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Comment by carlivar | Hacker News Reader

It is RSV immunity debt that worries me. I think it's an example of our poor capability for risk analysis. I talk to so many parents here in California that are terrified of covid for their kids. So they still limit activities. But statistically kids have very, very low risk. RSV, and even flu, on the other hand are more dangerous for kids and any immunity debt may make that worse.

It reminds me of how few parents realize the statistical risk of kids in cars versus how rare abduction is (if kid walks alone to school as an alternative to a car, for example). Again it is emotional/anecdotal thinking rather than data.

View on HN

The car thing is very frustrating. It's the most dangerous thing most parents do with their kids (myself included) but for the most part we're blind to it.

Of course, pedestrian deaths have shot through through roof in the US and that makes it harder to justify walking to school.

In the US, firearms are more likely to kill your child than car accidents are[1].

1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

Regarding the "your", I bet vehicle collision related deaths are more randomly distributed than homicides and unintentional shootings of children (and probably firearm suicides too, for that matter).

If you take out 18 and 19 years old, that is no longer true.

We have way too many firearm deaths in this country but the way these studies choose their age ranges always feel like folks are in search of the conclusion they desire.

That article also includes suicides.

Not really a discussion I particularly want to get into, but many people think “an increase in suicides” should be counted as a negative consequence of firearms.

But the US has a lower suicide rate than countries with fewer guns?

Does shooting up some place count on the suicide figures, almost always it's going to be a decision to die (you might not die, but surely death of an 'active shooter' is the expected outcome).

No but it wouldn’t matter if it was

The US has a pretty high suicide rate, especially for developed countries

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-r...

US isn't the highest but there are certainly countries with lower rates.

Right, other countries with higher rates have fewer guns. My point entirely.

Other countries with fewer guns have lower rates as well. Its a nonsensical argument.

Not sure why you're confused.

Claim: "More guns means more suicides"

Fact A: "Countries with far fewer guns have more suicides"

Fact B: "Other countries with fewer guns have less suicides"

Fact A disproves the Claim.

Fact B does not, at most it shows guns aren't a factor either way. Is that what you're claiming? Guns have no impact on suicides?

All we can know is it's not the only factor.

I think we can be more nuanced and discuss casual relationships for suicide and those for homicide and recognize that there are many differences. If we aggregate the two we will likely have bad policy and be inefficient at fixing either.

Depends if those lives were genuinely a net negative due to suffering.

How many people suffer longer than they should due to lack of access to suicide? I suspect the answer is "fewer than commit suicide due to temporary and fixable chemical imbalances and an easily available gun" but the question should be asked and evidence gathered.

As it happens, a large scale experiment is underway..

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanisin...

There’s no evidence of correlation or a causal link between guns and suicides.

In countries with guns available, men use guns for suicide.

In countries without, men use hanging.

Either way, it’s intentionally misleading to lump suicide in with murder and accidents.

This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning. So, no, it is not intentionally misleading, but it does need more data to show it is meaningful.

> This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning.

It’s not hard to find examples; Japan has a much higher rate of suicide. No guns.

Almost universally, men use guns or hanging, depending on what’s locally available.

> So, no, it is not intentionally misleading

They’re juking the stats to be able to make proclamations like “guns are the leading cause of death for children”.

When most people hear that, panic bells start ringing. They assume this means school shootings are killing an incredible number of children each year. This is a crisis!

People don’t realize that to manufacture that number, activists had to extend “children” to 19 years old, and include “suicide”.

It’s intentionally misleading.

If only they’d dedicate the same energy to exploring why our educational and cultural institutions are failing teenagers so spectacularly that they’re suiciding at unprecedented rates.

I'll grant it can be misleading. I don't think it necessarily is. I say this as someone that has had gun suicides in the family. I also have Saturday Night Special running through my head, now...

I don't understand the fixation that counting kids as up to 19 and including suicide is somehow a concern. Seems generally alarming that people under 21 is that high for this statistic, period.

Edit: Per https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Japan/Unit...; no, Japan is not much higher than the US. It isn't even higher. (I'm confused, do you have a better source?)

Edit2: Ok, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... has it higher, but doesn't look "much" higher. Though, I grant that is a subjective term.

Edit3: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide is an interesting source on this. I find it amusing that they are able to have articles that mention limiting access to pesticides as an effective way to reduce suicides, but don't look at limiting access to guns. It is listed in the top three methods. (Sadly, I'm stepping away from computer for a while now. Will be delighted to engage more on this later, but will probably be a day or so before I remember to check back here.)

