On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so many people seem to view it that way.
233% increase in chance of death for people less than 65...
183% increase for people 65+: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...
> For people younger than 65 who were hospitalized with COVID-19, the risk of death in the 12 months after the infection was 233% higher than it was for people who did not have the disease, results published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine have shown.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...
My mistake - but I would argue it's WAY less scary.
Chance of death is already high when you're 80 (4%). An extra 133% is 5.32% chance of death.
If you're 16 is 0.02%. An extra 133% is a rounding error.
So from 4% to 9.33%, not 5.33%
The negative group should've had a correct proportion of "unhealthy" people.
Again - even if it is only increasing chance of death in "unhealthy" people... It's still increasing chance of death!
Re-read the citation, it's specifically looking at hospitalization.
"The 12-month risk of mortality was assessed in unadjusted Cox regressions and those adjusted for age, sex, race and comorbidities."
They controlled for comorbidities.
https://www.mdcalc.com/charlson-comorbidity-index-cci
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3818341/ - a peer-reviewed proof demonstrating how comorbidity indices are effective
There're obvious reasons why people of all ages with preexisting health issues are likely to get severe COVID-19 as opposed to asymptomatic, mild or moderate one, and the same people are also more likely to die from other health-related reasons. This would explain the correlation they found.
However, in the "Discussion" section they wrote this:
Based on the evidence that contracting severe COVID-19 infection increases the risk of death after surviving the episode, it is clear that prevention of significant COVID-19 infection is the most effective way to decrease the risk of death following COVID-19
Does anyone understands why exactly is it clear?
Note the graph in the same article shows people with mild COVID-19 have lower risk of death compared to people with no COVID at all.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Are you sure that isn’t just a modern trend now that we are able to quantify so much stuff?
Is it? I see no evidence to justify this statement at all. Care to show some?
The vast majority of how society is organized seems to eschew quantification in favor of descriptive qualification. Most laws, and governance, for example are formed that way.
The use of metrics in governance has been dramatically increasing as our methods of quantification have developed, but that is definitely a modern development.
> The use of metrics in governance has been dramatically increasing as our methods of quantification have developed, but that is definitely a modern development.
These two statements seem slightly contradictory. If quantified metrics in governance has increased as our ability to quantify things has increased, then it would seem that laws did not favor descriptive qualification, they merely relied on it due to lack of ability to quantify.
Or put another way: The only times we don't quantify things is when we cannot.
Just because something has increased recently doesn’t mean there is an inbuilt human tendency for it.
For example the wearing of lounge suits for business is a modern development.
I don’t think you are going to claim that means there was a ‘human tendency’ for lounge suits all along.
Sure, but that wasn't my point. I was just showing the flaw in logic of the two quotes given. My original claim was not that we definitely quantify when we can, but that the reasonings given do not support your claim.
Weaving is a necessary stepping stone to making lounge suits. That doesn’t mean humanity has been destined to wear lounge suits all along.
It seem like you are simply assuming that was present.
If I do not assume we optimize for the quantifiable, I must assume either (1) we optimize for the unquantifiable, (2) we do not favor one way or the other (innately), or (3) human nature has changed over a very short (few thousand year) time period.
I was trying to rule out (1). (3) Seems pretty easy to rule out purely on our understanding of evolution. And (2) would follow after ruling out (1) and accepting the original assumption.
But onto this:
> Can you think of a historical period in the distant part where there is evidence of a preference for quantification?
Tax law.
Given your apparent desire to be logical about this, it seems almost absurd that you would give this answer.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shu...
Better questions to think about are why the U.S. medical system supporting the words largest economy can't trivially expand its capacity to treat a relatively benign respiratory virus on top of its usual duties, or why there is a shortage in the training pipeline, or why people need ER care for other things in the first place.
Also with an evolving disease you don't know what its death-rate will be and it will depend on the preventive measures you and the government take, one of which is "shutting down" another being vaccination, which was not available at the beginning. If there had been no vaccine surely the death-rate had been larger.
According to data below the mortality rate is 7.5% in Mexico. In US it is 1.5%, not 1% as implied by whoever posed the question.
"Shutting down" will affect the mortality-rate because presumably it will protect the most vulnerable population more. If they don't get infected the mortality rate will be smaller.
And as far as I can tell US was never really "shut down" was it? Everybody still got their groceries. Many died of Covid, nobody died of hunger I believe. Subways and buses were running.
That is probably the CFR (case fatality rate). This depends on actually testing. If you don't test mild or asymptomatic cases, the mortality will look way larger.
But we know the actual global mortality, is about 0.7%.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Everyone will get infected. Shutting down can only delay that.
Let's say you get to a serious car accident. But the hospital can not take you because it is full of Covid patients.
In the past it was considered normal to lose 50k soldiers in a war, have 3 of your kids die as infants, ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
It's also passed the death toll in the U.S. from the Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 675K (although this was out of a smaller total population).
It doesn't take a very large death toll to have a major impact on American society.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
You also can view the weekly totals for observed and predicted deaths on that site. You'll see that deaths from non-COVID causes track the predicted value quite well, but when you add in deaths from COVID, the curve follows the timing of COVID cases quite well.
