Narrative will, of course, be that NY’ers should just mask harder, lock down more, yet it’s obvious the higher numbers are correlated with areas in which people don’t have the privilege to work from their couch.
NY’s vaccine system is great...for English-speaking people who know how to use the internet and can move quickly to get appointment. Dark red areas experiencing spikes right now are filled with elderly immigrants who don’t know about Turbovax. Need a better system to reach them.
My mom lives in one of those (older, super immigranty) dark red neighborhoods. There is no way she would have gotten vaccinated without my help.
And yes, of course, these neighborhoods might have higher rates because people without symptoms aren't getting tested since, again, we use an absurd metric that relies on healthy people getting tested.
You know what's actually wrong with me? What's wrong with me is that I have spent a bunch of time in Florida and they are living their normal lives while ppl in my home of Brooklyn are set to wear 48 masks and FLORIDA HAS BETTER NUMBERS. So no, I won't mask after vaccine. Bye.
Had I not seen Florida with my own eyes I might be quiet. But kids go to school full-time in Florida, they don't social distance in class, they don't wear masks during recess, they play sports maskless and hug their friends when they win, and they're doing better than us.
Florida restaurants are packed, people are smiling on the street, no one is yelling at people 50 feet away to mask up, everyone is in a good mood, and there's no discussion of putting on a third mask in extremely low-risk situations like there is in NYC. And FL is doing BETTER.
I'm just going to keep tweeting this through September: every time you hear people say "schools are safe to open with precautions," ask which precautions. If they say "social distancing," please understand that means part-time school, at best, in most American cities.
(Couldn't live with that typo and had to redo)
Schools around the country, and around the world, have largely scrapped the social distance requirement. NYC insists on 6 feet between kids. That's crazy. We will never have full-time school again if we don't drop that.
My cousin sent me a BBC piece today that basically argues we should have been wearing masks and social distancing always since even, say, the MMR vaccine isn’t foolproof. bbc.com/future/article…
It used to only be anti-vaxxers pointing out “In fact, most vaccines don't fully protect against infection” now it’s mainstream media.
We threw out every single thing we know about human nature in order to fight COVID and this is where it led us. Pieces like this crush me because it was so, so obvious this would happen. I could have predicted this piece in May. nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/…
If I told you that teenagers would be kept from seeing friends, learn only online, have their social lives conducted only on social media, not have any in-person interaction with supportive grown-ups, wouldn't I be drawing you a picture of rising suicide rates? Yet we did this.
I have been screaming from the rooftops that schools will not reopen in Sept. So many ppl have told me that's crazy, so crazy. I have pointed out that literally nothing changes for kids in Sept. No vaccine for them, social distance requirements still mean no full-time school.
Success Academy declaring that they will open in a "hybrid" (part-time in-person) model in September is absolute worst news for people (like me) who are worried about schools not reopening in the fall. SA is being honest while all of our officials are not. Nothing will change.
We need to say, today, that there is no reason for children to be social distancing. None. No one else is doing this. Look at countries around the world that have opened their schools without social distancing (and largely without masks under 12yo!) while we have not.
I find articles like these so deeply frustrating: nytimes.com/2021/01/21/us/… So much parsing and dancing around the point that schools are safe and we should open them everywhere.
That evidence has been with us for months. And it’s not just when community spread is moderate or low. Look at Europe when they had high spread and yet schools saw few cases—even without these mitigation strategies!
The very next paragraph (which also jumps from elementary to high school without pointing out these are very different) muddles this point. Yes, when transmission goes up in communities, it goes up in schools. But it’s still super low. Say it.