> Japan has a much higher rate of suicide.

Maybe it was _much_ higher a very long time ago, but it has been on a downwards path for a long time. And the US's on an upwards path... for so long that it has actually past Japan. So not only is Japan's suicide rate not _much_ higher, but it has been, for a few years, slightly lower.

Source here: https://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDEASDR?lang=e...

2019, per 100k data (average of both/male/female):

US: 14.5 / 22.4 / 6.8

Japan: 12.2 / 17.5 / 6.9

> This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning

I think if you look at gun deaths and suicide you're going to have significant autocorrelation. 60% of gun deaths are suicide, so the data is baked in. But I have another correlation that may be more fruitful and interesting. It isn't 1 to 1, but there is significant overlap with (per capita normalized) overdoses[0] and gun death rates[1]. We'd have to dig deeper, but I think it wouldn't be surprising to find that rates of gun suicide and overdoses has many similar root causal factors. The north east seems to be the biggest mismatch

[0] https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-overdose-deaths/

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

I'm not sure what you are claiming. Seems safe to assume that suicides do correlate in numbers. Question is if they substitute in magnitude.

That is, if it isn't 1:1 in correlation, then it is reasonable that you can prevent suicides by limiting access to guns. Just as you can prevent suicides by limiting access to drugs.

The a reason that is not valid?

> That is, if it isn't 1:1 in correlation, then it is reasonable that you can prevent suicides by limiting access to guns.

The problem here is you're assuming that there's a singular dominant causal factor. You don't need a one-to-one relationship for either a weak or strong causal relationship.

On the other hand, what I'm claiming is that there are causal relationships between gun suicides and drug overdoses. That solving one will help solve another if we look at the causes from a standpoint beyond the first order viewpoint. We need to ask why people are depressed and what in society is causing that. I'm sure you'll recognize that this issue is likely rather complex. I think you'll agree that getting to the root of this issue will save more lives overall (some people will for sure just choose an alternative method of suicide -- such as drugs -- though you are also likely to save a few that are acting in the moment and getting a gun -- which is why waiting periods can be helpful. But either way, they are still depressed, which is a problem we need to solve).

From the studies I'm seeing, limit access to the means of suicide, and you reduce suicides. Do you eliminate them? No, but a reduction is still a reduction.

Note most of the studies I saw were not about guns, but pesticides. I see no reason to think they would not apply similarly. Would be nice to see studies in them.

Now, should we /also/ try and tackle more issues down the chain? Yes. Not sure why this has to be a "pick one" scenario.

> There’s no evidence of correlation or a causal link between guns and suicides.

There's definitely evidence of correlation. But the thing is that there are clearly other factors. Access to guns is definitely a causal variable (you can't shoot someone unless you have a gun) but the question is if it is weak or strong. I think it is pretty clear that this is a weak causal variable. It's clearly naive to think that simply having a gun makes one more likely to murder someone or kill yourself. Similarly women do not are not subject to gun deaths (suicide nor homicide: killer or victim) at nearly the same rate as men when controlling for household ownership.

This is why I've encouraged people to look at a more complex picture. Clearly suicide, homicide, and mass shootings have different principle causal variables. There's definitely overlap as well. People are comparing to European countries and Australia simply based on number of guns. But this ignores a lot of other factors like access to health care, household debt, trust in government, social mobility, and many other things. The US consumes far more opioids per capita than European countries. We also have higher suicide rates. I'm willing to bet that there's some coupling relationships here.

But I agree it is misleading to lump homicide and suicide together. There's plenty of statistical paradoxes that depend on aggregating data that shouldn't be aggregated. If we over-aggregate data we'll have no hope of solving any of these issues. I'd make the argument that it is of the upmost importance that we be nuanced in these conversations and communicate in good faith. We must have self doubt in our own models. It is a complex problem, we've been handcuffed in obtaining data (forcing aggregation), and people with agendas are trying to oversimplify the problem and have us make decisions based purely on emotions. We live in the information age yet it is sad we have so little here and think so broadly about this problem. It is getting people killed.

One thing to note is that there's a pretty decent overlap between gun deaths/capita and drug overdoses/capita

https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-overdose-deaths/

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

Regardless, from the POV of day to day risky things, none of this crap matters.

All of these "average risks" people are slinging back and fourth like idiots are dominated by outliers who are engaged in specific behaviors that have a strong causal link to that means of death. Said outliers drag up the average making it completely unrepresentative of the typical person's risk.

Don't drive drunk, don't pedestrian while drunk, don't get involved in drug industry business disputes and don't let mental illness go untreated and you will almost certainly not get killed by a car or bullet.

