to such extremes if we had a choice, but we don't have a choice.  We don't have to apologize for our  extreme actions.  We want to live a decent life.  

ME 163 and Vicki 

Spanish flu was a variant of flu.  Flu is endemic.  If there were no circulating flu, there could have been no spanish flu.  If there were no circulating flu there would not be deaths from even the milder strain every year.

Delta is a variant of SARS2.  SARS2 is being allowed to become endemic.  If it circulates endemically, there could be another "spanish flu type" variant - and there most probably will, as this virus seems to love mutating into new nastier strains.  I am not sure it can be wiped out now, as too many governments failed to take it seriously enough at the start.  But we have to try!  Otherwise our descendants may face horrors far beyond what we have seen in the last 18 months.  

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-brain-coronavirus-symptom-stroke-anxiety-depression

COVID-19 can affect the brain. New clues hint at how

Researchers are sifting through symptoms to figure out what the virus does to the brain

scan of human brain

COVID-19 can come with brain-related problems, but just how the virus exerts its effects isn’t clear.

ROXANA WEGNER/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES

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By Laura Sanders

APRIL 27, 2021 AT 6:00 AM

For more than a year now, scientists have been racing to understand how the mysterious new virus that causes COVID-19 damages not only our bodies, but also our brains.

Early in the pandemic, some infected people noticed a curious symptom: the loss of smell. Reports of other brain-related symptoms followed: headaches, confusion, hallucinations and delirium. Some infections were accompanied by depression, anxiety and sleep problems.

Recent studies suggest that leaky blood vessels and inflammation are somehow involved in these symptoms. But many basic questions remain unanswered about the virus, which has infected more than 145 million people worldwide. Researchers are still trying to figure out how many people experience these psychiatric or neurological problems, who is most at risk, and how long such symptoms might last. And details remain unclear about how the pandemic-causing virus, called SARS-CoV-2, exerts its effects.

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“We still haven’t established what this virus does in the brain,” says Elyse Singer, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. There are probably many answers, she says. “It’s going to take us years to tease this apart.”

Getting the numbers

For now, some scientists are focusing on the basics, including how many people experience these sorts of brain-related problems after COVID-19.

A recent study of electronic health records reported an alarming answer: In the six months after an infection, one in three people had experienced a psychiatric or neurological diagnosis. That result, published April 6 in Lancet Psychiatry, came from the health records of more than 236,000 COVID-19 survivors. Researchers counted diagnoses of 14 disorders, ranging from mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression to neurological events such as strokes or brain bleeds, in the six months after COVID-19 infection.

“We didn’t expect it to be such a high number,” says study coauthor Maxime Taquet of the University of Oxford in England. One in three “might sound scary,” he says. But it’s not clear whether the virus itself causes these disorders directly.

The vast majority of those diagnoses were depression and anxiety, “disorders that are extremely common in the general population already,” points out Jonathan Rogers, a psychiatrist at University College London. What’s more, depression and anxiety are on the rise among everyone during the pandemic, not just people infected with the virus.

Mental health disorders are “extremely important things to address,” says Allison Navis, a neurologist at the post-COVID clinic at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “But they’re very different than a stroke or dementia,” she says.

About 1 in 50 people with COVID-19 had a stroke, Taquet and colleagues found. Among people with severe infections that came with delirium or other altered mental states, though, the incidence was much higher — 1 in 11 had strokes.

scans of brains with strokes

Serious neurological damage, such as these strokes caused by blocked blood vessels, turn up in people with COVID-19.

K. THAKUR ET AL/BRAIN 2021

Taquet’s study comes with caveats. It was a look back at diagnosis codes, often entered by hurried clinicians. Those aren’t always reliable. And the study finds a relationship, but can’t conclude that COVID-19 caused any of the diagnoses. Still, the results hint at how COVID-19 affects the brain. 

Blood vessels scrutinized

Early on in the pandemic, the loss of smell suggested that the virus might be able to attack nerve cells directly. Perhaps SARS-CoV-2 could breach the skull by climbing along the olfactory nerve, which carries smells from the nose directly to the brain, some researchers thought.

That frightening scenario doesn’t seem to happen much. Most studies so far have failed to turn up much virus in the brain, if any, says Avindra Nath, a neurologist who studies central nervous system infections at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Nath and his colleagues expected to see signs of the virus in brains of people with COVID-19 but didn’t find it. “I kept telling our folks, ‘Let’s go look again,’” Nath says.  

That absence suggests that the virus is affecting the brain in other ways, possibly involving blood vessels. So Nath and his team scanned blood vessels in post-mortem brains of people who had been infected with the virus with an MRI machine so powerful that it’s not approved for clinical use in living people. “We were able to look at the blood vessels in a way that nobody could,” he says.

