I think it's still more dangerous to adults (pretty sure statistics still show that) it's just there are so many kid cases right now. They have no vaccine, most of them no immunity, and restrictions have been removed so many places that they are having a lot of exposure. I think it never was true that they weren't affected by earlier variants. They weren't as seriously affected as adults as far has how sick they got, but so many of the studies of rates among kids were measuring that during a time when most kids were at home. It makes sense that now that kids are no longer at home, their case rates are going to be a lot higher.

Well, for me, a 1% risk of hospitalization that is easily avoided does not seem a reasonable risk to me. If it was 1 in 10,000? That would seem more reasonable. (And incidentally, after looking it up, I’m finding that currently most countries are saying delta looks to about double hospitalization risk across all age groups.) To me the difference is that the former is extremely easy for the vast majority of people in this country, and free to boot, and the latter is not nearly so. Lots of people work hard to lose weight, but struggle to do so. Others have barriers to even working at it. The latter scenario is still accurate, and doing those things would be for the best and would likely have prevented that person’s hospitalization. Like when you have a relative who smokes ends up with lung cancer or emphysema—you wish they hadn’t done that.

I would have to look to see what that’s currently looking like with Delta, but my best guess before looking would be somewhere between 1 to 5%. And I’m talking about for people on the adult end of that spectrum. The age of people on this forum – – someone in their 30s or 40s, with the risk being higher for the latter than the former.

If someone was going to expose themselves and then quarantine and not be around family or anyone else, I guess that's one thing, but I still think the chances they will need hospital care are too high for that to be a responsible choice. There are way too many young, healthy people being hospitalized for it to seem like anyone can feel secure that they won't be one of them. For those that aren't vaccinated though, and think this would be a better option than being vaccinated, the statistics really don't work out in that direction at all. I agree that for someone vaccinated, the chance of hospitalization for someone with no risk factors is incredibly low. eta: I saw a graphic earlier I wanted to share from a governor's press conference today. I think it was Louisiana. It showed that in that state they have given over 2 million covid vaccines and had 8 serious vaccine reactions, where serious means a hospital stay was required. They have had no vaccine reactions that resulted in death. They have had 11,162 covid deaths.

You may pass it on to others who pass it on to others, and you might get sick enough to need medical care, contributing to hospital overload. That could happen to any of us, but doing it on purpose doesn't makes sense to me. Even less so after having seen many video clips of people suffering badly with covid, because that's not something I want to experience, if I can help it. On the other hand, having the vaccine means you're very unlikely to need any medical care for covid, thus not only do you get the benefit of that, but you also don't contribute to the hospital overwhelm.

Yeah, it’s like the article was written by someone who really didn’t understand what they were talking about.

As far as fidgets, they are easy and inexpensive to get, so I would probably pick up at least some thing for him to have. I would expect the tester to have things like that there though, too. maybe not because of Covid. I wouldn’t go overboard with finding things to help him stay still though, because you want the tester to get an accurate read on how he actually is. If he can’t stay still in his seat, that’s important information. As far as the anxiety, we were super low-key about it and told them we were going to do some testing to find out how they learn best so that we could use that information for deciding the best ways to teach them. We told them the testing would probably be interesting and involve doing a lot of different kinds of activities. Fortunately, they did find it interesting, which I expected they would or wouldn’t have said that.

I just wanted to add that in addition to them having to wait until after the trials had been done with adults first, the parts of the trials that could be accelerated largely already have been. They can’t and aren’t shortening any of the actual trial periods, so they have to wait for that to be done and for enough kids to be enrolled and for enough for them to reach the trial end point. Unfortunately, with schools about to open and so many with little mitigation, they may reach trial end point quite quickly now. I hadn’t been thinking about that before, but now that I do, it means that the timeline could end up being quicker than they thought, if there is a lot of illness among children this Fall 😔.

Boy, is it just me, or is that article really unclear? I still don't know if they are talking about testing to see if someone has Covid or sequencing to determine if it's Delta. This is a weird thing to say, because a rapid test will never tell you if it's Delta specifically. That's not what those tests do; it's a simple one line or two like a pregnancy test. So it's weird it says "not necessarily."