Would that offer some consolation to the parent?

Every single child (and people under 18 are just that: children) dying because their parents couldn't be arsed to follow even the most basic gun safety laws is one too much. Toddlers shooting themselves with the gun that their reckless father left under the pillow? Even in countries with very liberal attitudes to guns such as Switzerland don't have that problem.

Not to mention, the cutoff at age 18 is obvious because most people have finished education at that age - and the most shootings happen at high school.

The cutoff at age 18 is so that gang warfare that kills gang members who are under 18 can be counted as shootings of "children".

The US has a child accidentally shoot a gun almost every day, with 765 people ending up dead in five years [1].

That alone is horrific and completely unheard of outside the US and active war zones.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1032725392/guns-death-childre...

So in a country with around 75 million under-18s, that works out to an approximate risk of 1/500,000 per kid per year. And per the article:

> The most likely age group to be both shooters and victims are teenagers ages 14 to 17

Maybe we should make firearms safety and hunters education classes once again part of the school curriculum to prevent these accidents? Just like with driving classes, training and experience in a controlled environment is a great way to reduce the frequency of accidents. Although that assumes the incidents in question are accidents, rather than "accidents".

That's teen gangs blasting each other in certain hotspots. Not kids accidentally being killed by firearms in average homes.

To elaborate, it's around 65% homicide, 30% suicide, and 5% accidental or undetermined.

Compare homicide rates

FIGURE 8: Male Gun Death Rates by Race/Ethnicity, 2020

A Year in Review: 2020 Gun Deaths in the U.S

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/202...

Live map of Chicago: https://heyjackass.com/

Scroll down and look at who the real victims are (it's sad)

2022 Race of Victim/Assailant https://heyjackass.com/?p=382

That last link is so upsetting. Not just because of the racial composition, but also because of the assailant/victim ratio being 25/220, which means an average of 11 victims per assailant.

9, not 11. But that is still significant.

The loss of math abilities is probably a side effect of the bout of COVID I'm currently experiencing. Probably.

That is just where assailant's race is known and recorded.

The homicide clearance rate in Chicago is at or under 50% and approximately 50% of those identified as assailants had no charges filed against them. This implies the assailant figures may be 4x under represented. Who knows?

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/3/31/22996487/cpd-po...

yes. Texas and Florida have the highest gun deaths in the country.

Double false. First's it's not true. #1 and #2 are Texas and Californa

Second, unless you at least divide by population the comparisons are meaningless. A state with 1 person in it is going to have less death in general than a state with a million people

Dividing by population the top 10 are

    Mississippi
    Louisiana
    Wyoming
    Missouri
    Alabama
    Alaska
    New Mexico
    Arkansas
    South Carolina
    Tennessee

Texas is 26th, Floria is 29th

Source:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

The bottom 7 are

  California
  Connecticut
  New York
  Rhode Island
  New Jersey
  Massachusetts
  Hawaii

I wonder if the strong gun laws in California and NY, NJ have anything with them being at the bottom.

I'd bet that (like damn near every other violent crime) it correlates stronger with income than anything else.

Teasing out the correlation and causation here is difficult. People generally don't like getting shot, so it's plausible that stricter gun control is at least partially responsible for the higher wages, since places with better gun control laws are more attractive areas to set up businesses in.

Wouldn't the correlation run in the opposite direction if that were the case, since the employees would basically demand the higher wages as a sort of hazard pay?

> it correlates stronger with income than anything else

If it were only income, we wouldn't see reductions in deaths from mild gun-control law (like banning high-capacity, automatic "assault-style" weapons) within the same state.

We also wouldn't have seen the large increase in gun deaths after such laws were invalidated, and we have seen that[1].

So income is certainly some component of it, but access to untracked, powerful firearms is a big component of it.

1. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/dem/releases/studies-...

Just a quick point of correction, not to derail the conversation, but "automatic" weapons have been heavily restricted since 1934. Buying one requires a tax stamp, background check (even if private sale), notifying the ATF of where the weapon is at all times, and giving the ATF the right to search the premises of the firearms at any time without need for a warrant or reasonable suspicion.

As far as I can find data for, legally-licensed automatic weapons have only been used in 2 homicides since 1934 (both by police officers, weirdly) and a single suicide.

To address your data directly, it has some issues.

The first is that there was no "large increase in gun deaths". The lowest gun deaths during the 1994-2004 period was 5.9/100k, and the highest it's been since 2004 is 6.2/100k. About a 5% increase. 2001 was actually the highest since 1994, at 7.1/100k. That's per CDC data. The incidence of mass shootings is what they're talking about, not gun violence overall.

