Substitute Teaching During a Pandemic – Anxiety Double Plus

“The CDC now…”, therefore not a pandemic? Seriously?

Wow. No regard that the CDC has been taken over by a Trumpite? No regard that medical reporting by this organization NOW has to be first filtered by an appointed and temporary political officer? And this is happening in the US to little concern of millions of voters? Political officers is right out of the Communist model. So this kind of information filtering, which is NOW being done, is standard operating procedure only in countries run by despots and those who must rely on filtering what’s true to replace it with the ‘correct’ political narrative. So any health-related trust in the reporting by such an organization’s talking head NOW therefore has to reflect this political bias, which is to say, we should trust what it announces NOW not at al.

The CDC’s reputation and trustworthiness upon which people refer to it has been directly undermined by this political targeting and mandated political oversight. Anything the CDC NOW ‘announces’ after passing through its political filter by its political overseers is what is untrustworthy, just like this kind of referral to ‘earlier’ computer models. Which ones? By whom? When? Regarding what? Hand-waving is what we should look forward to only after the US election in November and not as a core part of any health-related advice NOW.

The fact of the matter is that we are in a second wave of the pandemic, a SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes a vast and variable amount of damage – some temporary, some lasting, some not at all, some with death – across all ages and all groups and offers an equally vast and variable amount of risk to all – from nothing all the way up to death. All we can do is mitigate this risk to others by taking certain physical precautions. What we cannot control is how much risk others force on us by their lack of participation and respect for these mitigating measures. That, too, is variable because of bullshit non-medical but highly politicized statements like “The CDC now…”.

Because I’m a member of NHIMA, a music association, we funded several studies out of Colorado earlier this year about aerosol spread. This is different from droplets and other contact contagion that precipitate out relatively quickly because we had come across information from Italy and Spain (and brought home by how the virus raged through a choir out Oregon and California, specifically) that was best explained by aerosolized viral concentrations… in other words a virus that did not precipitate out relatively quickly and within a short distance but stayed airborne (after droplet evaporation) like Measles. (Oh, we also know people who wear glasses are less likely to get infected per exposure.) We wanted to know how playing an instrument or singing seemed to increase larger than average infection rates by the participants. Concentration studies were therefore carried out and this seemed to fit the evidence very well long before we found out that Trump already knew this was an airborne aerosolized virus but stopped the CDC from announcing as much… and even pulled this info very shortly after this was put on its website in mid September, its political overseer claiming it was ‘preliminary’!

Good grief. The misinformation is incredible and the gullibility of people who don’t want to hear bad news astounding.

So, to go into a classroom means evaluating not just the personal contact but the concentration risk. Is the classroom properly ventilated? Do they use HEPA filters? (Ideally, our studies showed you want to blow fresh air in at ground level and vent at the ceiling level, flowing across the room in the same direction as any outside ventilation. This massively reduces any increasing concentration levels – any Albertan will know the cloud from winter exhaled breath looks like multiplied by how many breaths are exhaled from the same position to get some idea of what a classroom concentration might look like – and seems to reduce the spread of the contagion.) Do the students distance in class? Do they reliably and consistently wear masks? How long are they in the same spot? How many are bussed? Bussing is a huge weak spot in that they are mobile Petrie dishes where even mitigating measures are haphazard and so these students are particularly vulnerable to becoming unwitting vectors, but we won’t have good data on that until this real life, real world, real time experiment is run… in spite of anything any ‘earlier’ computer models might suggest.

We cannot protect ourselves completely. Therefore, each of us has to determine what level of risk is acceptable knowing that any measures we take in effect only reduces the risk to others and do not offer protection for ourselves. Any contact increases risk. That’s the brute fact. This risk is only mitigated by how much others try to protect you from them.

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VRK, the hype opinion is factually wrong.

Even in my small circle, I know two people personally who were positive in May and June respectively but who are still suffering waves of debilitation. Both are healthcare workers who treated people who were positive and followed protocol. Both wore full PPE including face shields and N95 fitted masks. Both think they got it through their eyes by airborne virus even though they worked in well ventilated and scrubbed environments. Concentration from shared air rather than physical contact seems to be the key risk. Planes are about 6X cleaner air than these well ventilated rooms because of the filtration systems mandated for planes far exceeds hospital rooms.

The fact is that one week, or a few days, they are feeling good and then 5 days or two weeks of being bed-ridden with temperature spikes, loss of apatite and energy, heart issues, breathing difficulty, and one has permanent damage to her eyes.

This isn’t hype. This is a real affect. Neither is over the age of 60 and both were very physically fit and healthy without any of the typical risk factors we like to presume made these people more vulnerable than ourselves. That’s delusional thinking. Their families are really struggling not just from loss of income but never knowing what adverse health symptom will happen next. So this kind of risk is important when going into a class of 30 potential carriers to spend the day sharing their air.

The term is ‘long haulers’ for these folk and the medical community has no clue how to treat these people or even how to collect data regarding them. Many, I’ve been told, have simply given up on trying to use the medical system because it’s so difficult and onerous and useless to keep going to be offered a shrug and pity for the effort.

So I find the comment about ‘hype’ dismissive of real people in real life who have suffered – and continue to suffer – very real long term affects that you are waving away… presumably because you haven’t heard much about these people and so can assume that, hey, it’s very unlikely this might be a danger. But the fact is we as a society have very little collected information to go by. Erring on the side of caution if possible now rather than agreeing with bluster because you got through it okay I think is the better advice.

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