That sounds really encouraging, but then looking at Singapore's Covid data, they have so few cases right now anyway, that the chances of a student getting it would be low. If we were in that situation, I would feel totally different about Fall.

I'm sorry! Can you get a PCR somewhere? Hopefully it's a just a cold, but we've had friends recently test negative on Binax and positive later on PCR.

I hear this, too, even here on this forum. People say things like, “I’m not concerned that I would get very sick if I got Covid” and I always wonder what makes people so sure. We all hope the odds are in our favor, but with this illness, I don’t think anyone can feel confident about that, especially any of us old enough to have older kids. Last stat I saw from one of the surging areas, the average age of hospitalized patients was 42.

Really? We are loving it. The women’s skateboarding have been my favorite events this time around. I can’t see any reason it wouldn’t be appropriate for the olympics—it’s super athletic and takes a lot of skill. Better late than never, I say 😊.

I agree that Russia has been incredibly successful at this. I've actually seen it talked about a lot, so I'm not certain I agree that no one is bothering to warn other Americans this is happening. To me, it's been more than I don't understand why so many people don't seem to care. I just saw a new story about this today: Russian Disinformation Targets Vaccines and the Biden Administration; A new campaign appears to be spreading falsehoods about the potential for forced inoculations against Covid-19. Maybe that's where these ideas about "the government is forcing injections" are coming from.

KF is a Korean standard, KN Chinese, and N US. They all are good if they are authentic, with the KN95s having the issue of a lot of conterfetis. The numbers are the filtration level they have to meet to meet the standard, but in testing, they are all very similar (many in the 99% range), except the N100 do meet a higher standard, but are also harder to breathe in. For your husband, I hate to say this, but the truth is that it's not possible to get a good seal with a beard. A moustache fits inside the mask and doesn't interfere, and there are some other facial hair styles that can work (like a soul patch, lol), but anything that means the mask is passing over facial hair means air is going to be passing through there. For big masks, the BOTN size large and the AirWAsher LG are both supposed to work well for large faces. I hope all of you stay healthy! The Bluna Facefit size Large are good on small-medium adult size heads. I have a ds a similar age who is small and it fits him. The BOTN size medium is nice on him as well, as is the POSH adult mask. My 12 year old with a very tiny face does better with a true kids size mask--Posh or Bluna small. I like the adult Posh myself due to having a small face. The BeHealthy site has the option to order a 10 pack where you pick and choose different ones to fill it, and that might be nice to try a bunch and see how they fit. I definitely don't recommend the bifold style KF94 for a small chin (they are shaped more like a Happy Mask--only a couple of us here can get a good fit with the bifold style, but all of us can with the boat style).

I still don’t see it as needing to be any different. Some schools handle transgender room assignments just by having a check box where students indicate that they would or would not be open to sharing with a transgender student. They could do the same thing with vaccines. Ask people if they would or would not be open to sharing with someone who wasn’t vaccinated, and assign accordingly. If someone checks the box that they are open to that, they still don’t know whether the roomate assigned with them is vaccinated or not. No need to disclose anything. I just don’t think these are such insurmountable problems that we should throw up our hands and say that people should have no choice in the matter. I know I shared a couple days ago a link that explains that this is not the case. I don’t have time now, but will look it up later if you didn’t see it. It explains that the observational period is standard even after full approval. Nothing is being skipped. It may be that some people are spreading the idea that this is an issue while neglecting to make clear that this is standard procedure in order to make it sound nefarious. eta: actually, it turned out to be much faster than I expected to pull up that link, as well as several others saying the same thing. Reuters is an excellent source: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccine-monitoring-idUSKBN2AC2G3

All of these things. I gather it's one of those buzzwords that is especially popular among people on social media right now. I have a young adult kid who very suddenly began using it, but along the lines of what FuzzyCatz above. She will say something was a certain way that very definitely wasn't, insist that it was, and then accuse the other person of gaslighting. In actuality, that makes her the gaslighter. There's mental health at play there, though.

