NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
What was done to children in public schools during the Covid lock-down was inexcusable. There will never be a full accounting, but this article in the NYT gets much of it right.
Category: Covid
Politico: CDC wants to be trusted.
Mandy Cohen wants to win back America’s trust.
Perhaps this article is incomplete or misrepresents Mandy Cohen. I hope so, because we need a CDC with integrity.
The new CDC director spent her first two months on the job telling audiences in New York, Wisconsin and Washington state the agency has made mistakes, a mea culpa of sorts meant to show that she understands past shortcomings.
Did Mandy Cohen go into detail about what mistakes were made, by whom and what action is being taken to make sure mistakes don’t happen again? Absent further information, a good assumption is that Mandy Cohen gave the vague and impersonal “Mistakes were made.” line.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Wednesday warned healthy adults under the age of 65 against taking the newly approved Covid-19 vaccine.
Cohen called efforts to undercut vaccine uptake “unfounded and, frankly, dangerous.”
“I want to make sure folks know, particularly in Florida, that vaccination remains a safe way in terms of protecting against severe disease, hospitalization and death,” she said. “It’s important for Americans to get these shots.”
I hope Mandy Cohen did better than this. If not, she is completely inept and the CDC is going to continue to spiral down the drain. American doesn’t have a CDC anymore.
Does Mandy Cohen think that anyone gives two shits that she says something is ‘unfounded and frankly dangerous”? That’s what not being trusted means. She should be providing studies and research. She should assume that Surgeon General Ladapo knows more and cares more about Floridan citizens than she does.
“A part of trust building is making sure people know I wouldn’t recommend something for the American people I wouldn’t recommend to my own family,” she told POLITICO.
There are plenty of people who recommend things for their families that sound batshit crazy. Why would we think that Mandy Cohen is any different? The CDC confidently lied to us. She could be lying.
It’s hard to believe that anyone cares about Covid.
During the Covid year, the first quarter was going to be remote. and that was about all we knew. Teaching remotely, I couldn’t give students the a quality show, so I thought that I’d produce lecture videos that are good in a different way. The intent was to renovate the curriculum while producing videos that would be a resource for my remaining three or four years.
By the end of the year, NoRo management decided that I was done teaching Physics, so the videos were never edited to perfection or to be seen by anyone ever again. I decided that I’d post them here. These are the lecture videos. There were homework explanation videos, practice problem videos and quiz videos. I may post those in subsequent years.
Since this is about the time when the Chapter 2 test would be coming up, these are the “Kinematics in One Dimension” presentations.
This is our first lecture on actual physics.
Then we get to velocity.
Acceleration, and we are done. Usually, students get killed on this chapter test.
I’ve recently been conversing with a couple of students that I had during the Covid year. Both are in engineering at The Ohio State University. I had both when they were juniors in Physics, and again, as seniors in AP Physics 2. Since I knew them prior to the Covid year, I didn’t need to introduce myself. For students with whom I was not acquainted, it seemed important to produce a video that gave them some sense of Physics and how I approached the course.
Both videos were produced a couple of weeks before school started. I had time, but not much of an idea how to edit videos.
For the Physics students, I wanted to get across the fun and wonder of Physics. In an online course, it’s hard to communicate the twin virtues of fun and dangerous. For the intro video, I tried to get across the fun, my unconventional nature and that diligent effort would be expected.
For AP students, the purpose of the introduction was different. AP Physics 2 students are smart and they’ve had a year of physics. They know the score. It’s important that they believe that even if I’m not smarter than them, at least I know physics better than they do.
NPR: History and Civics scores are down, and nobody should be surprised. The response to the Covid pandemic by the government and education officials was deplorable. I heard this story on NPR this morning, and it also illustrates how trivial their news reporting has become. Everyone wants to know how much damage was done to students by long periods of remote learning.
I can go on about all the bad that came from the Covid lock down, but one good result is that people who weren’t previously technically savvy, stepped up their game to learn new skills and start establishing an online presence.
Homeland Security denies entry to top ranked tennis player, for no reason that I can figure out. Covid-19 is over and Fauci lied about everything. Sure, some people will get a Covid variant. People at great risk can keep getting booster shots and wearing masks, but the rest of us have moved on.
Homeland Security may wish to finish building the border wall and get serious about the legal and illegal immigration system. They certainly aren’t acting in a way that benefits the American people.
The way the Covid-19 pandemic was handled was a shit show. It’s over, but we have to do better than just never speak of it again. Questions should be openly discussed so we learn. The Norfold Group put together a reasonable set of questions. I don’t care who funded them or the background of the doctors. The report is so reasonable, it may become hard to find, so I’m backing the Questions for Covid Commission by Norfolk Group Full Report .
The executive summary provides ten concise questions, and they are:
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What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?
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Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity by government officials and some prominent scientists? How did this hinder our fight against the virus?
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Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality, early data showing that schools were not major sources of spread, and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?
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Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health, including but not limited to, cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, childhood vaccinations, and mental health?
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Why did the CDC fail to collect timely data to properly monitor and understand the pandemic? Why did we have to rely on studies from private initiatives and from other countries to understand the behavior of the virus and the effects of therapeutics, including vaccines?
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Why was there so much emphasis and trust in complex epidemiological models, which are by nature unreliable during the middle of an epidemic, with unknown input parameters and questionable assumptions?
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Could therapeutic trials have been run in a more timely manner? How was information on drug effectiveness and safety disseminated to doctors and clinicians? Were effective therapeutics easily accessible across the population? How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?
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Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints? Why were they terminated early? Why were there so few studies from the highest-quality CDC and FDA vaccine safety systems?
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Why was the USA slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity? Why was there more emphasis on testing young asymptomatic individuals than on testing to better protect older high-risk Americans? Why was so much effort spent on contact-tracing efforts?
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Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them, at the expense of efficient and critical COVID-19 mitigation efforts? Why did the CDC or NIH not fund large randomized trials to evaluate the efficacy and potential harms of mask wearing? Why didn’t policy recommendations change after the publication of randomized trial data from Denmark and Bangladesh which showed no or minimal efficacy of mask wearing by the public?
When cheating becomes the norm, normal kids cheat. During the summer of 2020, the administrative team for my school had time to plan for fully remote classes. They made no provision for valid testing. Teachers asked questions and suggested solutions, but no answers ever came. Even worse, the administration kept insisting that students be shown grace. In education-speak, grace means dialing down the accountability.
North Royalton students are generally honest and respectful. I taught college-prep and AP courses, so my students were smart and ambitious, but not necessarily better people. Most teachers changed their assessments for remote learning. Some tried to hold the line by making it harder to cheat with more extended response questions, while others threw in the towel and went for multiple-choice questions. It wasn’t long before this system corrupted students who wouldn’t have considered cheating.
To compound the educational dereliction, the administration gave students the option of remaining remote, after we went back to a hybrid schedule. Those remote students remained in classes with in-person students. The remote students cheated their asses off, while the responsible students took tests and quizzes in class. For three quarters of a school year, some students took minimal interest in their education, but got the same or better grades than students who attended class. I don’t stand by any of the grades I gave that year.
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
It isn’t clear why the Energy Department is investigating the Covid origin, instead of building nuclear reactors, but at least they got to the answer that the rest of us figured out a long time ago.