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Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is definitely not surprising to the least! Even if I was laid off I am more worried about my children having long term health effects (or worse) than missing a few bills, and that is before considering how flexible lenders are claiming to be (I've gotten emails from all my major bills about covid related help they can provide).

I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.

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It's all about risk. Humans are terrible at understanding probability. There must be a threshold where it becomes ok to take on the risk (e.g. driving a car everyday for most Americans). So where is that threshold?

Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?

It might be the case that opening schools for younger ages with 2 shifts to reduce density (2 weeks in person, 2 weeks from home) could have an acceptable risk profile.

Risk and uncertainty go hand-in-hand. It’s clear what the risks are, generally, with cars. It’s unclear what the risks are with a novel pathogen.

If its unclear yet then don't shut down school ? Its clear that there are risk of closing school.

> Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?

Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.

The problem with all of these simple "risk profile" analyses is that we as a country are being forced to accept risk we don't have to. With cars, we understand there is some amount of risk but also we as a society also care about those deaths and make tons of regulations and improvements to make driving safer. As such, death rates have fallen over the decades even as miles driven have accelerated.

Whereas with the pandemic we seemingly are just accepting high death rates and hoping for the best instead of putting in the level of effort to fix it. That makes it not just about risk tolerance, but frustration with the level of concern the country is putting into fixing the problem.

> Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.

ok now imagine the virus lives on surfaces for 5+ years and never dies. now what? you can’t eradicate this virus by quarantining, someone, and it only takes one, is going to spread it somehow.

now answer with that in mind. “we would just fix it” is a cop out, we can’t fix it.

Your comments are all dead and I vouched for this one, but it's clear from your comment history why. Nobody likes reading "angry programmer" comments here because you're just not special around here, so nobody has to bear the cost of your malice in order to divine the meaning behind your words. "Shut the fuck up" and "delete your account" are really intolerable, stupid ass comments for HN, and if your response to this is that you know but you don't care, I would suggest finding a technical community that places more emphasis on free speech absolutism (like EFNet maybe) than just wasting bandwidth as you are here on HN.

You can see the death rate dropping while cases are dramatically going up which one could argue is that exact mitigation happening.

Masks, sanitation, and distance have likely lowered the overall viral load even if one does contract it. Obviously higher testing rates contribute to the decreasing death rate but given the blind studies from asia I don't think it would be that drastic of a reduction.

It gives me some hope we can lower the risk enough to have children interact with the caveat being adults actually enforce masks/sanitation/distance.

The big question marks are "Long COVID", which I haven't seen mentioned about kids (so, good news?), and ADE reaction (Antibody Dependent Enhancement , of the virus) which we'll see in the second wave, when people get re-infected.

I think this is textbook confirmation bias. When you have two seemingly equivalent theories (the threat of C-19 is serious vs overblown), you select the one that is more convenient for your worldview.

Mr. and Mrs. Applecart both have full-time jobs and four children; they don't have time to home-school and wouldn't know how if they did. Their lives would be more functional if the threat is overblown, so they believe the threat is overblown.

Mrs. and Mr. Bandersnatch work in the mining industry. If scientists are correct, the fossil fuel industry is going to lead to climate collapse within about twenty years. Their livelihoods depend on oil extraction. They have a vested interest in being skeptical of scientific authority.

As someone else here pointed out, the study doesn't seem to factor economic security. I bet you would find a very strong correlation between economic security and willingness to keep children at home that would cross political lines.

(yes, I know, confirmation bias cuts both ways)

> yes, I know, confirmation bias cuts both ways

Indeed. I suspect people who are adamant for more aggressive lockdowns are those who have good WFH options and good job security.

... and who ought to be advocating for better social safety nets for everyone. I feel a lot of the "get back to normal" fighters are failing to imagine a sensible social safety net that might enable a lot more people to remain home/locked down.

That's an easy allegation to throw out. Someone can advocate for a social safety net and still have bills due next month.

> what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years?

What societies have done throughout history for diseases like smallpox, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, the flue, etc. Essentially, we learn to accept it.

