#i have anger issues & texas drivers make them worse

[emdotcom]

Lol. Yeah I'm pissed -- ihate this place.

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Schools Walk the Tightrope Between Ideal Safety and the Reality of Covid

California mom Megan Bacigalupi has had enough. She wants her kindergartner and second grader back in their Oakland classrooms.

This story also ran on USA Today. It can be republished for free.

But the coronavirus is spreading too quickly to open schools in Alameda County, based on the current state standards. And the local teachers union hasn’t agreed to go back — even after teachers have been vaccinated. So she expects her kids will be logging on to school from home for a while.

“The impediments to opening are just too great,” said Bacigalupi, who is lobbying California lawmakers to establish firm, statewide health metrics that, once met, would require schools to open. “In the end, it comes down to a lack of political will to get the kids back in the classroom.”

Parents across the country, many of whom relied on schools to care for their children while they worked, are frustrated and angry that remote instruction has gone on so long, even as grocery store clerks, city bus drivers and other essential workers have braved the risks of their workplaces. Lawmakers are increasingly joining their calls to get kids into classrooms, citing the loss of worker productivity and parents’ concerns about the social, emotional and academic effects on children.

President Joe Biden has pledged to open most schools within his first 100 days in office if Congress provides funding, and if states and cities adopt safety steps.

But that will be a herculean task. Nearly one year into the pandemic, fewer than half of students are attending schools that are teaching in person every day, and the question of how and when to get kids back into classrooms often depends less on science than politics — including the strength of local teachers unions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded recently that schools can reopen safely if their communities have low levels of the virus and they adhere strictly to measures such as requiring everyone to stay 6 feet apart and wear masks.

But in numerous communities, those basic measures haven’t been followed, even before the vaccine rollout — and many teachers aren’t convinced they will be safe on campus.

With infection rates starting to decline nationally, many parents, superintendents, school boards and politicians insist this is the moment to stop striving for perfection and embrace the health measures necessary to get kids into classrooms safely. Some are even taking dramatic measures, such as the city of San Francisco, which sued its school district Wednesday to force it to open.

The same day, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a press briefing that schools can safely reopen even if teachers aren’t yet vaccinated.

“If we wait for the perfect, we might as well just pack it up and just be honest with folks that we’re not going to open for in-person instruction in the school year,” Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently told school administrators — breaking with the politically powerful California Teachers Association, which wants all teachers vaccinated before reopening.

Teachers Fear for Safety

In many states, teachers lobbied to be among the first to be vaccinated after health care workers and nursing home residents. But they also argue the vaccines alone are not enough to open schools. They want low levels of community spread. They want as many school staffers as possible vaccinated, which could take months. And they want assurances that schools won’t relax masking, physical distancing and other safety measures.

“We’ve had concerns about some districts being more lax even before the vaccine,” said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

Dr. Mark Schleiss, a pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, agreed that health measures must be enforced even after vaccination.

“It’s unfortunate that people think life goes back to normal, that once we get the vaccine, the masks come flying off,” he said. “Vaccination doesn’t take things back to normal.”

That’s because there are still unknowns about the vaccines: It’s unclear if vaccinated people can transmit the virus. Plus, not all adults can get a vaccine (for medical reasons), and about 5% of those who receive the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech versions might not be fully protected. Kids are another matter entirely: No covid vaccine has yet been approved for use in children younger than 16.

Teachers say they feel especially vulnerable when the virus is running rampant in a community, but health experts don’t agree on exactly what that means.

“We don’t know a definite threshold,” said Dr. Neha Nanda, medical director of infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California.

In Montgomery, Alabama, four educators died within 48 hours in January, spurring the city’s district to go remote starting Feb. 1.

“We have educators who are dying from this. We know they’re taking it home,” said Theron Stokes, associate executive director of the Alabama Education Association teachers union.

The Politics of Reopening

As of late January, about 38% of K-12 public school students attended virtual-only schools, 38% attended in-person schools, and 24% attended hybrid schools that offered a mix of both, according to Burbio, a company tracking a representative sample of 1,200 school districts.

Decisions about returning to school have often been driven by ideology in the absence of firm scientific guidance about community spread.

