I make booklists and use the individual books, for the most part. But the Norton Anthology books are nice to have for poetry and excerpts. Are you wanting to design the study yourself, or are you looking for a program that has a lot of the work done for you?

Kolbe homeschool courses use secular texts from mainstream educational publishers. The Biology course uses a supplement for the Catholic Church’s teaching on the possibility of evolution, but you do not have to use it. The packages include assignments, tests, and answer keys for all. I used the Biology and plan to do so again. It uses the Miller Levine text. The negative is that the labs are virtual, but real labs are easy enough to add, with some coordinating ahead of time. The labs you do can also add to the level of content and output required if you so choose.

He is a nutrition epidemiologist. https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-impersonator-eric-feigl-ding The article goes on to talk about a lot of political ties which may or may not be less relevant, depending on your POV. https://undark.org/2020/11/25/complicated-rise-of-eric-feigl-ding/ This is a long article that leaves all political stuff out. There is a lot more but here are some excerpts.

He is not only alarmist, he doesn’t usually know what he is talking about. Many people that do know have called him out since the beginning. There were even a couple of articles about him and his qualifications. He does not know anything about infectious disease epidemiology. He advocated for schools to stay closed in the US. Meanwhile, he has been in Austria for the pandemic, where he has his kids in school. He’s a hypocrite and a poseur. eta There is a parody account that is actually pretty funny.

My kids have been quite bothered by blood draws in the past. The only antibody test available to me when I got tested was a blood draw. It’s great to know there are finger stick tests available.

Deleted, getting too into the weeds

I’m not restricting anything more at this time, but I considered antibody testing for about 5 minutes in the spring. But blood draws can be an ordeal for young children. Adults can get tested as a proxy, though. If parents don’t have antibodies, it seems less likely that the young children would have been infected.

Right. That’s why I added my caveat. Here it is again. But still, people choose to interpret my post as saying the opposite. 😕 Saying that there are people who have real things going on doesn’t mean that every. single. person that thinks they have long Covid does have real things going on that are actually due to Covid. And that’s essential to figure out when it is being studied. I am talking about studying and defining the illness. Because accepting that 100% of those who say they have long Covid do have disease from Covid, just on their say-so, doesn’t seem like good medicine to me. How can people with various symptoms be helped, how can researchers study things that can help them, if there are no clear definitions, documented infection isn’t required, and there is no investigation into other things that might be causing the symptoms? We know that you can get a vaccine and then have prolonged fatigue or a blood clot or a heart attack, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that event was definitively caused by the vaccine in every case. The same is true for any virus. You can have a virus and have all sorts of things occur for months after the virus that are not due to the virus. Or maybe for many people, they are, but for some others, they have other causes.

I’m not sure why you tagged me here; is it because I linked this article in another thread last week, or just to include in the conversation? Here are some excerpts from the article. This podcast transcript with Dr. Rasmussen has a similar explanation. https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/delta-covid-variant/ Incidentally, what is the rule around here, or general rule, on how much of the article is okay to copy with a link included?

Also potentially confounding is the potential for a sort of nocebo effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22833756/ If you have read and heard a lot of stories about long-tail symptoms, and have some subconscious anxiety about developing them, you might be more aware of any symptoms and to interpret them as secondary to your Covid infection. The mind is powerful. Some of the surveys and stories last year included people who had tested negative for PCR and antibodies, but still were sure they had had Covid and were experiencing long haul symptoms because of Covid. I’ll add as I always try to do, that this doesn’t mean I think long Covid is ALL in people’s heads or that there aren’t people suffering because of real physiologic issues due to Covid. It’s just so very messy right now that it’s hard to say what the extent of this is.

I put a break like this ———- in my post after the first part where I was responding to you, and before the part you quoted. So no, that quote was not a response to you. I don’t know if it is more numerous on one side or the other. I think some public academics are just more careful to say when something isn’t certain, rather than say something definitive and turn out to be wrong later. OR they are more nuanced when they talk to journalists, but are quoted out of context.

I’m quoting this post because I got to the PHE report from there. Am I reading this right? From PHE report https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001358/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_18.pdf Secondary attack rates, both in household and out of household, are now very similar on the whole for Alpha and Beta, keeping in mind that the Alpha data is from January-June and Delta is more recent. Table 6.

Same experience but I’m a little younger. It wasn’t declared eliminated til the 2000’s. I shouldn’t have said “plenty of measles around”, because I guess that sounds widespread, but I just meant it wasn’t gone. There was still “plenty” of it around for about 15 years after a vaccine was available, looks like anywhere from 30-80,000 cases per year, then declined from there, link below has a graph. Looks like another bump from 1988-92, 30 or 40 thousand cases per year. https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/graph-us-measles-cases This is one article I had looked at and found interesting. https://www.history.com/news/measles-vaccine-disease

I don’t know what to make of the bar graphs, but I doubt that this one graph is all the analysis that was done. It’s an op-Ed, with all the limits those entail. Whatever was done is of course not the same as a careful study, but the studies that have been done also have plenty of issues. The issue is controversial and not settled either way. In the end, it’s still the same virus, and the same strain as it always has been, and it is plenty bad on its own. It seems to have evolved to spread better, maybe, though when everything is analyzed mor thoroughly in the coming months and years, who knows what the consensus will be on all the different variant diversity, transmission, and virulence. It seems like there would be probably have to be huge fundamental changes to have huge, major changes in virulence, maybe such that it would be a new strain and not just a variant. And whether there is a slight change in virulence or not doesn’t change what we, or most adults, can do about it: get vaccinated. It’s reassuring for those with unvaccinated children that there seems to be no increased virulence in children.

