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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

This shows a gross misunderstanding of viruses.

1. Children don't exist in a vacuum. Even if they don't become symptomatic, they can still be a carrier and they can still infect adults that they're in contact with. Should teachers be sacrificing themselves? Should families isolate their children within the house?

2. It's a low risk to healthy children. What do you do for children with other health complications? America has a lot of diabetic children. Covid is also shown to increase the risk of pre-diabetic children becoming diabetic https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/covid-19-substan...

3. Covid is not a one and done. You get it, and it can have long term lasting effects even if it doesn't kill you. That applies to children as well.

4. Covid spreads very quickly with a relatively high risk to the greater population. Lockdowns were a safety measure at the very least to be able to keep pace with things. It was absolutely the right thing to do till the virus was more understood.

5. As the virus was more understood, it reinforced the above points because covid has very complex side effects

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> Should teachers be sacrificing themselves?

I want to directly address this one - I think the answer is yes. I still get in the engine and answer 911 calls. My wife still goes to the hospital and attends patients. Why shouldn't teachers go to work?

Sure, some teachers are old and/or have health issues, and even with vaccination might be at unreasonable risk. Those people need to do something else (sure, with a lot of social support) and let people who are willing and able to do the job take over. The purpose of the educational system is not to coddle teachers.

The virus is endemic. Whatever happened to "keep calm and carry on"? My grandparents experienced far worse than a virus with a sub-1% fatality rate (and a tiny fraction of that with a couple jabs), and they still sent their kids to school. Let's just accept the danger and move on.

This. Millions of workers, "essential" or not, went to work day in and day out in 2020. The only reason that so many teachers did not is that they have strong unions, who turn out in droves to donate and vote for politicians that do their bidding in return. The teachers unions openly advocated for policies that were terrible for our kids.

I will never forget how the union in my district fought us at every step as we tried to restore normalcy in our children's lives.

I think I just fundamentally disagree that we pay our teachers, workers and other frontline workers like yourself enough (though I'm not sure how much firefighters make) to warrant them risking themselves if they don't have to.

Teachers can teach with remote learning. Maybe it's not as good, but it's doable. You can't stop a fire remotely.

We really need to reevaluate society by making work safer and making sure people are paid better.

The firefighters in my district don't get paid (except for a few support staff). We do it for free.

If teachers think the pay isn't worth the risk, retire and let others take over. We don't need to re-evaluate society, we need people to man up and do their jobs. What are you waiting for? We have very effective vaccines. The virus may wax and wane but it is never going away.

Thankfully my kiddo is too young to be impacted by this, but all my friends with grade schoolers tell me that remote learning is a farce. So I don't think that's the answer.

How much should people be paid to risk themselves? The US Army pays privates about $21K per year.

Remote learning doesn't work for most children, especially the youngest ones and those with bad home environments. The laptop class seems to intentionally ignore that reality.

Is doing logistics work for the army particularly dangerous?

I agree with this, have since the beginning and it's very unpopular view discussing this on places like HN.

I'll never forget a passing encounter I had in March 2020 as things were starting to shut down in my area. I was at Lowe's (big box hardware store) and hadn't bought or even worn my first mask yet but knew the CDC was recommending social distance when I literally bumped into an elderly woman in a narrow aisle of the store. I apologized and commented how I didn't hear her come up behind me. Then I apologized again and said I'd step away as I hadn't got a mask yet (she hadn't either but I was being polite as she was obviously elderly/high risk). We chatted for a moment about everything that was going on in the community regarding closures/lockdowns. That's when she said, "this is all non-sense, when I grew up Polio was going around and we still went to school, the world has to keep moving on and life is not meant to be risk free".

I have thought about that conversation a lot as time has passed and while unpopular, I believe we over-reacted even given what we knew at the time. It was always going to take a toll but we made it quite a bit more expensive in many ways. Instead of ripping the bandaid off, we'll be pulling it away for quite some time and our kids will be impacted for their entire lives to varying degrees. I have a now 3 year old and in talking with PreK/PK3/PK4 teachers they are already seeing a drastic social/emotional shift of incoming children from the norm. I've heard accounts that slightly older kids have PTSD symptoms from the fear they experienced.

