3 ms·

Consider that the first-order effects of just _older people dying_ may not be everything entailed with this outbreak: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kawasaki-dis

by sj4nz 6y ago

Consider that the first-order effects of just _older people dying_ may not be everything entailed with this outbreak: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kawasaki-disease-coronavirus-illness-possible-covid-19-link-blamed-children-deaths-new-york/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kawasaki-disease-coronavirus-il... A _novel_ virus means we don't know what it does to everyone yet. At a minimum, closing the schools globally probably has saved millions of children from this "new polio"... for now. Perhaps also maybe grandparents would like to live long enough to see their _healthy_ grandchildren again.

taeric 6y ago
I'm not against caution, but don't take credit for saving kids without hard facts. It is an unnecessary appeal to emotion. Worse, it has a shaky basis with everything else we do know about the virus. Which is that it is highly contagious and the earliest community spread cases we knew of in WA included a student. Which is to say it remains to be proven that we did keep the kids from getting it. Again, I'm not against caution. And I am not pushing for reopening the schools. I am pushing for testing the students to see if that ship sailed or not. If it had, I would actually push for more expensive measures on older populations.
lbeltrame 6y ago
It is a novel virus, but not a magic virus like the press says. Take for example the brain infections: it's a feature of other coronaviruses (and I only found out by reading the literature), not just this one. The school closure was criticized basing on current evidence in an editorial[1] on Disease and Childhood (sister publication of the British Medical Journal). They also go over the reports of Kawasaki disease saying that there needs to be more evidence to support the claim. Also a limited test in two schools in New Wales, where contact tracing was used, there was one reported infection of a student by another out of 853 recorded contacts. There are indications that a. grave effects are rare in children (rare does not mean zero) and b. children aren't as good "spreaders" of this disease as adults. [1] https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/05/archdischild-2020-319474 https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/05/archdischild-20...
krona 6y ago
> closing the schools globally probably has saved millions of children Actually I don't think we don't know the infection rate among children[0]. Keeping them isolated among adults 24 hours a day could be having the opposite effect. [0] Although one Icelandic study claimed 0 (zero) known transmissions between children.

by sj4nz 6y ago

taeric 6y ago

I'm not against caution, but don't take credit for saving kids without hard facts. It is an unnecessary appeal to emotion. Worse, it has a shaky basis with everything else we do know about the virus. Which is that it is highly contagious and the earliest community spread cases we knew of in WA included a student. Which is to say it remains to be proven that we did keep the kids from getting it. Again, I'm not against caution. And I am not pushing for reopening the schools. I am pushing for testing the students to see if that ship sailed or not. If it had, I would actually push for more expensive measures on older populations.

lbeltrame 6y ago

It is a novel virus, but not a magic virus like the press says. Take for example the brain infections: it's a feature of other coronaviruses (and I only found out by reading the literature), not just this one. The school closure was criticized basing on current evidence in an editorial[1] on Disease and Childhood (sister publication of the British Medical Journal). They also go over the reports of Kawasaki disease saying that there needs to be more evidence to support the claim. Also a limited test in two schools in New Wales, where contact tracing was used, there was one reported infection of a student by another out of 853 recorded contacts. There are indications that a. grave effects are rare in children (rare does not mean zero) and b. children aren't as good "spreaders" of this disease as adults. [1] https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/05/archdischild-2020-319474 https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/05/archdischild-20...

krona 6y ago

> closing the schools globally probably has saved millions of children Actually I don't think we don't know the infection rate among children[0]. Keeping them isolated among adults 24 hours a day could be having the opposite effect. [0] Although one Icelandic study claimed 0 (zero) known transmissions between children.