Damage abounded, the team reported February 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Small clots sat in blood vessels. The walls of some vessels were unusually thick and inflamed. And blood was leaking out of the vessels into the surrounding brain tissue. “You can see all three things happening at the same time,” Nath says.

Those results suggest that clots, inflamed linings and leaks in the barriers that normally keep blood and other harmful substances out of the brain may all contribute to COVID-related brain damage.

left: inflamed immune cells around blood vessel. right: cells affected by COVID-19

Signs of damage in the brains of people with COVID-19 involve inflammation, including these immune cells around a blood vessel (left), and changes in cells (right) that might have resulted from low oxygen.

J. LOU ET AL/FREE NEUROPATHOLOGY 2021

But several unknowns prevent any definite conclusions about how these damaged blood vessels relate to people’s symptoms or outcomes. There’s not much clinical information available about the people in Nath’s study. Some likely died from causes other than COVID-19, and no one knows how the virus would have affected them had they not died.

Inflamed body and brain

Inflammation in the body can cause trouble in the brain, too, says Maura Boldrini, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York. Inflammatory signals released after injury can change the way the brain makes and uses chemical signaling molecules, called neurotransmitters, that help nerve cells communicate. Key communication molecules such as serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine can get scrambled when there’s lots of inflammation.

Neural messages can get interrupted in people who suffer traumatic brain injuries, for example; researchers have found a relationship between inflammation and mental illness in football players and others who experienced hits to the head.

Similar evidence comes from people with depression, says Emily Troyer, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego. Some people with depression have high levels of inflammation, studies have found. “We don’t actually know that that’s going on in COVID,” she cautions. “We just know that COVID causes inflammation, and inflammation has the potential to disrupt neurotransmission, particularly in the case of depression.”

See all our coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Among the cells that release inflammatory proteins in the brain are microglia, the brain’s version of the body’s disease-fighting immune system. Microglia may also be involved in the brain’s response to COVID-19. Microglia primed for action were found in about 43 percent of 184 COVID-19 patients, Singer and others reported in a review published February 4 in Free Neuropathology. Similar results come from a series of autopsies of COVID-19 patients’ brains; 34 of 41 brains contained activated microglia, researchers from Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital reported April 15 in Brain.

With these findings, it’s not clear that SARS-CoV-2 affects people’s brains differently from other viruses, says Navis. In her post–COVID-19 clinic at Mount Sinai, she sees patients with fatigue, headaches, numbness and dizziness — symptoms that are known to follow other viral infections, too. “I’m hesitant to say this is unique to COVID,” Navis says. “We’re just not used to seeing so many people getting one specific infection, or knowing what the viral infection is.”

Teasing apart all the ways the brain can suffer amid this pandemic, and how that affects any given person, is impossible. Depression and anxiety are on the rise, surveys suggest. That rise might be especially sharp in people who endured stressful diagnoses, illnesses and isolation.

clotting protein in postmortem brain from person with COVID-19

In a postmortem brain from a person with COVID-19, a clotting protein called fibrinogen (red) indicates that the blood vessels are damaged and leaky.

AVINDRA NATH

Just being in an intensive care unit can lead to confusion. Delirium affected 606 of 821 people — 74 percent — while patients were in intensive care units for respiratory failure and other serious emergencies, a 2013 study found. Post-traumatic stress disorder afflicted about a third of people who had been seriously sick with COVID-19 (SN: 3/12/21).

More specific aspects of treatment matter too. COVID-19 patients who spent long periods of time on their stomachs might have lingering nerve pain, not because the virus attacked the nerve, but because the prone position compressed the nerves. And people might feel mentally fuzzy, not because of the virus itself, but because a shortage of the anesthetic drug, propofol, meant they received an alternative sedative that can bring more aftereffects, says Rogers, the psychiatrist at University College London.

Lingering questions — what the virus actually does to the brain, who will suffer the most, and for how long — are still unanswered, and probably won’t be for a long time. The varied and damaging effects of lockdowns, the imprecision doctors and patients use for describing symptoms (such as the nonmedical term “brain fog”) and the indirect effects the virus can have on the brain all merge, creating a devilishly complex puzzle.

For now, doctors are busy focusing on ways in which they can help, even amid these mysteries, and designing larger, longer studies to better understand the effects of the virus on the brain. That information will be key to helping people move forward. “This isn’t going to be over soon, unfortunately,” Troyer says.  