1. There should have been and were lockdowns early in the pandemic. Once vaccines were available teachers should be ready to teach, just like every other worker that interfaces with people. At least teachers see the same people every day unlike grocery store clerks.

2. It's low risk to almost ALL children. The hospitalization rates of children have been around 1 per 1 million at peak infection periods. This is no worse than other diseases and doesn't prompt a special response.

3. Please present evidence of long term effect in a non-negligible percentage of children

4. We still don't understand the flu virus.

You're only focusing on the children, while the post to which you're responding explicitly calls out that they are only a part of the entire system. The fact that they don't get really sick or are asymptomatic is actually really bad when you're trying to reduce transmission.

Prompting the obvious questions (which I don't think have clear answers): How much do we think that it reduced transmission? How much transmission reduction is needed to justify knocking a year of socialising out of of a child's life?

What I'm curious about is why did we see so little effort to keep socializing available to kids without just going back to school? I'm not aware of a single place that made a noticeable effort to e.g encourage small fixed social pods to form, or run outdoor activities after school hours for the kids who wanted to be there, etc. Even among the parents who were basically fulltime campaigning to re-open schools for the sake of mental health, I didn't notice discussion of what they were doing in the meantime, and surely they were doing something.

Long Covid is understood better now as an autoimmune disease that comes from even mild cases.

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-can-trigger-s...

This is in addition to worse damage that occurs throughout the body to any ACE2 cell, which are found in the brain along with the entire cardiovascular system and every other major organ in the body.

Hospitalizations in children are rising this year because last year they were out of school and NPI safety was much higher than 2021.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/new-omicron-variant...

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/number-babies-toddlers...

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

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-children-us-covid-hospit...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210716112443.h...

https://twitter.com/rafalab/status/1477302949604995075

https://twitter.com/jneill/status/1476253591677587456

https://mobile.twitter.com/jneill/status/1479066859270025219

117,000 children now living with long Covid +40,000 more than October

20,000 children for longer than a year +6,000 more than October

Children crossing 12,000 children have their "activity limited a lot" +4,000 more than October

Fantastic answer. Thank you.

What's the proposal here, exactly? Should children be kept in hermetic isolation indefinitely to forestall the possibility of long COVID (at least, until a sufficiently infectious variant comes along that even the Ted Kaczynskis of the world get it)?

There may be ACE2 receptors in the brain but what has never been found in the brain so far is SARS-CoV-2. The spike protein crosses the blood brain barrier in mice, but you also get plenty of that from the vaccines which doesn't seem to concern anyone at all.

> 105 children hospitalised with Covid on 27-Dec

With Covid. Not because of Covid. Most children at hospitals with Covid are incidental cases.

Also the long covid figure from children comes from self report. Given the hysteria in some children and some parents I would take this measure with a huge grain of salt.

Protip: don't use emotional Twitter post as your main source of information.

What?

You clearly did not read the report that has proven autoantibodies were detected from mild covid cases associated with long covid symptoms.

How do you explain the rise in children’s hospitalizations in areas with high covid rates?

"A five-fold increase in pediatric admissions in New York City this month. Close to double the numbers admitted in Washington, DC. And nationwide, on average, pediatric hospitalizations are up 48% in just the past week."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/new-omicron-variant...

"An average of 672 children were being hospitalized every day in the US, as of 2 January - more than double the average just a week before. And the rate is rapidly increasing."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/covid-hospit...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-real-...

https://nypost.com/2021/12/25/new-york-dept-of-health-warns-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/08/26/child-c...

> autoantibodies were detected from mild covid cases associated with long covid symptoms

And? Just because someone has those antibodies doesn't mean he has long-covid.

> How do you explain the rise in children’s hospitalizations in areas with high covid rates?

>"A five-fold increase in pediatric admissions in New York City this month. Close to double the numbers admitted in Washington, DC. And nationwide, on average, pediatric hospitalizations are up 48% in just the past week." https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/new-omicron-variant...