So I don't think we're necessarily all that sensitive to death, although we I suppose if it's highly publicized and pushed (like war deaths or non-gang-related murders). We're much more sensitive to fear, which is perception of risk (which obviously includes mortality), but it is also very strongly driven by the amount and tone of news coverage, politicians, social media, etc.
Not to comment on the merits of the response to covid or any of these other issues or whether fear is justified, but the reason why economies were shut down for covid was because of fear not deaths.
i.e. there is a one-way ratchet on these measures since one direction is gated by the "trade grandma for a dollar" line.
It's classic minimization. You see it all the time when someone is motivated to ignore reality, or is suffering from a condition that makes it hard to accept reality. A heroin addict might say that shooting heroin isn't a big deal because they haven't died from it yet, even if they have a history of overdosing.
Also, please see this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most "long COVID" symptoms disappear in children. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876
Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...
Having covid presumably worsens outcomes for unrelated causes, in some cases turning a non emergency condition into an emergency condition.
I'm seeing the opposite. Most public officials and news articles seem to only care about case numbers, which have very little meaning these days.
For instance, more positive tests could be due to testing. Hospitalizations are affected by different policies. I don't even know how you would measure long covid.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3063394/
But many cases of "long COVID" appear to be psychosomatic.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
And none of that is really relevant to school closure policy anyway. All of us will eventually get infected. At most closing schools again would only delay the inevitable. Instead we should focus on reducing risk factors by encouraging more people to get vaccinated and aggressively treating chronic metabolic diseases.
What I don't understand is why you would shut down schools and enforce silly unhelpful mask mandates on them when the science shows children do not spread the disease in any meaningful way and are not badly affected by it. This is the "blind" spot I see.
Browse /r/teachers some time. It used to be a sub full of teachers venting steam about their students and sharing helpful tips. These days it’s just one post after another about teachers who are fed up and either quitting or planning to quit. They are proposing a new subreddit to handle the influx of complaints.
If your “stay open” analysis begins and ends with the immune system and virus response of the students, then your analysis is incomplete because you are missing a huge dynamic that is at play here.
It would be bad business to fly with a sick crew.
They're quarantining people that aren't sick, that's why they don't have staff. They've scared away substitutes with unscientific fear mongering about super spreader events in school. This is a problem of over-testing and unnecessary quarantining not a shortage.
> They're quarantining people that aren't sick, that's why they don't have staff.
Is your position that no one has been quarantined who legitimately needed to be? Or hospitalized? Or died? Or retired? It's 100% people who aren't sick being quarantined, and that's why schools don't have enough faculty and staff?
> They've scared away substitutes with unscientific fear mongering about super spreader events in school.
Coming from a family of teachers, I'm sure you're aware that many if not most substitute teachers are older, retired, and often have multiple comorbidities related to Covid. Some of them are immunocompromised and can't even get vaccinated. Couple this with the fact that many schools do not have vaccination, testing, or masking requirements. Do you think it's unreasonable for such people to not want to subject themselves to a school environment at this time?
> This is a problem of over-testing and unnecessary quarantining not a shortage.
I understand you think this is fear mongering and people being quarantined who are healthy, but at the same time people are also actually dying and being hospitalized with very severe illness. You can call it a problem of quarantining healthy people and over testing, but that doesn't relate to the fact that vacancies are being created by Covid, and they aren't being filled because people look at the shitshow that education has become with Qanon craziness infiltrating school boards, and the demonization that they are getting online (being called lazy and that they should all be fired) and they nope out real quick. Why bother?
I don't see how lifting quarantine requirements and testing less makes things better for teachers. It doesn't make the field more attractive for new teachers. It doesn't help retention. It doesn't give kids a better environment for education. An alternative solution might be to impose a vaccination mandate, increase testing, better facilities with improved ventilation, and hazard pay for teachers along with a big freaking raise. But that seems to be a non starter.
Instead we've chosen a path of disrespect, and that's actually a big component of this. Coming from a family of teachers, I'm sure you've heard this. Moreso than feeling afraid, teachers feel disrespected and disillusioned. They are ostensibly front-line essential workers, but they are called lazy, called unpatriotic, are underpaid, and overworked. There is a huge gap between the rhetoric/reality about how essential teachers are to managing this pandemic, and the attitudes and compensation they receive.
Also, it's pretty condescending to suggest that this is all in teachers' heads, and they are just the victims of a fear mongering campaign. Stopping testing doesn't prevent teachers from being hospitalized or dying (and teachers are indeed dying). It also doesn't prevent their family members from being hospitalized or dying and teachers having to leave their jobs to take care of their family. It doesn't take many vacancies due to deaths or hospitalizations or retirements to completely throw a school into disarray -- especially considering the massive class sizes that many have to deal with. There's no extra slack other teachers can pick up. They are already stretched to the extreme when things are fully staffed.
Hasn't happened, and the numbers show that would be rare.
