At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligation to give them their very important education.
Instead, we applied the lessons of the common flu[1]: children do get more sick from the common flu than young and middle-aged adults and so, in light of a novel severe respiratory disease, it doesn't make sense to take chances.
Why aren't the low death rates for the 0-17 cohort enough?
See https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876 and https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...
A lot of the "varied issues" that long-COVID sufferers deal with are more easily explained by the disruption of the circulatory system (esp. as it affects the brain - when the body's defenses kill COVID-infected brain cells en-masse that results in the "brain fog").
If you're having a hard time remembering how things actually played out in 2020, just ask yourself: did you hear about pediatric wards filling up with COVID patients? No, you did not. You heard about an extremely rare multisystem inflammatory disorder and that's about it.
When it became clear that children weren't dying in large numbers from COVID, keeping them out of school throughout 2020 because of the transmission theory was (and may still be, depending on other circumstances) sufficient justification.
We knew COVID was not dangerous to children by early summer 2020. The article says this and the article is correct. I simply and plainly repeated this.
It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.
Please dispense with any further nonsense about subtlety. Speak plainly and without subtlety, as I am doing.
This is the aforementioned pivot. Nobody made this claim.
The claim is that, early in the pandemic, unknowns about the dangers of COVID to children were one among many sufficient conditions for closing schools. Once we learned what we currently know, that condition lost its sufficiency. But that didn't change the sufficiency of the other conditions (read: community transmission, teacher health, &c.), which remain.
That's why TFA was written. Tons of people still deeply disagree with this risk calculus.
It should be obvious by now, however.
There was some secondary concern of long-term side-effects ("long covid") cases in children as well, and I recall some talk of MIS-C and Kawasaki disease... but even early on those seemed fairly rare.
I find it offensive to use "the media" when describing other's positions in a debate. You're basically saying your opponents are brainwashed by evil media while you are completely objective. And ignoring all the media that you consume that backs up your position.
If kids education were really a priority, the right time to invest was 20 years ago. The system has been broken for a long time already.
The second best time to plant a tree is today
You appear to have missed the news around the Omicron variant being much better at vaccine evasion than Delta. You can't compare the situation a year ago with the one now, which is unique and unprecedented, just like the pandemic was initially.
Clearly they must be operating under the same mysterious constraints that are keeping schools closed.
Certainly this couldn't be the case for teachers teaching remotely – they probably enjoy their 10 hour workdays where they are standing most of the time and wearing a mask.
The problem right now where I live is that everyone is sick. Grocery stores, restaurants, delivery services and even fucking Walmart are closed because they don’t have enough employees to operate. The schools tried to open but it was a disaster with half the teachers out sick so they just postponed opening them a week in hopes it will go away.
This wave will be over, but without lasting immunity in the population the next mutation could be worse. We could very well be dealing with this the rest of our lives and there is no return to “normal”. We’re in the new normal.
There are 30-40M symptomatic cases of the flu each year in the US, with the same or worse symptoms as what you just described. There is no "new" normal, cold & flu season just got more complex.
We’re already in the new normal; nobody is going back into the office if they don’t have to and that alone will force a realignment of American life. We were slowly headed that way before Covid anyway, the pandemic just made it happen. Companies requiring knowledge workers to be onsite are having huge levels of attrition because the employees have options.
One of my clients who was very eager to get back into the office and tried forcing the issue in Q3 last year has seen 40% of their engineering staff quit over the last 6 months, and are having a hard time finding replacements. They made the decision just before the holidays to switch to a remote-first model and downsize their offices. This is happening, and it’s going to crush commercial real estate.
I completely agree with you on the new normal regarding in office, but that wasn't what we were talking about. We were discussing a new normal regarding seasonal infectious disease and the social and economic burden it causes. As COVID becomes endemic, there won't be anything "new" about that normal, it'll look almost identical to the burden caused by the cold and flu prior to 2020.
Isn't this exactly what the article is talking about? I think recognizing that we are doing this trade is a step in the right direction. Only then can we proceed to discuss how we should make that trade, instead of throwing kids whom have no say, and their future, right under the bus.
Great, so just set up a fund to compensate teachers and daycare workers who get long covid in order to pay their salary and medical expenses for the rest of their lives if they're unable to work.
This might be the case in some specific jurisdiction you are in, but is patently not true across the United States. The state I'm in stopped pensions for teachers in the nineties.
Bringing back pensions and providing free post-retirement healthcare for teachers and their families will back up grandiose statements like yours with actions. With the current right-wing thinking in vogue in the US, I suspect there is vanishingly little chance of that happening.