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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Mask mandates are collective punishment of children for no real benefit. I absolutely condemn them and they are not a system that works. Most European countries don't require young children to wear masks in schools.

And don't presume to claim that masking children is necessary to protect adults. The adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months.

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Yeah well my 7 year old hates wearing pants but I still manage to get her clothed for the classroom.

The only kids I know that have a problem with masks are kids with parents that have a problem with masks. It's not a kid problem its an adult problem. Kids are adaptable but adults are whiny little assholes that are set in their ways.

Just because kids aren’t actively complaining doesn’t mean it’s not bothering them. My kid is a conformist Asian like me, and we’ve been going along with masking this whole time because her private school is full of democrats. But she broke down crying last fall when she found out that we’d be doing another year of masking. It’s not just the inconvenience of the masks, or the eating outside on the ground, but the whole exercise of disrupting normal life for these kids: no field trips, no birthday parties, etc. We’re into the third year of this reduced childhood.

If pants had been invented in 2018 in order to cure horniness, I'd treat them with the same gravitas that I give to graham crackers. One person's "set in one's ways" is another person's "doesn't change with the wind".

Well that was...some words.

> If pants had been invented in 2018 in order to cure horniness

What if they'd been invented hundreds of years ago to stop the spread of disease, and prevented millions of deaths since then? Curious that you use a weak and hyperbolic analogy when the reality is so readily available.

Well, you can call me foolish, but I don't think COVID is severe enough to be worth long-term realignment of cultural norms around wardrobe. Most people agree with me, which is why so much of the debate has been based on panic.

i had speculated months ago that perhaps cultures that wear veils and mouth coverings originally did it for health purposes

If that was true, why are only women forced to wear veils? In reality the veils are all about controlling women's sexuality.

you will see that I avoided referencing specific cultres and made claims about the past. too much racism / elitism on HN in some threads, although those issues need to be discussed too.

Exactly, kids simply reflect what they hear at home.

Go to any store, chin-maskers are with maskless kids, while parents with N95 masks are without kids or with fully masked kids.

Don't kid yourself. Children are suggestible and easily manipulated by adults on BOTH extremes of this polarising argument.

Masks for kids are significantly less issue then you make them be. There is maybe one in 60 kids that acts as if it is punishment and the rest just used to wear them.

And yes, I am in contact with kids. Masks don't bother them all that much.

My 12 yr old now feels naked without the mask... Perhaps the mandate isn't very useful, but kids are so adaptable (evolutionary trait!) that this isn't in general a big deal for them.

The teachers on the teachers subreddit STILL go on about how bad they have it "risking their lives". It's unbelievably dramatic over what to a vaccinated person is an endemic sniffle. I think they really just want to drag out their WFH situation as long as possible, consequences to the next generation of society be damned.

A. It’s not just an endemic sniffle even for vaccinated people. I lost my sense of smell and got it back way after my quarantine ended, like months after. Plus there’s a mental fog that lifted a long time later. I got Covid after my first shot but before my second.

B. In general, being vaxxed keeps you from getting badly sick but you just can’t say.

E.g., say you’re in a group of a hundred people with a thousand guns trained at your group. Just one gun out of the thousand has a live round while ten others have blank which don’t kill but can injure. Would you be willing to face those odds? Would you be willing to ask others to face the same odds?

These are roughly the odds what you are asking teachers to take on.

Think it through longer term. Over the next couple years the odds that teachers and all the rest of us will be infected is approximately 100%. Where the exposure comes from is irrelevant. I am willing to face those odds, and to ask others to do the same.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

Fortunately the vaccines and other therapies are quite effective at preventing deaths.

Even if you have a 100% chance of getting COVID eventually (something that we have zero evidence for) it totally matters when you get it. Sometimes ICUs are overloaded, other times they aren't. If you wait long enough we develop drugs that help. We will make vaccines more effective with time.

What's worse, is a lot of people have long-haul COVID where they suffer severe symptoms that never seem to go away. We have no idea why. Maybe if you get COVID in 5 years we will have figured out why and you get to avoid ruining your life.

Also. COVID is not one and done. You can get it multiple times. People have gotten COVID twice, the first time they were fine, the second time they died.

Not only are you totally misinformed for wanting to "face those odds" you are risking the lives and well-being of those around you.

Hospitals have been overwhelmed during bad flu seasons many times before 2019. We didn't use that as an excuse to impose mandates and restrictions on the rest of society. Omicron is so contagious that your odds of avoiding infection for the next 5 years are approximately zero. Fortunately the vaccines and other therapies we already have are quite effective at preventing deaths. The notion of acting based on the hope that something better might appear at some indefinite point in the future is just absurd.

While reinfections can occur (just as with any coronavirus), symptoms are typically mild. The number of deaths due to reinfections are so low as to be statistically irrelevant from a public policy standpoint.

