I've personally heard from several tens of parents that they are primarily worried about the economic and social affects of all these so-called safety measures governments and communities are taking. Just because it's easy to measure cases and deaths and hard to measure lost human connection, depression, children being left in environments of neglect, delayed/paused innovation and economic growth, etc. doesn't mean that those costs are less than the loss of life incurred from not being "safe". I would rather my children (and I have 5) grow up not being told they need to be afraid of everything. I would rather they grow up being able to learn with and interact with their peers face to face. And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren and great grandchildren can grow up in a better world.
We all will die. Can't let a fear of dying prevent us from living.
How about the fact that long term effects are unknown. Or what sort of ongoing medical issues will people have for the rest of their lives?
There is people who believe that once you're done with this virus, it is gone from your system and you're back to normal. Certainly that is the case for many, but there are still many more that will continue to suffer from what they are calling now 'long haulers'.
Spend some time in a large (91k people and growing) Survivors group [0] to get a feeling of what people are facing.
Sure - but the point/principle still applies. Every day we confront unknown risks that we don't fully understand. But we just keep on living. I think we have enough data for people to evaluate their own personal risk and generally take appropriate personal measures for safety. We can and should make efforts to accommodate those who assess their personal risk to be significant. But when you/others ask schools to close - are you really considering what the short-medium-long term costs of those choices really are? I have personally taken neighborhood kids to pick up free lunches offered by schools while they were shut down - because those kids' parents didn't care to take them and neither cared to help them feed themselves. I've seen working parents leave their young children at home because child care logistics and cost were not acceptable for their circumstances. I know kids down the street that are basically ignored by their parents that are not likely to have a healthy structured school environment they can count on.
I believe these hard to measure costs are enormous but easy to ignore because the affected demographic can't fight for their rights/desires - they can't even vote. And privileged SV folks and internet yuppies are happy to drive this line forward. I have friends who have lost their jobs. I have a cousin who has lost their small business. Not because of COVID - but because of the "cure" for COVID.
Most of this just speaks to how problematic it is for a society to rely on (poorly-funded and unevenly-resourced) schools alone for universal childcare, alleviating child hunger, ensuring safety from awful households, and other concerns that could have been addressed elsewhere (this is all orthogonal to the effects of COVID).
Yes - in some imaginary world it might be easier to close schools without adverse consequences. But we don't live in that world. We live in one where closing schools has lots of bad short and long term consequences. So acknowledging that we must decide between existing alternatives - not between fictitious ones - what do people want?
Adverse affects of closing schools for a year on 56 million elementary, middle, and high school students? Or maybe 500,000 people dying a bit early (just making numbers up on this one - adjust up or down depending on various factors)? That is not so one-sided obvious as many people on the internet seem to want to make it.
How many kids need to die from attending school and catching covid? For me, 1 is enough and we are already there.
How many children will bring it home to adults? For me, 1 is enough and we are already there.
On the other hand, not all 56 million kids will end up ruined if education is delayed a bit or parents need to come up with new and creative ways to educate their children safely.
You're basically arguing to 'stay the course' during a global pandemic and fact is that isn't workable either.
> How many kids need to die from attending school and catching covid? For me, 1 is enough and we are already there.
This is equally as irrational as people who just want to fling the floodgates open.
~5 children per year die on playground equipment in the US. Are you actually proposing that we sit around until we've neutered a lethal virus enough that it's less dangerous than playground equipment?
The IFR for school age children is astonishingly low. Low enough that we don't even really have a good sample size. CAs data right now is showing 1 death out of ~50k infections. My first Google hit with IFR estimates for those age ranges puts them at 0.0016% for 5-9, and 0.00032% for 10-17.
Assuming every single one of those kids is in the higher risk 5-9 bracket and that every single one gets infected, we would end up with less than a thousand fatalities. That's about 10% lower than children that die from drowning (or congenital birth abnormalities, or drug overdose/poisoning, they all hover around 980 per year). It's slightly higher than the number of children who die from heart disease.
On the other hand, it's less than a quarter the number of children who die in car crashes per year, and less than a third the number who die from firearm accidents.
I don't suppose that you're going to stop putting your kids in the car, despite it being 4 times more likely to kill them than the worst case scenario of Covid in schools.
Everybody has a cost above which they are not willing to pay to save someone's life. If you can't admit that, then there is nothing we have to discuss.
I think this is one of those cases where you are taking a bunch of anecdotal evidence and drawing the wrong conclusions from it or at least biasing them towards your own dislikes... 'privileged SV and internet yuppies'. Your response feels a bit like Dunning-Kruger [0] effect going on here.
I am not a doctor so I won't give you advice, but Dr. Gupta is. I felt like his reasoning for not sending his kids back to school in this article [1] was spot on.
> According to Makenbach, there are two main issues in dealing with the coronavirus. The first is to what extent this disease, which mainly affects the elderly, should be allowed to damage younger generations who are losing their jobs and falling behind in education, he said. And the second is to what extent the virus and measures against it should be allowed to further increase inequality. Socio-economically vulnerable people are more likely to become seriously ill, and also most disproportionately affected by drastic anti-coronavirus measures, Makenbach said.
It's a sad affair. The measures wouldn't have to be so severe if there wasn't so much noise about it.
