Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully.

It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons.

For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary.

The solution is not to generally apply more careful and scientific thinking, because the problem is not a lack of careful and scientific thinking. The agencies in charge are full of people who study this exact problem for a living and are fully qualified and trained for it.

What we're really grappling with is a clear mismatch of priorities between the decision makers and the "decision-makees." Why didn't their study and training lead to a decision that we're all comfortable with? If someone is to blame for this poor decision, why have they not been indicted -- and if we, the public, are to blame for our complicity, why haven't yet we acknowledged our mistake?

No one wants to point the finger out of fear of being called divisive. But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..."

It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu.

If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fine, watch them yourselves."

Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.

Honestly, I wonder if remote learning couldn't be better for at least some student populations. I have family who were bullied terribly (think on the level of "attacked by a crazy person with a knife at school" and "sexually harassed by teachers") and they probably would've benefited from an easier way of getting away from their tormentors instead of having to quit school and get a GED.

I know that's not a one-size-fits-all thing, people are social after all and isolation causes its own issues, but I sort of wonder if remote learning can't become an option for kids, especially those who are poorly-served by their local schools.

> And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs.

Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.

You were downvoted because of how the current generation of adults judges your comment; but how will the next generation see things?

I haven't heard any discussion about this question, at all, and frankly, it disturbs me, today's children are tomorrow's adults.

Somehow, I don't think, "think of the teachers," or "we didn't think it through" will be good enough for them.

This argues we must drastically improve traffic safety, not just accept driving and covid risks.

Not necessarily. There is an opposing argument that we need to accept the risk of death as a part of life. When does a population decide the risk has been reduced enough? I could argue we are well past that point.

As a culture we have completely lost touch with the natural cycles of life. The boomers in positions of power have clearly prioritized their own safety at the expense of the upcoming generations.

That's probably inflammatory. But it's a popular opinion where I'm from that isn't vocalized in the media.

Without trying to say one take is right or wrong, this can in a lot ways be reduced to the security vs freedom tradeoff.

This is a population that would have decided their own risk. A great many of them simply would not have shown up, and quit or be fired.

Right. And there are many who would have kept showing up, but policies mandated they could not.

When everyone runs the risk of dying in traffic accidents in quick succession, every individual traffic accident becomes more problematic

"Keeping schools closed was necessary to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed" is a different argument from "teachers don't want to face the mortal peril of in-person instruction," and not the one that was made in favor of keeping schools closed.

Kids infect eachother -> Kids infect teachers and their parents -> Hospitals overwhelmed

When hospitals are overcrowded any injury has a higher mortality rate. Teachers not wanting to die is a totally fine reason to close schools, too.

No, they weren't.

There are half a million COVID deaths last year. There are around 30,000 deaths a year from automobile accidents. COVID is more deadly than automobile accidents, by an order of magnitude.

Unlike automobile accidents, risk of death from Covid varies substantially according to age and whether one has any comorbidities.

>There are half a million COVID deaths last year.

What a joke. Please read about excess mortality before saying stupid things. Most people who die in car crashes wouldn't have died otherwise. Huge numbers of people who died "from COVID" would have died from something else.

> Please read about excess mortality

The World Mortality Dataset: Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7852240.2/

"Summing up the excess mortality estimates across all countries in our dataset gives 3.3 million excess deaths. In contrast, summing up the official COVID-19 death counts gives only 2.1 million deaths."

Interestingly enough, their conclusion was that covid deaths are being undercounted:

"At the time of writing, the world’s official COVID-19 death count is 2.9 million. Our results suggest that the true toll may be above 4.5 million."

lol so in a year where tons of the developing world was forced into food insecurity as a byproduct of Covid response and lockdowns, they want to attribute every excess death to "Covid"?

My research says this claim is false. The mortality rate for COVID-19 for all age groups is much higher that mortality rates for drivers.

How I compared the risks:

In New York the mortality rate for COVID-19 for all age groups over 18 was found to be at least 0.2%[1]. The CDC[2] reports 18-29 years at 0.5%, 30-39 at 1.4%, 40-49 at 3.5%, 50-64 at 16.4%.

There were 36,560[3] motor vehicle related deaths in 2018 in the US. With 273,602,100[4] cars on the road one could make a rough estimate of mortality of 0.013%. This number is conservatively high since it does not include passengers.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e1.htm#T1_down [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle...

Several problems with this analysis:

- Using confirmed cases as the denominator significantly overstates the fatality rate, because a large share of the total infections is never confirmed

- "All age groups over 18" elides huge disparities between the younger and older age groups. It also obscures large differences in risk between those with comorbidities vs those without. The CDC does not make this easy to parse out, but in Canada after their first wave, "100% of the COVID-involved deaths under the age of 45 as of July 31 had at least one other disease or condition certified on the medical certificate of death." https://web.archive.org/web/20210219195135if_/https://www150...