This panel discussion by several leading physicians provides a good scientific overview of the current situation. It's long, but worth a listen.

https://youtu.be/GklHGYY8vN8

I’d like to add that we did wait about a year for the vaccines. That was the treatment that was “good enough” for life to return to normal for me. I don’t need to wait 5 more years. That treatment relieved ~85% of the original risk for me.

What’s the alternative in your hypothetical? If it’s “never socialize normally again”, then hell yes I’ll fade the mostly prop guns. Even if the alternative is two years of these measures, I think the .99 nearly no-op and .999 survival is way preferable.

This will be endemic, just like the 1968 flu is. The sooner we can get to that point, the better.

This isn’t some sort of binary choice. You could take some basic precautions in crowded spaces or try new lower risk activities to socialise with friends e.g things you do outside. You know, do what humans have done for thousands of years: adapt.

But people are so eager to go back to exactly how things were.

> What’s the alternative in your hypothetical? If it’s “never socialize normally again”, then hell yes I’ll fade the mostly prop guns. Even if the alternative is two years of these measures, I think the .99 nearly no-op and .999 survival is way preferable.

What morbid insanity. In the US 850,000 people are dead. That's more dead people than all US soldiers who have died in combat in all wars in history.

Wear a mask, get vaccinated, socially distance, and stop risking your life and that of the people you love.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? We're trying for something different here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Real life is full of risks. You can't seriously expect people to continue socially distancing and wearing masks indefinitely. What morbid insanity.

"I lost my sense of smell and got it back way after my quarantine ended, like months after. Plus there’s a mental fog that lifted a long time later."

I've had exactly the same, and still haven't got my taste or smell back 100% yet. It sucks, but I still can't imagine being so selfish as to expect millions to endure endless global restrictions over some minor personal inconvenience.

I’m not a fan of endless global restrictions either.

If we don’t like to live with global restrictions at someone else’s say so, why should we expect teachers to go out to teach at our say so? As a group, they have chosen to stay home and that should be that.

It’s not war where the price for not wanting to face the enemy is a cowardice charge and a court martial. These teachers don’t want to teach in-person. End of story.

Absolutely. I wouldn't dream of expecting anyone to do anything "at our say so", be that in-person teaching, vaccine-taking, mask-wearing, close proximity in social situations...

But this thread started with the observation that many private Catholic schools ARE just getting on with the job, and as a result parents are voting with their feet and heading there in droves. These are not teachers being forced; it's just their ideology leads them to make a different risk/benefit calculation to others.

And yet this thread is full of comments arguing that the system of endless global restrictions "works for the vast majority of people". To me and many others, that just seems like wilfully ignoring the harm to our children rather than seeking a way out.

I'm sure I don't need to link to the many MANY studies that have shown how damaging lockdowns have been to our kids' outcomes, and these negative effects hit the poorest kids the hardest. We should be doing everything within our power to undo the damage, and yet so many are willing to stick with restrictions for the foreseeable future with no exit strategy. THIS is why parents are looking for a way out for their kids, and why private schools like those mentioned above are seeing enquiries sky-rocket.

Why the hate for those who seek a return to normality? I don't understand it.

The teachers are more essential than pretty much anyone else besides doctors. They just have to show up, that's part of the deal when you take on such a big responsibility. What if doctors just stopped showing up in the middle of a pandemic? Society would be fucked. And a generation of kids is fucked because teachers weren't willing to take their responsibility seriously.

Teachers compensation does not reflect the dedication and mortality risk their family should accept according to you.

You get what you pay for. Your kid is your responsibility, not your teachers. If your kid "is fucked" its because you weren't willing to take their responsibility seriously - not underpaid teachers.

Your expectation that teachers should expose their families to a pandemic for 40K pa is absurd.

My kid is my responsibility but also we collectively pay the teachers and we don't have to keep doing this. We can just defund the entire system and make it an individual responsibility (of course as most things this would fuck over the poor kids the most). If there is a moment to crush the teachers unions it is now. California parents who normally would nod their heads at whatever garbage the union feeds them are probably primed to go Margaret Thatcher on their ass. I hope someone is organizing this; they have my vote.

> we collectively pay the teachers

Poorly, in a normal environment.

Laughably, with what you are demanding they do for you.

There's a whole lot of "other people should endanger themselves for me" around this topic and it deserves some introspection.

Teacher salaries vary a lot by state. Some states pay quite well relative to the US median income.

https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.ht...

Great. What does that have to do with anything? No state pays teachers well relative to the opportunity cost or to the resultant workload and personal investment.

And that is in normal times. Not when rich computer-toucher randoms want them to go into COVID hotboxes Because They Said So.

> What if doctors just stopped showing up in the middle of a pandemic?

Yeah what if that happened in medicine and related fields:

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/physicians/more-docs-consid...

https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2021/08/california...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ems-workers-retiring-higher-rat...

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