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Comment by seasoup | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn't take into account that maybe the kids didn't all get sick because closing the schools helped stop the spread of COVID in kids. It's like saying I exercised and lost weight so clearly that exercise was a waste of time, I would have lost weight anyway.

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41% of school-aged US kids are estimated to have gotten COVID. Not such a great success.

See Table 2 of https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

We had a person running for government office in Oregon loudly proclaim over and over, "Why do we have have to have these mask mandates and rules. Oregon has one of the lowest infection rates"..

Some people just seem to get cause and effect mixed up.

Or the threads all over twitter this winter alleging 'funny numbers' because the flu cases were so low last year.. Imagine that, when everyone is social distancing, we have our lowest amount of influenza ever.. it must be a great conspiracy to manipulate the numbers..

> Imagine that, when everyone is social distancing, we have our lowest amount of influenza ever..

And yet the explanation for Covid spreading so much during the winter is popularly held to be that people weren't social distancing and were selfishly refusing to follow the guidelines. I mean, how is it that these measures were simultaneously almost 100% effective against influenza and clearly much less so against Covid?

I think viral interference is the real explanation here: https://www.insighttherapeutics.com/publications/insights/20...

You need to look at other countries. Sweden kept their schools open, and not only did not a single child die, but the prevalence among teachers was no greater than in the general population.

Isn't the Covid rate in kids exceptionally low? Closing offices only barely slowed the rate of progress in adults but closing schools helped children, who are less at risk, a lot?

> Isn't the Covid rate in kids exceptionally low?

No. The rate for ages 5-17 was actually slightly higher than that of adults 18-49, which was higher than the rate for 50-64, which was higher than the rate for 65+.

What was much lower for kids was the severity of their illness. For every 100k kids that got it, about 600 were hospitalized. For 18-49 it was about 2400. For 50-64, 7200. For 65+, 21000.

See the CDC data on the page mulvya linked in a parallel comment.

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