Dallas County has no pediatric ICU beds left
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
This wouldn't happen to be one of the places that fired people over the last 18 months, would it?
Unfortunately literally everyone needs ICU staffing now.
We are at about 20% below staffing.
It’s mostly RSV, a virus more dangerous to the young than COVID, which has been suppressed by Lockdowns and other measures.
"Jones said there are some theories about why there's a summer surge this year.
'For the last year and a half, a lot of us have been in these. In masks. We were also social distancing,' Jones said."
In other words, as you said the natural ebb and flow of RSV has probably been interrupted by Covid containment measures, then restarted at an unexpected time as those measured briefly started to be relaxed. Which means that in a sense, the lack of beds was caused BY the mask mandate, not by a refusal to adhere to it more strictly. Propaganda and fear-mongering, over and over. Also:
"'We are all on team public health,' the judge said. 'And every person needs to understand that the enemy is the virus, it's not each other.'" Our enemy is clearly both, because "experts" and officials have been lying since day 1. And of the two, it seems like the lies have caused more damage than the actual virus at this point.
The off-season RSV surge is both coming at the worst possible time, and is a paradoxical effect of (amongst other measures) masks, which led to a “immune deficiency” in kids.
Influenza isn’t gone either (although except for some regions in China there is very little signal so far). Knock ok wood that it takes a bit longer.
Also an 100% known and predictable effect.
People will think that the PICU beds are full of Covid patients, which will cloud their judgement about the real-risks for their children.
It's paralyzing, and ... it's your kids, you just don't eff around.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2021/08/12/dal...
> A record-high number of pediatric COVID-19 patients — 73 — and an unusually large number of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, patients has resulted in the overall occupancy of children’s beds reaching about 95%.
Nowhere does it say that it's mostly RSV.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/IDCU/disease/rsv/Data/2020-21/202...
> There were 783 children admitted to Texas hospitals with COVID-19 between July 1 and Aug. 9.
The aggregate totals in the 2nd link's chart for the same eriod are way higher than 783
> Within Texas Children’s, more than 45 children were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Wednesday, and hospital staff members have diagnosed over 1,600 cases of RSV.
Without that information, this article doesn't really mean much.
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/covid19_3.html
The real contagion is this fear.
And the cause is the news media replacing Trump with covid as their ratings booster. Glenn Greenwald has documented how major corporate news media saw ratings plummet after Trump left office:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1404784933030223874?s=...
Bad outcomes from Covid in kids are extraordinarily rare.
Why take any additional risk? The downside of masking in schools, vaccinating staff and spacing out desks is zero.
That is, my prior would be that as schools reopen for the first time in a while, there will be a spike in sicknesses. If you ever had kids in daycare, you probably saw the sickest were the new kids. First exposures.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/new-zealand-ch...
https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/nrevss/rsv/region.html#sout...
Up here in the PNW, we have had kid's camps start up. Big feeling that these are going to shut down real quick, though.
Speaking as a parent of kids under six. Many of them literally suck on the masks they are wearing...
Edit: though, big plus one on the shots for staff. I take that as a given.
Edit: I should underscore that I agree with your opening points. Doing those things seems straight forward enough. I'm asking if we would still expect a rise in cases due to reintegration.
If we compare Austria to it’s neighbors, or Bavaria to it’s sister states we see no effect.
My child’s school provides training. It works.
EDIT: responding to below as I'm rate-limited
>>Do you have any actual evidence that this is true in school-age children (ages 5+)?
Yes, I've already provided the evidence. There was only one hospitalization with a positive covid result in 200,000 children aged 5 - 17 in the US in the week ending July 31st. The CDC page is linked above. The Delta variant was the predominant variant in the US in that period, so this definitively rules it out as a significant danger to children.
You can also look at the Delta variant data from England:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from...
>>Nonetheless, the data showed that there have been 117 deaths among people in England who had the delta variant with the majority being in the over-50 age group.
>>There have been eight fatalities among the under-50s with six of them in unvaccinated individuals and the other two in people who had received one dose.
I'd venture to guess that in the time period under study, there were ZERO covid delta variant deaths amongst children in the entirety of England. This would be funny if the destruction caused by this over-reaction wasn't so sad.
EDIT 2:
>>I asked for data to support your claim that masks stunt social development in school age (5+) children.
