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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> It's an inability to deal with risk out of all proportion to the reality it actually poses.

Are we reading the same post?

The kids are going to school. The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.

> And children his age are not at a great risk to begin with.

Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation? They have older parents at home. They have older teachers in the classroom. Many of them see even older grandparents and relatives frequently, perhaps also at home.

Where do kids go if they get sick? Home, where they are cared for by older parents.

Kids don't just live in isolated bubbles with other kids. It's dishonest to ignore the second-order effects of kids getting sick.

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> The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.

This depends on how you define "so sick". Tested positive? Yes. Hospitalized? I bet not all (or > 1.8% [1]) of them. I notice when verbiage sensationalizes COVID. The OP, I believe, is also sensitive to this.

> Honestly, do people think children just exist in isolation?

This is the primary argument. Your two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. He can believe that the kids are overly scared based on the statistics because, well, they are not at that much risk while at the same time recognizing that individuals not at risk put other people who are at risk in danger.

This is why we fail to have beneficial conversation, we talk around each other.

[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/omicron-...

You do not need to be in the hospital to be too sick to work. Probably 99% of sick days are taken without being hospitalized.

I am 25 years old, vaccinated two times (we are only eligible to 2 vaccines in Québec, Canada), had contact with a COVID positive case on sunday last week (January 2th) and I got sick enough to not be able to work from January 4th to January 9th.

I was not hospitalized and I was not able to work due to some quite heavy symptoms that prevent me to talk or focus more than a few minutes on a task.

You and the commenter above you miss the point. If you change "Hospitalized" to "unable to work" the point is still valid. I just do not have statistics on "unable to work" and I do not like to state things without evidence. However, it is very likely that 100% of those cases are not "unable to work" and that some percentage >0 is asymptomatic. The point stands.

Either way, you focused on the minor point rather than the main purpose which is a "both and" scenario rather than a "either or" where the two arguments are debating different issues which are not mutually exclusive but for some reason are used to argue against each other as if it's an either/or scenario (risk to ones self vs risk to others - It can be low risk to the individual and high risk to others at the same time).

> The faculty is so sick that they don't have enough people to run the school.

Bullshit.

Assuming that 20% of the teachers are sick (=coughing or not feeling well), which is a ridiculous overestimation, schools can still work perfectly well. That just means that 20% of the lessons will not happen. And if the schools' administration is not completely useless (I admit that may be a long shot), some of these lessons could be replaced by other lessons.

“Just” doesn’t mean what you seem to think it does. Schools have very little margin for soaking up absence at that scale. If one out of five teachers are out, the kids will not be doing the learning which is the stated justification for not keeping them safe at home. Teaching is hard work, not hitting play on a video, and it requires time to prepare in addition to classroom time – teachers don’t call in sick for fun, it actually creates more work for them since they still need to create the lessons and deal with the impact on their work when they’re back, and in many districts a decline in test scores will cost them money (in some, so does taking a sick day).

School administrators are extremely busy with all of the extra work they’ve been given, and if they’re babysitting students that work (often required by law) will not happen.

But, at this point, they are pretty much babysitting them, at least according to the account from the reddit poster. Everyone's talking more about the testing than anything else with little added benefit.

Yes, note the large number of absences — that was basically the point: schools which have been resource-starved for many years don’t have anywhere near that much slack capacity, especially since one of the sources of substitutes are retired teachers who are at higher risk.

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