An open call to restore normalcy for U.S. children | Hacker News Reader

An open call to restore normalcy for U.S. children

urgencyofnormal.com

57 pointsjohnwdefeo40 comments

I don’t know how anyone can support restrictions at this point. All school aged children can be vaccinated and the vaccine is effective at decreasing hospitalization and death.

The teachers’ unions have their own interests to look out for…

Yeah their interests of keeping the teachers and their families and the children safe.

Anti union rhetoric when the workers are looking out for their own and their community's safety is pretty rich.

I guess we have different interpretations of what happened in Chicago and elsewhere. In our school district the teachers’ actions diverged from a group focused on safety, regardless of one’s interpretation of the covid threat level. I used to be 100% behind the teachers when they were fighting for better pay. I’m sorry to say that they have lost my support. I should probably also say that I’m not generally anti-union. Workers have lost a lot of leverage since the 70’s.

I’m unaware of any data showing that children require vaccines to avoid hospitalization and death in large numbers.

Can you share some?

"Large" is subjective, and the vaccine moves the decimal point one or two digits in the correct direction.

Also, as a matter of practicality, you don't want a steady state where a rotating 10-20℅ of the class is out with whatever the current covid variant is.

Sure, but to the second point, the vaccines also don't materially reduce transmission

They somewhat reduce it. Perhaps by 50%, against currently dominant variant (which is itself of course subject to change.)

Everything that helps to reduce prevalence helps kids stay in the classroom.

Here in the UK there's a huge subpandemic among 5-11 year old schoolchildren, a group which are not vaccinated. I have a child of this age, off twice with covid in the last few months. I wonder if it'd be more effective to vaccinate them or to just do away with self isolation rules for them. The problem is the spillover into parents, who will be at higher risk due to age and possobly at much higher risk if clinically vulnerable.

On this one I find it hard to form a strong opinion.

The data released by public health here in Ontario suggests that 2-doses has no impact at all on transmission, while boosters - which 5-11's aren't eligible for - reduce transmission against Omicron by about 40% for about 6-8 weeks.

While vaccines should be available to any 5-11 year old child whose parents want them, the idea that they help in keeping schools open doesn't seem at all logical.

Citation needed on transmission reduction

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...

It's less true for Omicron, but the study there looked at transmission in Danish households. Against Delta, vaccinated individuals were much less likely to get infected. Against Omicron, boosted individuals are less likely to get infected, and vaccinated are similar to unvaccinated.

Not commenting on the particular issue/article, but can we dispense with blind faith in pre-prints as gospel and final instance of truth?

"This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice."

Consider all pre-prints complete bunk until proven otherwise. Anyone can publish whatever they want to support whatever conclusion they want in a pre-print.

I object to your characterization of my posting the link as "blind faith", and that I have somehow adopted it as gospel.

It's an analysis of an interesting data set and the conclusion isn't unreasonable.

Any statistics for children who are prior infected and unvaccinated?

UK's JCVI declined to recommend vaccines to children on risk/benefit basis. That was prior to Omicron, probably even less useful now.

> I don’t know how anyone can support restrictions at this point.

Off the top of my head...

- Kids can spread it in their community

- Adults and elderly people work at schools

- Not all kids are fully vaccinated

- Kids are adaptable, it's adults who are throwing temper tantrums about having to wear a mask

- Most of the mental health effects mentioned in the article are consequences of school closures, not caused by wearing a mask and reducing crowding in the cafeteria. In fact masking can make school more normal and routine, by reducing the need for substitute teachers, or skipping PE because the gym teacher is out sick, etc.

You clearly have no kids, nor have you never dealt with any for any length of time.

Kids aren't tabula rasa. I don't know why you'd think you can just brainwash them to do what you want.

It's just people that don't have kids tell everyone how to deal with kids.

I guess they never tried putting masks on cats and dogs either.

Even through the worst of the pandemic, children going to school has always been my primary concern. I'm totally fine with having to work from home for a few more years. Restaurants and big events closed sucks, but I can live with that. I personally really miss church, but I can totally see how a big crowd indoors singing is one of the most high-risk activities you can do. I'll survive.

But children need school. They need to socialise. Homeschooling can work, but it puts a serious strain on the parents, the kids, and their education. Until last week, Dutch kids would be quarantined until tested if a certain number of their class mates tested positive, but in the face of omicron, that lead to entire schools closing, so they ended that.

