Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

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For how long? A week? A month? If widespread infection is successfully avoided in a particular region, there's no herd immunity if it circles back again, so you'd have to cancel again and again and again. How long are you willing to keep kids out of school? They could easily lose half the school year or more.

Considering that serious complications seem to be confined to older adults and the elderly (as opposed to seasonal influenza, which is also dangerous for very small kids), perhaps it's better to let it burn through the population as quickly as possible. It might be easier to keep the vulnerable population confined for a short period during the burn; once there's herd immunity (assuming infection provides immunity, of course) they should be safe.

Stanford students can just do distance learning. The infrastructure for primary and secondary schools just isn't in place to provide that, so they're forced to make more difficult decisions about the needs of their students and the curriculum on the one hand, and the risks to students' families and the wider population on the other hand.

This is an exceptional scenario, so normal rules don't apply.

Kids are in close proximity at school, touch each other, don't wash hands or not touch face as they are told...

Also, even if they don't very sick, they can make others in family sick.

Many kids are cared for by older (60+) relatives. Losing their primary caregiver is going to negatively affect them way more than having to do school through the internet. Letting it burn through the population is exactly what we need to avoid.

It's really not that common for a child's primary caregiver to be 60+.

> Considering that serious complications seem to be confined to older adults and the elderly

This is misinformation. Its just way more likely to kill the elderly them the young. The same applies to the influenza however, and the preliminary numbers make this strain more deadly than influenza in both elderly and adults.

But nevertheless: we just don't know with the virus just taking hold outside of China. Give it 3 more weeks and realistic estimates are possible.

It's been widely reported that there were no deaths among children 10 or younger (at least until a few days ago) despite a not insignificant number of infections among that age group, and even the CDC says that young children are low risk (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/ch...). This was also the case with SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. By contrast, children under 5 years old are at high risk for complications from seasonal influenza. (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/highrisk/children.htm). And there were quite a few deaths of children during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, both in absolute and relative terms. (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5834a1.htm)

This isn't surprising because influenza is a completely different virus from coronavirus.

Of course the elderly and sick are far more at risk for any of these. All of these viruses kill by causing pneumonia--primary viral pneumonia in the case of SARS and MERS, secondary bacterial pneumonia in the case of seasonal influenza, and a seeming mix of primary and secondary pneumonia in the case of 2009 H1N1. People with cardiopulmonary problems are far more likely to succumb to pneumonia if only because their lungs are already compromised.

Yes, corvid doesn't seem to be dangerous to children. I'm not sure how that's relevant for it's danger to adults and elderly however. I did only mention these age groups for a reason ;)

I am not demographic x and therefore x people deaths don't matter is quite sociopathic.

I don’t think it’s sociopathic to choose having a functioning economy over elderly people getting a severe cold

Nope. This kind of shock is how you determine which companies are robust or antifragile to reality. You don't sacrifice humanity for the companies, its the other way around.

By "severe cold" you mean high chance of death. This kind of reframing is manipulative too.

There's a distinct possibility that a vaccine will be discovered before too long.

The problem is less discovering the vaccine - though corona viruses seem to be a quite challenge in this respect - but to get it to the point where it can be used. For that it needs to be proven:

- that it is harmless. As vaccines are to be used on healthy people, it needs to be very safe. And of course

- it needs to be shown to be effective.

So even if we find a vaccine right now, it will take at least a year until it can be deployed. Though in this case, everything will be tried to cut the time short.

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