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March 29, 2024, 03:07:33 am

Author Topic: COVID-19 and Education  (Read 84134 times)  Share 

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sweetiepi

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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #195 on: July 12, 2020, 01:36:54 pm »
+3
Most Victorian students will return to remote learning in term three, with those in years prep to 10.

It has been officially announced that we are returning back to remote learning (those in year prep - 10)

What do you think about this?
Inevitable, but doesn't stop my parents going nooooooooooooo because I'm not around much to help out this time (as it currently stands) 😂😅
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #196 on: July 12, 2020, 09:46:54 pm »
+3
Not sure if this is unique to my friends' experience but a worrying number of teachers are choosing to stay at home. While of course they are entitled to work from home should they feel they are at risk, how will VCAA account for the fact that some students essentially did not have a present teacher for the majority of the year? I really feel bad for them because they essentially have "online school" but at school and have to learn many things independently. Not to mention the fact that they falling so behind in terms of content... this year is such a mess can I just hibernate to 2021
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #197 on: July 12, 2020, 09:51:32 pm »
+5
this year is such a mess can I just hibernate to 2021
Even if you do 'hibernate' to 2021, I doubt it will be any better... it's impossible to completely ease restrictions until there is a suitable cure or vaccine, unfortunately. And by the looks of it, a vaccine is not going to available in the near future - we can only hope that there's a successful one at the end of this year. If not, the start of 2021 is not looking to be any less bleak.
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turinturambar

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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #198 on: July 13, 2020, 09:05:07 pm »
+3
Even if you do 'hibernate' to 2021, I doubt it will be any better... it's impossible to completely ease restrictions until there is a suitable cure or vaccine, unfortunately. And by the looks of it, a vaccine is not going to available in the near future - we can only hope that there's a successful one at the end of this year. If not, the start of 2021 is not looking to be any less bleak.

Even if there are one or more effective vaccine candidates by the end of the year, scaling it up to the world population will be a non-trivial job that takes time.  Even if countries like Australia and the US grab control of a lot of the supply (which I'm hearing is what happened with the swine flu vaccine 10 years ago - and did not make us popular), just getting it manufactured and administered to everyone needing it (most of the population if you want some kind of herd immunity...) will take time.
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #199 on: July 13, 2020, 09:14:08 pm »
+3
Even if there are one or more effective vaccine candidates by the end of the year, scaling it up to the world population will be a non-trivial job that takes time.  Even if countries like Australia and the US grab control of a lot of the supply (which I'm hearing is what happened with the swine flu vaccine 10 years ago - and did not make us popular), just getting it manufactured and administered to everyone needing it (most of the population if you want some kind of herd immunity...) will take time.
This is true. But don't they already have stuff that they've been testing, at any rate?
this year is such a mess can I just hibernate to 2021
I know other people have already said this but - this thing ain't going away soon. Everyone seems to talk about it like everything'll be fine by the end of the year, exams and so forth, and yet that's not how it looks.
Why can't we just do hard lockdown - as in, no one sees anyone else for two weeks, no contact at all, and then test everyone? Then the people who come in positive can be kept home (by force if needed) and everyone else can go about their merry way. Or three weeks to be safe.
Year 12 this year is interesting, no doubt about it. A mix of good and bad for us kids. I do like not having all the other students around at the moment though... but that's probably my introversion speaking. And probably not good anyway.
All my subjects are right now up to date with where we should be without COVID - in other words, with it, for my class, this is better. Hmm... ???
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #200 on: July 13, 2020, 09:31:35 pm »
+3
This is true. But don't they already have stuff that they've been testing, at any rate?
Yes - everyone has been in a mad scramble to be the first to commercialise a successful vaccine, because not only will it prevent everyone from being affected by COVID, but also it'll make them quite rich, haha. However, producing and trialling vaccines is a long process - every time the developing vaccine is found to be unsuitable, they have to scrap it and start over. Like turinturambar stated, distribution also isn't easy, and poses the question of who gets vaccinated first and if those in poverty will even have access to the vaccine.

Why can't we just do hard lockdown - as in, no one sees anyone else for two weeks, no contact at all, and then test everyone? Then the people who come in positive can be kept home (by force if needed) and everyone else can go about their merry way. Or three weeks to be safe.
I think this is because hard lockdown for any period of time will significantly worsen the already damaged economy, and the government cares about the economy a lot. I also don't think many people would be keen to do this, because there's the whole thing of if the virus is contained early and infections drop, people will criticise it as too much, and if restrictions are imposed too late and too lax, then people will criticise it as too little. I think this was also discussed on the other thread about Victoria's lockdown measures. There's also a shortage of testing kits, iirc?
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #201 on: July 13, 2020, 09:56:11 pm »
+1
Interestingly, my house mate just told me that Victoria is tossing up the idea of complete elimination.