Yes, I know, eventually a vaccine was found for smallpox, etc., but those diseases had been around for centuries (millennia?). Only very recently have we found ways to deal with them.

> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.

Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.

Sure, but they can pass it as easily as an adult can (saw a recent paper that said that children under 5 have higher viral loads than adults so they might actually be more infectious). There's a myth that kids can't pass it, but it's only a myth.

> they can pass it as easily as an adult can

Sounds like you're using a proxy result (viral load instead of shedding or actual transmission) in a single unnamed paper to make a pretty strong assertion?

> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.

But that's one of the biggest unknowns. While children are at far lower risk of dying, according to data we have, we still don't know about long term health effects and we're finding out new information all the time. And much of that new information doesn't seem great.

Are you confusing harm with death rates? It's a novel virus and we still do not know the long term health impacts of it.

Everything novel has this problem, and fortunately our epistemology is up to the task. We set our priors to a weighted linear combination of other similar things and then revise as evidence comes in.

For instance, MMR II was approved in 1978. How do we know that people who were given MMR II won't spontaneously die at the age of 60? Or perhaps to bring it closer to another problem, how do we know they won't spontaneously develop Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of 60? There hasn't been time. It's a pretty novel vaccine.

There is no indication whatsoever that MMR has likely long-term health effects, and there are indications that C19 could have long-term health effects, and what we appear to learn month by month is more alarming, not less, with respect to the question of whether or not C19 is a "you either die of it in a month or you're fine" situation.

It also doesn't have to be a universal effect for it to generate effectively universal concern among parents. If it turned out that 1/20 kids suffered permanent kidney damage due to infection, most parents would keep their kids home. Look at the stats on school shootings and note that we pointlessly traumatize kids to assuage the concerns of parents. That's your figure of merit: that's how powerful the long-term C19 effect would need to be to change the behavior of the median parent.

I agree with these (hopefully not incorrectly) restated things I think you believe:

* It is more likely that MMR has few significant long-term health effects than if COVID-19 does

* COVID-19 effects are unlikely to be binary outcome

* Effects need not be universal for them to affect parental behaviour

However, none of that agreement is important to the discussion I was hoping to have. My comment was solely on the epistemology. I suspect you also use the same methods I was talking about in my previous comment.

If that is the case, then perhaps some other day we can argue about what the priors are. If we're good about it, we'll end up with the Aumann Agreement Theorem (+ corollaries) result, and rapidly agree (through likely both of us shifting our priors as we exchange information).

I think we have no disagreement and am happy to conclude this here.

Just to give you one possible side effect: sterility. There are plenty of viruses that when caught as a child do not give much in terms of symptoms but will make you sterile for life. That's not something that will come out in the next two months.

True, and whether MMR 2 will kill you or your mind in 60 years isn't something that comes out in 42 years. We don't know that yet.

But if I had to guess, you're probably pro-MMR-2 (as am I), so the question is what epistemology permits that view?

It could, but we have a lot of data on those diseases and typically a weakened or reduced dose live virus shot has a known outcome with some outliers where the shot leads to the disease or something worse in the relatively short term.

For COVID-19 we are still guessing at most of this, hopefully the long term effects are not too bad and those effects of contracting the disease will get reduced over time.

But I would definitely not rule out some shocker long term effect at this stage that we are unaware of, especially not when taking into account developing organisms such as children, where effects can stay hidden for a long time.

I think we're close to agreement, but not quite. We're not, after all, guessing at most. For instance, it's pretty unlikely that COVID-19 will cause you to grow three extra feet from your nose within the next 60 years.

There are some things we don't have high certainty on, but our epistemology would be faulty if we ignored how other coronaviruses behave, just like it would be faulty if we ignored how other attenuated viruses behave when we examine if MMR-2 will cause instadeath at age 60.

But there are quite a few examples of some pretty nasty effects that only show up when a person reaches maturity. So better to take this the slow and the sure way, more evidence is better.

> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor

Others have mentioned this, but just for emphasis: you do not know that. Nor does anyone else. Repeating it is irresponsible, and you should stop doing that.