I don't have any data as we've never had a case of a large cross-section of children being masked for extended periods of their day, so no cause to study its effects. The burden of proof that it's safe is therefore on those advocating this untested policy.
Just common sense tells us masking will interfere with communication. Even doctors who are masked are perceived as less empathatic:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879648/
Beyond communication, masking interferes with heat dissipation, as it's at least one layer of insulating material on a highly exothermic part of the body. Subjecting almost all children to this for over a year is a massive over-reaction considering the actual risks posed by covid to children.
EDIT 3:
>>> I don't have any data
>>Thanks for clearing that up.
This is a bad faith response that ignores extremely important context and criticism of your masking advocacy.
What this and your other response show, is you don't want to take responsibility for the fact that the burden of proof is on you, to show that masking to this extent does not harm children's development.
EDIT 4:
>>dissipation? Social stigma? WTF?
Not a direct response to me from u/Steltek, but criticizing me to someone else, so I think I'm warranted in responding.
I never said anything about "social stigma". I said it would interfere with the development of communication skills, because it obstructs non-verbal communication cues like facial expressions.
And heat dissipitation is nothing to scoff at, given how much biological evolution has gone toward optimizing bodies to dissipitate heat efficiently, and the damage heat can do to biological organisms.
Any policy that impacts tens of millions of children deserves better than this knee-jerk "anti-masker" prejudice and petty partisanship.
But we really should have the data before engaging in real-world experimentation on children.
The closest we have is some data in macaques. https://massivesci.com/articles/facial-recognition-patches-b...
But outside that common sense based in very well-understood science, there is evidence that the disruption to normal life is dropping childrens’ IQs substantially.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...
Care to share some of this boatload of data for school-age (5+) kids?
> there is evidence that the disruption to normal life is dropping childrens’ IQs substantially.
This we can agree on. Your article specifically refers to the closing of schools (not masks). Closed schools and full PICUs are about as disruptive to a child’s daily life as you can get. This is already happening in Georgia and Texas and will only get worse if we don’t take evidence-based steps to control the spread of disease.
Perhaps there is some data on how harmful halloween masks are to kids. Or on pubescent Muslim girls/teens... (/sarc)
You are assuming the existence of some implausible 2nd or 3rd order harm (masks harm kids and they are so un-adaptable that it couldn't possibly be mitigated), and then claiming lack of data from another implausible obstacle (that this supposed harm is so obviously bad that no ethics board would allow it to be studied) all as a pretext to avoid a proven-effective measure to prevent a first order, and often deadly harm.
The burden would be on you to show actual harm from wearing a mask when thousands do it without harm all day every day (for work and for disease prevention)
Also it is not just about the kids whom you wrongly assume to be invulnerable - it is about not making another petri dish to both further spread the disease to those whom the kids come in contact. I watched as the infection rates tracked in Britain, Quebec, Israel, etc. all rose with schools going into session, and fell in school breaks.
Public health measures are not about you. Its about everyone taking on just a bit of responsibility to contain a deadly pandemic, and not freeloading on what collective immunity is provided by the more conscientious and intelligent around you.
Calling it trolling is exactly the kind of intolerant hostility that prevents a debate on the issue and puts society on autopilot to never-ending restrictive measures that are wildly disproportionate to the danger posed to children.
>>Perhaps there is some data on how harmful halloween masks are to kids. Or on pubescent Muslim girls/teens... (/sarc)
We don't wear halloween masks for most of every day, every day for months on end.
The vast majority of Muslim girls who wear hijab don't wear a niqab that covers the face.
This a bad faith effort to find comparable situations.
Facial expressions are extremely important for communication. Forcing children to largely make do without them could very plausibly - I would say highly probably - harm their social development.
This is not far-out speculation, and your smug dismissal of it is reckless and irresponsible.
>>The burden would be on you to show actual harm from wearing a mask when thousands do it without harm all day every day (for work and for disease prevention)
We have never had children wear masks for much of every day for months on end.
Even medical professionals - who are adults and have already had normal childhoods without their faces being covered - don't wear masks all day at work on a regular basis. Masks are only worn in specific situations that don't encompass most of their work hours, like time in surgery.
>>Also it is not just about the kids whom you wrongly assume to be invulnerable
The evidence shows they are no more vulnerable to covid than to the flu. Masking the entire population of children is not a proportionate response to the risk covid poses to them.