I usually use BeHealthyUSA.net though if yiu refer to this chart, it lists a couple other reputable places. I just can’t remember the URLs for those ones off the top of my head. You can see the data for Dr. Puri on that chart. It looks pretty good, over 95%, but that’s lower than many of the other KF94s. It also looks like it may not fit as well because it required doing some thing special in order to get better numbers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M0mdNLpTWEGcluK6hh5LjjcFixwmOG853Ff45d3O-L0/edit For kids masks, I like the Bluna Facefit small or the Posh kids (The Posh fits smaller faces better. An 8 year old should be able to wear either.). The BOTN kids mask is very nice, but it’s a little more fragile where the ear loop adjuster is, in my opinion. Whatever you get, I recommend you get one that either has adjustable ear loops (all the ones I mentioned do) or you get some ear loop adjusters. It’s rare for the masks to fit snug without making the ear loops tighter. Of course, tight enough ear loops means you might want to get ear savers if your child will be wearing it for a long time. Mine are fine in them for the amount of time they wear a mask, but if they were going to school, I’d use their ear savers.

I could sing my KF94 song again 😂. If you have enough N95s though, and they fit and you’re comfortable, I’d do those. I just bought some myself, now that we can get them again, but I’m mostly wearing KF94. They fit all of us really well, are highly protective, are easy to breathe in, and are easy to get. My new N95s are pretty impressive, though (3M Aura 9205). The nose seal is so tight that the first time I pinched it down over my nose, it cut off my airway and I couldn’t breathe through my nose at all 😂. I definitely have found boat shaped masks to fit best for everyone here, snd we have a wide range of face shapes. For Happy Masks, you do have to pay attention to how much they’ve been washed, since they lose filter efficiency with washing.

To be fair, this was accurate before Delta came around. The vaccine was incredibly effective at preventing disease and transmission pre-delta. Now it’s like we have a new disease. Fortunately, the previous vaccines are still highly protective against illness and death. (I fear If we don’t get transmission rates down, we’ll have something much worse eventually.) This would be so much more doable if there weren’t so many places with abysmal vaccination rates. That is what prevents us from moving on. There is too much illness still out there, too much transmission, too much overwhelm of the healthcare system. It’s very frustrating, because it doesn’t have to be this bad right now, even as bad as delta is. This is an aside, but has anyone else noticed it seems an unusual number of couples where both of them are severely affected? It makes sense with the cases like that in genetic families, but I wonder what is causing that with married couples? Perhaps something about the particular variation or viral load they both catch?

I have not seen the former happen at all. On rare occasion, I have seen a version of the latter (not to the level of wishing that just for those that don’t follow their personal mitigation efforts, but for those flagrantly disregarding), but I think the latter has been pretty consistently pushed back against on the rare occasions it has come up on this board. I think there is one, possibly two posters who have said something along those lines, and again, they have been met with disagreement.

I still think there are ways to do this. I used the example before of transgender students. Most universities find it’s not a good situation for either the transgender student or the roommate to simply assign them based on gender. Students have to mutually agree on the situation in that case. I think different schools do that differently, but often through having certain housing designated gender inclusive, and then having all roommates sign off on being OK with the arrangement. If they can do that, I think they can figure something out for this emergency situation as well. Certainly, someone who is medically vulnerable and either can’t be vaccinated or the vaccine isn’t likely to do that much good, should be able to have housing accommodations made to make that safe for them.

Fortunately, I have not seen that at all, but would find it despicable if I did. That’s really disgusting, and it’s the opposite of what I have heard anyone here say. Social media may be another thing because there’s all kinds of gross behavior there. There have been quite a few boardies who have either had Covid themself or their unvaccinated family members have, and I’ve seen nothing but compassion for those cases. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people who really wish everyone would get the vaccine, wish that because they care about people and don’t want people to get sick and die.

I think it would be helpful if there was a public education campaign to explain succinctly and clearly how it was that operation warp speed produced vaccines so quickly. It seems that those who feel nervous about that believe that there were steps that were skipped or rushed. I think it would be really helpful and useful to make clear to people that all the steps were followed and all the data was collected for just as long, it’s just that there was massive funding and removal of red tape that allowed all of the steps to happen all at the same time, rather than having to do one thing and wait for approval or funding for the next thing and then do the next thing and then wait for the next one, etc. nothing was skipped. That’s why we are still waiting for the kid vaccines to be approved, because they have to do all the steps.

I almost shared that last night, but couldn’t think which thread or which other people had noted Nate’s embarrassing tweets throughout the pandemic. That one was hilarious though.