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Comment by doopy-loopy2 | Hacker News Reader

Deaths in children are essentially 0

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.

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.

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.

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).

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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.

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.

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

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