The second is that we're working with small numbers here. Homicides with a rifle are exceedingly uncommon; per FBI data, it's about 300/year. Your link is specifically discussing mass shootings, which are rarer yet. For the 3 periods, they list 19 events, 12 events, and 34 events, each spread across a decade. Columbine happened in the middle of that period.

The third is that the correlation isn't as tight as you might presume. Have a gander at https://www.statista.com/statistics/811487/number-of-mass-sh... Unless someone pointed it out, it would be hard to guess where the assault weapons ban even is in time. The numbers aren't really notably different until 2001. Mass shootings aren't even noticeably high until 2007 when we hit the recession, which is a massive confounding factor.

The fourth is that if assault weapons are to blame, you would expect numbers to roughly match before and after. They don't. 2005-2006 follow roughly the same trend as before. It's not until 2007 when they go up (again, recession), and 2012 before it gets really crazy. 2012 is coincidentally when US median wealth hit it's lowest after the recession, and hasn't really recovered since then. California has more mass shootings per year now than they did before 2016 when they passed their high capacity magazine ban. I don't think it's causal, just of note.

There are just so many other factors that play into this. Increased media attention on mass shootings, niche online communities forming, increased political polarization, increased wealth inequality, zero tolerance school policies, etc.

I also find it a bad thing to focus on. Every death is a tragedy, but rifles are low on the chart of causes. Homicides by rifles are roughly equal to deaths by ladder. About 2 times as many people are beat to death with hands/feet. About 5 times as many people are stabbed to death. About 10 times as many people die from foodborne illness. About 20 times as many people die of anemia.

It just doesn't make sense. Even if you want to focus on guns, why rifles? Handguns are used to kill roughly 50 times as many people.

This is almost universally due to gang activity and not the kids picking up weapons from friends and family and shooting themselves or others.

> This is almost universally due to gang activity and not the kids picking up weapons from friends and family and shooting themselves or others.

This doesn't seem to be accurate. Research [1] looking at data from a few years back (before firearms became the leading cause of death for children in the US) found:

Firearm deaths in children were 53% homicide, 38% suicide, 6% unintentional.

Of homicides in older children (13-17) the leading circumstances were argument (40%), precipitated by another crime (31%), and gang related (21%.)

[1] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/140/1/e20163...

It's a purely emotional response about what a parent can control. Driving the kids to school, you have some control over the situation; e.g. you can swerve out of the way of a potential accident. When they walk alone to school, there is nothing you can do to help them or prevent accidents from happening and that lack of control opens up the imagination to all sorts of scary things.

Why can you swerve out of the way of a car, but you can't jump out of the way?

It's EXTREMELY uncommon for cars to Grand-Theft-Auto-style run people down walking on the sidewalk.

~80% of pedestrian deaths happen when it's dark.

There's about ~19 pedestrians that get killed by cars per day. Only ~4 during day time.

You have a higher chance being in a random mass shooting. Worrying about getting killed by a car in broad daylight is silly.

It being all about control is spot on.

While it’s possible and maybe even likely that I overrate my own driving ability, I’ve never been in an accident in 20+ years and drive in a paranoid, defensive, assume-everyone-is-crazy style that I feel must push the statistics in my favor quite a bit.

So despite statistics I tend to worry more about other things. I also have a hard time with my 3 year old daughter being driven by others unless I’ve seen their driving firsthand. There are people I know who I flat out won’t allow to drive her and it has created some awkward situations. I will also only let her go in an Uber/taxi if there’s no other option.

Your numbers and statements seem logical but can you provide any datasets to support? I’m slightly surprised a random mass shooting would be a higher likelihood than something automotive related.

I didn't check your pedestrian deaths during the daytime statistics, but ~4 per day would be ~1400 a year. I did check the number of mass shooting victims, and in 2019 (the most recent year for which data is really meaningful) the total was 180 (~.5 a day), of which 71 were deaths (~.2 a day)[1], or about 20x less likely than getting killed by a car during the daytime.

That's pedantic, but I just wanted to clarify because mass shootings are also in the news.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-vic...

There's different measures for mass shootings.

By some measures (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...) - this year there are ~1.8 per day.

So you're about twice as likely to be killed by a car in daylight as a pedestrian as you are to be killed in a mass shooting.

Your point stands. I overestimated.

The world is bigger than the USA. The chances of getting caught in a mass shooting are lower than you are estimating, and pedestrians are more impacted by automobiles.

