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1. There should have been and were lockdowns early in the pandemic. Once vaccines were available teachers should be ready to teach, just like every other worke

1. There should have been and were lockdowns early in the pandemic. Once vaccines were available teachers should be ready to teach, just like every other worker that interfaces with people. At least teachers see the same people every day unlike grocery store clerks. 2. It's low risk to almost ALL children. The hospitalization rates of children have been around 1 per 1 million at peak infection periods. This is no worse than other diseases and doesn't prompt a special response. 3. Please present evidence of long term effect in a non-negligible percentage of children 4. We still don't understand the flu virus.

skeeter2020 5y ago
You're only focusing on the children, while the post to which you're responding explicitly calls out that they are only a part of the entire system. The fact that they don't get really sick or are asymptomatic is actually really bad when you're trying to reduce transmission.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Prompting the obvious questions (which I don't think have clear answers): How much do we think that it reduced transmission? How much transmission reduction is needed to justify knocking a year of socialising out of of a child's life?
  - lazyasciiart 5y ago
    What I'm curious about is why did we see so little effort to keep socializing available to kids without just going back to school? I'm not aware of a single place that made a noticeable effort to e.g encourage small fixed social pods to form, or run outdoor activities after school hours for the kids who wanted to be there, etc. Even among the parents who were basically fulltime campaigning to re-open schools for the sake of mental health, I didn't notice discussion of what they were doing in the meantime, and surely they were doing something.
nosuchthing 5y ago
Long Covid is understood better now as an autoimmune disease that comes from even mild cases. https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-can-trigger-self-attacking-antibodies/ https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-can-trigger-s... This is in addition to worse damage that occurs throughout the body to any ACE2 cell, which are found in the brain along with the entire cardiovascular system and every other major organ in the body. Hospitalizations in children are rising this year because last year they were out of school and NPI safety was much higher than 2021. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/new-omicron-variant-fills-up-childrens-hospitals/ar-AASbGCQ https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/new-omicron-variant... https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/number-babies-toddlers-hospital-covid-25821925 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/number-babies-toddlers... https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-symptoms-children-kids-hospitalized-record-numbers-rcna10741 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-sym... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-children-us-covid-hospitalized-uk/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-children-us-covid-hospit... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716112443.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716112443.h... https://twitter.com/rafalab/status/1477302949604995075 https://twitter.com/rafalab/status/1477302949604995075 https://twitter.com/jneill/status/1476253591677587456 https://twitter.com/jneill/status/1476253591677587456 https://mobile.twitter.com/jneill/status/1479066859270025219 https://mobile.twitter.com/jneill/status/1479066859270025219 117,000 children now living with long Covid +40,000 more than October 20,000 children for longer than a year +6,000 more than October Children crossing 12,000 children have their "activity limited a lot" +4,000 more than October
- dagmx 5y ago
  Fantastic answer. Thank you.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- DannyCasolaro 5y ago
  What's the proposal here, exactly? Should children be kept in hermetic isolation indefinitely to forestall the possibility of long COVID (at least, until a sufficiently infectious variant comes along that even the Ted Kaczynskis of the world get it)? There may be ACE2 receptors in the brain but what has never been found in the brain so far is SARS-CoV-2. The spike protein crosses the blood brain barrier in mice, but you also get plenty of that from the vaccines which doesn't seem to concern anyone at all.
dagmx 5y ago
Vaccines don't absolutely prevent infection. By the time the vaccines were out, we were already in a second wave with Delta which dramatically reduced the efficacy. Why should teachers, or anyone for that matter, be willing to risk their health? As a society, we treat too many people and jobs as literally expendable. You also don't address how children can be carriers even if covid doesn't affect them directly. Child vaccines only recently became available, which reduces the infection possibility and therefore the ability to pass it on. By that time , omicron was a thing and has mutated enough that the vaccines aren't as effective to curtail spread. The flu is significantly less spreadable/fatal than covid. People bringing this comparison up in 2022 are either wilfully ignorant or disingenuous. Studies on long term risk to children have just started (1) so numbers are unavailable, but covid has already shown to have long term effects in some children as per my link in the other post 1. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/long-term-study-children-covid-19-begins https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/long-term-stud... All these anti lockdown comments tend to be the same, ignoring network effect and falsely trivializing the risk factor. Comparing to the flu is just ridiculous, and has been debunked over and over and over.
- colordrops 5y ago
  > Comparing to the flu is just ridiculous You are too easy to dismiss here. I wasn't comparing severity, but rather out understanding of the flu. Please re-read. Nevertheless, tens of thousands have died every year from the flu. Many more who do not die get post-viral syndromes. The symptoms change every year, sometimes with full body rashes, or severe congestion that lasts weeks. Sometimes it mutates into something deadly, like the last pandemic. The vaccines we've created are hardly effective. To pretend we understand the flu is to be willfully ignorant or disingenuous.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
>2. It's low risk to almost ALL children. What do we do if their parents end up unable to work due to long term COVID or worse their parents die? https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true 30-64yo are a significant percentage of total deaths. 30-55 is probably a reasonable age range for parents with dependent children. >3. Please present evidence of long term effect in a non-negligible percentage of children You realise we are still going through the pandemic right? There is no long term data either way anywhere because we have to live through it first.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  > What do we do if their parents end up unable to work due to long term COVID or worse their parents die? Indeed. Parents should also be vaccinated. It would be reasonable to delay school until that point. (This is an additional delay over those previously mentioned in parent comments in this thread.) However, we should also expect that all parents will be exposed to the virus sooner or later, as we have been told from the earliest days of the pandemic, and thus we should limit further delay. Yes, parents will get COVID from kids who go to school. Yes, unfortunately, there will be children orphaned as a result of that exposure. No, there won't be substantial numbers of net orphans -- certainly not such that crippling public education for years or even decades is the more humane response.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    It's not just about death though, it's about hospitalization and long term effects too. We've had multiple major variants. Also what number of orphans is acceptable? 30% of the US won't vaccinate. Delta has a mortality rate of 3+%(1) by the most charitable takes. Rough math would show that could add somewhere under 1 million orphans to the system. Do we also ignore medical costs for those who get sick? What about the hospital resources those people take up? Again, there's just so much more than "just the children" 1. I'm estimating 3% for Delta by taking the NHS estimate of 1.9% CFR for Alpha and the subsequent estimates that Delta had around double the risk of fatality.
tzs 5y ago
> There should have been and were lockdowns early in the pandemic. Once vaccines were available teachers should be ready to teach, just like every other worker that interfaces with people. Isn't this largely what happened in the US? Vaccines started to become available in early 2021, but generally only to health care workers and the most vulnerable. It wasn't until around April that they were available to most adults, with the mRNA being by far the most available. If you jumped in as soon as they opened up general availability it would be early to mid May before you were considered fully vaccinated (Two weeks after second shot). That's near the end of the 2020-2021 school year. And remember, that's for people who got vaccinated soon after general availability. In a lot of areas demand was outstripping supply, so it could take a couple weeks or more to actually get an appointment. By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, everyone that wanted to get vaccinated could easily get it for no cost and very little effort, so in-person school has been very widely offered.

