Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

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So he should foot the bill for private school because people like you don't understand basic statistics, or even bother to look at the data? With all due respect, there's a name for fear that is divorced from reality and not in proportion with the actual risk: paranoia. And that's what this is.

The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period. TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR. Virtually zero of those kids that died was healthy before they caught COVID. The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks.... it's almost like maybe, just maybe, you've let your brain get hijacked by a mass panic and are refusing to acknowledge reality now, because that would require you to admit you've completely overreacted, and have done damage to children in the process. I don't blame you for not wanting to admit that to yourself, but at some point this has to stop.

> The number of kids who have died of COVID is in the hundreds, over a two year period.

That's just deaths, though. What about other long-term effects? Long COVID and MIS-C come to mind.

> TWICE AS MANY KIDS DROWN EVERY YEAR.

And you'll notice that schools tend to take measures to prevent drowning - namely, barring unsupervised access to bodies of water deep enough for kids to drown.

> The number of children dying of COVID is the same as the number dying of influenza in previous years (despite a dramatically more contagious virus with far higher case rates), but for some odd reason, there wasn't a mass of parents demanding that all kids wear masks

Maybe there should've been?

Care to back up any numbers with long COVID? Or am I again going to have to suffer with hand waving and zero quantitative analysis?

Throughout this pandemic, measures were taken with a public health benefit in mind that was purely limited to the virus, and any and all mentions of weighing the cost of these measures or even trying to quantify it was met with "You're killing people!!! You shouldn't have a platform. You should be silenced!" Shaming tactics are the last resort of people with bad policies and bad ideas.

I wasn't aware that any schools had completely closed their doors to prevent kids from drowning or were preventing kids from learning to speak by forcing them to cover half of their faces to prevent drowning. The point is that you don't know a kid that's drowned most likely and most of us don't.

Additionally, masks don't stop the spread. So we're sitting here arguing about an intervention that hasn't done anything to prevent omicron from spreading all over classrooms anyway. If you had school age children you would know this, but I'm going to take a wild guess you don't do you?

Your last question indicates that you think making mask wearing in school by children a permanent feature should be explored. I would welcome you to submit your own children if you ever have them to this experiment, but good luck finding researchers that think it would be ethical to conduct this experiment. They certainly wouldn't endorse it for more than a short period of time, but we did it to all of our kids in an uncontrolled experiment born out of panic.

You are on the wrong side of history.

The number of children seriously impacted by long COVID or MIS-C is tiny. Those are not valid reasons to maintain any restrictions in schools.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-021-04345-z

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surve...

Everyone will inevitably be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that exposure occurs in school or somewhere else hardly matters. We can't wrap our children in protective bubbles. At some point they have to exist in the real world with all of it's risks.

Kids aren't the only ones at risk - he also mentioned teachers, some of whom don't want to take the higher risk of in-person teaching or dealing with 100+ kids every day that aren't wearing masks.

Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.

My wife is a kindergarten teacher. We face the "risk" on two fronts. Unlike many of her colleagues, she was unhappy with the obvious impeded ability to teach resulting from the school closures. A large percentage of her colleagues were clearly enjoying working from home. That's a dark side of this that people on your side are unwilling to admit.

I deeply resent it when people call it an issue of convenience. Proper emotional and social development of children is not an issue of convenience despite the constant claim from people like you that "You're just mad because you lost your free babysitting. Get over it."

The teachers were first in line to get vaccinated. Every other kind of employee in public places faces equivalent risks. As usual nobody is talking about numbers because your side has no numbers to back you up. It's just waving your hand and talking about people's comfort levels. Unquantifiable emotional nonsense, with people who are impervious to any form of facts or statistics or actual numbers.

Consequences be damned.

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