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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is too much emphasis on these and not enough on the ones that earnestly want to go back to work. There should be a balance here, as we really do need a lot of students to have access to schools in the fall.

Remote learning doesn't work for everyone and leaves a lot of people behind. The overall consequences of another lost semester may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.

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Here's a question to consider: behind on the way to what, exactly?

If we keep on getting pandemics (something that's been expected for a long time) the whole baseline of how society operates will be forcibly disrupted. (a baseline people can be 'left behind' on the way to: I hear talk of students missing vital academic AND SOCIAL connections, which sounds like pre-pandemic talk)

If we have even moderate economic collapse, which is inevitable with the pandemic we do have (and the other, related upheavals going on) then the destination simply will not exist. We will be flung into a Star Trek future where the existing mechanisms of human survival no longer apply. It's possible the consequences of dropping 'behind' will mean the difference between becoming wealthy through business and social connections, and literally starvation and homelessness (rather than just doing poorly and getting by). However, in those conditions, all of society collapses and the wealthy have no place to be anymore. Wealth depends upon the existence of a society that can support it.

In my opinion there is no possible benefit to pretending it's possible to go 'back to normal' in any sense, and it's on us to envision what comes next. 'Normal' is never coming back. It's already gone forever, so it's time to decide whether we want human beings to survive or not.

We've always 'kept on getting pandemics'. Pandemics and rampant disease and death is the normal historical state of the world. We have become accustomed to it being not the case due to the prevalence of vaccines and better medicines, but COVID is nowhere near the worst pandemic ever, nor is it even the last in living memory. Recall that the worst pandemic in terms of per-capita death is still within living memory. Pandemics are normal. There is nothing that has accelerated their emergence. This is a fantastic lie.

> 'Normal' is never coming back.

That's ridiculous. If anything, this pandemic has restored 'normal' to the world. The normal state of the world is pandemics, natural disaster, human death, etc. Only by active human society have we been able to avoid that. Modern society is so good and efficient that too many people have forgotten what's normal.

>may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.

Let's be perfectly clear, this isn't something abstract. The consequences are dead kids and dead teachers. Get that through your head. You of course imagine it won't be your kids that die but there's absolutely no reason to think that.

> Let's be perfectly clear, this isn't something abstract. The consequences are dead kids

Yes, the serious risk of increases in childhood “morbidity and mortality” if schools remain closed are exactly what the American Academy of Pediatrics cited as a key consideration when strongly urging that planning center on a return to in-person schooling with the start of the coming school year.

Yes, and then the American Academy of Pediatrics announced a revised statement that included:

"Returning to school is important for the healthy development and well-being of children, but we must pursue re-opening in a way that is safe for all students, teachers and staff. Science should drive decision-making on safely reopening schools. Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics. We should leave it to health experts to tell us when the time is best to open up school buildings, and listen to educators and administrators to shape how we do it."

Bottom line IMO is that these decisions need to be made locally. There is no one-size-fits-all for schools across the country. And sadly there will also be other significant negative consequences for some kids who can't go back to school yet. We should be attacking these issues on multiple fronts with multiple strategies, using strong leadership, increased funding, and careful planning instead of rushing into a situation we are unprepared for.

Not to mention dead family members these teachers and kids will bring the disease back to. Maybe it won't get through people's thick skulls until we start making school yearbooks have obituary sections.

Dead parents too, because even if the kids don't die from at the same rate, they can and will spread the disease.

Strong statement: dumb kids are better than dead kids.

Deaths in children are essentially 0

Which is not relevant. This is not an issue regarding the health of the children as much as it is the health of the teachers.

YES! I don't want my wife sacrificed by an asymptomatic kid carrying it to class

In spite of the common idea that schools and young children are germ factories that make adults sick, there's a recent article from the American Academy of Pediatrics that shows children are very rarely the index case for COVID. It's much more likely that she would give it to them, than that they would give it to her.

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2020/07...