skeeter2020 5y ago

You're only focusing on the children, while the post to which you're responding explicitly calls out that they are only a part of the entire system. The fact that they don't get really sick or are asymptomatic is actually really bad when you're trying to reduce transmission.

roenxi 5y ago
Prompting the obvious questions (which I don't think have clear answers): How much do we think that it reduced transmission? How much transmission reduction is needed to justify knocking a year of socialising out of of a child's life?
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  What I'm curious about is why did we see so little effort to keep socializing available to kids without just going back to school? I'm not aware of a single place that made a noticeable effort to e.g encourage small fixed social pods to form, or run outdoor activities after school hours for the kids who wanted to be there, etc. Even among the parents who were basically fulltime campaigning to re-open schools for the sake of mental health, I didn't notice discussion of what they were doing in the meantime, and surely they were doing something.

nosuchthing 5y ago

Long Covid is understood better now as an autoimmune disease that comes from even mild cases. https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-can-trigger-self-attacking-antibodies/ https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-can-trigger-s... This is in addition to worse damage that occurs throughout the body to any ACE2 cell, which are found in the brain along with the entire cardiovascular system and every other major organ in the body. Hospitalizations in children are rising this year because last year they were out of school and NPI safety was much higher than 2021. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/new-omicron-variant-fills-up-childrens-hospitals/ar-AASbGCQ https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/new-omicron-variant... https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/number-babies-toddlers-hospital-covid-25821925 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/number-babies-toddlers... https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-symptoms-children-kids-hospitalized-record-numbers-rcna10741 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-sym... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-children-us-covid-hospitalized-uk/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-children-us-covid-hospit... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716112443.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716112443.h... https://twitter.com/rafalab/status/1477302949604995075 https://twitter.com/rafalab/status/1477302949604995075 https://twitter.com/jneill/status/1476253591677587456 https://twitter.com/jneill/status/1476253591677587456 https://mobile.twitter.com/jneill/status/1479066859270025219 https://mobile.twitter.com/jneill/status/1479066859270025219 117,000 children now living with long Covid +40,000 more than October 20,000 children for longer than a year +6,000 more than October Children crossing 12,000 children have their "activity limited a lot" +4,000 more than October