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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #202 on: July 13, 2020, 10:20:34 pm »
+3
I feel like this is moving a little bit away from education but nonetheless

Retrospectively it looks like we should've gone with the elimination strategy from the start. Given Australia has no borders with other countries and at the beginning only had minimal community transmission it becomes an ideal country to go for the elimination strategy. However, looking back I don't think a lot of the general public would've accepted this and would've said it is an overreaction. Even with the initial lockdown it was quite possible to be done once we got to low levels in Victoria but everyone was complaining about the need to open up quickly.

The health first response would be elimination. I am seeing a lot of epidemiologists and health officials say that if we go for that strategy we should go for it within the next month.

The economy vs health argument is interesting. We have already seen some countries that have prioritised the economy but they are still getting destroyed regardless. Australia has done ok to somewhat artificially prop up the economy via stimulus payments but once this is all over the real impact of the pandemic is likely to be seen.

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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #203 on: July 14, 2020, 12:57:01 am »
+8
This is true. But don't they already have stuff that they've been testing, at any rate?

As I understand it, the usual vaccine development process is measured in years.  This is already fast.  There are multiple rounds of testing, testing things like is it safe, does it actually provide immunity, does it have unexpected side effects, etc.  Typically these things would be done in serial - we're trying to do them more in parallel, but there are still limits to how fast you can go.

Quote
Why can't we just do hard lockdown - as in, no one sees anyone else for two weeks, no contact at all, and then test everyone? Then the people who come in positive can be kept home (by force if needed) and everyone else can go about their merry way. Or three weeks to be safe.

What's the false positive rate on those tests?  And the false negative rate?  Who's administering them?  And processing them?  How long does it take to test everyone? (took multiple days for a few towers, remember)  Are any of the people administering them sick?  How do you know there's no-one tested who has contracted it but are not quite infectious yet?  Are the people keeping other people home by force not sick?  Can they ensure the integrity of their protective equipment while also restraining someone?

During this hard lockdown, who's taking care of people in hospitals?  Aged care homes?  People feeling suicidal from the enforced isolation?  People in quarantine hotels?  Who's delivering babies?  Who's stopping the people who inevitably break that lockdown?  What's the correct response to domestic violence in lockdown?  Who's keeping electricity running?  Water?  Other essential services?

And that's just off the top of my head.  The four reasons aren't just government being too nice: There are good reasons for each of them.  We can certainly debate whether we should have a harder lockdown than we have now - I'm not convinced that the benefits would outweigh the personal and community costs of going too much harder, and I think you'd get outright rebellion if you presented it as the plan that solved everything and it turned out not to.  But to say we can 100% stop society for 2 weeks - we just can't.

That said, I do find it odd that this situation in Melbourne is more serious than it was in April, and yet the restrictions are slightly less restrictive.  I suspect part of that is that the authorities are (correctly) wary of lockdown fatigue.  The best rules in the world don't help if you can't convince enough of your population to follow them.

Like turinturambar stated, distribution also isn't easy, and poses the question of who gets vaccinated first and if those in poverty will even have access to the vaccine.

In a country like Australia, we likely have the resources to give it to everyone, poverty or not, and doing so is likely to reduce the risk for everyone in Australia (particularly if the early vaccines are more like 60 - 70% effective).  We will probably rely on the fact that we can largely keep out unvaccinated people, and so people in poverty stricken countries without the vaccine will not be as significant a risk to Australians.  Not saying this is a good thing, just that I've been profoundly disappointed by how much Covid-19 has shown off our human insularity, pitting country against country, state against state, return travellers against people already in the country, community against community, etc.

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I think this is because hard lockdown for any period of time will significantly worsen the already damaged economy, and the government cares about the economy a lot.

This has been Fed vs State the entire time.  The Feds have more responsibility for the economy, the states more responsibility for health.  They've worked together better than in some countries, but Victoria and NSW in particular have throughout been stricter than national or the other states.

Retrospectively it looks like we should've gone with the elimination strategy from the start. Given Australia has no borders with other countries and at the beginning only had minimal community transmission it becomes an ideal country to go for the elimination strategy. However, looking back I don't think a lot of the general public would've accepted this and would've said it is an overreaction. Even with the initial lockdown it was quite possible to be done once we got to low levels in Victoria but everyone was complaining about the need to open up quickly.

I still don't get how this squares with Covid-19 jumping out of quarantine hotels.  Maybe that happened before we eased lockdown - I'm not 100% sure any more - but while there remains the possibility of errors, there remains the possibility of errors with serious consequences after we've declared it eliminated.  NZ, poster child of elimination, have had people get out of quarantine on multiple occasions, at least one where someone was positive.  They haven't had spikes as a result (that I know of), but is that 100% good management, or is there some luck as well?  We had people going through quarantine hotels in Melbourne then testing positive in NT and NSW, and I don't think we know whether they caught it in hotspot suburbs once out of quarantine, or whether it was still dormant somewhere inside them (we do know people can be ill for months after catching it while testing negative - does that manifest in any other strange ways that end up contagious?)