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2778090

I am very lucky. Get to teach from home again.   At full salary.    I hope none of you have to face death in the face like we did.   Jill and Becky are home schooling their kids with help from us.  We are all blending in well.  Neil is working with ME and Vicki is playing with the dog and two cats , ME has his pet rats and everyone makes sure that the cats don't get downstairs.   Neil cut a ton of firewood for the family and ME  paid for 5000 dolllars worth of natural gas for the stoves.   We have wind and solar also as well as power backups.     We are going to get some fruit and veggies from an organic COOP.  We canned at least 500 bottles of fruit and veggies this past month. We will do more.   

Things are going as well as we can expect.  

Jill and Neil, Becky and partner,  ME 163 and VICKI 

Thanks for your help 

Techno, I'm hopeful that for the majority of children they will catch it, have a mild illness and develop natural immunity. Look at the Spanish Flu - it's still circulating today and we are all fine with it and it's one of the milder flus that we deal with each year. Hopefully the children of today will grow up to be the adults of tomorrow for whom Covid is a mild inconvenience. 

So I say don't vaccinate children UNLESS they are particularly vulnerable, but for the majority just leave them alone. 

As for the whole mask debate, I do think we all need to assess our own personal risks and requirements and take appropriate steps to protect ourselves, and for some people that will mean they get vaccinated, wear masks, socially distance etc, but for others, it won't. We need to stop blaming others and start taking responsibility for ourselves. I have 2 cousins in the UK who are extremely vulnerable and still full on shielding, and I have a cousin in the Netherlands who is an advanced healer and is using meditation to boost her immune system - and it's working. In the last 3 months she's been to Puerto Rico, Mexico, Holland and is currently in Italy. She's travelling everywhere and is just fine. She's not vaccinated.

Technophobe wrote: Speaking as a crustie, I think a couple of jabs to be rather inconsequential - compared to death.  Also severe disease is rare in children, but not unknown. Much more to the point though, the more unvaccinated people there are, the more new variants are able to emerge.  The youth of today age, and eventually they will become crusties themselves.  As the disease becomes endemic and those new variants emerge (all of which could be avoided with more vaccinations, of more age groups) the problems pile up for those future old-folk.  The chances are, they will find themselves faced with a far nastier disease than we have all faced over the past year and a decreased life-span as a result.

I disagree with you on this Techno. The unvaccinated aren't the problem. The vaccines do not stop people from contracting Covid, they simply make it more likely that someone will be asymptomatic and you can bet your last dollar that right now there are thousands of fully vaccinated people asymtomatic cases walking around transmitting the virus to all and sundry. Where the vaccines create obstacles to Covid, the vaccinated person with Covid provides the perfect petri dish for the virus to mutate in, to circumvent those obstacles and to enable the virus to become more effective. 

Some scientists even believe that it is the "vaccines" that are driving the evolution of the variants. 

https://trialsitenews.com/why-is-the-ongoing-mass-vaccination-experiment-driving-a-rapid-evolutionary-response-of-sars-cov-2/

Be under no illusions. The one and only benefit to having a covid vaccine is to lessen the recipient's chance of developing a serious case that may result in hospital admission and / or death. There is no benefit to society as a whole in having one despite what the British Government has told you. If anything, the vaccines allows Covid to spread by stealth more easily. Giving them to children will serve only to ease the concerns of frightened older people, even though it will give them a false sense of security. 

I'm all for vaccines that actually work and actually stop someone getting an illness eg. measles. But these covid "vaccines" are not technically vaccines. They are medical treatments and, under normal circumstances, the majority of doctors do not support giving medical treatments to someone who doesn't need it. We wouldn't put a plaster cast on a boy's arm just in case he's about to break it. We wait until he needs the cast. I'm not going to take a paracetamol now just in case I get a headache later on this evening. It would be madness. 

There seems to be a hysterical madness to all this. I've no doubt that some people have narrowly avoided death from Covid and, in the process, have witnessed appalling scenes, but this is the minority. The vast majority don't get ill enough to need that sort of medical intervention. I have a number of overseas relatives who have had Covid and it's been fine. I rail against manipulation by fear, it's morally questionable and generally misleading. I fully appreciate that the majority of people on this site are older, but still, we have to have a sense of perspective. We have to remember that the fatality rate of this disease in very small. In children, Dr John Campbell said this week that it's 2 children in a million. That's 0.0002%. Miniscule by anyone's standards.

Problem is, we can't be sure yet how long that immunity lasts.  I've seen figures as low as 6-8 months.  I would not be willing to risk long Covid, the complications that I am pretty sure are coming in 2-20 years, the lung damage that is being seen universally and/or brain/neurological damage that is being seen all too frequently after the initial illness, for the sake of 8 months of immunity.  Nor 8 years.  And I wouldn't let my children risk it either.