Politics plays as big a role as health, said Bree Dusseault, practitioner-in-residence at the Center on Reinventing Education, a nonpartisan research center that has tracked 477 school districts since March. “Because the pandemic became so politicized, districts found themselves in political debates in their own communities.”

For instance, some politically motivated decisions to reopen schools were made despite dangerous surges in covid cases over the summer. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott told schools in July they’d have to transition to in-person education after the state attorney general declared “sweeping” school closures unlawful. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to withhold state funding from schools that did not reopen in person.

In Democratic strongholds such as New Jersey and Chicago, powerful unions have protested and delayed school reopenings.

Union opposition played a part in the Oakland school district’s decision to stick with remote-only learning in the fall, which boggled Bacigalupi’s mind because covid cases had dropped after the summer surge. At the time, restaurants, gyms and hair salons in her county were allowed to partially reopen, and some schools in neighboring counties had also opened.

“One of the reasons it’s so frustrating is that we can look at so many places and we see tens of thousands of kids back in school,” said Bacigalupi, whose children, ages 5 and 8, have been out of school for nearly a year. “I’m also just sad. And the sadness gets worse as you see what’s happening to your kid. It’s harming them.”

Bacigalupi said her second grader is like a different child — he’s quick to anger and struggles to regulate his emotions. He now gets counseling once a week.

Balancing Risks

Under pressure, more schools are reopening by the day. In Cincinnati, city schools returned to a hybrid model of in-person and remote learning this month after a judge dismissed a teachers union lawsuit seeking to delay reopening.

Public health officials say districts must acknowledge that holding school in person is a calculated risk, and take concrete steps to minimize the danger for staff members and kids. These include separating desks in classrooms — even if that means holding class in a gymnasium — erecting plexiglass barriers where possible and limiting school sports.

“Implementing a combination of all of these layered approaches will make it a lot safer,” said Krystal Pollitt, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, which last year issued guidance to help schools determine when to reopen.

For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country, has taken a number of measures, including installing upgraded air filters, purchasing an ionized cleaning system to sanitize surfaces and rearranging furniture in classrooms, said Kelly Gonez, president of the school board.

But like the local and state teachers unions and the district superintendent, Gonez believes the rampant spread of covid in the region must be addressed first.

“Once the broader covid conditions are in a safer place in the community, I think we will be ready,” Gonez said. “We have the protocols in place to do this successfully.”

On Wednesday, the local American Academy of Pediatrics chapter countered that schools should reopen immediately because the social isolation, anxiety and lack of structure are “causing undue harm” to children.

“‘Safe’ is a relative term,” said Schleiss, the Minnesota professor. “Continuing to attend school with careful monitoring is reasonable. We don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Schools Walk the Tightrope Between Ideal Safety and the Reality of Covid published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Schools Walk the Tightrope Between Ideal Safety and the Reality of Covid

California mom Megan Bacigalupi has had enough. She wants her kindergartner and second grader back in their Oakland classrooms.

This story also ran on USA Today. It can be republished for free.

But the coronavirus is spreading too quickly to open schools in Alameda County, based on the current state standards. And the local teachers union hasn’t agreed to go back — even after teachers have been vaccinated. So she expects her kids will be logging on to school from home for a while.

“The impediments to opening are just too great,” said Bacigalupi, who is lobbying California lawmakers to establish firm, statewide health metrics that, once met, would require schools to open. “In the end, it comes down to a lack of political will to get the kids back in the classroom.”

Parents across the country, many of whom relied on schools to care for their children while they worked, are frustrated and angry that remote instruction has gone on so long, even as grocery store clerks, city bus drivers and other essential workers have braved the risks of their workplaces. Lawmakers are increasingly joining their calls to get kids into classrooms, citing the loss of worker productivity and parents’ concerns about the social, emotional and academic effects on children.

President Joe Biden has pledged to open most schools within his first 100 days in office if Congress provides funding, and if states and cities adopt safety steps.

But that will be a herculean task. Nearly one year into the pandemic, fewer than half of students are attending schools that are teaching in person every day, and the question of how and when to get kids back into classrooms often depends less on science than politics — including the strength of local teachers unions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded recently that schools can reopen safely if their communities have low levels of the virus and they adhere strictly to measures such as requiring everyone to stay 6 feet apart and wear masks.

But in numerous communities, those basic measures haven’t been followed, even before the vaccine rollout — and many teachers aren’t convinced they will be safe on campus.