>>it is about not making another petri dish to both further spread the disease to those whom the kids come in contact.
Children should not be burdened with daily masking to protect adults, and in any case, children are not known to be a high-risk transmission vector:
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/147/4/e202004...
The disappointing thing is that your responses to my arguments have been very weak - like comparing daily mask wearing to once a year Halloween mask wearing - showing you actually don't want to have a good faith debate on this issue.
5 kids have now died in Mississippi from COVID in the current Delta Wave [1]. In all of 2019, there was 1 pediatric flu death in Mississippi [2]. I chose MS because they are in an active outbreak.
[1]https://www.mississippifreepress.org/14800/mississippi-8th-g... [2] https://www.wlbt.com/2019/11/27/mississippi-has-highest-flu-...
Data from England, where Delta variant deaths are tracked, shows that during the period under study, only 8 people under the age of 50 died from it.
EDIT, as I'm being rate-limited:
Even with the differences you note, the fact that England, with a population of 55 million, had only 8 deaths of those under the age of 50 from the Delta variant, after a month of Delta variant propagation in the country, definitively shows it's not a significant risk to children.
It has been repeatedly proven that vaccines, masks (particularly N95/FFP3 level), and ventilation work against airborne diseases in general and CV-19 in particular.
The hard peer-reviewed scientific papers on all of this are so legion that I won't attempt to link them here.
Even if we assume that COVID-19 and flu are relatively similar in risk to children that get it (it's impact is already greater [1], and is already a top-10 killer of children [2]), the fact is that CV-19 has an R0 of 5-9, vs Flu at around 1.2, so being much more contagious, it will affect many more kids, and otherwise unlikely events will become common. Ignoring the risk is foolish.
Schools are already known to be a large vector for airborne diseases, and the CDC advocates all students and teachers who can to get flu vaccines for this reason.
As noted above, I watched as report after report from Israel, BG, Quebec and others showed general population cases tracking school openings, vacations, and closings.
There is solid evidence that Delta is not only a risk among children, but also to the community at large.
Against this, you posit some hypothetical emotional harm to children of wearing masks.
This is absurd on its face, but we'll discuss it.
About masks in general, there are many other professions that wear them all day, not only physicians whom you glibly dismiss. I've read countless physicaian/nurse/HC accounts mentioning wearing masks all day. I've worn masks or even full respirators all day for some tasks in my composites shop, and also when helping others with drywall or other dusty work. There are many other professions that do so. This is not a problem. Hell, I've worn them skiing all day.
There are also multiple cultures who do. You don't think Muslims are a good enough example, consider the Inuit, who wear coverings face coverings for long periods daily almost from birth, barely exposing their eyes.
Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet, and children are the most adaptable among us.
Your claims of some kind of emotional harm are pure conjecture. Seriously, you dismiss all other evidence yet produce not a scintilla of your own.
You claim you aren't trolling, but if not, then this looks an awful lot like a lot of motivated reasoning around supporting an "I don't like it" attitude.
Remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The precautionary principle says to FIRST take care of the large, deadly, demonstrable, and present danger.
You want to instead put a marginal, possibly emotional, hypothetical, and at-best-distant danger in the front.
That is not a recipe for success.
[1] https://www.idsociety.org/multimedia/videos/idsa-media-brief...
[2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-kids-s...
It will affect many more kids, yes, and then they will be immune, and subsequent infections, if they occur, will be even milder.
The virus is not going away. Even near total vaccination does not end its transmission in the population:
https://twitter.com/eliaseythorsson/status/14240115421950238...
So barring every one living in bubbles for the rest of their life, every one will be infected by it at least once. Masking at best just delays the inevitable, for a virus which poses an extremely low risk to children who have already seen their lives disrupted for a year and a half in this over-reaction.
>>Schools are already known to be a large vector for airborne diseases,
Children shouldn't be burdened with continuous masking to protect adults. Moreover, children are not major vectors of transmission:
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/147/4/e202004...
>>Against this, you posit some hypothetical emotional harm to children of wearing masks.
I never said anything about "emotional harm". I said it would interfere with the development of communication skills, because it obstructs non-verbal communication cues like facial expressions.
>>This is absurd on its face, but we'll discuss it.
This - trying to gaslight people into thinking their extremely legitimate concern is 'absurd' - is not an appropriate way for you to debate and attempt to push your agenda.