Those studies are mentioned in the article I linked in another thread, and IIRC, in NYT. The tweets are by the authors of the articles, explaining the article and including quotes and charts for those who cannot read them because of paywalls. That is the reason I included the tweet threads. The NYT article has multiple quotes from experts. i was sharing because as we discussed in the other thread days ago, the experts are saying that those couple of studies don’t establish increased virulence, and then I had these articles pop up in my email. There are multiple other sources with epidemiologists and virologists over the past couple of weeks saying the same. JHU Public Health, Angela Rasmussen, all of the TwiV people, etc. They are just saying the evidence isn’t there. It also isn’t easy to determine. Just like the true R0 is no longer easy to determine when there is so much vaccination, natural immunity, mitigation’s, etc.

Yeah, that one was pretty poor, apparently.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-supporting-ivermectin-as-covid-treatment-withdrawn-over-ethical-concerns

I don’t either. 🙂 But what we each think is in fact based more on opinion and risk perception than evidence, when evidence is lacking. I haven’t read much of her. I know she was an advocate for opening schools, and I believe she, along with many others, was correct. But that’s about it. What do you think about her idea that since Delta has been around, you should halve the number of community cases you are willing to accept for certain activity levels? I am not sure if that makes sense or not. I haven’t really had a number in mind of when I would change things; I do have a threshold but it’s more “big picture” than a case number.

@Not_a_Number you quoted me as saying those things, when they are from the article. Not everyone gets everything right, not Emily Oster or Dr. Fauci or Dr. Walensky or whoever. I thought some might find the article helpful as it kind of distills the difference in how different people think about these risks. You have a certain perspective, and that’s okay. Others see it differently, and that’s okay, too. Right now, one isn’t really any more evidence-based than the other, and each of our families has many factors to consider. I thought her point about thinking about community cases differently when Delta seems to spread twice as quickly, was a really good one.

Thank you! Interesting, and not surprised. I have wished from the beginning that the message “eat lots of vegetables and get some sunshine and exercise” had been consistently promoted along with “practice physical distancing and wear a mask indoors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/briefing/delta-variant-spread-contagious.html “The Delta variant is more contagious. It does not appear to be more severe.” Multiple experts quoted, most in Twitter thread (more if you click), if you are out of free views. https://www.wsj.com/articles/delta-variant-hospitalizations-covid-coronavirus-vaccine-immunity-11626374706 there is more to the thread with other info from article if you click on the link. WSJ is very stingy with free articles.

https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/kids-and-the-delta-variant-should “Kids and the Delta Variant: Should you Act Differently?” First part: Delta more contagious, probably not more severe, but for sure no indication it is worse for children in particular. Then:

Here’s one with the studies others have posted mentioned, but with the conclusion being that good evidence is difficult and not conclusive. Same article as in the Atlantic, but no paywall. https://www.govexec.com/management/2021/06/why-no-one-sure-if-delta-deadlier/175037/ I listen to and have followed feed of a bunch of scientists. I will see what else I can find later. ——- I don’t understand why it’s so controversial to say it’s not conclusively more virulent. Not conclusive means maybe yes, maybe no. It’s not good science to make claims that aren’t yet well-supported. I’m not invested in the virulence or lack of virulence, but just don’t think that inaccuracy is helping anyone. I think some people, not just here, seem very invested in Covid being more and more terrible, and all of us needing to behave as though it is early-mid 2020. There have been statements in the forum that the virus is becoming more transmissible AND immune-evading all the time, and that this will continue. When actually, Beta and Gamma seem to evade immunity better than Delta, but Delta took over both of those. I just don’t know what point it serves to continue to see this virus through the lens of doom and still mostly be negative about it. We have vaccines, which practically seems like a miracle. Immunity is going to last a long time for most of us. Another paper showing it will be for years after infection. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3881728 And we know that our immune systems adapt, with memory B cells able to produce antibodies that target variants, and with the cell-mediated immune systems kicking in to prevent severe disease. That’s. Freaking. Amazing.

Right, that’s not the only study, just one I saw and still had the link. I don’t know what to make of the anosmia connection, and there also are people who have anosmia and nothing else. That PHE link that Laura Corin shared the other day suggested that anosmia was less common in vaccinated breakthrough infections, which hopefully portends well for the chances of long Covid in the vaccinated.

I’m sorry. I’d feel frustrated in that situation, too. We all do consider individual risk in deciding on activities for our own families, though. We aren’t in the same situation as March 2020. Play date with friends who are in danger? I would try to accommodate them. But continue to restrict the lives of all children in the same way as the last year, no.