A bit of cool headed thought, compliance, and leaders we could trust might have saved our grandparents while ensuring a pretty good upbringing for our children.
Alas, that's not the world we live in. We don't trust anything, the media is busy being sensational, big money only cares about making more money in way possible, our leaders continuely lie to us and foster partisanship and miscommunication.
> And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren ...
Sigh. I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out for you and your ilk.
There are other people out there beyond your grandparents. Regardless of how you and they personally feel — I don’t want to die just because your personal definition of “living” (hello, a few months of lockdown or similar is still alive) facilitates disease spread. I AM NOT WILLING TO DIE PREMATURELY just so your kids can avoid going a few months without physically engaging peers, or just so you all can avoid having to take simple personal precautions when outside.
Lest anyone accuses me of not understanding without raising children- I am literally holding my sleeping 5 month old as I type this.
It’s not about being told to be afraid of everything (where does this idea come from? literally no one is advocating that). It’s about responding to existing, real dangers with appropriate measures.
I think this is really unfair to OP. Who among us hasn't taken health risks because we enjoy our culture? When I heard about heart disease as the leading cause of death I did not immediately change my diet. I assume many others here did not as well.
And yet isn't not eating bacon a relatively easy step to take so one is around to spend time with family? The answer is not so clear.
One question I have is why you believe lockdowns will help? A vaccine may be approved but it's likely it won't work for obese Americans that make up 40% of the population.
> “Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
> “Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
> In 2017, scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill provided a critical clue about the limitations of the influenza vaccine. In a paper published in the International Journal of Obesity, they showed for the first time that vaccinated obese adults were twice as likely as adults of a healthy weight to develop influenza or flu-like illness. [0]
This essentially means we are going to have large numbers of cases for the next 3+ years.
But how many people? Should 10,000 kids lose school and all the problems that can avalanche into for the future to save 1 year of 1 life of one person who already has degrading health?
I acknowledge that we are choosing between two bad alternatives here. I personally believe that we should trade all N hundred thousand lives for a normal school year for 56 million kids.
The rest of society is certainly not happy to make that sacrifice for your extreme selfishness and callousness and frankly, we shouldn't have to die because your kids might grow up fearful. What a selfish, disgusting attitude.
Around my city I'm seeing a lot of kids lonely, anxious and unhappy where I've never seen before. My children were really looking forward to school and seeing friends, were crushed when told it wouldn't be happening.
And a lot of adults were similarly disappointed. I mean, aside from the whole possible loss of livelihood and disruption to earning potential thing... I’ve seen adults who were really looking forward to these things that didn’t pan out as planned thanks to COVID:
- professional conferences
- sport games
- concerts
- school reunions
- weddings
- grieving death of elder together with family
- baby showers
- travel/vacations
- birthday parties
- having friends over for support while stuck at home with a newborn (editors note: it me)
It’s been hard of everybody. Maybe this is my perspective from having grown up in poverty/underclass talking- but I don’t get this hand wringing over how hard this is for children in particular.
I agree. Perhaps it is because we are rapidly approaching the date when most schools around the U.S. begin opening back up (or not) after summer vacation. So this is on many people's minds and many decisions are being made about it at local and state levels currently. This is why it is on my mind particularly anyway. I think people are way underestimating the negative consequences economic, social, psychological, etc. of covid mitigations generally. I think we have long passed the point where benefits are worth the costs.
Seeing their friends. In a mask. Without being allowed to talk or interact with them before, during, or after class.
Sounds fun. The reality of what in-person school looks like isn't anywhere close to what your children are looking forward to.
Our oldest is going into Kindergarten this year. We chose distance learning before that became the only option because we didn't want her first experience with "big girl school" to be something out of Handmaid's Tale.
I think teaching kids to be afraid of disease is one of the few things separating humans from animals. It’s one thing that’s let us survive for so long and build societies.
You perhaps were being sarcastic, but there is truth in the statement. And while it is unpleasant, I think it is an aspect of this pandemic that is worth considering - not necessarily in an of itself, but perhaps as a way to begin discussing our culture's unhealthy view of prolonging life at all costs. I don't want to spend my last days/weeks/months slowly rotting in a hospital bed.
If you're worried you're going to die from coronavirus given the current statistics you can self isolate.
No need for the entire population to do the same.
I started self isolating me and my family 4 weeks before my country imposed a lockdown, after seeing neighbouring countries being hit by the virus and not knowing what to expect.
I stopped caring completely after seeing the hospitals were empty and after seeing a reported death rate of around 1% in my country.
According to my mother, who is a doctor who fought covid on the first line (despite being at risk of death, given her age and statistics), the guidelines given by the government were nonsensical: ventilators probably did more harm than good in the majority of cases and there was a stance against steroidal treatment (which would have been the first choice she would have picked if it wasn't for the guidelines) which have been subsequently reevaluated.
There was also a problem with dropping requirements for counting covid deaths which created a massive statistical problem.
These factors make me think covid deaths are probably over-counted and it explains why this second peak of infections doesn't have a peak in deaths.
Of course, the issue has been politicised and if you say something like the above you'll be socially ostracised - or just downvoted.
We all will die. Can't let a fear of dying prevent us from living.