If you want to talk about absurd, it's you comparing one day of Halloween mask-wearing a year, to continuous mask-wearing for every school day of the year.
>>About masks in general, there are many other professions that wear them all day, not only physicians whom you glibly dismiss. I've read countless physicaian/nurse/HC accounts mentioning wearing masks all day.
They don't wear masks all day on a regular basis though. I did not "glibly dismiss" physicians. I pointed out that they do not wear masks all day on any regular basis.
I also pointed out that they are adults and have already had normal childhoods without their faces being covered.
>>consider the Inuit, who wear coverings face coverings for long periods daily almost from birth, barely exposing their eyes.
Do you have a source on Inuit wearing face coverings indoors? And I don't see why, even if it were true of Inuit children that their faces are covered for most of their childhood, you'd assume it doesn't harm their development of communication skills.
>>Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet, and children are the most adaptable among us.
Glibly dismissing the harm to communication skills, from not being able to use facial expressions, with over-confident proclomations of the human ability to adapt, is reckless.
EDIT, I'm being rate limited so I'll respond to the below here:
>>... you post nothing but frantic rationalizations ... to put the cart before the horse, the secondary issue before the primary
The evidence I provided shows that the response you are advocating, of masking all children all school year, is disproportionate to the risk covid poses to children. You seem to be emotionally wedded to a position and not able to process arguments against it in a rational way.
>>People who wear face coverings learn to communicate better with their eyes,
Source on this being an equal substitute to facial expressions?
The burden of proof is on you to show that forcing children to use substitutes wouldn't be harmful to communication and social development.
>>and the kids are not in school every day all day. They don't have parrnts, siblings, friends at home?
School is where children engage in much of their socialization, if not most of it. And they're now being required to mask with their friends outside of school too, so that exacerbates whatever harm masking does.
>>Meanwhile you glibly dismiss actual data and a disease that is already (pre-Delta) in the top 10 causes of child death, nevermind other ongoing effects, and knock-on infections.
Which data am I dismissing? Can you provide it?
People who wear face coverings learn to communicate better with their eyes, and the kids are not in school every day all day. They don't have parrnts, siblings, friends at home? And that is IFF there is actually a problem.
Meanwhile you glibly dismiss actual data and a disease that is already (pre-Delta) in the top 10 causes of child death, nevermind other ongoing effects, and knock-on infections.
You really need to reconsider your self*centered perspective
good night
Sure - here's just one citation about COVID-19 being in the top-10 causes of deaths for children. [1] Note that this was in 2020, BEFORE the Delta variant existed. With Delta being far more contagious and causing deeper infection levels, especially different profiles in the young, this will not get better with Delta.
Sure, getting a jab and a mask is mildly inconvenient, and might impose a bit on your expectation of a fully smooth and privileged life.
But make no mistake, the fact that you are making those arguments in the way you make them shows that it is from every perspective,both current and historical, you are massively priveleged.
The fact is that throughout history the demands of actual survival have, with only rare exceptions, imposed themselves on our lives. Full "self-actualization" is a luxury, not some basic right, and it is only available AFTER survival needs are met.
This is a survival need. People far more expert, and with far more skin in the game are imploring us to take a few simple measures. Yet jokers like you endlessly whine, bitch, and moan about imagined harms that might come to you because it is a bit inconvenient.
Get over yourself, contribute a bit to the general welfare, and you might find things get better. If you don't want your kids to wear a mask, keep them home. Stop imposing your idiocy on everyone else.
In short, YOU are part of the problem, part of the reason we are having a massive spike, while, for example, Germany is not. Stop it.
[1] https://www.wbrc.com/2021/05/23/covid-is-one-top-causes-deat...
From your link:
>>Officials with Children’s of Alabama said in 2020, the virus was one of the top 10 leading causes of death in children.
>>“COVID is the tenth leading cause of death for children in the United States,” Dr. David Kimberlin with Children’s of Alabama said. “It is among most common causes of death in children and adolescents.”
Covid being described as the 10th leading cause of death for children in a single state in a single year is very weak substantiation of your claim. First of all, at 10th place, it is the least significant cause of death among the top 10. This diminishes the potency of your statistical claim.