- New York as a region had one of the highest fatality rates of the entire pandemic

- Covid is a "one-and-done" risk as far as we know, while the risk of a car accident is repeated year after year for as long as one drives on the roads. Even in the absence of vaccines, the risk of death from Covid is unlikely to remain as high in 2024 as it was in 2020.

The most sound way to run this sort of comparison is something like "how many in risk group X (say, people aged 30-39 with no comorbidities) died in 2020 from Covid vs how many in that group die in a typical year from auto accidents?"

If you want to say that overweight 60 year old teachers with diabetes should not have been forced back to in-person instruction you'll get no argument from me.

If you feel a different form of analysis would change the outcome please feel free to provide us with the data and your conclusions.

I took it as far as I felt I needed to. When I saw that the risk due to COVID to even a young and generally more healthy demographic was still an order of magnitude bigger I didn't feel I needed to dig further. Car accidents are already a big enough source of risk that I personally take measures to reduce it and support societal interventions to reduce it further. COVID is much worse.

> When I saw that the risk due to COVID to even a young and generally more healthy demographic was still an order of magnitude bigger

You didn't see that though, you just goofed the numbers. Confusing CFR with IFR (and comparing that with absolute risk from car accidents) is just way off base.

I found this for Sweden:

Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670

19 teachers per 100000 received intensive care through June 2020, and it's unclear if any died. Sweden's motor vehicle death rate is relatively low, 2 per 100,000 over an entire year (vs. 11 in the US), but that's over the entire population, not just teachers.

The effects of school closures on SARS-CoV-2 among parents and teachers

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2020834118

This article says that keeping schools open without masks or quarantines doubled covid risk for teachers and also affected partners as well as students' parents. It concluded that "keeping lower-secondary schools open had minor consequences for the overall transmission" but "results for teachers suggest that measures to protect teachers should be considered." They estimated 9 parents (out of 646K), 1 teacher (out of 73K), and 1 partner (out of 47K) died from covid. However the data only appear to be through July.

In 2020 in California, some 51,000 people died from covid vs. 3,723 from traffic crash injuries.

I haven't found exact statistics for both covid and crashes in 2020, but it looks like around 20% of covid deaths are in the 24-54 age range, as are around 45% of crash deaths, for an estimated 10,000 covid deaths vs. 1675 crash deaths in that age range.

So in spite of California's high traffic crash rate, covid deaths seem to have been a much greater risk in 2020 for the 24-54 age group.

As someone who is literally studying to be a teacher, I don't think teachers were being entirely reasonable throughout the pandemic. Particularly a little later on when we didn't have vaccines yet, but knew more about how the virus spread and were somewhat better at treating it.

Yes, teachers didn't sign up for this. Neither did grocery store workers or—in many cases—even nurses and other hospital staff. Everyone did what they had to to stop the world from collapsing.

Lots of grocery store workers, nurses, and doctors sat the pandemic out too. Grocery stores needed to increase pay to keep people. Where I am, nurses were often in short supply. Anecdotally know a bunch of physicians who took the past year off.

> It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision.

I can tell you, around here, infection rates clearly tracked with school closures, and did so independently of other lockdown measures.

So I frankly do not buy any narrative that claims that school closures weren't justified as a means to control spread.

School closures are clearly a tool in the arsenal for controlling spread, and the decision then becomes one of context: how bad are local infection rates, what is the trend line, etc, and is the reduction in infection rates from school closures justified when considering the downsides.

It was possible in other countries.

My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave.

Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the extent possible. As a result, schools were able to stay open.

But staying home surely wouldn't help if the virus came home with Little Billy? And I'm guessing nobody wore masks and limited contact with their own children in their own homes...

If a child or a teacher at a school caught covid, the entire class was fully quarantined for a minimum of 14 days and two negative covid tests were necessary for anyone in that class to return. Classes were kept fully isolated from one another, and children had to wear masks in class for a significant part of the year.

No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.

What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.

I would go one step further. We wouldn't have had to close schools for so long or at all if we had responded aggressively to Covid before the outbreak got large. South Korea largely controlled their outbreak without lockdowns because they aggressively tested, contact traced, and quarantined in the early days of the pandemic. Today, South Korea has something like 1/300th as many deaths even though it has about 1/5th the population of the United States.

The US had its first confirmed case on the same day as South Korea but was much slower to respond. Had we had a more robust response, we might not have had to make these tough choices about closing schools.

This, and not just the US, the West in general. Everyone concerned about the long term consequences of these closures needs to look no further than our leadership mostly ignoring it and thinking we were somehow immune. Heck, even after taking some measures, many parts of the nation/world then reopened too early only to see multiple surges.

There were intimations at closing down the border from President Trump, howls of racism were made. Nancy Pelosi went down to Chinatown and asked what was the president afraid of.

The president tried to take action, but politics was and is involved. We have a report from last week saying that scientists were afraid to speak up because of fear for saying orange man bad was correct.