With infection rates starting to decline nationally, many parents, superintendents, school boards and politicians insist this is the moment to stop striving for perfection and embrace the health measures necessary to get kids into classrooms safely. Some are even taking dramatic measures, such as the city of San Francisco, which sued its school district Wednesday to force it to open.

The same day, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a press briefing that schools can safely reopen even if teachers aren’t yet vaccinated.

“If we wait for the perfect, we might as well just pack it up and just be honest with folks that we’re not going to open for in-person instruction in the school year,” Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently told school administrators — breaking with the politically powerful California Teachers Association, which wants all teachers vaccinated before reopening.

Teachers Fear for Safety

In many states, teachers lobbied to be among the first to be vaccinated after health care workers and nursing home residents. But they also argue the vaccines alone are not enough to open schools. They want low levels of community spread. They want as many school staffers as possible vaccinated, which could take months. And they want assurances that schools won’t relax masking, physical distancing and other safety measures.

“We’ve had concerns about some districts being more lax even before the vaccine,” said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

Dr. Mark Schleiss, a pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, agreed that health measures must be enforced even after vaccination.

“It’s unfortunate that people think life goes back to normal, that once we get the vaccine, the masks come flying off,” he said. “Vaccination doesn’t take things back to normal.”

That’s because there are still unknowns about the vaccines: It’s unclear if vaccinated people can transmit the virus. Plus, not all adults can get a vaccine (for medical reasons), and about 5% of those who receive the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech versions might not be fully protected. Kids are another matter entirely: No covid vaccine has yet been approved for use in children younger than 16.

Teachers say they feel especially vulnerable when the virus is running rampant in a community, but health experts don’t agree on exactly what that means.

“We don’t know a definite threshold,” said Dr. Neha Nanda, medical director of infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California.

In Montgomery, Alabama, four educators died within 48 hours in January, spurring the city’s district to go remote starting Feb. 1.

“We have educators who are dying from this. We know they’re taking it home,” said Theron Stokes, associate executive director of the Alabama Education Association teachers union.

The Politics of Reopening

As of late January, about 38% of K-12 public school students attended virtual-only schools, 38% attended in-person schools, and 24% attended hybrid schools that offered a mix of both, according to Burbio, a company tracking a representative sample of 1,200 school districts.

Decisions about returning to school have often been driven by ideology in the absence of firm scientific guidance about community spread.

Politics plays as big a role as health, said Bree Dusseault, practitioner-in-residence at the Center on Reinventing Education, a nonpartisan research center that has tracked 477 school districts since March. “Because the pandemic became so politicized, districts found themselves in political debates in their own communities.”

For instance, some politically motivated decisions to reopen schools were made despite dangerous surges in covid cases over the summer. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott told schools in July they’d have to transition to in-person education after the state attorney general declared “sweeping” school closures unlawful. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to withhold state funding from schools that did not reopen in person.

In Democratic strongholds such as New Jersey and Chicago, powerful unions have protested and delayed school reopenings.

Union opposition played a part in the Oakland school district’s decision to stick with remote-only learning in the fall, which boggled Bacigalupi’s mind because covid cases had dropped after the summer surge. At the time, restaurants, gyms and hair salons in her county were allowed to partially reopen, and some schools in neighboring counties had also opened.

“One of the reasons it’s so frustrating is that we can look at so many places and we see tens of thousands of kids back in school,” said Bacigalupi, whose children, ages 5 and 8, have been out of school for nearly a year. “I’m also just sad. And the sadness gets worse as you see what’s happening to your kid. It’s harming them.”

Bacigalupi said her second grader is like a different child — he’s quick to anger and struggles to regulate his emotions. He now gets counseling once a week.

Balancing Risks

Under pressure, more schools are reopening by the day. In Cincinnati, city schools returned to a hybrid model of in-person and remote learning this month after a judge dismissed a teachers union lawsuit seeking to delay reopening.

Public health officials say districts must acknowledge that holding school in person is a calculated risk, and take concrete steps to minimize the danger for staff members and kids. These include separating desks in classrooms — even if that means holding class in a gymnasium — erecting plexiglass barriers where possible and limiting school sports.