We have those viruses and diseases too, you know.

It has to do with at what percentile of wary and being good drivers we think we are. Also abduction is not the only risk for children.

I believe that often than not people do the right thing, if it something done in mass there is a reason for it and it is just hard to pin point the reason.

There can be social reasons for it, also we don't know if there is some implicit higher chances of getting abducted for kids who get drove to school. Like them walking to school will increase the chance of them abducted.

That sense of control is a dangerous illusion, though. Cars move way too fast for people to be able to react when something unexpected happens. Drivers included.

> That sense of control is a dangerous illusion, though. Cars move way too fast for people to be able to react when something unexpected happens. Drivers included.

That's a dangerous fatalistic (literally) assumption. One must train and practice car control. Which unfortunately isn't required in the US, but training is available for those who seek it.

A driver can most certainly safely control mostly any slide or emergency manouver. But it does take training and regular practice.

I regularly drive on Hwy 17 (a windy highway in the hills just south of silicon valley) and have witnessed countless times cars which start to slide and the driver panics and doesn't know what to do so they end up crashing. But watching the slide, all of them would've been easy to control by a driver exposed to a decent amount of car control training. It's unfortunate we allow people to drive without requiring car control school and frequent referesher training.

I tried to explain the fact that covid risk comes in many levels to someone I'm living with by referencing the risk we take on by driving, and she just immediately jumped to drunk driving. I guess people find it uncomfortable to live with the fact that there's a small but nonzero chance of dying.

It really has been hard explaining to fellow parents that their unvaccinated kids are still way lower risk than they are with their vaccines.

Edit: Leaving the original wording, but the "they are with the vaccines" is referring to the parents. Not the kids. I agree that vaccinated people are better off than unvaccinated, other items equal.

Edit: I have misread the comment. The poster and I agree fully. (Original comment follows)

This is just false. The risk of vaccines is lesser than the risk from the diseases they prevent.

I had to re-read GPs comment several times but I think they want to say that even unvaccinated kids are at lower risk than vaccinated adults.

He’s saying, that unvaccinated kids are at a lower risk for serious COVID than is a vaccinated adult. It’s true as far as I can tell. So far, COVID has proved to be quite low on the list of things that kill kids. The ratio of fear to danger is / was way out of whack vs other things on that list.

COVID has proved to be quite low on the list of things that kill kids

The leading causes of child mortality are accidents, homicide, suicide, cancer and congenital diseases. Children are not supposed to die, we are trying to control these factors, they won't let you take your newborn home from the hospital unless you show them car seat. There is law enforcement, counseling for parents and children, genetic counseling and all that.

But when it comes to COVID we are told not to worry, the risk is low. It doesn't make sense.

The risk to children from COVID-19 is much lower than most of those other things you listed. It's basically just a cold for children who don't have serious co-morbid conditions.

The risks to children from the action necessary to prevent Covid infection -- namely, social isolation -- are well understood and far higher than their risks from COVID itself. Vaccines and masks are being mentioned a lot in this thread but neither are very effective at all in preventing infection.

Apologies on the easy to misinterpret post. The "they" at the end was the parents, not the kids.

Thanks :) Sorry about the mixup there.

Your comment still remains unclear. My interpretation, with major changes in (parentheses):

"It has been hard (for me) to explain to fellow parents that (the parents') unvaccinated children have a much lower Covid infection and consequence risk than (the parents themselves) do from any Covid vaccine."

Unstated: that the parents' risks of a Covid infection and long-Covid consequences are also much higher, with infection via their children being a highly likely route.

TL;DR: Vax, boost, mask in public.

I did not mean any risk from the vaccine. I was only talking about the risks with the vaccine. If that makes sense.

I am in no way arguing against vaccinations and booster shots. Do that. If you are sick, please stay home. Don't refuse to go to the park with your toddler because they aren't vaccinated yet.

Again: that's not what I get from your first comment to this thread, even as edited.

Clear communications is difficult. All the more so on complex, sensitive, or controversial topics. I fail often enough myself.

It made sense to me, but I chose the interpretation that was obviously true (kids are at very low risk from covid, adult vaccination doesn't prevent infection very successfully) rather than choosing the interpretation that was controversial.

For that, I can only apologize. Completely agreed that clear communication is difficult.

Fair enough. It's something I work on.

Every kid I know that caught COVID brought it back and gave it to the entire family. Mom, Dad, Grandma, etc....

