Nerd Pride Radio

Maryland extended school closings until April 24.

Virginia schools are done for the year.

Some senators have decided that I won't want to go back to work if they pass the stimulus bill as is, and therefore are holding it up. I think they're neat.

I am not holding up well mentally. My principal thinks that we will not be allowed to come back over break. I'm struggling to figure out how to actually teach my students in a meaningful way - and it's showing my shortcomings. I'm sick of seeing all the positive "do this stuff with your kids at home"....I can't, I still have to work! I don't stick to ordered plans, but there is way too much uncertainty going on right now, and I'm grasping at anything I can find that gives me some sort of control. Like, I'm wearing a button down shirt, tucked in. There is no reason I should actually be doing this right now.

Yes. I mean, if you are unable to eat chocolate, any flavor of ice cream will do. Or if you can't eat dairy, laying on the cold floor (for Clarity) of a garage or basement with a banana bread could do the trick. Or a head of cauliflower. The pointless weeping is necessary to the process, however.

My kids' school district is passing out chromebooks to students who don't have tech at home. I'm not sure if the district I work for will do anything like that.

Yeah, we are seeing the inequities in school support playing out, as people who most lack access may be in a district that lacks tools to give them. Here I sit in the optimal situation for home learning, and it's a full time effort to keep anything rolling forward. How are kids supposed to make progress? How do teachers like DMDarcs adapt a fundamentally in-person method overnight, for students unprepared to adapt to this? How do you communicate with students who can't now be reached, especially when it was already a struggle to deliver effective instruction? No idea what the long-term consequences of this mass experiment will be, but wow are they real.

"And two of the hardest-hit areas in the nation — New York City and Los Angeles County — released guidance earlier this week encouraging doctors not to test patients unless they think the test will significantly change their course of treatment. That means that potentially more people in both places could be admitted to hospitals with severe respiratory symptoms and recover — or die — and not be registered as a coronavirus case."

from:

Testing is vital to treatment and containment or have we given up on that?
Testing can have a psychological benefit as well because it drives down the numbers, charts, and graphs that inspire fear typically because it is usually a negative result.

The truth of the matter is that we have no real idea how wide spread the virus really is in the US due to the lack of testing. I hope for the best, but I think it's going to get very ugly over the next few weeks.

My son was supposed to take a school trip to France over the summer. That has now been canceled, right after we made the last payment for the trip. So now our choices are to reschedule the trip for summer 2021, or to get a partial refund of the cost of the trip. First world problems, and definitely not horrible compared to people getting sick and dying. But a let down for him nonetheless.

Yea, the lack of consistent case exposure tracking (which would have required heavy testing early) and low level of testing means that there are lots of people are infected with no or few symptoms. For the next few weeks, it's best to assume that most people have been exposed, especially if they traveled to some place like New York.

did some back of envelope computations -- given that over 100,000 has coronavirus in USA, it's not inconceivable that over a million of Americans has coronavirus now, many spreading as asymptotic individual.

We sorely need mass testing. With low false positive and false negatives.

The UK is doing mass testing for COVID antibodies which will tell them who has had it already and is (supposedly) immune. Especially among healthcare workers, this is invaluable.

And only way that people could theoretically go back to work and support the effort in some ways.

One problem we have here is health care workers asked to stay home because they have mild symptoms but can't get tested, as maybe it's just a mild cold or allergy season starting.

The supply breakdowns elsewhere are discouraging, given that we have known for at least two months (laypeople knew!) we would need to prepare for this. I started building a month's supplies and extra prescriptions for everyone back in February! It's unconscionable that so many national and state leaders failed to do the same for their medical providers. I know that here we have been prepping spillover medical facilities this whole time, because the people in charge of that had a damn plan. We have had people 3-d printing n95 alternatives to have an extra supply. Forget Trump himself; it astounds me that so many other people in positions of responsibility did so little. Even in March by itself, we could have jumped up preparations. I'm shocked by this. It will mean, directly, the loss of lives that could have been saved, including people who have other "normal" ailments.