“Implementing a combination of all of these layered approaches will make it a lot safer,” said Krystal Pollitt, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, which last year issued guidance to help schools determine when to reopen.

For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country, has taken a number of measures, including installing upgraded air filters, purchasing an ionized cleaning system to sanitize surfaces and rearranging furniture in classrooms, said Kelly Gonez, president of the school board.

But like the local and state teachers unions and the district superintendent, Gonez believes the rampant spread of covid in the region must be addressed first.

“Once the broader covid conditions are in a safer place in the community, I think we will be ready,” Gonez said. “We have the protocols in place to do this successfully.”

On Wednesday, the local American Academy of Pediatrics chapter countered that schools should reopen immediately because the social isolation, anxiety and lack of structure are “causing undue harm” to children.

“‘Safe’ is a relative term,” said Schleiss, the Minnesota professor. “Continuing to attend school with careful monitoring is reasonable. We don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Schools Walk the Tightrope Between Ideal Safety and the Reality of Covid published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[biofunmy]

90,000 Packages Disappear Daily in N.Y.C. Is Help on the Way?

Online deliveries to an apartment building in northern Manhattan are left with a retired woman in 2H who watches over her neighbors’ packages to make sure nothing gets stolen.

Corporate mailrooms in New York and other cities are overwhelmed by employees shipping personal packages to work for safekeeping, leading companies to ban packages and issue warnings that boxes will be intercepted and returned to the senders.

A new start-up company is gambling that online shoppers who are worried about not getting their packages will be willing to pay extra to ship them to a home-based network of package receivers in Brooklyn.

With online shopping surging and another holiday season unfolding, customers’ mounting frustration and anger over stolen packages are driving many to take creative and even extreme measures to keep items out of the hands of thieves.

In New York City, where more orders are delivered than anywhere else in the country, over 90,000 packages a day are stolen or disappear without explanation, up roughly 20 percent from four years ago, according to an analysis conducted for The New York Times.

About 15 percent of all deliveries in urban areas fail to reach customers on the first attempt because of package theft and other issues, like deliveries to the wrong house, according to transportation experts.

In suburbs and rural areas, thieves often follow delivery trucks and snatch just-delivered packages from homes, often out of sight of neighbors.

Now online shoppers are turning to a variety of strategies to stymie thieves. Some are installing video doorbell cameras or, at the urging of postal workers, replacing outdated mailboxes from a bygone era of postcards and letters with models that can accommodate large packages.

Online retailers and shipping services, recognizing the scope of the problem, are trying to help customers. Amazon has launched a real-time tracking service so shoppers can arrange to be home when a delivery arrives. UPS is working with a technology company to enable drivers to deposit orders for apartment buildings in locked package rooms.

Amazon, UPS and FedEx also offer an expanding network of secure delivery sites for packages when no one is home. Amazon has over 100 “Hub Lockers” in Manhattan alone. Today, a growing number of bodegas, supermarkets, convenience stores, drugstores and florists are acting as makeshift package holding centers.

Package theft has become so rampant in an apartment building in Brooklyn Heights that one resident, Julie Hoffer, says she now avoids shipping anything to her home that cannot fit in a mailbox.

She sends large boxes to a nearby UPS store, or to a relative in Manhattan. “It’s an issue every time I have to order anything,” Ms. Hoffer, said. “Do they offer tracking? Is it too big for a mailbox? Do I have it diverted?”

“I can’t have my medications delivered here or anything that is essential,’’ she said. “I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that it’s getting worse.”

Around the country, more than 1.7 million packages are stolen or go missing every day — adding up to more than $25 million in lost goods and services, according to an analysis for The Times by José Holguín-Veras, an engineering professor and director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems.

In a new survey by insuranceQuotes.com, an online insurance service, nearly 1 in 5 respondents nationally reported having had a package stolen.

“The internet economy has brought tremendous efficiencies but it has also created unintended consequences,” Professor Holguín-Veras said. “Human history shows that new technology solves some problems, but in doing so, it creates others.”

Yet the extent of package theft has been largely underestimated because most cases are not reported to the police. Customers have little incentive to do so when online retailers typically refund or replace items for free, often with few questions.

Most police departments do not track package thefts, but those that have examined the problem have reported notable increases.

The Denver Police Department started compiling data on package thefts in 2015, and has seen a 68 percent increase in reported cases, to 708 last year, from 421 four years ago.

