11 ms·

From the point of view of someone who is immunocompromised this seems like the bare minimum we can do as a society to protect the vulnerable. Something betwee

From the point of view of someone who is immunocompromised this seems like the bare minimum we can do as a society to protect the vulnerable. Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice. At the moment we’re at “almost nothing”.

sokoloff 4y ago
Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me.
- aflag 4y ago
  Why not? I don't think skipping one week and a half of school when you're 8 will have any real effect in your life neither in the short or long term future. Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage.
  - callahad 4y ago
    > one week and a half of school when you're 8 I think you're vastly underestimating how often kids exhibit symptoms potentially consistent with Covid during a school year.
    - neoromantique 4y ago
      How often do they exhibit symptoms AND trigger a PCR test?
      - callahad 4y ago
        Oh sure. I think we're interpreting the parent comments differently (i.e., I'm understanding sokoloff's and aflag's comments to be about more general precautionary isolation based on symptomatic illness, not necessarily PCR-confirmed infection like logifail's kid.)
        aflag 4y ago
        I was not really suggesting kids should be isolated whenever they have any sort of possible symptoms. But if you're diagnosed with some contagious illness, it's probably not a bad idea to try to curb the spread.
        logifail 4y ago
        > if you're diagnosed with some contagious illness, it's probably not a bad idea to try to curb the spread This was always true, and we never sent an obviously poorly child to daycare/preschool/school. I've lost count of the number of times I've picked up one of our kids from daycare/preschool/school before Covid after a phone call along the lines of "your child has spiked a fever/vomited/has had an accident and should probably see a doctor". Wasn't this typically based on common sense by the parties involved, though?
        aflag 4y ago
        Sure. If your kid is testing positive for a contagious diseases which killed over 6 million people worldwide and left many with long lasting effects, wouldn't common sense dictate that they should stay at home?
        sokoloff 4y ago
        PCR testing, as applied in the current COVID testing protocols, is not an appropriate tool to approximate contagiousness. It reliably tells of prior exposure, that's all.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        People who recovered from C19 many weeks ago and are no longer contagious can still test positive on a PCR test. Catch C19, recover, get the sniffles in the next 2 months, get PCR tested, require a parent to take off work and the kid to sit out 10 days [possibly more than once] is not a reasonable policy IMO.
        neoromantique 4y ago
        Testing positive months after does happen, but is extremely rare, and yes, missing few days of school/work is not that big of a deal considering risks involved.
        landemva 4y ago
        PCR test amplifies whatever was swabbed, usually from the nose (an air filter). A positive result does not prove there is an infection.
        logifail 4y ago
        Our state-run testing facility always did PCR tests using a throat swab, and since I was the one who drew the short straw and took each of our kids there for mandatory tests, I've observed this being done a couple of dozen times over the last three years.
        logifail 4y ago
        > People who recovered from C19 many weeks ago and are no longer contagious can still test positive on a PCR test Which is why the EU issued the "recovery certificate" and put it on the same basis as a negative test, and why our schools didn't test recovered children (to clarify: were mandated not to test recovered children) after they returned to school after having Covid.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I think kids are likely to catch asymptomatic or extremely mild Covid annually. That’ll potentially be 4-5% of their educational time. Kids of wealthy families with parents with flexible jobs will be fine. Not every kid is in a home situation like that.
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      You have to look at both sides of the intervention, right? Like if isolating that kid doesn't prevent any further infections, then it isn't doing any good. If isolating them for 3 days prevents a couple other kids from getting infected, it's less clear. Using PCR tests to evaluate clearance doesn't make sense though, since they can be positive if there are fragments but no viable virus.
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > Using PCR tests to evaluate clearance doesn't make sense though, since they can be positive if there are fragments but no viable virus. It's a cost and time issue. The cost of filtering snot, inoculating a culture dish of infectable cells with the filtered snot, waiting a couple of days for the cells to show signs of infection (cell swelling or bursting), and then running a PCR test on the cells in the culture dish. With high enough throughput you could probably do this for $50 or there about, and maybe three days, to verify whether they were technically still infected three days ago.
