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Comment by kimmeld | Hacker News Reader

My children’s health are a risk you are willing to take. That’s what you are trying to say.

Yes, literally. We do the same when we discuss traffic laws. We're all part of the same society, you have the right to take whatever action is in your child's best interest, but that DOES NOT necessarily imply that everyone else must get in alignment with what you think is best. The city doesn't need to install roundabouts at every intersection on your school route because you knows it to be safer than the traffic lights. That's ridiculous. Maybe they should, but its a discussion that will require you to think about resources and about risk.

Externalities are real, and as such the discussion is about acceptable risk. So yes, in the most ridiculous and obvious sense it includes your kids, but you're assuming a lot too, and I question whether you're willing to reason critically - rather than emotionally - about school policy.

That's true, but rarely are kids thrown in the woodchipper for the survival of old people. And I worry that's what has happened to my toddler (infant when covid started) as a result of mask mandates and lessened social exposure during the most neuroplastic years of her life where speech and socialization starts forming. I do legitimately think some old/vulnerable lives were saved at the expense of suppressing childhoods, but it's certainly an anachronistic prioritization of life.

There has been little thought given to non-covid health and developmental issues caused by mitigations. My friends had to go to private school to get a school to accept a doctors note that their kid shouldn't wear masks because he's having a hard time with speech development. The kid already had covid--a low grade fever for two days.

The speech development and language problems are going to be a huge issue, in hindsight, if not already.

Not just kids learning verbal skills and to speak with masks on, but non-verbal-receptive kids, who rely more on facial expressions and visual cues.

For them, it's a double-whammy, because you're delaying their speaking and language/ listening skills further, but also depriving them of the alternative forms of communication that they rely on to cope with the primary deficits.

And that's before getting into whatever effects decreased socialization overall will have.

We risk your children’s health for all sorts of things and it would be absurd if we didn’t.

I empathize with you. Don't worry; you're not alone in how you feel.

That's what they are saying, and that's what's been said during this entire pandemic. I remember in 2020 when a Texas Lt. Gov official mentioned letting old folks die for the sake of the US economy[1]. The whole "let them die and shrug shoulders" theme throughout this pandemic leads into some concerning overtones, but not surprising =(

[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-...

It's consistent with our approach to children dying of malnutrition and simple (to us) ailments around the world. It is true that "That's different!", but when one aggressively plays the ~selfishness card one should also accept when it is played back imho.

Per the cdc [1], the US has 250 deaths from covid ages 0-4 and an additional 573 ages 5-18.

Compare [2] to an estimated 216 deaths ages 0-4 and an additional 156 ages 5-17 from the flu in 2018-2019.

Those aren't perfectly comparable -- we took serious additional measures against covid that we don't take against the flu. On the other hand, how much actual masking of the 4 and under set is going on in preschool or kindergarten?

[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

I know all my children under the age of 4 (3 of them) are able to receive a flu vaccine though. I would assume quite a few parents are doing the same. So not quite apples to apples. That being said the risk to children that age for COVID is quite low, and I would not be shutting down schools or even forcing masks. Those are important to development of children especially since it disproportionally affects low income children. So I agree that the risk of COVID to children is small, and extreme measures should not be taken. My only issue was comparing two things that probably cannot fairly be compared.

Flu vaccines are hit and miss each year, and (cdc) only reduce risk by 40-60%. So it's a pretty comparable risk, and we're being given natural experiments like Texas and Florida to really test that hypothesis.

I dunno what the right measures are to take for kids that young, but the difference we're seeing between the flu measures we (mostly don't) take and some anti covid measures for young children is hard to explain.

And any time someone says, um, the data appears to show that covid is not actually that dangerous to young children, you get people (who I'm 99% sure don't lock their kids in the house for flu season) having a fit that you're risking their lives.

Isn’t the flu vaccine a bit of a crap shoot though? There’s I believe 7 variants of the flu, and the one vaccine we get every year is a bit of a educated guess [1] such that the flu vaccine may not actually do anything helpful at all. I don’t think this is a strong argument.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-selection.htm

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