It doesn't matter that the kids are ok. It matters that they spread it

Irrelevant when the parents are doing what they can to reduce the risk for their kid. As soon as you are willing to let them go to school, you have increased the risk to them more than getting them vaccinated will reduce it.

Are you trying to suggest people should not vaccinate because school is a higher risk to health than vaccination is a reduction of risk to health?

Maybe life is not only about survival but the upside to school is on balance worth the added risk, but not vaccinating is not worth the added risk (complications from vaccination are pretty small -- though I certainly don't advocate vaccination without any consideration of the risks).

Emphatically no. Get vaccinated. Take boosters if you have them available.

I'm more just weary of the doom and gloom about my 5 year old not being vaccinated yet.

Hey you might want to take a look at the latest research. I thought COVID had the same risk profile as the flu for children until I started digging into the stats a bit more. What I am finding is that these latest variants are more contagious, even controlling for less social distancing and masking.

We have this sense that COVID isn't as deadly towards kids because they honestly had not been spreading it as much as we feared until fairly recently.

https://insidemedicine.bulletin.com/delta-and-omicron-killed...

I never viewed "as the flu" as a minimizing view. You don't want to get the flu.

This has always been something almost as deadly as the flu for everyone. More deadly for older folks. And as contagious as the cold. Not something to take lightly.

Be that as it may, I would ask you read the cited article as the stats illustrate COVID is much more deadly than the flu for children.

I would hope you choose to get your kid vaccinated asap since you expressed hesitancy.

Oddly, I can agree it is more deadly for children, while still knowing it is not the likely reason for my kids to be in danger...

Well, it is definitely an interesting choice you are making for the child. I am not going to say you are a bad parent or anything of the like.

There are major morbidity concerns considering the pathology of COVID. I only wish for the best for your kid.

I'm not sure what choice you think I'm making. Me and my kids are all vaccinated. Even boosted. Except for the four year old, and that is just until five.

Perhaps I got your comment mixed up with another commenter's then, my mistake. Still, best of luck with the 4 year old.

Stay safe.

Makes sense. And I can see how my comments my have been closer to anti vaccine. My point was more that I also take flu seriously and we vaccinate for that every year, too.

What's your control group? Are you assuming none of these people would have gotten COVID if not for the kid?

Lots of comments on kids getting covid and it not being lethal. But it’s not as binary (life vs death). There are lots of reports of permanent lung scarring, reduced cognitive abilities, changes in breathing patterns, the list is long.

If you can avoid these things, it’s for the better.

This is the exact attitude that OP is talking about. Kids are at very, very, very low risk for all of those issues, and it's highly likely that the overprotection/overconcern from the exceedingly small chance of them happening is having very real second order effects that are net worse than covid. RSV in particular is way more dangerous for kids than covid. Plus it's a huge PITA, I had to nebulize my ~4mo old multiple times a day for weeks.

You can't avoid these things. There are lots of endemic respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). Unless you live as a hermit, you should expect to get exposed. It's better to catch those infections when we're young and our immune systems are most effective; the resulting cellular immunity then protects us as we age.

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

Did you know that children in daycare have almost a 100% chance of contracting RSV within the first year of attendance (even pre-pandemic)?

No, but that doesn't surprise me. So if daycare is inevitable, the child needs to go in "armed" with antibodies (including from the mother during pregnancy). Should pregnant women isolate? Does not seem like it.

Our family dog probably does a good job diversifying antibodies as well (I think there are studies showing the immunity advantages certain pets provide).

> No, but that doesn't surprise me. So if daycare is inevitable, the child needs to go in "armed" with antibodies (including from the mother during pregnancy).

Not sure how this works. Where to you get "armed" with antibodies if not from a vaccination (unavailable for some viruses) or prior infection? Antibodies from the mother vane over time as far as I recall.

From the article here:

"And babies born during the pandemic may have entered the world with few antibodies passed on by their mothers in the womb, because those mothers may have been sheltered from RSV and other respiratory pathogens during their pregnancies, said Hubert Niesters, a professor of clinical virology and molecular diagnostics at the University Medical Center, in Groningen, the Netherlands."

Those antibodies are transient. Baby doesn’t produce them itself, they just protect it while nursing.

Nursing ends well before preschool

Daycare does not end before nursing. And I'm not so sure about preschool either... perhaps you haven't lived in some, er, "crunchier" areas.

I was incorrect, it isn’t through nursing. The antibodies last about a year

https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/...

There's also a bit of herd immunity for the new kids. Kids that have lots of prior exposure to a virus are less likely to bring it to daycare if they're exposed outside daycare. Also less likely to be a link in the infection chain for intra daycare spread.