"Children aren't typically the family index case during lockdown" doesn't really tell us much about non-lockdown spread.

But all the evidence from European countries tells us a lot about non-lockdown spread following a proper lockdown.

Sure, but right now, we've got the Georgia governor suing Atlanta to forbid a "proper" lockdown and masking, and an anti-masking political movement.

"It doesn't spread in European schools" doesn't really help us very much in evaluating what'll happen in America right now.

...proper lockdown...

Which the US refuses to do.

It's like we're the kid in school who refused to do their work, then has a tempter-tantrum because they have to forgo recess. And much of the EU (and Taiwan, Singapore, HK, etc) are the nerdy kid who finished early and now get to spend the afternoon doing something fun.

Excellent analogy, actually.

It's entirely relevant to the parent comment who was specifically talking about kids dying from being sent back to school.

> Strong statement: dumb kids are better than dead kids.

The mortality rate in children would leave us with something like 10k dead kids country-wide if the virus is permitted to spread to everyone.

Mortality isn't the only issue, either. We're seeing plenty of signs some folks survive, but with long-term health impacts.

(An overwhelmed medical system will kill vulnerable kids in non-COVID ways, too. Mortality of things like car accidents and asthma attacks and suicide go up if the ICUs are full.)

How many kids have long term effects?

I don’t think we know that yet.

I partly believe this is because thus far kids have been mostly shielded - in my experience anyway. Schools and businesses (daycare, etc) closed as the virus gained traction. Now we are opening back up and throwing the kids headfirst into an uncertain future. It is worrisome to say the least.

It's not 0 and putting every kid in the country into a worst case scenario location for spread of the disease you are running an evil experiment.

even if it's zero they will bring it home to parents/grandparents where it's much greater than 0.

Children are some of the best disease vectors. In many schools, they easily come in contact with 100 other children.

When the child is sick with a disease, they bring it home. Now the parents are exposed.

This has actually not shown to be true.

Today I learned that children live on their own and never interact with adults away from school.

Maybe we should do that - big boarding houses, get all those kids infected, then they are immune and we can ship them to school :)

/s if that wasn't obvious - but with a small element of truth.

My niece was born with a defective kidney. Her chances of dialysis grows with every infection... and COVID19 has been shown to cause long-term damage to kidneys and livers.

I'd expect my niece to survive COVID19 if she got it. But I'd also expect her to get significant kidney damage and possibly dialysis as a result. Every UTI she gets results in an emergency room visit under normal circumstances. We've been lucky enough that she hasn't had anything this year, but... she's definitely not someone we'd want to see COVID19 infect.

Not everyone's kids are 100% healthy out there. Keep that in mind. There are mutations out there that are completely silent and hidden, and we try to keep these little facts inside the family.

Then she can stay home - 99.99% of children wont have issues.

You're grossly underestimating the prevalence of birth defects that lead to health issues in children.

And adults for that matter. (Any teacher who has a similar immuno-comrpomised situation, or knows of someone similarly immuno-compromised is at risk).

------------

In any case, I "don't worry" about the potential death of my niece at all. What I care about are the long term health effects on her and her life. And for the long-term health effects of other children too.

This disease has been shown to ravage and disable athletes: destroying their lung function even when they survive. Deaths are hardly endgame: long-term chronic illnesses are still a problem to try to minimize.

I have read that birth defects of one sort or another are 6% of live births. I have no idea what percentage of those lead to ongoing health issues.

I'd say that's a false dichotomy. Lots of kids won't have access to a safe environment during the day without school. There will be no visibility for those suffering abuse. Physical abuse will be worse with a kid at home with an abusive parent all day, under stress. There will be less access to food for many children. The virus holds the potential of devastating effects on school children and their families if kids go back. We don't have any good way of quantifying the trade-offs. With everything else, we've been running large-scale social experiments to see what works to keep rates at a level the hospitals can manage. I don't see why we shouldn't do the same with schools: let them re-open on a restricted basis, attempt to cater to those most in need, and see what happens.