Nothing in the article says because of Covid. And it is very easy to explain in fact. Hospitalizations always surge during holidays. Most notably due to falls and other respiratory viruses such as the flu which is known to be worse in children than covid.

Even so the article cites this data (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis...) and says: "US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Tuesday showed that on average, 305 children have been in the hospital with Covid-19 on any given day over the week that ended Dec. 26.".

That 305 children in all the US.

The other articles you cited use the same deceptive framing.

None of that is relevant or actionable. Everyone including children will be exposed regardless of what we do. Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments are pretty good at preventing severe symptoms.

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

Your link is an outdated opinion piece from someone who makes money from cancer self help books.

This may come as a surprise to you but contagious respiratory diseases can be prevented.

N95 masks and clean air are known actionable cost effective solutions.

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/wiss-cheese-model...

Do you intend to spend the rest of your life wearing an N95 mask every time you're close to another mammal? Because this respiratory disease isn't going away. You won't be able to avoid it forever.

Vaccines don't absolutely prevent infection. By the time the vaccines were out, we were already in a second wave with Delta which dramatically reduced the efficacy. Why should teachers, or anyone for that matter, be willing to risk their health? As a society, we treat too many people and jobs as literally expendable.

You also don't address how children can be carriers even if covid doesn't affect them directly. Child vaccines only recently became available, which reduces the infection possibility and therefore the ability to pass it on. By that time , omicron was a thing and has mutated enough that the vaccines aren't as effective to curtail spread.

The flu is significantly less spreadable/fatal than covid. People bringing this comparison up in 2022 are either wilfully ignorant or disingenuous.

Studies on long term risk to children have just started (1) so numbers are unavailable, but covid has already shown to have long term effects in some children as per my link in the other post

1. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/long-term-stud...

All these anti lockdown comments tend to be the same, ignoring network effect and falsely trivializing the risk factor. Comparing to the flu is just ridiculous, and has been debunked over and over and over.

> Comparing to the flu is just ridiculous

You are too easy to dismiss here. I wasn't comparing severity, but rather out understanding of the flu. Please re-read. Nevertheless, tens of thousands have died every year from the flu. Many more who do not die get post-viral syndromes. The symptoms change every year, sometimes with full body rashes, or severe congestion that lasts weeks. Sometimes it mutates into something deadly, like the last pandemic. The vaccines we've created are hardly effective. To pretend we understand the flu is to be willfully ignorant or disingenuous.

>2. It's low risk to almost ALL children.

What do we do if their parents end up unable to work due to long term COVID or worse their parents die? https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true 30-64yo are a significant percentage of total deaths. 30-55 is probably a reasonable age range for parents with dependent children.

>3. Please present evidence of long term effect in a non-negligible percentage of children

You realise we are still going through the pandemic right? There is no long term data either way anywhere because we have to live through it first.

> What do we do if their parents end up unable to work due to long term COVID or worse their parents die?

Indeed. Parents should also be vaccinated. It would be reasonable to delay school until that point. (This is an additional delay over those previously mentioned in parent comments in this thread.)

However, we should also expect that all parents will be exposed to the virus sooner or later, as we have been told from the earliest days of the pandemic, and thus we should limit further delay.

Yes, parents will get COVID from kids who go to school. Yes, unfortunately, there will be children orphaned as a result of that exposure. No, there won't be substantial numbers of net orphans -- certainly not such that crippling public education for years or even decades is the more humane response.

It's not just about death though, it's about hospitalization and long term effects too. We've had multiple major variants.

Also what number of orphans is acceptable? 30% of the US won't vaccinate. Delta has a mortality rate of 3+%(1) by the most charitable takes. Rough math would show that could add somewhere under 1 million orphans to the system.

Do we also ignore medical costs for those who get sick? What about the hospital resources those people take up?

Again, there's just so much more than "just the children"

1. I'm estimating 3% for Delta by taking the NHS estimate of 1.9% CFR for Alpha and the subsequent estimates that Delta had around double the risk of fatality.

