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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

But the old people are now all vaccinated so they won't get it or at least won't get really sick. I'm sure some will but a lot of the risk has been mitigated. There will always have to be some measure of risk we have to accept. We can't eliminate it completely.

I'm a bit worried that because of a year and a half of mass fear even the slightest risk of covid will be blown up.

I saw this effect here in Barcelona. There was an article on young people thinking they could not get covid. And an ICU nurse was quoted saying that's not true and they have a girl there who is bad.

But this doesn't take into account that the numbers are so low. Many young people die because of traffic accidents and the like. There has to be a point where we say it's mitigated enough and just move on with life.

I'm not saying we're there yet but we should start talking about where that point is.

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All the fear, isolation, and disruption to their normal lives has also had a very negative psychological impact on kids. I've seen many who are clearly developing phobias and anxiety issues. The rare and hypothetical long term risks of covid to children (and the mild risks to vaccinated adults) need to be balanced against these ubiquitous and very non-hypothetical adverse psychological effects. On a population level, I believe the evidence points to there being far more risk in the latter.

A society that sacrifices the psychological wellbeing of its children to prevent moderate illness in adults has really screwed up its priorities, and that's increasingly the situation in places where the most at-risk have been vaccinated.

At some point last year I read an article, probably in the Guardian, about what school was like at the time (when it was open) for the kids. Not allowed their own toys, forced to stand on markers on the ground, not allowed to mix with their friends or just play in the dirt and be, y’know, kids. I don’t have children, but I really started to question whether it was worth it - the poor things.

It wasn't worth it.

Honestly - I have to agree with you, no matter how unpopular an opinion that is. I got to watch my elderly relatives die long before COVID was a thing, which was of course very sad. But no one tried to take my childhood away to prevent it (which it wouldn’t have anyway) - like what seems to be happening now to some extent.

Doesn’t sound too dissimilar to schools before the pandemic. They weren’t exactly libertarian paradises

No they’re not - but it wasn’t all that long ago that I was in school myself and it sounded extremely dissimilar to how I remember it - particularly for younger kids, who spend all day outside of lessons running around yelling and playing sports or doing activities and all.

What era? My own childhood (in the 80s) was filled with recess and free-play and gym class. However, I got the perception from parents of kids who attended elementary school in the late 00s and 10s that recess has been cut or dramatically shortened and nearly everything is scheduled and academically-oriented. This predates COVID, and is a consequence of the general climate of fear and hyper-competitiveness that's followed the 08-09 financial crisis.

My kid plays in the dirt, but he does it with me, not at preschool (where apparently they don't even do play-dough and sand these days). He does have some recess & free-play time - I can't imagine managing a 3-year-old without it - but it's time-boxed into 30 minute increments.

I was in junior school (<11 years old) in the UK in the late 90s. Lunch time was an hour and a half of (obviously eating) and loosely supervised running around in a field with a ball, attempting to climb a tree, using your imagination to play games with your friends, falling out with your friends one day, learning how to make up the next, falling out of said tree and being patched up by the school nurse. There were music clubs and science and art ones too, where you’d mix with other years. The library had computers that a few of us learned HTML on, and later the internet.

I’m not really looking back through rose tinted glasses, this was also at a quite competitive academically driven private school (if you did not then pass the 11+, bye bye) but like, you really were free to do a lot. Perhaps things really have changed then (and I really have gotten old), I like to hope not. I dunno - I really just don’t think it’s fair to do that to the young. Especially coupled with the justification that ‘if you do rough and tumble play with your mate you will kill your grandmother’ reasoning that they must have picked up on.

IME, there are far more anxiety issues with “kids today” than there were before turn of century. IMO, this is not a mysterious phenomenon - kids take adults seriously, and adults have been involving kids in political awareness to a degree that is evidently unhealthy. Talking about how the world will end because of climate change, the end of democracy, COVID will kill everyone who goes outside. Adults hear this and either bin the talk as hyperbole or the testimony of certifiable wingnuts, but kids tend to internalize this stuff, hearing hyperbole as serious prediction. We wonder why kids are full of anxiety - try sheltering kids more from the kind of BS that circulates on infotainment news channels. There’s time enough for kids to become world weary and wise; help them to enjoy carefree living while they’re children and you might get more confident and less anxious kids out of it.

I agree that it’s time we started putting COVID risks in to perspective. Yes, the Delta variant is more transmissible that regular. But to a fully vaccinated person, is it more or less of a concern now than automobile accidents or other viruses?

Until there's more data on the long term effects and what we've heard so far of the long term effects, and then adding in the drop in vaccine effectiveness and new variants and the lower vaccine effectiveness against those variants, I'm going to continue to be cautious and concerned with all the handwaving and "it's over" rhetoric.

Why isn’t the same caution exercised when it comes to the long term effects of lockdowns and mask mandates on children, adults’ mental health, the economy, etc?

#whataboutism

It's not really whataboutism IMO because these are 2 sides of the same coin. One balances the other. Whataboutism applies to unrelated topics.

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