I 100% support your view IF they get smarter about protecting teachers and staff (masks, at a minimum). I would love to buy my wife a fogger so she could be sure her room was disinfected properly at the end of every day. Of course they are sold out and it's likely someone would complain about that, too.

Our state (NM) has proposed mask wearing, social distancing, isolation by classroom, and alternating schedules to achieve 50% capacity. Yet still they may not open. At the same time, teachers don’t generally get much support financial or otherwise, school is such a messy endeavor already I can understand the hesitation to move forward with any plan.

I have relatives where they live, the school plan is required mask wearing in hallways, but not in classrooms. This seems like madness.

There are 74 million children <18 in the US. [1]

CDC says that 1.7% of COVID cases belong to children. [2]

Among children, CDC says 1.8% of cases required hospitalization. [2]

    >>> 74000000*0.017*0.018 < 25000
    True

A dumb kid is better than a dead kid, I agree. But are 74M dumber kids worth less than 25000 ICU visits in the entire country?

[1]: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/number-of-children

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6914e4.htm

1.7% while schools are closed.

The numbers in the CDC article are up until just April 2, 2020. Two weeks prior (incubation period) puts the latest case data in mid March, prior to when the lockdown started to be rolled out.

Granted, the situation has become a lot worse since then. It's still a good glance at how the virus spread before any measures were put in place. Especially for relative figures of how COVID behaves differently across age.

There are plenty of examples of distance learning working well. Assuming it is a failure seems willfully blind to me.

This spring we rushed into something unexpected. We've had time to improve. But it seems that instead of focusing on improvements people are focused on their agenda.

Kids don't learn like adults. They can't replace teachers and peers with computers, not permanently.

The hospitalization numbers show the majority of them were under 1 year of age, who would not be attending school. This according to your link [2]

>> Among 95 children aged <1 year with known hospitalization status, 59 (62%) were hospitalized, including five who were admitted to an ICU. The percentage of patients hospitalized among those aged 1–17 years was lower (estimated range = 4.1%–14%)

And of course the number of children infected would be much lower than "all 74 million".

But those are tunnel vision stats only considering one variable.

It's the parents that will be at risk.

Your math is wrong. First, there are 56M students in the US (5-18 year olds, pretty much). Second, while you quoted the % of cases that belong to children, that is the wrong stat. You want the number of kids that would ever get COVID, which is probably all of them, although there is evidence that 20-50% of people have some sort of resistance. So, for worse case estimates, if all students get covid, then 56M * 0.018 = about 1M kids hospitalized. However, CDC also has evidence that there are 5-10x the number of cases in general out there. So if it is 10x, then it is 100,000 kids hospitalized because the hospitalization rate is commensurately lower. Still not a good number.

If we look at mortality, it is better. The current estimate for IFR in kids is about 1 in 300,000. That gives about 220 estimated deaths if every school age kid gets Covid. Cars kill more kids per year driving to school.

This is all horrendously tough to decide on, but we need to use the best data we can and understand the dangers and comparisons to other dangers.

Finally, kids are going to spread it anyway, so I think kids getting it is really a non-issue, except for the very vulnerable.

Staff/teachers are another concern. An even worse concern is people at kids' homes. That's the really tough part.

You need the Infection Fatality rate for mortality.

I just woke up when I wrote this. The math makes no sense. Please disregard this stupid comment.

The consequences of losing a semester for students are highly debatable considering the primary and in many cases only function of schools outside of feeding students is babysitting.

> Remote learning doesn't work for everyone and leaves a lot of people behind. The overall consequences of another lost semester may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.

I'm curious - how few would have to die so that the "overall consequences of another lost semester" is not worse?

That is a really good question, and also one that most people are incapable of discussing rationally. The reasons are, of course, understandable.