For context, for the 1-4, 5-9 and 10-14 age groups, pneumonia/influenza are the 6th, 7th and 8th leading cause of death, respectively:
https://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe
So in Alabama, the response to influenza & pneumonia in children should be more drastic than the response to covid.
Second, this is a single state, which could be an outlier, meaning this "10th leading cause of death in children" statistic, as unalarming as it is, may be an over-estimation of the nation-wide statistics.
Do you have statistics showing how many children have died from covid in the US, or what the infection fatality rate for covid is for children?
With resprct to the latter, the CDC says the IFR for children is only 0.002%, which is indeed EXTREMELY low:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Do you find this significant, and justifying indefinite masking of all children during schooling hours?
>>With Delta being far more contagious and causing deeper infection levels, especially different profiles in the young, this will not get better with Delta.
In England, there were only 8 Delta variant deaths in the entire country for those under the age of 50 in the period under study:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from-the...
So I see plenty of evidence showing that your concerns are in fact unlikely to be realized.
>>Get over yourself, contribute a bit to the general welfare, and you might find things get better.
Take your own advice. Look at the evidence and stop preaching from a soapbox.
Observing my kids and their friends (preschool to late elementary), everyone wears a mask, no complains about it, and they all play together just fine. It's probably because the adults act like adults and we don't whine about how life is so unfair that things might have to change because of a pandemic.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Clothing is a relatively recent phenomenon in evolutionary timescales. Should we abandon that as well to optimize body temperature?
>this is a bad faith response
No, it shows you have no data to support your claim that masks harm school age kids. I can point to hundreds of schools around the world that have masked for over a year and reported no developmental delays. If masks caused delays, we would know by now.
But we modify clothing based on personal comfort. It's extremely uncomfortable to wear a mask, especially as the moist air exhaled is trapped under the one/two/three layers of mask and heats up the face.
>>No, it shows you have no data to support your claim that masks harm school age kids.
Like I already pointed out, no studies have been done on this, because it's an unprecedented policy experiment. The burden of proof is on you.
>>I can point to hundreds of schools around the world that have masked for over a year and reported no developmental delays. If masks caused delays, we would know by now.
How would we know without studies? Smoking wasn't known to be harmful for decades until after it became popular.
As for anecdotes, there are plenty saying kids have become more antisocial. What we can't definitively say is whether these anecdotes are an indication of a broader trend, and whether - if there is a trend - it's due to masking, social isolation, or some combination of these factors.
There are thousands of types of masks. People can find one they like just like a shirt.
>It’s extremely uncomfortable to wear a mask
100% your opinion. Most people I know seem not to mind. I honestly don’t care whether you wear one or not. I care whether the child infected with covid in my kid’s classroom does.
>the burden of proof is on you
The ‘burden’ should be on the individual proposing to roll back safety measures.
The function of a mask runs counter to the function of heat dissipation. You can't get a mask that works well at stopping droplets that will allow heat to dissipitate and not cause steam to collect in the face.
>>100% your opinion.
It's not opinion that having to wear a mask traps warm moist hair that one exhales, against the face.
>>The ‘burden’ should be on the individual proposing to roll back safety measures.
Not when the risks to safety - that the measure is being implemented to mitigate - are extremely minute, and the measures very plausibly have safety risks themselves.
>>There is strong evidence they reduce transmission of aerosols
The virus will not be extripated from the population through these means. Even Iceland, where almost the entire population is vaccinated, is seeing a new wave:
https://twitter.com/eliaseythorsson/status/14240115421950238...
If you underestimate this pandemic, you are a fool. If you advocate others to underestimate this, you are a menace.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/562890-seven-missis...
[2] https://www.wdsu.com/article/more-than-3000-louisiana-childr...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7?mc_source...
[4] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210730/study-finds-covid-1...
> If you advocate others to underestimate this, you are a menace. If you advocate for interventions that harm children, which are barely affected, you are a menace.
Your 1 and 2 just point towards Delta being the most dominant variant, which surprises no one.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782164
Long Covid in kids. No significant difference between seronegative and seropositive children.
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.11.21257037v...
Long Covid in kids. Simular conclusion. The paper poses the question: “suggests that Long-COVID19 might be less common than previously thought and emphasizing the impact of pandemic-associated symptoms regarding the well-being and mental health of young adolescents.”.
[3] https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-01...
Invasive ventilation by itself leads to neurological symptoms.