There have been a lot of lessons the epidemic can teach us. But one big one is that magical thinking is still accepted as a substitute for reason by a frightening number of people, and that's before you get to the outright grifters.

Nobody knows anything for sure, but "the virus might be causing huge hidden damage to kids" is in the same kind of unlikely tail risk as "social distancing might be building up so much social pressure it'll cause a violent revolution". Sure, it might be, but speculation like that can't be a primary factor in decisionmaking.

But we do know that. Or at least we can glean as much based upon the distribution by age for hospital admittance and death.

We don’t know what, if any, the long term consequences will be. But the short term death risk for young children appears to be minimal.

The difference in worry parents have over short term and "long term" death risks for their kids is marginal. In particular: if something could happen to jeopardize your kids lives while they are still kids --- which we do not know --- it's an overwhelming worry.

This is one of those conversations where message board logic stands a good chance of taking us far away from how real-world humans would reason.

I think all it really does is that it highlights the difference between those who have children and those who do not. As a parent, I couldn't care less about the monetary impact of COVID-19 beyond the basics to survive and the years have taught us to be very frugal when we need to be.

Meanwhile, the thought of sending my kids back to school in two weeks has me sleepless (again). We have already seen different evidence surface in the last month or so but zero adjustment to the school plans. As much as I would like to approach this all in a dispassionate and rational way the parent 'module' in me tells me in no uncertain terms that I'm doing something irresponsible by not standing up for them more forcefully and trusting the experts on this.

My kids are going back to college in a couple days. They're adults! They're sharing an apartment this semester! And I'm a wreck. It's hard for me to fathom how this story is even news. What would be shocking is if the numbers had come in any closer between infection and work.

Ugh. I feel for you. That's a tough position to be in, college is if possible even worse than grade school where mine are going. Even so in your case the risk is clear and present, and the University teachers are going to be a lot more likely to establish what their own risk appetite is than grade school teachers. This whole situation sucks. Way too many unknowns and too many people pretending there is no problem. I'm not looking forward to this winter. It seems like a perfect storm is brewing: COVID-19 resurgence, US Elections (which will generate a lot of friction no matter what the outcome), Brexit. This will be a rough ride. Hang in there.

My oldest daughter left for college yesterday, living in a dorm. She's only 10min away, but between having her move out and worrying about COVID, I'm a basket case. I expect the campus to shut down in a month when cases numbers balloon, but I hope I'm wrong and they keep things under control.

You should strongly encourage your daughter to commute from home, since her college is only 10 minutes away. Students will take precautions during classes which will limit the spread, but in the evenings when they return to their dorms, they will let down their guards and the inevitable will happen. COVID spreads easily in dorms.

There's also the potential that they bring it home, causing the op to get sick/die. I'm a little more afraid of dying early, not because I want to live, but because : A. I don't want my kids to grow up w/out a dad, and B. I don't want to miss the important things in life. C. I'm hoping their chance of serious illness is less, but if I were wrong, I'd wish for death quickly afterwards.

I'm also sure things are easier when you have a parent to lean on for support, when a crisis comes up. (Lots of those on the horizon)...i'd rather be here to help them w/ that.

So part of me feels me living is important to their survival (mine are <4 yrs old - 2 boys, I'm 40). So, it might be safer and less traumatic if they stayed in the dorm, assuming they're healthy and have higher chances, and assuming they're good at social distancing / masking up to keep viral load down.

It'd be a hard decision to weigh, but I'd probably have a family council discuss the pros and cons and call a vote or something.

Basically commute or dorms, they can still catch it. At least in dorms maybe they don't infect older more vulnerable people or family members. Honestly, I'd probably teach them to code and say, hey work w/ dad till this is over then go to college :).

As a parent, I couldn't care less about the monetary impact of COVID-19 beyond the basics to survive and the years have taught us to be very frugal when we need to be.

Did you ever think that some people with kids may not be in the position to work from home and have to go to work every day? I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics where a large percentage of Americans don’t have $400 in savings.

