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Comment by rmk | Hacker News Reader

When children are vaccinated. It's not clear if the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity, i.e., you are protected against the bug and also can't spread the disease, so most people who have children or are around children will ideally not take undue risks.

I'm not sure if under-16 cohorts' trials are underway already. If they are, and if children are going to be vaccinated before their next school term starts, then society as a whole may consider dropping the current precautions.

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Children are almost immune from the virus. Everyone below 40 is also extremely extremely unlikely to die from the virus, just to a lesser extent.

You might want to update. There were two studies out of Europe last week stating that children are just as likely to get the virus as adults.

I think the poster above you was talking about the chances of death from the virus, not simply the chance of infection.

I think it's pretty well established at this point that the case fatality index for children is vastly lower than for older adults, about 0.1% for people under age 29. [1]

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518649/

The actual best estimate of infection fatality rate for people under age 29 is way less than 0.1%.

0-19 years: 0.003%

20-49 years: 0.02%

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

And that's counting people who have bothered to get tested. If younger people are getting asymptomatic or minor symptom covid that looks like a cold, then the "true" ifr will be even lower

Infection fatality rates are based on antibody seroprevalence studies and thus accounts for asymptomatic cases. What you're thinking of is the case fatality rate, not the infection fatality rate.

You can't get an accurate community seroprevalence measure when your community is told to shelter in place.

Seroprevalence studies have been conducted all over the world. For example in Delhi India approximately 50-60% of the population now have antibodies for SARS-CoV-2. There are statistical techniques for adjusting the raw results based on population demographics.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/delhi-may-be-head...

Note that seroprevalence studies will underestimate the number of infections because some recovered patients don't produce detectible levels of antibodies.

There's more to this virus than fatality. Many people that live will have debilitating aftereffects for the foreseeable future.

The virus hasn't been around long enough to make that claim.

No one will pay the political price of causing infections among children by reopening rapidly. And I'd like to believe that as a society, we are cautious about letting children be infected with a novel disease whose long-term effects are unknown.

I’m not sure your reading of the political climate is accurate. A lot of places have already reopened schools, and I’ve heard a lot of politicians explicitly say that they’re willing to pay the price because it’s not a big deal if kids get it. Maybe they’re wrong, but if you expect that there’ll be public support behind keeping things closed when the death and hospitalization rates start plummeting, I think you’d better readjust.

> it’s not a big deal if kids get it

The Academy of Pediatrics says this. It's not just some politicans who don't know anything about epidemology and likely have never even taken a college-level biology course.

I'm not saying that places will be shut down completely. I was talking specifically about masking and physical distancing mandates and other such restrictions. I don't think big business and the public will tolerate losing another season of attending (in-person) Football, Baseball, Ice Hockey, <insert favorite sport here> games.

> I don't think big business and the public will tolerate losing another season

The whole "COVID fatigue" thing is one of the craziest things I keep hearing with regard to this pandemic. The virus doesn't care if you're bored of the disease and "won't tolerate" staying home from more football games. It's not like it's just going to go away because we're tired of it! I sincerely hope governments aren't going to just open things up because 2021 is a different year and everyone's just really bummed of it all. Surely we have better sense than that.

Inflicting on all children the certain damage of social isolation, screen learning, and further economic precarity, to avoid theoretical and undemonstrated long-term effects (of a perhaps serious but not crippling nature) to a small percentage of them, does not strike me as societal wisdom in any way.

Also, do you know what else has unknown long-term effects in children?

I'm not arguing that children should be kept out of in-person school. In fact, I'm against it, and was against it even when the pandemic was raging last year. I agree with you that children have been silent victims of schoolteachers' refusal to do in-person school. I do, however, strongly support reasonable precautions including masking and physical distancing, which can be achieved with children (not very young children, but certainly 2nd grade and up) with continual reinforcement until it becomes a habit.

> I agree with you that children have been silent victims of schoolteachers' refusal to do in-person school

What should a schoolteacher do then, die? I'm not going to ask them to do that.

They should be put in one of the top priority categories for vaccination, and THEN we can expect them to go in classrooms (but we shouldn't be doing that anyway unless all kids are also vaccinated - otherwise they will keep the virus in circulation. They tend to have extremely mild or completely asymptomatic cases, but they DO catch it and spread it further)

> What should a schoolteacher do then, die?

Feudal traditions aside, no one has the right to draw an income from a position where they are not doing the job. So, if teachers don't want to teach, then they can find another occupation which they are comfortable doing.

> What should a schoolteacher do then

Why not the same thing a grocery clerk is expected to do? Or do you not consider primary education to be “essential” ?

First, that’s factually incorrect. Second, children can transmit COVID even if they don’t get severe cases. Ever send a kid to school or daycare and then spend a year or two sick with everything every child in that school or daycare had? Kids spread cold/flu like viruses probably faster than anyone.

This is one of the problems with the newly-developed vaccines. It's not clear if they confer sterilizing immunity, so it's not clear if a smaller percentage of people getting the vaccine will stop the disease spreading. Therefore, it may be necessary to get most people vaccinated if we don't want the disease around at all.

That has been true for us up until the pandemic - at least in our case. The combination of the school taking extra precautions and parents not sending sick kids to school is working. We've had our daughter in daycare for months with 1 total illness (minor cold). And in that case I believe it was from taking her to outdoor dining. Kids seem to touch every part of those restaurant high chairs which are never sanitized.

> We've had our daughter in daycare for months with 1 total illness (minor cold)

To be fair you can't be sure that wasn't covid, unless you have come up seronegative. Not every adult gets it bad

I get your point, but it's really a stretch. There's been no reported cases of covid at our school and the symptoms matched common cold. Sure I guess there's a chance it could have been some mild case of covid the same as it could have been flu or some other illness.

Prior to the pandemic she used to be in a tiny school with 4-6 kids and 2 teachers and she was sick seemingly every other week. The difference seems to be the combination of teachers sanitizing everything, keeping kids in smaller groups, temperature checks, and parents not sending sick kids to school.

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