        maxerickson 4y ago
        A series of well administered rapid antigen tests is more useful than PCR. Just waiting a couple days after symptoms abate is also going to bring most of the benefit of testing for clearance.
    - aflag 4y ago
      Assuming a 180 day school year (which would actually mean a 10 day period would be closer to 3-4% not 4-5%), that means that half of the year they are not in school anyway. So they have a good chance of catching it outside of school days anyway even if they catch it annually. Besides that, if that's that's a huge and consistent problem, school could just reduce the number of holidays by a week or so. The variance of number of school days throughout the world is already larger than that.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    > Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage. Is there any evidence this is different for Covid-19 than the vast sea of other viruses kids catch but we don’t PCR test for?
    - aflag 4y ago
      Probably not. It's likely there are worse diseases out there that we just don't check and keep our normal lives being carriers. But once you know, it's probably better to avoid. I think questioning whether or not doing a pcr test is good use of resources. But I don't think skipping school for a few days is where the problem resides.
  - gigibec 4y ago
    [dead]
  - knewter 4y ago
    Should they still punish parents for truancy?
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    I know it seems cruel but if you are immunocompromised that is your problem, don't make it everyone elses. The kids around the world ended up having to take nearly two years off of school and it was shown to have a massive effect on their development.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  > Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me. Example had COVID, not a one-day mild illness so it might affect other children worse than the kid. I'd like to know what the negative effect of that really is, my gut feeling is that it's zero. People often make it sound like they end up insufficiently educated and socially isolated which is bs in my opinion.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    > Example had COVID, not a one-day mild illness Unless we are doubting the description of the parent, example had mild illness (the patient's experience of ill health) for less than one day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752442
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      Tested positive for COVID
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        I'm not sure what point you're making there. COVID is the disease. SARS-CoV2 is the pathogen. That patient's individual experience is their illness.
        barbazoo 4y ago
        I think it's clear to most what is meant by "tested positive for COVID"
- Krssst 4y ago
  Allowing a single covid-positive kid go to school means contaminating a significant portion of the class's students and students' parents. Ten days out of school sounds fine. Long covid is a thing; being unlikely to die does not mean that illness is unlikely to be life-altering.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > Allowing a single covid-positive kid go to school means contaminating a significant portion of the class's students and students' parents To a first-order approximation based on data from my three kids and their classes/schools, pretty much all the children in all the kindergarten and school classes got Covid last year. All their teachers got it, too, including the vaccinated ones. Early last year I recall talking to my (then) 8 year-old about his best friend, who was stuck at home for a fortnight after testing positive Covid [this was before we'd all had it]: me: "How is he?" son: "What do you mean?" me: "Is he OK?" son: "Why wouldn't he be?" me: "Is he getting better?" son: "He's not poorly, he's just positive, Daddy!"
4RealFreedom 4y ago
Being immunocompromised, what sort of measures do you take when leaving your home? Just curious about how that impacts lifestyle.
gigibec 4y ago
[dead]
logifail 4y ago
> Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice. Based on who tested postive (and indeed negative) when, it appears our 8 year-old gave it to my OH, but not to his 12 year-old brother (with whom he shares a bedroom). When my OH had it, she didn't give it to me, either, and I was testing very frequently back then due to work & travel requirements. There is a hypothesis that the risk of catching Covid from someone may be related to the relative blood types. Based on the veeery small sample size of our immediate family it's definitely not the case that Covid always spreads quickly round a family group, despite us not having changed anything about our family routine when somone in the house was positive. We didn't send anyone to a separate bedroom, no-one wore a mask at home, and we all sat at the meal table together just as normal. FWIW My 12 year-old and I had Covid approximately two months later, when he caught it in his school and brought it home.