I also bet you have a job that allows you to work from home.

How many households are led by a single parent and/or two parents who have to go to a job where they can’t work from home?

I am not going to sit here tsk tsking all of the people who aren’t as fortunate as I am. Not only do I have a job where I can work from home. We were also in the financial position that we had the option of my wife not going back to work in the school system and just saying it wasn’t worth the risk.

> Did you ever think that some people with kids may not be in the position to work from home and have to go to work every day?

Yes, did you read the whole comment thread before asking that question? Because I specifically addressed it in another comment hours ago.

> I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics where a large percentage of Americans don’t have $400 in savings.

Yes, and as I've often said in other places and here as well: America is a country that has serious problems in terms of how the wealth is distributed. But that problem was there before COVID, and COVID is only going to make that problem worse. It is a systemic issue that won't be solved by how we deal with the virus and the associated disease.

Just like the 'war on drugs' impacts people from different social strata disproportionally, the same with three strikes laws and lots of other problems like that. It is a direct result of the laws you make and the politicians you vote for.

> I also bet you have a job that allows you to work from home.

That bet would work out, today. But six months ago that wasn't the case and as a result of that I contracted the virus at the end of the last job abroad and spent three weeks in bed. Fortunately I made it through and have decided that if I can't do my work remotely then I won't do my work.

> How many households are led by a single parent and/or two parents who have to go to a job where they can’t work from home?

Many. So, society should foot the bill there. It's only logical. This is how it is done in other countries.

> I am not going to sit here tsk tsking all of the people who aren’t as fortunate as I am.

Neither am I.

> Not only do I have a job where I can work from home. We were also in the financial position that we had the option of my wife not going back to work in the school system and just saying it wasn’t worth the risk.

Lucky you. But that is just you. For every you there are multiple people for who that is not the case. What are you going to do about that? Are you willing to pay increased taxes for a social safety net?

America is one giant study in the tragedy of the commons. And COVID just brings that out, it did not create any of it.

Take Lithuania or Latvia. Countries that suffered from being USSR satelite states for decades. Within a relatively short while their political structure and other infra put them on a footing solid enough to deal with this situation as it should be done, and many Western countries should look to them as examples of how you tackle a problem like this.

For those countries where it is worse - sometimes much worse - and which are substantially richer than Latvia and Lithuania you should be asking yourself what went wrong and why.

If there is any group we should be most cautious about when it comes to the unknown long-term risks it's children because they have the longest term that they'll be stuck dealing with it. For a 60 or 70 year old when we talk "long-term effects" we're talking 10-20 years. When we're talking about potential long-term effects for a 10 year old it's an entire lifetime - 50, 60, 70, even 80 years of unknown physical and financial burden. I'm not a parent but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that parents would be very troubled by that kind of potential downside no matter how remote or unknown or unquantifiable the possibility.

> you do not know that

You also don't know that the virus won't give you superpowers, but you'd be foolish to act like it.

According to the best evidence we have, children are very very unlikely to suffer serious consequences from covid-19. Yes, it's possible that there are future complications we aren't yet aware of - but we don't presently have any reason to expect it.

We have to live based on probabilities, not possibilities. 800 kids drown each year in swimming pools. We live with the risk because swimming is great. So is going outside, seeing other humans, and getting educated.

There is absolutely no proof that children will not have long term health impacts that could reverberate for the rest of their lives. There are signs of chronic health repercussions for adults who have been infected. There is no telling yet what we can expect for children as they grow.

You literally cannot prove a negative.

you can look at available data about chronic inflammation in people who have survived the initial infection. You can also look at data that a small number of kids are showing acute autoimmune reactions leading to severe illness and in a small number of cases death. You can then say, “we don’t know fully yet how big to expect this to be, but we should not risk exposing children to potentially life long health complications until we do.” Easy to reason through.

We still have no idea what the long term effects of this disease are, or how they depend on severity.

We don’t know an infinite number of things. You can’t make decisions based on unknowns. You have to make decision based of evidence, not the lack of evidence.