With everybody vaccinated and boosted, Covid is as under-control as it can possibly get. It's not going to get better than this for the time being, and with the vaccine and omicron's lower lethality, deaths seem to be down. The biggest problem there is that there are still unvaccinated people occupying ICU beds, leading to non-Covid related treatment getting postponed, and sometimes leading to deaths.

I think we should still do all the low-hanging fruit: wear masks, keep distance where possible, wash often, but other than that, open everything that's not clearly a very high-risk activity. And voluntarily unvaccinated people should not fill ICU beds that other people need.

>And voluntarily unvaccinated people should not fill ICU beds that other people need.

Wow. I'm speechless.

Blacks (along with some other minorities) are the group with the lowest vaccination rate, for rather obvious reasons. If you aren't familiar, look up the Tuskegee experiment.

You are proposing to flat out deny life-saving medical care, in a critical illness situation, to those very vulnerable groups that have completely justified distrust of a government that abused them for hundreds of years.

>there are still unvaccinated people occupying ICU beds, leading to non-Covid related treatment getting postponed, and sometimes leading to deaths.

Did you have a flu shot every year? Are all other vaccines you had in childhood boosted on schedule? Looking forward to you send us proof.

Also please prove you wash hands everytime you go to the washroom. Until then, I expect you aren't going to seek treatment for any infectious diseases, after all we don't even have proof you wash hands, and how can we waste precious medical resources on such irresponsible citizens who voluntarily refuse the best medical intervention of all time, basic hygiene? /s

The real biggest problem is people that do not understand why informed consent exists in the first place.

Lack of political will to expand the ICU capacity does not override informed consent. Even completely broke countries like El Salvador have been able to roll out field hospitals, it can be done.

This is also ignoring the fact that hospital staffing and beds have been on the decline for the past few decades. We were gonna run out of capacity at some point. COVID just made that come sooner.

Strange how that's completely forbidden to discussed.

I wouldn't say its forbidden. It's just that the antivaxxers have become the new "them", and "enemy". I'm not a fan of them, but ignoring the obvious problems in our healthcare system and blaming it on the action of a bunch of people who for multitudes of reasons don't trust the government is just liberalism in action.

But yeah, I'm really frustrated that we're ignoring the obvious problems here.

At this point, Omicron has made pretty much everything moot.

After this wave recedes and the hospitals unblock, I suspect everybody is going to go back to normal and treat Covid like we treat the flu.

I'd love to agree with you, but having engaged with local school board trustees on a number of tangential issues, I'm pessimistic. I think there's a lot of people who have permanent scar tissue as a result of the last two years, and aren't likely to ever go back to normal.

That’s pretty normal anyway - it’s a spike in total count, but there have always been folks who couldn’t handle life who act out in ways directed at public servants. It’s unfortunate, but if you attend any city council meetings you can’t miss them.

The reality is, we can’t stop that and we can’t let everything else stop because of that either.

An example of the "It's for the children" fallacy

This is especially timely and relevant as a recent John's Hopkins study reports: https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2022-02-02/a...

I feel like it's worth pointing out this study is from Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise.

The authors are all economists, none have a background in epidemiology or medicine.

Economists do this a lot.

Turns out Dvorak wasn't any better than Qwerty say keyboard ergonomic experts, oh no actually it's free market economists who think the market is never wrong and Qwerty is an annoyingly popular contradiction.

Betmax wasn't higher quality than VHS say analog video quality experts, oh no it's free market economists who think the market is never wrong and Betamax/VHS is an annoyingly popular counterexample.

Recycling doesn't actually help the planet say ecology experts, oh no wait it's those free market economists who don't believe the market is ever wrong and recycling is a popular counterpoint.

And so on..

None of the measures in the John's Hopkins study are currently in place.

Plenty still in place in Canada

"Children aren't at risk, so let them go back to school without restrictions"

"But they still can spread the virus to vulnerable people. How will this not result in more deaths of vulnerable people?"

"Those people can wear a mask."

So, fuck the health and safety of adults [and vulnerable children], our children feeling happy is more important.

I think that's a reasonable view at this point. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, particularly when a lot of the few will be dead soon enough anyway.

By arguing that the few should suffer and die just so the many can lead a comfortable life, then genocide, slavery, classism, teacher etc are all totally cool too. As long as the needs of the many are served by it, it's fine. Right?

... only in this case it's not a need, it's a want.

My kids never stopped being normal. I never saw a need for them to wear a mask.

I hate the idea of having to go to school normally again

Until the teachers union stops rentseeking, there will be no return to normalcy.

With the teachers I've seen on the internet, homeschooling is looking more and more attractive.

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