sokoloff 4y ago

Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me.

aflag 4y ago
Why not? I don't think skipping one week and a half of school when you're 8 will have any real effect in your life neither in the short or long term future. Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage.
- callahad 4y ago
  > one week and a half of school when you're 8 I think you're vastly underestimating how often kids exhibit symptoms potentially consistent with Covid during a school year.
  - neoromantique 4y ago
    How often do they exhibit symptoms AND trigger a PCR test?
    - callahad 4y ago
      Oh sure. I think we're interpreting the parent comments differently (i.e., I'm understanding sokoloff's and aflag's comments to be about more general precautionary isolation based on symptomatic illness, not necessarily PCR-confirmed infection like logifail's kid.)
      - aflag 4y ago
        I was not really suggesting kids should be isolated whenever they have any sort of possible symptoms. But if you're diagnosed with some contagious illness, it's probably not a bad idea to try to curb the spread.
        logifail 4y ago
        > if you're diagnosed with some contagious illness, it's probably not a bad idea to try to curb the spread This was always true, and we never sent an obviously poorly child to daycare/preschool/school. I've lost count of the number of times I've picked up one of our kids from daycare/preschool/school before Covid after a phone call along the lines of "your child has spiked a fever/vomited/has had an accident and should probably see a doctor". Wasn't this typically based on common sense by the parties involved, though?
        aflag 4y ago
        Sure. If your kid is testing positive for a contagious diseases which killed over 6 million people worldwide and left many with long lasting effects, wouldn't common sense dictate that they should stay at home?
        sokoloff 4y ago
        PCR testing, as applied in the current COVID testing protocols, is not an appropriate tool to approximate contagiousness. It reliably tells of prior exposure, that's all.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      People who recovered from C19 many weeks ago and are no longer contagious can still test positive on a PCR test. Catch C19, recover, get the sniffles in the next 2 months, get PCR tested, require a parent to take off work and the kid to sit out 10 days [possibly more than once] is not a reasonable policy IMO.
      - neoromantique 4y ago
        Testing positive months after does happen, but is extremely rare, and yes, missing few days of school/work is not that big of a deal considering risks involved.
      - landemva 4y ago
        PCR test amplifies whatever was swabbed, usually from the nose (an air filter). A positive result does not prove there is an infection.
        logifail 4y ago
        Our state-run testing facility always did PCR tests using a throat swab, and since I was the one who drew the short straw and took each of our kids there for mandatory tests, I've observed this being done a couple of dozen times over the last three years.
      - logifail 4y ago
        > People who recovered from C19 many weeks ago and are no longer contagious can still test positive on a PCR test Which is why the EU issued the "recovery certificate" and put it on the same basis as a negative test, and why our schools didn't test recovered children (to clarify: were mandated not to test recovered children) after they returned to school after having Covid.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think kids are likely to catch asymptomatic or extremely mild Covid annually. That’ll potentially be 4-5% of their educational time. Kids of wealthy families with parents with flexible jobs will be fine. Not every kid is in a home situation like that.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    You have to look at both sides of the intervention, right? Like if isolating that kid doesn't prevent any further infections, then it isn't doing any good. If isolating them for 3 days prevents a couple other kids from getting infected, it's less clear. Using PCR tests to evaluate clearance doesn't make sense though, since they can be positive if there are fragments but no viable virus.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      > Using PCR tests to evaluate clearance doesn't make sense though, since they can be positive if there are fragments but no viable virus. It's a cost and time issue. The cost of filtering snot, inoculating a culture dish of infectable cells with the filtered snot, waiting a couple of days for the cells to show signs of infection (cell swelling or bursting), and then running a PCR test on the cells in the culture dish. With high enough throughput you could probably do this for $50 or there about, and maybe three days, to verify whether they were technically still infected three days ago.
      - maxerickson 4y ago
        A series of well administered rapid antigen tests is more useful than PCR. Just waiting a couple days after symptoms abate is also going to bring most of the benefit of testing for clearance.
  - aflag 4y ago
    Assuming a 180 day school year (which would actually mean a 10 day period would be closer to 3-4% not 4-5%), that means that half of the year they are not in school anyway. So they have a good chance of catching it outside of school days anyway even if they catch it annually. Besides that, if that's that's a huge and consistent problem, school could just reduce the number of holidays by a week or so. The variance of number of school days throughout the world is already larger than that.
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  > Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage. Is there any evidence this is different for Covid-19 than the vast sea of other viruses kids catch but we don’t PCR test for?
  - aflag 4y ago
    Probably not. It's likely there are worse diseases out there that we just don't check and keep our normal lives being carriers. But once you know, it's probably better to avoid. I think questioning whether or not doing a pcr test is good use of resources. But I don't think skipping school for a few days is where the problem resides.
- gigibec 4y ago
  [dead]
- knewter 4y ago
  Should they still punish parents for truancy?
- throwntoday 4y ago
  I know it seems cruel but if you are immunocompromised that is your problem, don't make it everyone elses. The kids around the world ended up having to take nearly two years off of school and it was shown to have a massive effect on their development.
barbazoo 4y ago
> Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me. Example had COVID, not a one-day mild illness so it might affect other children worse than the kid. I'd like to know what the negative effect of that really is, my gut feeling is that it's zero. People often make it sound like they end up insufficiently educated and socially isolated which is bs in my opinion.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > Example had COVID, not a one-day mild illness Unless we are doubting the description of the parent, example had mild illness (the patient's experience of ill health) for less than one day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752442
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Tested positive for COVID
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I'm not sure what point you're making there. COVID is the disease. SARS-CoV2 is the pathogen. That patient's individual experience is their illness.
      - barbazoo 4y ago
        I think it's clear to most what is meant by "tested positive for COVID"
Krssst 4y ago
Allowing a single covid-positive kid go to school means contaminating a significant portion of the class's students and students' parents. Ten days out of school sounds fine. Long covid is a thing; being unlikely to die does not mean that illness is unlikely to be life-altering.
- logifail 4y ago
  > Allowing a single covid-positive kid go to school means contaminating a significant portion of the class's students and students' parents To a first-order approximation based on data from my three kids and their classes/schools, pretty much all the children in all the kindergarten and school classes got Covid last year. All their teachers got it, too, including the vaccinated ones. Early last year I recall talking to my (then) 8 year-old about his best friend, who was stuck at home for a fortnight after testing positive Covid [this was before we'd all had it]: me: "How is he?" son: "What do you mean?" me: "Is he OK?" son: "Why wouldn't he be?" me: "Is he getting better?" son: "He's not poorly, he's just positive, Daddy!"

4RealFreedom 4y ago

Being immunocompromised, what sort of measures do you take when leaving your home? Just curious about how that impacts lifestyle.

gigibec 4y ago

[dead]

logifail 4y ago

> Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice. Based on who tested postive (and indeed negative) when, it appears our 8 year-old gave it to my OH, but not to his 12 year-old brother (with whom he shares a bedroom). When my OH had it, she didn't give it to me, either, and I was testing very frequently back then due to work & travel requirements. There is a hypothesis that the risk of catching Covid from someone may be related to the relative blood types. Based on the veeery small sample size of our immediate family it's definitely not the case that Covid always spreads quickly round a family group, despite us not having changed anything about our family routine when somone in the house was positive. We didn't send anyone to a separate bedroom, no-one wore a mask at home, and we all sat at the meal table together just as normal. FWIW My 12 year-old and I had Covid approximately two months later, when he caught it in his school and brought it home.