Pets. More family members. Even natural birth shows gut / immune positives over C Section.

I've been tussling with my wife about putting our kid into daycare when he's 6 months old. I feel it's way too early, partly due to concerns about contracting a virus (though from the perspective that it would cause more hassle for us, rather than concerns about him getting sick per se, which I figure is inevitable).

That being said, I hadn't even thought that RSV would be a bigger problem due to the pandemic.

Its a real concern. Kids going in to daycare will be sick a ton based all the anecdata.

It SUCKS having to keep paying $250+ a week to keep them home while you or a partner are missing work on top of it.

Solution: move somewhere else where workers are not treated as cattle by big corporations. Like, say, anywhere in Europe.

Seriously, we pay $380 per month for childcare and each parent gets 20 days of paid your-child-is-sick leave, on top of the 20 days of regular sick leave and mandatory 25 days of holidays each year. All of the above is according to law and applies to everyone, whether you work in tech or you're the school janitor. I have never seen a hospital bill above $100, and I have a chronic autoimmune disease. With a population larger than Alabama we have never had a school shooting in the entire history of firearms. I can keep going like this, but you get the picture.

You will get paid 1/2 to 1/8 as much as an software engineer in Europe.

Is that really a solution though?

Like you're advising people to just pack up and move across countries and continents without having any idea whether or not that's feasible.

Are you really trying to offer a constructive solution or are you just trying to brag about living in Europe?

It also assumes an income level where this is possible. Unsurprising with the tech crowd here but not at all generally realistic.

When the rubber hits the road, people prefer the money.

You see lots of people from Europe moving to the US for a better life. Rare to see the opposite. Not sure which country you're referencing but I've looked at jobs in Europe (seriously too) and the salaries were honestly a joke. At least for SDE. $30-40k in Spain for a qualified SDE. Made more than that as an intern.

No, people fall for the propaganda of American exceptionalism, and they haven't done the actual math to see if they actually would have more or less money moving to another country.

Yes there are differences in pay level within Europe, which broadly also reflect differences in cost of living. In Northern Europe where I live a primary school teacher makes above $50k a year.

But you cannot just compare salary numbers like that, you have to do a full budget with real numbers and compare how much you're left with each month after you've paid all expenses. And you have to add PTO and health insurance and all that jazz. Health insurance is $0 here. An average a parent here will have maybe 15 days of my-child-is-sick and 5 days of I'm-sick per year, in addition to 25 days of vacation, plus Christmas and Easter and other public holidays combining to 10 days on average, so 55 days total of paid leave per year for a parent with small children. And when the child was born, the mother received 9 months of paid maternity leave while the father got 3 months of paid leave.

Did you know that the average total monthly payment for a house in the Bay Area is $5300? Where we live you are paying way less than half of that for a similar house. Say you pay half then, $2600 a month, meaning you live in a large house in a posh neighbourhood. That $2600 per month that you don't spend means you can live just as well with $31k lower salary. And we are just getting started.

To continue the example, we pay about $1500 per year for all our insurances - house, car, boat, travel. We own a 1900 sq.ft. semi-detached house with a large garage and nice garden, which is biking distance from downtown, our monthly mortgage cost is about $1700. The property tax is $500 per year.

With kids the cost of day care is $350 per month until they start school at 6, then it's $200 a month for after-school care until they are 10. School itself is free all the way up to and including PhD level, there is nobody here saving up for their kids going to college.

I ride my bicycle to work in 10 minutes. The longest commute of anyone I know is 45 minutes one way. How big of a pay cut would you take if your commute was less than 30 minutes?

Then you have things that are even harder to put numbers on, like the fact that my 7-year-old just walks by herself to and from school, we only drop off on Monday and pick up on Friday when there is a lot of stuff to carry. And there has never been a school shooting, ever. My 10-year-old can ride public transport to the city center by herself to meet friends, and I don't have to worry. The probability of a fatal car accident per million miles driven is reduced by 75% compared to the US. The infant mortality rate is less than half of that in the US. My life expectancy here is 4 years longer.

>In Northern Europe where I live a primary school teacher makes above $50k a year.

Where do you live? Because that's less than a teacher makes in the US, lol.

>No, people fall for the propaganda of American exceptionalism, and they haven't done the actual math to see if they actually would have more or less money moving to another country.

So a greater % of Europeans vs Americans are just ignorant? I don't honestly believe that.

>But you cannot just compare salary numbers like that, you have to do a full budget with real numbers and compare how much you're left with each month after you've paid all expenses.