If you believe these super simple arguments of hard lock downs would have worked, then look at how the guy at imperial college who screwed us all over with his horrible forecasts. He said “lockdown to save is all.” Then proceeds to visit his mistress, one of the two had coronavirus! How do you think we could legitimately implement a lockdown when the people who scream lockdown do not implement it themselves (athletes sneaking ladies, Newsome, Whitmer, etc.).

Pelosi flouted the lockdown too by getting her hair done at a salon that wasn't allowed to open.

It is certainly not true that South Korea's measures have succeeded in eliminating community spread, which has been significant (if not at the same level as the U.S.) since the start of winter. East Asians seem to be more resistant to SARS-CoV-2: their new case rate of about 1/20th the U.S. (1/4 on a per-capita basis) is translating into a death rate around 1/300th of ours.

Lockdowns have been largely orthogonal to school closures -- much of Europe kept its schools open while pursuing even more draconian lockdown measures than blue states in the U.S. "Just lockdown, test, and trace harder" is not the lesson from South Korea.

> But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..."

It's a good lesson that life is messy and unpredictable and society can only do so much to shield us from that.

If they cannot come to grips with the idea that a year of their education was sacrificed to try and save lives during a global pandemic, that's on them. Kids around the world and throughout history lose education for way worse reasons.

For instance, when I was growing up I lost at least a year to teacher strikes. My teachers went on strike for months at least once at every level of my education, Elementary, Secondary, and University (Yes, I was paying for it. I lost more than half a semester. No I wasn't refunded or credited for the next year or anything.)

I wish I could say I lost that time because we were trying to save lives, instead of "My teachers union was happy to use my education as a bargaining chip in trying to negotiate for a better collective agreement, and my school board would rather let me and everyone else go without than give the teachers union what they wanted"

At least "we were trying to slow a pandemic and save lives" sounds heroic.

> the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully

It's just getting harder and harder, as more and more is revealed, to believe that the costs and risks weren't weighed based on what harm or benefit would come to specific individuals instead of how specific policies would help or hurt specific politicians and political interests. Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk, but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk.

> Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk

Schools aren't closed to (primarily) protect the kids. Where did you get that idea?

Schools are closed to protect the teachers, the families, and anyone those people contact that would be infected by those kids spreading infection at schools and then bringing the infection into households.

If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.”

Children, who have the least agency and the least blame for the situation they find themselves in, were being asked to take a pretty big hit for the benefit of many of those who actually did have more agency and blame.

We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.

> If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.”

Absolutely, it did!

But is that more harm than if their parents, siblings, grandparents, or friends got sick or died from covid?

In short: Does that harm outweigh, balance, or is it overwhelmed by the harm caused but not closing schools?

That's not an easy question.

That being said, while I disagree with how the article's initial positioning on this topic (that governments didn't weigh the harms), I 100% agree with the rest of the article and I hope governments use this as an opportunity to improve education by learning from these experiences.

> We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.

This is sounding suspiciously like a nirvana fallacy.

All solutions for managing COVID are imperfect, and the defenses are layered. I struggle to believe there is any scenario where school closures are not a useful tool in the COVID prevention toolkit.

Would it be nice if other measures were more effective and school closures could be used more sparingly?

Sure.

But we don't live in that world.

> but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk.

Yeah. Remind me who ordered that, and whether they're out of office over it? That's so blatantly wrong that it should rise to the level of criminal endangerment, even if nobody died from it. And I'm pretty sure that people did die from it, at which point it's at least manslaughter. Yes, I want that politician charged, because that was the clearly predictable result of that insanely wrong-headed decision.

A loud minority of twitter mob participants shouted "You want to kill grandma!" every time anyone tried to discuss the full costs of the lockdowns. People don't want to risk their careers saying things that are unpopular with twitter mobs (especially in academia). So now we're effectively governed by emotional neurotics and government can no longer make reasonable decisions based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis.

Figuratively speaking, we did kill grandma. We've lost 603,000 human lives during this epidemic, and 90% happened within the first year.

There is no such thing as dispassionate cost benefit analysis (or at least, there isn't outside of a very narrow range of specific cases).

Cost benefit analysis for big complex issues like coronavirus requires the identification and quantification of things that are really difficult to identify and quantify, and there's no easy way to do that without some form of subjective value judgement.

CBA done properly is a good way to make these judgements explicit and transparent. CBA done badly is a good way to hide those judgements behind a load of figures. Neither is dispassionate.

The entire point of a republic and bureaucracy is to have that dispassionate cost benefit analysis. It's to be done by people that shouldn't be subject to the mob mentality.

The point of a republic is to limit government, not ensure technocrats can never get fired.

It's not about not getting fired. It's about having the person that can make the cold dispassionate, but ultimately best choice. If we are still getting decisions based mostly on emotion the usefulness is vastly diminished.

Ugh, Twitter mobs? Governments that got the pandemic "under control" gained approval ratings, the ones that messed up, well, that I agree with Biden aide that quipped "Covid is the best thing that ever happened to [Biden]". Had Dumbass & Co. got it under control, he would've probably won the reelection...

So I don't think it's just the Twitter mobs...

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