In Washington D.C., 1,846 cases of package theft were reported as of mid-November, already exceeding last year’s total of 1,546 cases, according to police records.

In New York, the police do not break out stolen packages into a separate category. Instead, these cases generally fall under grand larceny if an item is valued at more than $1,000, or petit larceny if valued at less.

Even so, package theft has become a concern in some police precincts. The 77th Precinct in Brooklyn recently posted a reminder on Twitter: “Don’t let your purchase become a steal for someone else.”

Package horror stories have become so common that some state lawmakers are taking aim at thieves. In Texas, package thieves could face up to 10 years in prison under a new law. A South Carolina bill, called the Defense Against Porch Pirates Act, would make package theft a felony.

Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce company, did not respond to repeated questions about how often its packages are stolen, saying only that the “vast majority of deliveries” arrive without an issue.

UPS and FedEx also declined to share numbers about pilfered packages.

FedEx and UPS offer delivery options that allow customers to leave instructions where to leave packages and UPS drivers have been trained to leave parcels in inconspicuous locations like behind bushes.

Concerns about package theft have helped push video doorbell camera sales to about 1.2 million cameras nationally this year from less than 100,000 cameras sold in 2014, according to Jack Narcotta, a senior analyst for Strategy Analytics.

“It’s a sense of, ‘I’m going to protect what’s mine — even if I have to get my camera,’” Jason Hargraves, managing editor of insuranceQuotes.com, said of the concerns about package theft.

Still, many New Yorkers have little, if any, package security. Parcels are routinely left outside brownstones and houses in crowded neighborhoods with heavy foot traffic.

In apartment buildings without doormen, residents — and anyone else passing through — can pick through boxes piled in lobbies or hallways in a kind of honor system.

Mercedes Alonte, 26, a wardrobe stylist who gets shipments of clothing for work, had packages disappear last fall from her Brooklyn building, which she has since moved out of. “It made me really on edge,” she said. “I can’t do my job if I can’t trust the packages are going to be there when I get home.”

Shane Reidy, 30, an architectural designer, used to ship packages to his Manhattan office. But he grew tired of carrying his orders — one was a 30-pound exercise bar — home on the subway, so now he takes his chances at his building in Queens.

Some companies that have become inundated with personal packages are telling their employees to find other options. JPMorgan Chase has asked its workers not to have shipments sent to the office, while Warner Media warns that packages will be returned to the sender.

Assuaging the anxiety of online shoppers has provided a new source of income for some businesses.

One mailbox store, the Brooklyn Postal Center, receives about 100 packages a day for residents who pay up to $5 for each delivery. “People used to come in for mailboxes,” said Suhaib Ali, the owner. “Over time, more and more people were signing up for mailboxes but didn’t actually want them for mail. They just wanted to receive their packages.”

Gabriel Cepeda, 23, came up with the idea for a start-up company built around collecting packages, called Pickups Technologies, after his own Amazon order of computer hard drives was stolen last year outside of his parents’ home in New Jersey. He spent hours on the phone trying to get his order replaced. “It was bad enough to motivate me to brainstorm,” he said.

Now Mr. Cepeda’s company connects online shoppers with a network of about 30 residents in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg who will accept packages at their homes at all hours, for fees ranging from $4.99 for a single delivery, to $9.99 for a monthly service. The company plans to expand to more neighborhoods.

In East Harlem, Miriam Cruz, a retired nurse’s aide, is almost always home so a couple of neighbors asked her to keep their packages for safekeeping. Soon, word spread around the building, and over the past five years she has opened her door to thousands of packages.

Nothing has been stolen on her watch — unlike the box of Nike sneakers that disappeared recently from outside another apartment. “Put Nikes in front of anyone’s door, of course they’re going to take it,” she said.

Ms. Cruz, 69, said her family did not want her to do it at first because of worries about strangers showing up at her door. She did it anyway. Now, during the holidays, she has boxes filling her hallway and spilling into her bedroom. If neighbors do not pick them up, she posts reminder notes on their doors.

Ms. Cruz, who is known as “Ma” to her neighbors, refuses to take money so they have thanked her with cake and chocolates.

“This is something I do,’’ she said, “because I love my neighbors and I want to pay it forward.’’

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