I have long felt we should drive it as close to zero as we can get it and try to keep it there, including border control as one of our most effective measures, but I'm not sure I believe in complete elimination with absolutely zero human error (though one of the advantages of driving it towards zero is that you can make more mistakes without consequences - because I still believe other states and other individuals within other states have made mistakes, but got away with those mistakes because they had a low virus load and maybe got a bit lucky).

Quote
The economy vs health argument is interesting. We have already seen some countries that have prioritised the economy but they are still getting destroyed regardless. Australia has done ok to somewhat artificially prop up the economy via stimulus payments but once this is all over the real impact of the pandemic is likely to be seen.

Part of the problem is that governments cannot by fiat declare that their citizens will not be scared of Covid-19 or of unemployment.  Many people were reducing their economic activity before official lockdowns, and that hits the economy.  Then of course businesses close and companies lay off workers (less here with JobKeeper, but it's still an issue).  Then people feel less certain about the security of their jobs and are more worried about spending, and the cycle continues.  I largely agreed with Scott Morrison's "once you start re-opening you should try not to close again", because it shatters confidence re-closing and that will have long-term consequences - but we always knew that there could be situations serious enough to have to go backwards.  Without the quarantine hotels here, maybe Victoria would have avoided spikes too.  No idea.  Rightly or wrongly, I did feel fairly safe in Melbourne in June, though I didn't go out of my way to join gatherings of people (other than family) or to eat in (or even to get my hair cut :P ).

When I compare us with, say, the US, the US has many states which reopened against the health advice because of the economy, and quite a few are now re-closing.  We re-opened following health advice, and, as I said, I at least thought it was tracking fairly well for the first month...

Finally, I can see in retrospect that a number of times during this pandemic my opinion has been wrong - so don't trust my judgement in public health matters :P
« Last Edit: July 14, 2020, 01:04:22 am by turinturambar »
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #204 on: July 16, 2020, 09:25:42 am »
+1
What's the false positive rate on those tests?  And the false negative rate?  Who's administering them?  And processing them?  How long does it take to test everyone? (took multiple days for a few towers, remember)  Are any of the people administering them sick?  How do you know there's no-one tested who has contracted it but are not quite infectious yet?  Are the people keeping other people home by force not sick?  Can they ensure the integrity of their protective equipment while also restraining someone?

During this hard lockdown, who's taking care of people in hospitals?  Aged care homes?  People feeling suicidal from the enforced isolation?  People in quarantine hotels?  Who's delivering babies?  Who's stopping the people who inevitably break that lockdown?  What's the correct response to domestic violence in lockdown?  Who's keeping electricity running?  Water?  Other essential services?
I know these are issues, I knew it when I said it. It doesn't change the fact that that could be the best policy.
'Outright rebellion' - in a world that is more connected than ever before, I think we're just too much used to our own way! I get that it's hard, I get it, I get it, but seriously? In preparing for it, aren't we basically telling people we expect them to break rules in such a way that we'll probably end up with several people dead? In the past they would've done it, wouldn't've expected to break rules (except for a minority) and wouldn't have the ability to contact others as we can. Granted, this is unprecendented, but we've had smaller-scale things than this before and stuck to the rules. Is it unreasonable to class us Generation Wimp?
(or even to get my hair cut :P ).
We could tell :P ;)
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turinturambar

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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #205 on: July 16, 2020, 11:12:56 pm »
+2
I know these are issues, I knew it when I said it. It doesn't change the fact that that could be the best policy.

If it's unworkable it's not the best policy.

Quote
'Outright rebellion' - in a world that is more connected than ever before, I think we're just too much used to our own way! I get that it's hard, I get it, I get it, but seriously? In preparing for it, aren't we basically telling people we expect them to break rules in such a way that we'll probably end up with several people dead? In the past they would've done it, wouldn't've expected to break rules (except for a minority) and wouldn't have the ability to contact others as we can. Granted, this is unprecendented, but we've had smaller-scale  things than this before and stuck to the rules. Is it unreasonable to class us Generation Wimp?

Absolutely it's unreasonable to class us Generation Wimp.  Talking about people dying isn't necessarily helpful when I identified multiple ways your suggestion could put people at risk of dying.  And what makes you think  you'd find greater compliance in past generations than now?