It’s impossible to have a data-driven discussion when the default response is ‘you’re just overreacting.’
Only 1 in 200,000 children in the US were hospitalized with covid in the week ending July 31st:
We can get strong indications about the danger a variant poses to each age group from looking at national data, notwithstanding individual states having "distinct public health policies and cultures".
The variance in public health policy/culture and vaccination rates across states does not make national data meaningless. When a particular variant of a virus has massively proliferated across the US, and caused very few deaths in children, a reasonable observer concludes the risks it poses to children is slight.
You're picking individual states, and then making inflammatory insinuations about the significance of the most alarming statistic you can find about them, while insisting that national data not be taken into account. This is just bad science, focused on reaching a desired conclusion.
What non-cherry-picked data shows is that the delta variant was the dominant variant in the US during the week ending July 31st, when there was only 250 covid positive testing children hospitalized in the entire US.
The data from England also shows that the risk delta poses to children is extremely low. Idiosyncracies of England's public health policy and culture cannot make such a huge impact on covid survivability that it's going to turn a virus that is dangerous to children into one that causes zero or close to zero deaths nation-wide.
Remember that across all of these jurisdictions, almost all children are unvaccinated, and vaccination status is the only health-care-mediated factor that could conceivably make a huge impact on survivability.
That was over 2 weeks ago. As of August 15th there are now 1,900 children hospitalized with COVID in the US. There are many states that are just starting to experience the delta surge. The US delta wave is not projected to peak until September/October.
How many more children than 250 must get admitted to hospital for you to accept there is sufficient risk for masking? How have you determined this number?
Also, if you're going to compare outcomes between England and US you absolutely have to compare policy and vax rate. Nearly 90% of adults in UK have had at least one shot compared to 70% in the US. In some individual states it's more like 50%. This is why per capita caseload in the US is significantly higher. Higher caseload means a greater number of children will get sick.
How much of that hospitalization is driven by over-concerned parents being driven by exactly the kind of hysteria that we've seen fanned in this discussion, to admit their children when they get sick? How much of it is driven by RSV, which is surging:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/13/children-ho...
>>Combined with a highly unusual spike in the number of children admitted with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a flu-like illness that usually strikes in the winter, and parainfluenza viruses — and in some cases, co-infections with covid-19 — many children’s hospitals are overwhelmed.
Something similar is happening in New Zealand, where there is no covid, as children pay an immunity debt:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/new-zealand-ch...
The fact is, there have been only 292 deaths with positive covid status, in the 5-18 age group in the US throughout the entirety of the covid epidemic:
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
That is not a large enough number to justify masking tens of millions of children for much of every day, for two years, when the most likely effect of masking is going to only be to delay contraction of the virus, rather than prevent it altogether.
>>Also, if you're going to compare outcomes between England and US you absolutely have to compare policy and vax rate. Nearly 90% of adults in UK have had at least one shot compared to 70% in the US. In some individual states it's more like 50%. This is why per capita caseload in the US is significantly higher. Higher caseload means a greater number of children will get sick.
I would consider it if the number of children dying from covid delta wasn't ~0 in the entirety of England with a population 55 million. That tells us the risk is extremely small, and won't become significant even if the case load increases by several fold.
Your worst case scenario would likely be a phenomenal outcome. American kids age 5+ should have access to both mRNA vaccines by October. Vaccination reduces the death rate from Delta to effectively zero. If 292 US kids have died since day 1 of the pandemic, we could reasonably expect at least 30 more to die before vaccines are widely available. Assuming masks really can delay a child’s infection (which seems realistic) then I can’t fathom anyone who couldn’t be bothered to wear one for a couple months longer.
Because the quality of life given up is not worth the risk mitigation. If a child has a 0.00006% chance of dying each month they are not masked (30 deaths / 50,000,000 children aged 5-17), and wearing a mask for most of the school day reduces their quality of life by 5%, they are giving up 0.00417 (1 yr / 12 * 0.05) quality-adjusted life years to gain 0.000045 (0.0000006 risk of death × 75 years lost if they die) life years.
The cost, in life years, is approximately 100X the benefit, in mitigating risk of death.
And this is assuming masks reduce the risk of death by 100%, and don't exacerbate other risks of death (e.g. less development of communication skills, leading to less lifetime income and lower life expectancy). The real ratio, in terms of cost vs benefit, could be 1,000X.