>You can’t make decisions based on unknowns.

What? Of course you can. We know there's potential long term health effects in adults who get COVID-19, there's risk children face the same ones. We don't know how severe or how likely children are to get them (much like in adults), but we can absolutely decide not to take the risk anyway, and keep kids out of schools.

Keeping kids out of school _is_ a decision, and not an easy one when having kids at home means the parents can't work.

This keeps being trotted out but is actually a solved problems. For those situations where both parents have to work and both have to work out of home the schools can stay open and give a limited number of pupils regular lessons.

That way you cut down tremendously on a potential vector of transmission with as limited an impact as possible. We've done this here in NL successfully and in other countries besides.

maybe the solution is that parents shouldn't have to work during a pandemic if they can't.

I should have said that you can’t logically make a decision based on unknowns.

Certainly many people make all kinds of decision based on irrational fear.

“We know there’s potential long term health effects” — without a percentage qualifier of how many people are affected, and a qualifier on the magnitude of the effect, this statement is utterly meaningless. There’s “potential long term health effects” (of some unspoken magnitude, to some unspoken percentage of the population) to everything.

“We don’t know how severe or how likely children”.... hundreds of thousands of children have tested positive for COVID. What we know for sure is that most will never know they ever even had it, and of those that do, less than 1% require hospitalization. 10-24 year olds are about 25x more likely to die of suicide than of COVID. (6,500 vs 175)

One thing we absolutely do know for sure is that social isolation will increase the suicide and overdose number in older kids. We also know that detected cases of children abuse and neglect are way down since lockdowns started, and it’s not because kids are being abused or neglected less. We know many kids primary source of good nutrition comes from school lunches. The evidence all points to closing schools being more dangerous for children than opening them. Particularly for children in low income households.

There may be an argument for closing schools, but it’s one that sacrifices children‘s social, mental, and economic wellbeing for the sake of potentially lower transmission among other truly at-risk populations.

We absolutely can. We could be wrong and dead and we could be wrong and not dead. I'll pick the latter every time.

Even if the kids are fine, if both parents get sick at the same time it's going to be hell taking care of the kids. Especially when you can't hire outside help due to social distancing requirements.

That is my biggest concern as well. Plus the reality that if both parents come down with serious symptoms the kids likely have it, so it would not be ideal to send the kids to other family members to watch long term

Also a lot of parents rely on... Grandparents to childcare when they are sick!

"Hey Grandma can you take care of my covid-kid while I am slowly maybe dying here?"

There is 0 societal support here.

> Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.

I think that's assuming that death is the only thing you have to worry about with this disease, and that if you don't die you'll recover and be no worse for wear. That may be a false assumption, and it could be that many children suffer from some kind of long term damage from the disease.

I think a bigger problem is fear mongering like this without providing sources or data to back it up. People have become distrustful in general because frankly it's exhausting figuring out what is true and what isn't.

> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.

Even if this is true (we already have evidence it's not for some children), it's completely irresponsible to allow schools to open. We know children are infectious and easily spread the disease. There are other members of society besides children. Letting the virus run rampant in schools will lead to parents and other adults getting sick and dying. It's not ok for children to die but if their parents, grandparents, teachers, or parents' friends die it's somehow ok? What kind of logic is that?

there's other forces at work with the rush to open schools than just covid19. Keep in mind, extended unemployment is expiring as well as a number of other emergency programs. School is the only place where many kids get a semi-square meal regularly. For many kids it's also a much safer environment than not school.

Then extend those programs. That should be obvious. Open up socially distanced food lines for kids and their parents that give out free food. None of this is impossible especially with the amount of wasted food we have. None of these problems lead to the conclusion that we should open schools when we can resolve these side issues in smarter, better ways that don't put the entire society at risk for covid. The House passed a relief bill 3 months ago. The failure of the Senate to do the same is simply inexcusable. That failure should not be the reason for even more people to die. This is so fucking absurd.