Please stop spreading misinformation about a serious subject. The CDC estimated the infection fatality rate at 0.6%. There is no credible evidence of a 3% rate at the population level.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

I was estimating based on NHS numbers that showed a CFR of 1.9% for alpha and the estimates showing delta at being double the CFR. Not trying to spread misinformation, but I'm specifically talking about delta in a fully unvaccinated group in the case that everyone gets it (which is the colloquial talking point for people who say "everyone will eventually have covid" used to dismiss the precautions)

EDIT: HN won't let me reply to the comment below me until the cool down period. They say my argument is not in good faith, which is an odd assertion to make. Their comment assumes a higher case count than reported, which while likely, is not an assumption I'm making because it's hard to discern whether there is also therefore uncounted mortality.

Case fatality rates are completely irrelevant. Most infected patients are never tested and thus never officially counted as a "case". Everyone is aware of that now, so if you're still citing CFR numbers then you're obviously acting in bad faith.

Delta has a mortality rate of 3+% by the most charitable takes.

What's your reference for that?

Even if this 3% number was accurate, which it's not, the most vulnerable group of people typically do not have school age children.

> 3. Covid is not a one and done. You get it, and it can have long term lasting effects even if it doesn't kill you. That applies to children as well.

> 3. Please present evidence of long term effect in a non-negligible percentage of children

> There is no long term data either way anywhere because we have to live through it first.

If we don’t have long term data one way or the other, why is the starting assumption that children will experience long Covid to the same extent and same severity as adults (especially given that they have much lower rates of getting a serious case of covid compared to adults)?

Because early results show that there are long term effects in children, we just don't know how bad, and we already know about long covid in adults. Long covid also doesn't require having very severe symptoms either.

And again, children don't exist in a vacuum and can therefore cause long term issues in adults.

This is about being cautious based on what we do know. And we do know it's a crippling societal risk that children are such a huge vector.

> What do we do if their parents end up unable to work due to long term COVID or worse their parents die?

What will my mother's friend's family do after their father, husband and sole provider died within 10 minutes of taking the vaccine, right there on the spot, on the vaccine queue? (Answer: the family almost got evicted by the way. And lived in poverty for 7-8 months before recovering.)

Where do we draw the line, I ask?

Simple statistics show that the risk of dying by taking the vaccine is significantly lower than the risk of dying from covid.

Someone having the vaccine also doesn't increase the risk of someone else dying. It's pretty simple.

> Someone having the vaccine also doesn't increase the risk of someone else dying. It's pretty simple.

This is a non-sequitur. I ask the reverse: how do I help society by vaccinating? Judging by the contemporary info out there -- I don't in any way or form. I don't reduce the spread and I won't reduce my symptoms because I got through it 3 times without realizing and only the first time was bad (and it was before the news of the pandemic even started so I couldn't have known; and there were no vaccines back then so I had no choice).

Your reply is not helpful.

> Simple statistics show that the risk of dying by taking the vaccine is significantly lower than the risk of dying from covid.

So it's okay if people die of taking the vaccine but it's not okay if they die of Covid? Got it, thanks.

"Smaller percent" is a very inhumane way of looking at it. You're counting lives as if they are rice grains. You should be ashamed of yourself. People still die, regardless of percents.

It's IMO understandable that many elders in my country decide against the vaccine because in many of them it evokes a severe immune response that carries an actual risk of death on the same day. Do you just write them off with "they are a smaller percent than Covid deaths"? How humane of you.

Your response is shockingly insensitive.

You're clearly uninformed on vaccination issues and spreading FUD in the process. Trying to paint me as insensitive is a cute tactic to hide your ignorance.

Vaccination helps reduce the risk of you catching the virus, spreading the virus, reduces the risk of hospitalization, reduces the risk of you taking medical resources from someone else.

The risk of a "severe immune response that will cause death" is statistically MUCH lower than the risk of catching and dying from covid.

Not accommodating your sealioning is the humane response.

> Trying to paint me as insensitive is a cute tactic to hide your ignorance.

You should tone down the conspiracy theorist act and look for actual human beings with worries and a lot to lose because, you know, that's exactly what's going on.

Think what you will though.

> how do I help society by vaccinating? Judging by the contemporary info out there -- I don't in any way or form. > So it's okay if people die of taking the vaccine but it's not okay if they die of Covid? Got it, thanks.

