One of the worst things to learn early in the pandemic was that Canada mismanaged its pandemic supply stockpile years ago, and wasted it. This almost certainly was part of the reason for the medical officials to first recommend against the public buying and using medical masks while in public, despite the common sense nature of wanting sick people coughing to have a mask on to contain the virus to some degree.
Expired N95 masks weren’t sufficient for front line workers in March when the government advised against general mask use when within 2m of strangers, but now teachers & students aren’t being given even expired masks to spend all day indoors to spread the plague.
“The virus can harm the heart, and doctors are concerned about long-term damage. How the heart heals after COVID-19 could help determine whether a patient develops an irregular heartbeat.”
Do kids need to be protected from COVID-19 as if it was Polio or Smallpox? I think so.
The plot thickens, like your COVID-19 infected blood.
I’m not a typical human. I’m a mutant, zombie, cyborg — or a person who narrowly survived a cardiac arrest caused by a heart defect due to mutation, and have an implanted computer designed to restart my heart should it suddenly stop again. I also grew up in a village of only ~40 people, walked to school until Grade 8, home schooled in Grade 9, and was driven by school bus for an hour and a half a day, 50km away, for the rest of high school. I took a calculus class by satellite TV, faxing assignments in to Regina. I finished at the top of my class of 12 students.
My experience isn’t average. My siblings had very similar experiences of course, but most humans on Earth didn’t grow up like I did.
I give this background to explain why I don’t think a single different year of distance schooling is destined to harm most children’s education or social development. It might be more crucial to their development that we prevent them from contracting a potentially fatal disease that might require them to get computer implants like I have so they don’t keel over dead at 34 (like I did).
Do I trust the Saskatchewan Government to adjust to scientific data released in July that indicates the virus is airborne, and cleaning surfaces and hands won’t be sufficient to stop outbreaks in schools? It only took them half a year to adjust their opinion on masks being used in public. In another half a year, most students could have already acquired COVID-19 organ damage for the rest of their natural lives.
Before there was a mask shortage to at least partially excuse why medical experts oddly advised against them. They convinced me then. I almost brought it up with a friend walking by my desk in public, with a dust mask around his neck. I saw the same friend a couple weeks ago. He was in public, social distancing, but without a mask, indoors. It’s too large a leap to expect individuals to all mask up without government intervention. And I think it’s a leap to expect political pressure to not corrupt medical science for selfish reasons. I expect the Sask. Government to try and open schools as if everything is normal, because it’s run by amoral, corrupt, anti-science, Luddites and worse.