But you took two words way out of context.  Read the sentence again.  This isn't about obedience, it's about trust.  I have said from the start that it's dangerous to say "If everyone obeys, we will get through this quicker", because I'm not convinced it's true.  Statistically, it's probably somewhat true, but it ignores the impact of luck on spread, and it leads almost inevitably to a blame game when we don't actually get through it faster, or when (like this time) we go back into lock-down again when we were implicitly promised last time that our tighter restrictions in Victoria would make Victoria safer than the other states.  I understand why they do it - to try and incentivise better compliance - but they're making implicit promises that they can't actually fulfil.

I think this is a lot worse with your proposal: Yes, I think a large percentage of Victorians would agree to harsher restrictions over a few weeks over lighter restrictions over 6+ weeks.  But to make that deal, the government has to essentially guarantee that the harsh restrictions will be successful.  And they can't.  If they succeed, great.  But if they fail, how many people will trust them to get it right next time?  Lighter restrictions over a longer period of time allows them to adjust restrictions and choose a re-open date in response to the data, rather than making a one-off gamble and hoping it works out.

Quote
We could tell :P ;)

Walking to my local grocery store to get groceries and exercise today, I walked past the hairdresser I usually use.  They were closed with a sign on the door that one of their clients was a contact of a Covid-19 positive case, so they were waiting for test results before re-opening.  I joked with a co-worker that I wouldn't get my hair cut this year.  This may well end up true.
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #206 on: July 17, 2020, 02:08:14 pm »
0
If it's unworkable it's not the best policy.
Perhaps. But I contend that it isn't unworkable - just difficult.
Quote
Absolutely it's unreasonable to class us Generation Wimp.  Talking about people dying isn't necessarily helpful when I identified multiple ways your suggestion could put people at risk of dying.  And what makes you think  you'd find greater compliance in past generations than now?
We're too used to being able to do everything we want. I do think we'd have greater compliance in past generations. For one, they were more used to being forced to make do - something we aren't. There was this thing called 'grin and bear it', 'stiff upper lip'. You notice it isn't extant any more?
But more importantly, older generations had more belief in God, allowing them to trust in him and know that he had given them this for a reason (such as, this might be the return of Jesus!) So they could trust in God and then they wouldn't be getting terrified by a virus like a lot of people nowdays. Rebellion is allowed and I would say almost encouraged in the depraved society in which we live. Once the society as a whole walked away from the truths of the Bible it all went downhill from there.
Quote
But you took two words way out of context.  Read the sentence again.  This isn't about obedience, it's about trust. 
OK.
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I think this is a lot worse with your proposal: Yes, I think a large percentage of Victorians would agree to harsher restrictions over a few weeks over lighter restrictions over 6+ weeks.  But to make that deal, the government has to essentially guarantee that the harsh restrictions will be successful.  And they can't.  If they succeed, great.  But if they fail, how many people will trust them to get it right next time?  Lighter restrictions over a longer period of time allows them to adjust restrictions and choose a re-open date in response to the data, rather than making a one-off gamble and hoping it works out.
That might be true. I guess people are probably less compliant now because of the time we did it and relaxed already. I'm not too happy with people's behaviour then either, but that isn't the issue now.
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I joked with a co-worker that I wouldn't get my hair cut this year.  This may well end up true.
Perhaps... do you really think it'll go on that long? Bringing it back to education - what about VCE education and so forth? Do you think it'll stay the way they're optimistically saying now?
Spoiler
I don't. I think we're in, at this point, for the long haul. My social skills are dying, but I don't mind...
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #207 on: July 17, 2020, 04:30:17 pm »
+15
This thread is for discussion about COVID-19's impact on education and, as has been noted, it's been veering off-topic. There is already a thread on opinions about Victoria's lockdown here. This topic of conversation can invoke strong feelings and be contentious, any posts (whether here or in rants and debate) will be expected to adhere to the forum rules, especially our first one of respect.

Let's get replies here back to just being about the impact of covid-19 on education

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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #208 on: July 17, 2020, 09:11:13 pm »
+3
This thread is for discussion about COVID-19's impact on education and, as has been noted, it's been veering off-topic. There is already a thread on opinions about Victoria's lockdown here. This topic of conversation can invoke strong feelings and be contentious, any posts (whether here or in rants and debate) will be expected to adhere to the forum rules, especially our first one of respect.

Let's get replies here back to just being about the impact of covid-19 on education

Sorry. Turin, you want to shift to the other thread?

Will COVID shut down schools again? Exams? I reckon so but what are others' opinions?
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Re: COVID-19 and Education
« Reply #209 on: July 27, 2020, 12:30:04 pm »
+7
Questions for those who are going to school currently.

What sort of interventions are in place at school to prevent the spread of the virus. I know schools have temperature checks in the morning but for asymptomatic individuals what other changes are in place. How often are classrooms getting cleaned? How close are students normally? What goes on during recess and lunch time? How often are students not following the rules?