The ones who want to go back are either working with special needs kids or have no family of their own. There's a difference between "I'd love to be in a classroom teaching again" and "I want to be in a room full of 20+ potentially infectious children." The government has a responsibility to its constituents that goes beyond "a return to normalcy."

We're hitting 75K positive tests a day in this country and that number is increasing daily. That's WITH social distancing by kids. What do you think is going to happen when a school has 800 kids running around? That's 800 daily potential avenues for disease transmission.

Seriously, who cares if some people "fall behind?" They can catch up at their own pace. I'm pretty sure that most parents would rather their kids graduate at 19 or 20 than be buried at 8 or 9.

I would prefer every student to be held back 1 semester from graduating high school than 1 more dead (if that were a possibility, but you get the point).

I don't even understand how its possible to prefer sending kids back over one semester. Of course I think the bigger issue is its just parents that want kids out of the house for a multitude of reasons including getting back to their own work.

It is easy to go about and proclaim, "life is priceless", "I would prefer to have every student held back than one dead", and so on.

What of students that have debt and now will have to wait more to get their "education"? Do you realize this is all going to cause more pain and suffering and possible deaths?

Do you realize given more budget it is possible to save more people if you spend it wisely?

How does delaying your school career 1 semester cause death?

What debt? School debt? Are you talking about college? If you aren't attending school at all then you aren't adding to the debt (in most cases with Federal loans). If its online then you are still on track so I don't see your point.

We are talking about large number of people. On average this would take away half a year of their productive life.

Nowadays, many people have a plan which is mostly: finish school, get a job based on the education.

It is not difficult to see that if you set back financially large number of people, suddenly, this might increase suicide rate, for example. Or may make them worse off in many different ways causing some to tip into loosing life.

These are not easy decisions, and saying "I would prefer people to pause their lives for 6 months than loose one life" is a completely braindead, extremist way of looking at things.

To show how stupid this is, you can use just a portion of your home budget to save a life. Today. There are many people that don't need much in the way of help. You are free to find one and help him/her, without involving large percentage of population that doesn't want to get involved in it.

I guess it is easier to go about and proclaim extremist slogans.

> These are not easy decisions, and saying "I would prefer people to pause their lives for 6 months than loose one life" is a completely braindead, extremist way of looking at things.

Based on the data from March it's pretty easy to estimate the effects of reopening things, including school. It's a very easy decision, don't reopen yet.

You're comparing an estimated thousands to tens of thousands dying from schools reopening to at most a few hundred thousand having to pause for 6 months and saying it's not an easy decision...?

Not to mention that most schools would have online programs as an alternative, not hold everyone back so your entire premise is false anyway.

I was reacting to the person saying how easy the decision is.

Whether it is actually safe to let people back in schools, I have not enough data and knowledge to decide. Most likely not.

Nowadays no one's plans work out exactly the way they planned.

You can ignorantly (and hypocritically) call avoiding super-spreading schools in the midst of a pandemic an extremist position all you want, but you are overvaluing 6 months of "productivity" and completely avoiding continued remote learning.

I'm also against schools reopening in the fall (though I haven't done much research and don't hold this opinion strongly).

But it seems like holding people back semesters eventually adds up to something that's as bad as a death. These kids are never going to get that semester back. And if you think they enjoy the at home alternatives half as much, or learn half as much or value that time in their lives half as much it seems like on some level the equivalent of 1000s of person lifetimes of value have been lost. I wouldn't hold back everyone one semester in high school in exchange for even on the order of 100s of deaths.

I presume kids die in accidents at school at the moment. if 1 kid dies a year falling down steps at school should all schools be forced to be only 1 level? there needs to be a sensible look at the cost and benefits and zero deaths should not be a a hard requirement.

You would hold back every kid 1 semester to save 1 child?

How about 10 semesters to save 10 children? 100 semesters to save 100 children?

Let’s be honest. It’s not a semester we’re talking about, following your guidelines. It’s more likely three years or so.

Doling the pain out in a few month increments is how it is made to seem more reasonable.

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