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Kids need routine and social interaction with their peers and teachers. Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. Like immea

Kids need routine and social interaction with their peers and teachers. Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. Like immeasurably bad idea. They never closed down schools (except for universities) in Sweden for this reason. They also never forced masks or curfews. The main thing that they did was to limit inside capacity to 50 people max for restaurants and other avenues. There were groups of people who would protest that the government should be enforcing masks, basically full reverse of what people were protesting in all other places around the world.

bsder 4y ago
Sweden has about 2x the number of per capita deaths from Covid vs any of Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. You can't simply blow that off and not acknowledge that you are making a tradeoff. My anecdata shows that the children who fared well through all of this didn't need group interaction at all. A small number of peers (<4) and a teacher or two were completely sufficient for children up through almost teenage years. In fact, those students are WAY ahead of where there would be even before Covid. Small groupings like that for children would have been completely fine through Covid. The problem in the US is that we, as a society, lack the collective will to fund something so obviously, ridiculously beneficial like that for an extended amount of time.
shortcake27 4y ago
> Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. I wonder if the debate was stifled because of reductionist comments like this. COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold. How can we be expected to have a real discussion about this topic when you either don’t understand or choose not to understand the difference between a cold and COVID?
- tmn 4y ago
  This may be true, but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, don’t be surprised when people think it’s a duck
  - jamie1np 4y ago
    If a creature that quacks like a duck killed over 1000 children in less than 3 years(1) I would be surprised if people still treated it as a duck. 1) https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b...
    - andscoop 4y ago
      As someone who was vaccinated three times, obeyed quarantine and had a kid during the pandemic— I don’t think that stat is having the effect you intended. Kids were relatively resilient from the virus. Now addressing the logic in your response, are you suggesting we should have similar school shutdown measures for the flu every year? For a similar three year period influenza will kill 400-600 kids.
    - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
      I'm curious how this compares to other causes of deaths for kids under 18. I'm sure there have been more teen suicides, overdoses, accidents, and car accidents that tragically ended lives (about which the government largely does nothing, except for the National Suicide Hotline, which is important).
  - sli 4y ago
    > ... but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience. And that doesn't matter one bit, because their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality. Millions of people are dead and using one's own personal experience to pretend that it was actually no big deal is just willful ignorance.
    - progrus 4y ago
      As you grow older and wiser, remember that you said this: “Their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality.” This is how the enlightenment ends, in a nutshell. Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics and buggy models. “Since we’re awash in this contemporary ocean of speculation, we forget that things can be known with certainty, and that we need not live in a fearful world of interminable unsupported opinion. But the gulf that separates hard fact from speculation is by now so unfamiliar that most people can’t comprehend it.” — Michael Crichton
- theknocker 4y ago
  [dead]
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  >COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold Not for kids. And we always knew this, but our public officials didn't listen. It's one of those cases where it was better to do _nothing_ instead of force this massive mask trauma on our children. And still, they want us to vax 5 year olds against a virus that has long passed us by. For what?
- tristanbvk 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure I caught COVID but thought I was constipated (suffer from that because I eat lots of tastey stuff). Anyways, long story short - I'm pretty sure it was COVID .
comte7092 4y ago
People always talk about school closures by citing the fact that Covid was relatively less dangerous for children, always conveniently leaving out that you need adults to actually operate a school. Such a narrative would seem to imply that those adults are expendable.

bsder 4y ago

Sweden has about 2x the number of per capita deaths from Covid vs any of Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. You can't simply blow that off and not acknowledge that you are making a tradeoff. My anecdata shows that the children who fared well through all of this didn't need group interaction at all. A small number of peers (<4) and a teacher or two were completely sufficient for children up through almost teenage years. In fact, those students are WAY ahead of where there would be even before Covid. Small groupings like that for children would have been completely fine through Covid. The problem in the US is that we, as a society, lack the collective will to fund something so obviously, ridiculously beneficial like that for an extended amount of time.

shortcake27 4y ago

> Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. I wonder if the debate was stifled because of reductionist comments like this. COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold. How can we be expected to have a real discussion about this topic when you either don’t understand or choose not to understand the difference between a cold and COVID?

tmn 4y ago
This may be true, but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, don’t be surprised when people think it’s a duck
- jamie1np 4y ago
  If a creature that quacks like a duck killed over 1000 children in less than 3 years(1) I would be surprised if people still treated it as a duck. 1) https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b...
  - andscoop 4y ago
    As someone who was vaccinated three times, obeyed quarantine and had a kid during the pandemic— I don’t think that stat is having the effect you intended. Kids were relatively resilient from the virus. Now addressing the logic in your response, are you suggesting we should have similar school shutdown measures for the flu every year? For a similar three year period influenza will kill 400-600 kids.
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    I'm curious how this compares to other causes of deaths for kids under 18. I'm sure there have been more teen suicides, overdoses, accidents, and car accidents that tragically ended lives (about which the government largely does nothing, except for the National Suicide Hotline, which is important).
- sli 4y ago
  > ... but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience. And that doesn't matter one bit, because their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality. Millions of people are dead and using one's own personal experience to pretend that it was actually no big deal is just willful ignorance.
  - progrus 4y ago
    As you grow older and wiser, remember that you said this: “Their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality.” This is how the enlightenment ends, in a nutshell. Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics and buggy models. “Since we’re awash in this contemporary ocean of speculation, we forget that things can be known with certainty, and that we need not live in a fearful world of interminable unsupported opinion. But the gulf that separates hard fact from speculation is by now so unfamiliar that most people can’t comprehend it.” — Michael Crichton
theknocker 4y ago
[dead]
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
>COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold Not for kids. And we always knew this, but our public officials didn't listen. It's one of those cases where it was better to do _nothing_ instead of force this massive mask trauma on our children. And still, they want us to vax 5 year olds against a virus that has long passed us by. For what?
tristanbvk 4y ago
I'm pretty sure I caught COVID but thought I was constipated (suffer from that because I eat lots of tastey stuff). Anyways, long story short - I'm pretty sure it was COVID .

comte7092 4y ago

People always talk about school closures by citing the fact that Covid was relatively less dangerous for children, always conveniently leaving out that you need adults to actually operate a school. Such a narrative would seem to imply that those adults are expendable.