My primary point is that masking takes from your quality of life, and that it's not worth giving up a lot of quality of life to gain a little bit of life expectancy.
As for masking's potentially negative effect on life expectancy, we don't know if it exists and what it could be, but we cannot rule it out, as extended masking in children has never been tested to see its effects, let alone its long-term ones.
So you completely ignored my primary point about quality of life. Did you really misinterpret my reference to quality of life as being about life expectancy, or are you deliberately trolling me?
There is such a thing in the world as altruism. Sometimes people inconvenience themselves to help others (not just themselves).
I think any reasonable estimate of the quality of life degradation caused by all-day masking would result in the conclusion that masking children does more harm than good.
But for the sake of argument, if we polled people, and found the value was indeed 5%, then would you agree that masking children does massively more harm than good? I just want to know if you hold the same logical axioms as I do, or else this exercise is pointless.
>>Sometimes people inconvenience themselves to help others (not just themselves).
But you're not just inconveniencing yourself. You're inconveniencing tens of millions of children.
Not a perfect proxy but people have been polled around how they value extra years of their life. According to this article [1] they would pay $7,500 to add an extra year to their life.
So if 5% of a typical human lifespan is 4 years that's $30,000. Median annual wages in the US are about $34,000, so people would willingly work full time for a year to extend their life by 5%.
Hard to see in any universe how wearing a mask at school for a couple months is more of an inconvenience than working full time for a year.
>would you agree that masking children does massively more harm than good
You've still failed to demonstrate masks do any harm more than being a minor inconvenience. It sounds like you personally don't like wearing them, and are looking for ways to rationalize that opinion.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151201-how-much-would-y...
That's not an appropriate comparison, because we're not trading wearing a mask for a couple months, for a 5% longer lifespan. We're trading wearing a mask for life, for a 5% longer lifespan. The percentage added or removed is from the duration that they're wearing a mask, so you reduce 5% from the two months of mask-wearing, not 5% from their whole life. And yes, I think many people would rather work one year longer, than have to wear a mask every day all day at work.
Going back to the previous logical exercise:
If someone would be willing to give up 5% of their lifespan, to forego wearing a mask for life, then they'd be willing to up 5% of a year of life, i.e. 18.25 days, to not have to wear a mask for a year, and 1.52 days of lifespan, to not have to wear a mask for a month.
If wearing a mask is 100% effective at preventing covid infection, then not wearing a mask all month reduces their risk-adjusted lifespan by 0.016425 days (0.0000006 risk of death × 75 years lost if they die * 365 days / year), which is nearly 100X less than what they lose in quality of life (1.52 days).
>>You've still failed to demonstrate masks do any harm more than being a minor inconvenience.
You're not answering my question, which was the following hypothetical:
But for the sake of argument, if we polled people, and found the value was indeed 5%, then would you agree that masking children does massively more harm than good? I just want to know if you hold the same logical axioms as I do, or else this exercise is pointless.
You're being evasive..
I don’t hold the same logical axioms as you, no. I don’t believe that minor inconveniences, of which masking is one, are anything more than that. I also believe that most people would sacrifice their quality of life (in a very minor way) to help save the life of another, particularly a child. If this were not true, no one would ever donate blood, work in a soup kitchen etc.
If you come back with some actual data (not your opinion) showing harm from masking kids for 2-3 months, I am happy to continue the conversation. Otherwise there does not appear to be a basis for further rational discussion.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31162205/
I don't know the breakdown among states, but given the number of beds is at least 20X greater than the number of covid hospitalizations across the US, I don't imagine the situation will ever be that dire in a significant number of states.
Also fullmoon provided evidence that suggests the shortage of PICU beds in Texas is mostly due to the immunity debt [1] being paid, and RSV spreading, with the lifting of covid containment policies:
https://www.wfaa.com/mobile/article/news/local/unusual-rsv-s...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/new-zealand-ch...
It is not fear that is filling up the available ICU beds, it is an avoidable surge in an actual disease.
- https://eu.oklahoman.com/story/news/2021/07/30/oklahoma-chil... - https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/nrevss/rsv/region.html#sout...
As cameldrv points out, an increase in RSV of this magnitude is normally well-handled, only the timing is different. As both the original article and the one you link to make clear, the problem at this time is staffing, and the staffing problem is being driven by Covid.