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- Welcome to ANI in the Air Online and Around Baltimore,
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your daily podcast briefing on the goings ons,
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ins and rounds, arts and ideas, Sudbury School.
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So today is Farewell Friday.
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And so we'll kind of look back on the week.
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The events of the day I feel like were a little bit minimal.
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There was another Minecraft hangout at 10 a.m.
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and then there was some role playing game
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that was hosted at three.
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And there were some funny postings on Discord.
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Be sure to check out Discord if you haven't in a while.
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It's always good and fun.
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Upcoming next week is a short week, we have Thanksgiving.
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So we're actually closed Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
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On Monday we'll have our usual announcements at 11.05.
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Please make sure to attend.
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And we'll have a school meeting at one on Tuesday.
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And we have an assembly meeting that night
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to discuss the numbers and further actions.
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Speaking of the numbers,
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so there are two numbers that we tracked for our policy.
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One is the positivity rate,
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which is the number of positive tests
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for the number of tests given, more or less.
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And our threshold was set at 5%.
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We have now in Baltimore City, as of November 19th,
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hit 7.62%, which is pretty high
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given the breadth of testing that is going on.
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We are at the highest testing volume we've been at of,
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it sounds like
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around, we're testing 40,000 tests a day
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in Maryland, I guess.
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Doesn't specifically talk about Baltimore.
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And then there is the case rate,
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which is number of people per 100,000.
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So we had set our number threshold at 15
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and we are now at 42 per 100,000.
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So basically for every 100,000 people,
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there are 42 cases, I guess.
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And I guess that's kind of new cases per day.
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So that can start to add up quickly.
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That is the highest rate we have been at
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during this entire pandemic.
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We also have, we don't track this for our policy,
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but another useful thing to look at
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is the hospital bed utilization.
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This is across Maryland.
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We are currently at 1,200 total beds used.
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I don't know how many beds are available.
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The peak before this, which happened in the beginning of May
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was around 1,700 beds.
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And just for also kind of local context,
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at the beginning of November, it was at 500.
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So we more than doubled the use of the hospital beds
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over the past three weeks.
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So yeah, that's our weekly number update report.
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So it doesn't look terribly good
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for coming back in person at this current time.
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Thanksgiving is coming up
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and the official recommendation is stay home
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and don't go to family gatherings.
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Yeah, just be safe.
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But it sounds like a lot of people will not listen to that.
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But hopefully our community will stay safe.
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So this was our first fully online week.
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I hope you all had a good week with it.
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You know, this is a challenging time for us.
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It's not enough just to do what you want
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in order to keep this community going,
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but you actually have to reach out more in person.
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You can just do whatever you want
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and that naturally creates community.
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But being online, you really have to try to make an effort
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to stay connected to people.
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Ideally, this is happening on Discord
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so other people outside of your networks
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can see and participate,
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but at least hope that everyone is connecting online
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in some fashion with people.
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It's good not to be isolated.
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So that is I guess that for this podcast.
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Thanks for listening and talk to you all later.