People put a lot of weight in early studies from countries that didn’t see outbreaks in schools. My problem with those studies has been: 1) Community spread in those areas was very low. 2) Kids were/are not being tested at anywhere near the same rate as adults. 3) We really have no idea whether there are long term effects in asymptomatic individuals.

Regarding both 2 and 3, kids seem to be largely asymptomatic. That would explain the lower testing rates. People are generally not going to go have their kid swabbed if there’s no apparent reason to do so. But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects, it seems pretty cavalier to just assume kids won’t. Hopefully they don’t, but we really don’t know.

This type of thinking often gets dismissed as “alarmist”, however a bit of alarm (and an abundance of caution) over a rapidly spreading novel virus is warranted.

(This is my armchair analysis. I’m not a health expert.)

People put a lot of weight into early proprietary models that turned out to be absolute garbage.

> But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects

Unfortunately, there's no control for these assumptions. People are exposed to all sorts of things over their lifetime. Not everyone produces antibodies, so there will be no definitive way to link any person having an infection and any long term effects. Need to establish the risk compared to existing baseline.

So far, deaths are down for the year, so everyone's switched to 'unknown long term effects.'

> Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU

You see this kind of vague claim online all the time when it comes to COVID but with no actual data.

What are the actual risks of a child going to the hospital as a result of COVID infection? How does that compare to other risks that you regularly expose your kids to?

The risk in children is from diabetes and metabolic syndrome, conversely what protects children most is a relatively well functioning immune system.

As we've seen that coronavirus immunity is enhanced with exposure to other coronaviruses, and innate immune system function, it appears children should not be isolated. By this rationale, they shouldn't even be wearing masks.

About 1% of detected cases in children require hospitalization. That number of course does not account for undiagnosed, subclinical, and fully asymptomatic cases in children.

Compared to the flu, just looking at the proportion of children who are diagnosed positive cases, children would be about equally as likely to require hospitalization, but this likely overstates the hospitalization risk of COVID.

In terms of death rates, flu is significantly more deadly (at least 10x more deadly) in children 0-14, and about equally as deadly for ages 15-24. [1]

[1] - https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/07/14/coronavirus-covid-death...

Plus we know nothing about the long term health consequences. Kids may not be dying at a high rate but they may suffer long term heart, lung, or organ damage. It feels like everyone is just assuming that if it isn’t death then it is fine. Just because you survive something doesn’t make you stronger.

> Plus we know nothing about the long term health consequences.

I'm not anti-vax, but anti-vaxers use this same tactic; they use ambiguity to breed fear against vaccines.

I get that some unknowns are dangerous, but there has to be a limit, right? We can't be afraid of everything we don't know.

Most vaccines have been in use for years, sometimes decades. They're given nearly universally. We've had ample time and sample size to uncover their dangers (if any). Covid hasn't even been around for a year. The two situations are nothing alike.

The difference is that anti-vaxers make this point against vaccines that have been used for a long time about which we do understand the long term health consequences.

This is contrasted to the long term health consequences of COVID-19, which appears could be significant, but we just aren't certain yet only because there just aren't any long term survivors yet and thus studies [0] related to it haven't been completed. I don't think this is past the limit.

0 - https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2020/looking-forward-understa...

I’m basing my risk assessment on evidence of likely long term damage to adults. Combined with very little data there is a huge amount of unknown risk still to children.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/07/08/from-lung-scarring-to-h...

I hope I’m wrong. In six months or a year maybe I’ll feel more comfortable with the risk to my kids (and myself with a damaged spinal cord), but right now I don’t and to equate it to anti-vaxxers is fairly insulting.

Or people are assuming that the long term effects of COVID on children are similar to that of the flu on children, given similar death rates. (Which seems plausible, if you count '10x higher' as 'similar'. Overall, the flu is about 1/30th the IFR of COVID-19, but apparently most of the difference is at older ages)

EDIT: And, in fact, the CDC says that the Flu is more dangerous to healthy children than COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm and search for 'children'. Though the CDC may not be a trusted source for many...

10x higher for people in their 80’s. Show me where the death rate is 10x higher than the flu for people under 40.