>Is your position that no one has been quarantined who legitimately needed to be? Or hospitalized? Or died? Or retired? It's 100% people who aren't sick being quarantined, and that's why schools don't have enough faculty and staff?
Nope, didn't say that. Strawman.
>Do you think it's unreasonable for such people to not want to subject themselves to a school environment at this time?
Maybe they should focus on why they're only able to get old immuno-compromised individuals to substitute.
>I don't see how lifting quarantine requirements and testing less makes things better for teachers.
By allowing staff that's not actually sick to teach, therefore you're not loading extra burden on fewer teachers. By also allowing students in the classroom, lessening the need to make lessons for quarantined individuals.
>I don't see how lifting quarantine requirements and testing less makes things better for teachers.
School isn't for teachers, it's for educating kids to be productive members of society. Any teacher worth their salt knows this.
>They are ostensibly front-line essential workers
You're right, so they need to start acting like it instead of following the lead of their unions (e.g. Chicago) and completely shutting down the system for what's essentially a cold at this point. I don't see nurses, emt's, or firefighters doing these things.
The entire problem here is that you're basing your stance off of false assumptions. COVID has never been an issue in schools because children do not contract it at a high rate and they do not spread it at a high rate. So, going to remote learning was never a good solution to begin with. You know what the biggest burden my wife had was during all of this? Creating multiple lesson plans to try and teach to remote kids who were sitting in their rooms pretending to pay attention in Google Classroom while actually playing video games not giving a shit about school for a year. She 100% would have preferred being in person and reiterated that daily to me.
Okay, but it has happened to other people, and even if it is a rare occurrence, it can throw an entire school district off axis. That's been shown to be true even if it hasn't happened in your wife's particular school.
> Nope, didn't say that. Strawman.
What you said was "They're quarantining people that aren't sick, that's why they don't have staff". So now you're telling me now you are open to other possibilities. For instance the possibility that they don't have faculty/staff because sick people are being quarantined, or that many teachers are retiring and not being replaced?
> By allowing staff that's not actually sick to teach, therefore you're not loading extra burden on fewer teachers.
Okay, but what about in the cases where teachers are too sick to teach? Or when they have to take care of others who are sick?
> School isn't for teachers, it's for educating kids to be productive members of society. Any teacher worth their salt knows this.
School isn't for teachers, but you still need teachers to teach school. And if things aren't good for teachers, you're not going to be able to hire new ones. This is the very attitude that is causing so many to leave the field or avoid it entirely. Any teacher worth their salt also knows their worth, and they know when they're being exploited and disrespected.
> You're right, so they need to start acting like it
Well they have been acting like it for a very long time throughout this pandemic. Teachers have been teaching in person all year. They have actually died in service of their discipline and the nation due to this diseases despite the fact that you don't know any personally. They have done so at great cost to themselves financially, emotionally, and mentally while around them others, who are neither essential nor workers, have profited massively. What they are asking for now is to be supported and listened to, and not be called lazy, unpatriotic, un-American, traitors who deserve to be fired.
> The entire problem here is that you're basing your stance off of false assumptions.
I'm not basing my stance off of assumptions, I'm basing it off of experience. I am a teacher and what you say about students is just plain wrong. Maybe for small children it's true, but the kids I teach are teenagers and they spread covid just fine. The first week in class there was a massive outbreak as students mixed together after summer break -- over 250 cases were recorded. Some people got very sick. We went remote for a week, cases died down, and then we were back in the classroom. The rest of the semester went on uneventful.
This only worked because we had proper precautions. We had a vaccination mandate with 90% compliance. We had mandatory masks, mandatory and available testing, and mandatory quarantine. These are the kinds of measures that are nonstarters at public schools, but experience has shown they are needed to keep things open and running and teachers happy. Teachers were giving the requested tools, and they got the job done. In other cases teachers are being disrespected, minimized, even demonized, and in those cases teachers aren't getting the job done, because they can't.
Yes it's true that young children don't spread it according to the statistics. That's a relief! But I don't know how many times it needs to be said that children are not the only human beings in a school community, and the school is not a closed system. When community spread is as high as it is right now, it really doesn't matter how much children do or don't spread Covid!
> You know what the biggest burden my wife had was during all of this? Creating multiple lesson plans
Very true, I had that same problem! Based on my experience, I think there are approximately 0 teachers I know who would prefer teaching online to teaching in the classroom -- teaching to children in person is the entire joy of the profession. Without that, it's really not that rewarding of a job. But that's another issue of a lack of administrative support for teachers. Technology support staff could have been hired to help essential teaching workers through this time, but that never happened.
1. Shutting down schools does not help prevent the spread
2. Mask-mandates do not help (prevent the spread)
3. Science shows children don't spread the disease in any meaningful way
4. Children are not badly affected
5. Mask-mandates are "silly"
Can you give us links to data that shows each of your five (5) claims to be correct?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200710100934.h...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32430964/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32914746/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.26394
Yep and that's just a handful of easily found studies showing that children aren't in very low risk of COVID infecting them and/or causing any serious ailment. Therefore, the rest of your points are moot.