dagmx 5y ago
Fantastic answer. Thank you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
DannyCasolaro 5y ago
What's the proposal here, exactly? Should children be kept in hermetic isolation indefinitely to forestall the possibility of long COVID (at least, until a sufficiently infectious variant comes along that even the Ted Kaczynskis of the world get it)? There may be ACE2 receptors in the brain but what has never been found in the brain so far is SARS-CoV-2. The spike protein crosses the blood brain barrier in mice, but you also get plenty of that from the vaccines which doesn't seem to concern anyone at all.

dagmx 5y ago

Vaccines don't absolutely prevent infection. By the time the vaccines were out, we were already in a second wave with Delta which dramatically reduced the efficacy. Why should teachers, or anyone for that matter, be willing to risk their health? As a society, we treat too many people and jobs as literally expendable. You also don't address how children can be carriers even if covid doesn't affect them directly. Child vaccines only recently became available, which reduces the infection possibility and therefore the ability to pass it on. By that time , omicron was a thing and has mutated enough that the vaccines aren't as effective to curtail spread. The flu is significantly less spreadable/fatal than covid. People bringing this comparison up in 2022 are either wilfully ignorant or disingenuous. Studies on long term risk to children have just started (1) so numbers are unavailable, but covid has already shown to have long term effects in some children as per my link in the other post 1. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/long-term-study-children-covid-19-begins https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/long-term-stud... All these anti lockdown comments tend to be the same, ignoring network effect and falsely trivializing the risk factor. Comparing to the flu is just ridiculous, and has been debunked over and over and over.

colordrops 5y ago
> Comparing to the flu is just ridiculous You are too easy to dismiss here. I wasn't comparing severity, but rather out understanding of the flu. Please re-read. Nevertheless, tens of thousands have died every year from the flu. Many more who do not die get post-viral syndromes. The symptoms change every year, sometimes with full body rashes, or severe congestion that lasts weeks. Sometimes it mutates into something deadly, like the last pandemic. The vaccines we've created are hardly effective. To pretend we understand the flu is to be willfully ignorant or disingenuous.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago

>2. It's low risk to almost ALL children. What do we do if their parents end up unable to work due to long term COVID or worse their parents die? https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true 30-64yo are a significant percentage of total deaths. 30-55 is probably a reasonable age range for parents with dependent children. >3. Please present evidence of long term effect in a non-negligible percentage of children You realise we are still going through the pandemic right? There is no long term data either way anywhere because we have to live through it first.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
> What do we do if their parents end up unable to work due to long term COVID or worse their parents die? Indeed. Parents should also be vaccinated. It would be reasonable to delay school until that point. (This is an additional delay over those previously mentioned in parent comments in this thread.) However, we should also expect that all parents will be exposed to the virus sooner or later, as we have been told from the earliest days of the pandemic, and thus we should limit further delay. Yes, parents will get COVID from kids who go to school. Yes, unfortunately, there will be children orphaned as a result of that exposure. No, there won't be substantial numbers of net orphans -- certainly not such that crippling public education for years or even decades is the more humane response.
- dagmx 5y ago
  It's not just about death though, it's about hospitalization and long term effects too. We've had multiple major variants. Also what number of orphans is acceptable? 30% of the US won't vaccinate. Delta has a mortality rate of 3+%(1) by the most charitable takes. Rough math would show that could add somewhere under 1 million orphans to the system. Do we also ignore medical costs for those who get sick? What about the hospital resources those people take up? Again, there's just so much more than "just the children" 1. I'm estimating 3% for Delta by taking the NHS estimate of 1.9% CFR for Alpha and the subsequent estimates that Delta had around double the risk of fatality.

tzs 5y ago

> There should have been and were lockdowns early in the pandemic. Once vaccines were available teachers should be ready to teach, just like every other worker that interfaces with people. Isn't this largely what happened in the US? Vaccines started to become available in early 2021, but generally only to health care workers and the most vulnerable. It wasn't until around April that they were available to most adults, with the mRNA being by far the most available. If you jumped in as soon as they opened up general availability it would be early to mid May before you were considered fully vaccinated (Two weeks after second shot). That's near the end of the 2020-2021 school year. And remember, that's for people who got vaccinated soon after general availability. In a lot of areas demand was outstripping supply, so it could take a couple weeks or more to actually get an appointment. By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, everyone that wanted to get vaccinated could easily get it for no cost and very little effort, so in-person school has been very widely offered.