Yeah, the CDC actually says that COVID-19 is safer for healthy children than the flu now: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm

I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.

Those people think "opening the economy" is worth more than human (kid or otherwise) lives. They're either politicians trying to convince an electorate that they didn't fail miserably at their job, or are regular Joes falling victim to disingenuous cable news networks.

Painting your strawmen with very broad brushes.

What about the long term health consequences of poverty? At least those are known.

Please consider the long-term implications here. We don't get to choose whether economic damage happens - it's already happened and will continue. People who are scared are not going to go out unnecessarily, and even if that's only 30-40% of consumers it'll have a massively negative effect on the economy.

We have only one thing we can do to get the economy back on the rails: bring the case count down. The longer we let this go without properly managing it, the harder it is to bring the case count down. The longer the case count is too high for reasonable, cautious people who care about their parents and grandparents' survival and their long term lung health to participate significantly in the economy, the more damage the economy will sustain.

If you want businesses to be opening up now, you should've demanded for them to close 6 months ago. If you want schools to open, you should've been demanding that everyone wear a mask 6 months ago.

At this stage of the pandemic, people who selfishly refused to do their part for their fellow citizens are entirely to blame for the continued necessity of mask requirements and schools closing.

I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid

Perhaps people are simply desensitized to kids catching colds & flus? My kid probably brought home twenty different novel coronaviruses, all before his second birthday.

> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.

Because we have forgotten how to say to ourselves, "I generally agree with this ideology, but on this subject, I agree with other people." Politics (and this is, sadly, political) is a zero sum game now.

> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.

Minimization and denial are powerful psychological forces, and the fact that some children get the condition without severe symptoms lulls some people into complacency.

The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection.

> The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection

If this is the way to treat with life, how would you be still alive? Isn’t it the very reason we get ill because the body is treating the virus.

Do you have any source to believe that asymptomatic infected person has long term negative effects from infection?

> If this is the way to treat with life, how would you be still alive?

I'm confused as to why you're taking my observation about a novel deadly disease as advice to live the rest of your life by.

> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.

That was what the Chinese data said - they had fewer cases so presumably they didn't see the full range of possibilities.

It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction so long as they have a child at home.

The parent will not abandon the child home alone to go to work, no matter how big the stick.

School being effectively state subsidized working hours daycare, it must resume before low wage workers can once again be coerced back into risking their lives to avoid homelessness.

> It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction so long as they have a child at home

Impossible? definitely not. (i would argue this is the exact issue many people in the US face today).

highly immoral and with a total disregard to one's decency or life? absolutely.

Parents simply will not abandon their small child, home alone for the day, to go to work. Not going to happen.

If that’s their only option, they will end up homeless, with their child.

It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction

It's a failing of the government that so many Americans have to face this choice.

How is this a failing? The system is performing well for its stakeholders - maximizing wealth extraction for the upper class, with a simulation of free market choice to keep the middle and lower classes occupied and pacified. From this perspective, a 1% fatality rate should merely translate into the stock market declining by 1%, and then we move on.

Yes! It's also a failure of imagination of the American public. It's like a social safety net DURING A PANDEMIC is just too far outside the Overton window. It's crazy!

Covid-19 might be a major challenge for the society, but individual risks for younger people wothout health issues are still small, at least based on the knowledge we currently have. I am afraid the attitudes described in the article are more due to uninformedness and normal parental anxiousness than anything rational.

I know 7 people now that have had it. The worst affected one had to stay in bed a day, most of the others just lost taste or felt a bit run down. Children had sniffles. 2 were asymptomatic.

I know two people who have had it. Once lost her sense of smell four months ago. Not back yet. The other died.

Wow that is incredibly bad luck.

So, now you know 8. Three weeks in bed, recovery another 4, still not 100% but managing. That's been 5 months now.

> some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid

I mean, that point of view was literally expressed in a public forum by the president of the United States. It must carry weight in some circles at least.

More kids go to the ICU and die due to the flu.

Who's gonna take care of the kids whose parents are in the ICU?

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