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Comment by jhelphenstine | Hacker News Reader

Parent here. In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020.

Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. I think pondering transitions to virtual class, where students are virtually attending school in the more flippant sense of the word “virtual”, is overweighting risks of the ‘rona and sorely underweighting risks to childrens’ development, to say nothing of the economic toll for parents pulled aside (if they can be, as in this article).

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> a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020.

Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.

It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).

If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].

Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.

My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.

Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.

1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

I don't think I disagree. If there was a good time to consider full lockdown, it was at the beginning of the pandemic when little information about it was known. The more we learn about it, the less it seems like a real threat.

But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people.

It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of:

'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks'

We are way past that and it shows.

> If there was a good time to consider full lockdown, it was at the beginning of the pandemic when little information about it was known.

Agreed. A really aggressive lockdown right at the start would have made sense.

Deaths typically lag behind infections by 6 weeks or so. It's a little too early to tell if Omicron hasn't caused an increase in deaths.

This is absolutely false.

Before people die they have to be in the hospital. Hospitalization rates are extremely low considering the infection rate. Death rates are also very low.

This is essentially a flu at this point, even for the unvaccinated. People with 2 shots are as susceptible to omicron infection as the unvaccinated, and once the booster wanes, so will the triple boosted.

Child hospitalization rates are at an all time high

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-sym...

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/childrens-national-...

Read more carefully.

Hospitalization rates are down. Number of hospitalizations may be up but the spread is larger than it’s ever been. Omicron is 5x more contagious than the original Covid at levels we’ve never seen before as a society.

Sorry if that was unclear: yes we are saying the same thing, that more children are now in the hospital for covid. I was talking about the rate per 100k children.

And that number is trending up. It has actually being trending up since Delta: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036e2.htm

Look at South Africa. The Omicron variant swept through there starting about 8 weeks ago. It didn't cause a major increase in deaths.

In my district we have a lot of teachers that are currently COVID positive with reported symptoms. Relatively mild from most accounts (all vaccinated), but still under the weather. I wouldn't blame any of the individual teachers for calling out - I've called out from my own job for similar symptoms in the past. It's what sick days are for. Of course the system isn't built for this many people to call out sick at once. I think a week or two of virtual "learning" is inevitable in some places, but I don't mind that and I don't think there is a risk of turning into indefinite shut down like what occured in 2020.

Yes, making people work while sick is stupid. Even without covid.

The problem is there's a handful of parents that don't give a fuck and constantly gets the classroom sick. So if you want to abide by that rule your kid misses a ton of school.

Just before the winter break someone sent their kid to school coughing and sneezing. Apparently they were sick enough that the teacher noticed and sent them home within 30 minutes.

I hate people.

It's a complicated problem. I have the luxury of a tech job that lets me work from home, and forgives a couple of distracted days if my toddler's home sick with me.

Not everybody is so lucky.

Lots of people have jobs where they can't just skip out for a few days. Do our bus-drivers, cooks, and teachers have that luxury? Do their jobs allow them to have it? What about surgeons or doctors?

How many days can somebody take off in a row if their kid is sick? 2? 3? A week?

Sometimes, parents have to make a hard choice about whether to send their kids to school with a cough. It's just another harsh reality of the society we live in.

When my kid comes home from daycare and gets us all sick, you can bet that I'm mad at the other parents. But it's also not my place to judge them, because I don't know what they have to juggle.

There are dozens of endemic upper respiratory viruses, including four other coronaviruses. It's probably to our long term advantage to get infected with as many of those as possible when we're young and healthy. While the symptoms may be unpleasant and inconvenient, the resulting cellular immunity gives us some protection when we're old and frail. Short term costs versus long term benefits.

Why wouldn't this be true for older people too? In the case we should encourage everyone to go to work sick.

It reminds me of something from The Office;

>Dwight K. Schrute: The worst thing you can do for your immune system is to coddle it. They need to fight their own battles. If Sabre really cared about our well-being, they would set up hand de-sanitizing stations. A simple bowl at every juncture filled with dirt, vomit, fecal matter...

Well the immune system does change over development, but still it's a hot take. I don't think it's 100% incorrect, but it is going to vary wildly by the person, their current state, the exact disease, etc. In ways we don't even fully understand yet. It's also wrong to expose others to infection unnecessarily without their consent obviously, even if it would have positive health consequences long term.

But yeah, that quote from The Office is pretty hilarious, thanks for sharing!

> In our PTA (parent teacher association) group, someone held forth that we just needed a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”.

That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating.

Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not.

In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.

> Vaccines are widely available for children and adults.

This is true for children ages 5 and above. From that perspective school closures now offer less benefit than school closures in 2020.

Children under the age of 5 still have to manage without vaccine.

It’s been stated the flu, even with vaccination, is more problematic to this age group than Covid-19. I think restrictions around this age group are a net negative.

It has been stated, but last time I checked it was lie. The flu kills more people of you compare all flu deaths in all categories and add estimated flu deaths (not just confirmed).

Less than 1000 kids under the age of 18 died from Covid despite tens of millions of infections. That’s vastly less than the flu.

The best data summary I’ve seen [1] suggests that COVID-19 IFR for kids is 0.01% or less which is in line with the COVID-19 stats you cite. The same data summary [1] suggests that flu IFR for kids is probably the same order of magnitude but not “vastly less”.

I think COVID-19 vs. flu has gotten way too much press though and it’s worth noting that IFR in kids is low for both relative to IFR in adults. What I would really want to learn more about are the long-term effects of disease and how that varies by age. We know a bit about that for flu or polio or RSV but not so much for COVID-19 because it’s still so new.

[1]: https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr

The CDC best estimate says under 18 IFR is 20 in 1 million or .002%

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

if 5% of the kids and 7% of the staff at a school currently had the flu, I think there would be serious consideration of temporarily closing it too.

There absolutely is. The school system I work(ed) for closes regularly every February because of the increase in numbers in strep and flu. Our attendance gets so low that it's the only thing they can do. Usually we can tell the week before, then they give it Monday and Tuesday and then are out the rest of the week, though sometimes attendance is so low Friday they just cancel the whole week already.

Basically: this is something that already happens for other diseases, as they spread like wildfire in schools. Kids are disgusting (and honestly, some of the teachers are too. I mean, I've seen several not wash hands after taking a dump...)

Teacher absences are forcing hands right now, but even from the student perspective parents seem pretty split on if they want their kids going in, so I'm interested to see how number of absences develops in the next week.

The shitty part is there seems to be 0 compromise in most school districts. A friend's district is staying in person as of now with no accomodations planned for those out sick or not comfortable going in. The whole situation has become bizarrely political so I fear they will not make accomodations even if half the school ends up staying home.

It's especially ridiculous at the high school level where these kids are more than capable of continuing academic progress virtually for a few weeks. Hell even with the teachers out for a week high schoolers could easily be assigned self directed work. Would all of them do it? No, but it sucks for the kids that would be willing to and are instead now forced to sit in person with a substitute teacher doing whatever to kill time.

Meanwhile I recognize some lower income districts where a week or two pause of in person schooling could be a lot more impactful are shutting down. Not much they can do when it comes to sick teachers, but in an ideal world I would get as many teachers/subs as I still could to come in and at least "babysit" for the parents that need it.

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