The US is sitting on 860K deaths from 60m cases. A bit over 1%. Vaccine related deaths are about 6k2 in 187m people. Or 0.0018%.

It's only no help if you consider reducing deaths by orders of magnitude and freeing up resources for the more needy "nothing".

You also need to stop thinking about individuals when talking about public health policies. It sucks but at population levels you're talking about millions of faceless individuals.

Edit: I should really have tried to find deaths in fully vaccinated individuals vs unvaccinated. E.g https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Within the vaccine-eligible population of Scotland aged 65–79 years, the death rate per 10 000 person-years was 64·8 for unvaccinated individuals and 4·2 for fully vaccinated individuals. This difference in death rate was most marked in the population older than 80 years (14·0 deaths per 10 000 person-years for fully vaccinated vs 420·1 deaths per 10 000 person-years for unvaccinated individuals older than 80 years) but attenuated in individuals aged 18–64 years (0·8 deaths per 10 000 person-years for fully vaccinated vs 3·1 deaths per 10 000 person-years for unvaccinated individuals aged 18–64 years). For fully vaccinated individuals who subsequently tested positive, there was a median of 8·0 days (IQR 5–13) between a positive test and dying of COVID-19.

I still don't understand how I'm helping society by vaccinating. Almost all scientists out there are saying that the vaccines don't stop the spread. So I won't contribute anything, plus I'm not keen on getting myocarditis while I'm in a shaky health condition due to pre-diabetic condition.

So why should I do it? I will not help anybody (and no I won't hog an ICU bed).

I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated but your numbers are way off. The CDC estimated that as of September 2021 there had been 146M infections in the US, not 60M.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

> There should have been and were lockdowns early in the pandemic. Once vaccines were available teachers should be ready to teach, just like every other worker that interfaces with people.

Isn't this largely what happened in the US? Vaccines started to become available in early 2021, but generally only to health care workers and the most vulnerable. It wasn't until around April that they were available to most adults, with the mRNA being by far the most available. If you jumped in as soon as they opened up general availability it would be early to mid May before you were considered fully vaccinated (Two weeks after second shot).

That's near the end of the 2020-2021 school year.

And remember, that's for people who got vaccinated soon after general availability. In a lot of areas demand was outstripping supply, so it could take a couple weeks or more to actually get an appointment.

By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, everyone that wanted to get vaccinated could easily get it for no cost and very little effort, so in-person school has been very widely offered.

A gross misunderstanding of viruses in January of 2022 is indistinguishable from a troll. I applaud your patience in replying so well, or even at all.

Thank you and agreed

You conveniently miss one crucial piece of data that is already available. That is countries that had schools open for the most part of the pandemic.

I have families in western Canada and except early Spring and summer of 2020, schools remained open and are still open. They didn’t have much different outcome if not better than us in US.

Canada had varied lockdowns too by province. Canada also has way lower vaccine hesitancy and lower population density. On average Canadians have fewer co-morbidities.

I live in Canada so am quite aware. If we're talking about comparisons then let's not cherry pick ones without considering the whole context.

> Canada had varied level of lockdowns too by province.

Schools have been open for the most part in Ontario and Alberta since Fall 2020.

> Canada has way lower vaccine hesitancy.

New York City has 82.5% of population vaccinated, about as much as Ontario [1]. Yet schools were closed for most parents throughout the pandemic.

> On average Canadians have fewer comorbidities.

Where the hell are you getting this from? Health Canada numbers say 64% adults are overweight or obese [2].

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...

[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications...

The CDC numbers (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db56.htm) say Canadians have lower obesity

Ontario also had outbreaks that aligned with the removal of lockdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Ontario?w...)

> In early September 2020, the province showed a significant increase in new cases, beginning the second wave of the pandemic.

> From late November to mid-December 2020, the province began placing regions in rolling lockdowns, culminating in a province-wide shutdown beginning Boxing Day

So I'm not sure your use of Ontario is the greatest.

Sweden kept primary schools open even when no one was vaccinated. It wasn't a problem.

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