Hacker News Reader

Comment by space_fountain | Hacker News Reader

Schools are indeed quite safe. The younger the safer, but generally children get sick less and are vanishingly unlikely to end up in the hospital or die. There's also evidence that schools haven't been a big transmission sites for covid probably because while teacher to teacher transmission is as big a problem as anywhere teacher <-> student and student <-> student transmission isn't that likely. The other side is that closing schools has had big negative impacts on children especially poor children.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

View on HN

I'm very skeptical that schools are quite safe.

See https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1346362159446577154

Some key quotes:

Here is a study carried out across >200 countries that showed that among all interventions studied, closing educational institutions was the 2nd most effective. Importantly, the impact on R was similar for pre-school, primary & secondary school settings.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0

Another study of >131 countries showed that among different interventions studied, one of the highest changes in R (R ratio) between introducing an intervention & lifting it was for school closures:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

There are more good quotes and citations in that thread, it's worth a read.

Anecdotally, the amount of times I've been sick since my daughter enrolled in public school has been mind-blowing. The notion that kids are somehow impervious to contracting this, or don't bring it home to vulnerable family members, would mean this virus behaves very differently from all the other upper respiratory diseases commonly seen out there. That's certainly possible, but based on what I've observed -- for example, I'm 99% certain the coronavirus vector that got me was a child -- it just doesn't pass the smell test with me.

(Edit: Moved this from downthread)

If we're going to be super sensitive about the almost non-existent threat of children wrt sars-cov-2 why aren't we also super sensitive about destroying any semblance of normality in children's lives?

Surely this damages children in their crucial developmental stages when they're deprived of social signalling, and effective teaching methods (sorry, Zoom doesn't cut it).

As science would inform us - humans have millions of years of evolution searing social interaction into our biology. Cutting this out will have profound effects.

If we're going to be super sensitive about the almost non-existent threat of children wrt sars-cov-2

According to the studies I linked above, closing schools during outbreaks saved many, many thousands of (mostly adult) lives. If those studies are correct, the threat is absolutely not "almost non-existent." If you have particular issues with those studies, please share them.

I think it's good to remember that the following can both be simultaneously true:

1. There can be significant mental (and maybe physical!) health risks to keeping your kids home from school.

2. There can be significant physical (and maybe mental!) health risks to sending your kids to school.[0]

Neither point makes the other any less valid.

Every family is different, so everyone's going to weigh those two risks differently, and we need to be generous, patient, and understanding in figuring out how to accommodate each other.

[0] I'm seeing more studies saying mental illness rates are ticking up in Covid survivors relative to other cohorts, so there seems to be a mental health risk that rides the coattails of risk of infection.

> According to the studies I linked above, closing schools during outbreaks saved many, many thousands of (mostly adult) lives.

How many millions of children have had a profound impact on their lives, essentially sacrificing crucial years that determine the rest of their lives?

Some people seem ok with sacrificing children to save (primarily) the elderly.

This whole thing has transcended any kind of logic, and there does not seem to be a rational way to discuss the tradeoffs with people. I think this is just the first "crisis" - actually the mildest thing that could happen and still be considered a global pandemic - to land in the milieu of social media and polarization that the world had become already, and this is the result. The pandemic is really just a fashion accessory for a lot of people, a way to talk about how they're doing their part, look down on others they perceive to be the cause, and add as a hashtag to their posts.

In an earlier, less connected world, there would be other more sensible jurisdictions to go to, and people to speak out and debate rationally about why the ridiculous overreaction we've seen is in nobody's interest. But these days, I think we're all fucked. I think we lost a war a long time ago without noticing, and this is what we're stuck with.

I personally know that the hospitals are empty no covid-19 patients I was there for many surgerys pass few years in and out weeks staying over night. The news claims it's full of virus patients I walked down that wing to find the lights off and no one around.

Boy, I didn't exactly mean to inspire quite this level of skepticism. There is like pretty solid evidence of some wards being awfully full of covid patients some of the time. You're one trip down one wing of a hospital and finding it empty doesn't change the fact that lots more people died in 2020 than the year before

Thanks for the links. I think an interesting and hard thing to communicate with this sort of thing, is that it will always be possible to pull out evidence from both sides and it is difficult for me to weigh where the center of gravity is. Both Trump's and Biden's CDC has recommended school reopening in a lot of cases. I agree that it can't be exactly like normal. Capacity will need reduced especial in highschool, but they obviously believe that the balance of evidence is for reopening. Studying this sort of thing is also really darn hard and I fully believe that numbers based on school reopening times between countries can easily be used to support either side depending on what you control for. I've for example totally heard studies saying that reopening schools was associated with no change in transmission. The author of the twitter thread also remarks on cases dropping during what I think is the summer break. Given the patterns we've seen in covid there might be you know some other explanations for that.

They also seem to be disputing the idea that children spread covid less. I'm not any sort of export, but I think this is a fact that's been pretty well established. It's a bit counter intuitive because yeah as you say children are usually a vector for diseases to get into households, but different diseases work differently and for covid it seems like young children especially are better at fighting it off. One epidemiologist who disagrees doesn't change the larger picture

If I understand correctly there is some evidence this may be changing with the variants, but it's inconclusive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com