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David Roberts's avatar

I applaud your go forward comments policy. Anything one can do to make life more polite is worthwhile.

At a middle school in Washington Heights (Manhattan), attendance today was about 60%. This is a school that in normal times has 95%+ attendance.

I want to self-report a psychological phenomenon, which i call the Covid reverse slot machine syndrome. The longer I go without an infection, the more value I place on not getting infected. Given that I'm vaccinated and boosted and the evidence about Omicron, I know I rationally should be less worried, but my lizard brain tells me "you've invested so much care up until now..."

A behavioral expert would cite, perhaps, some strange "variant" of the :Endowment Effect.

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Regarding health care staffing, it is probably worth remembering that many place (e.g. Philadelphia and environs) required employees to get vaccinated or be fired, regardless of whether they had gotten COVID or not, with the deadline around late summer. Around here that was an estimated 10-15% of the workforce, although I never saw a final count. We should remember this because present lack of staff is partially because policy makers in government and the healthcare industry decided they wanted to have fewer staff around. I would say they are now trying to cover up their mistake by talking about quit rates, but who knows if they even believe it was a mistake.

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