So, realistically, what is someone that is paid $30-40k left with each month?

>Health insurance is $0 here. An average a parent here will have maybe 15 days of my-child-is-sick and 5 days of I'm-sick per year, in addition to 25 days of vacation, plus Christmas and Easter and other public holidays combining to 10 days on average, so 55 days total of paid leave per year for a parent with small children. And when the child was born, the mother received 9 months of paid maternity leave while the father got 3 months of paid leave.

And again, Europeans are very willing to give these up if it means a higher salary/ability to work in the US.

>Did you know that the average total monthly payment for a house in the Bay Area is $5300?

No, because I don't live in the Bay Area and I find anyone that does to be insane... but the salaries mostly scale to reflect that. The _average_ salary for the bay area for SDE is $230k. That's more than enough to cover that cost. A lot of people just rent or get an apartment to build wealth and then move somewhere else though.

Again, all the stuff you're saying is great and if that's your choice all the power to you. I don't see how any of that negates the simple fact that Europeans try very hard to get SDE jobs in the US.

The US is incredibly huge and diverse. You can find almost any type of living situation you want. No matter how you spin it, its hard to beat SDE opportunities in the US. Only thing I can think of is getting a job with an American company in Europe to have the "best of both worlds" but even then, not sure you'll find too many ppl willing to take it.

So you're saying $30-$40k for SDE in Spain, the internet seems to say $10k above that, but never mind. My knowledge is from Northern Europe, so I'm basing my math on that.

So in our case, the average SDE salary here is $98k, and let's say your partner is a teacher, so a combined gross salary of $150k/yr for the family with small children, let's say living in the capital (most expensive). Then statistically you have more income than 80% of couples with small children living there, so already you know you're well off.

After tax you're taking home about $8000 per month. We already said you're spending $2600 on your nice house. Let's say you have two kids, one electric car and one petrol car. Then the official reference budget published by the state says you're spending $3400 a month on food, clothing, the cars, public transport, furniture, childcare, most of the necessary expenses. We are missing a couple of things like insurance, utilities etc., which is about $500 a month. So you're left with something like $1000 to $1500 a month for discretionary spending. And you have basically no commute and live in a perfectly safe place with free healthcare.

As for "Europeans try very hard to get jobs in the US" - that is not supported by the data. By a very large margin the people immigrating to the US are from Asia, South America and Africa. The first European country on the list is the UK in 22nd place with 10k people per year. The next is Poland and Germany with about 5k people each, and software devs is obviously just a tiny fraction of that. Meanwhile Germany plus the UK are home to an estimated total of 1.6 million software developers, so the percentage of devs emigrating is obviously extremely, ridiculously small.

>So you're saying $30-$40k for SDE in Spain, the internet seems to say $10k above that, but never mind. My knowledge is from Northern Europe, so I'm basing my math on that.

Those were the numbers I found when looking into an extended stay in Spain. Seems to line up with the first result on the internet (google).

https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Engineer/S...

Where are you getting your numbers? Here are mine:

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Franci...

>So in our case, the average SDE salary here is $98k

Where is "here" ? At this point we might as well be comparing states with such an insane variability of nearly double the salary (if your numbers are correct). We're flipping between Europe and your country, lol

>So you're left with something like $1000 to $1500 a month for discretionary spending. And you have basically no commute and live in a perfectly safe place with free healthcare.

Well, that's exactly my point. Using your same scenario, an average SDE in the "most expensive city" makes $230k. After 3-5 years its close to $300k. If their spouse is a teacher, they make ~65k. That's easily 2-2.5x the salary right there. Again though, while the bay area is popular, its not for everyone and there's thousands of remote jobs that pay $130k+, allowing you to live anywhere.

>As for "Europeans try very hard to get jobs in the US" - that is not supported by the data

I never said most foreign devs are coming from Europe, just that often Europeans have and continue to move to the US in pursuit of better SDE opportunities. The opposite can't be said.

We put our kid into daycare around 7 months old. Obviously every kid is different, but we're happy we chose that time. Around 7 months, our child had developed an understanding that we leave and come back, but was still young enough that separation anxiety wasn't a problem. The kids who start daycare at 1 or 2 seem to really struggle. She does get sick all the time, but it's becoming less frequent over time. It's annoying at the time, but her immune system is getting stronger and that is a good thing in the long term.

We had to put ours in at 6 months. About a week in, she caught her first cold, then it was continuous illness (for all of us!) of one kind or another for about 2 months. Things have gotten much better since.

Kids are all going to catch those viruses eventually. Might as well get it over with.

>rather than concerns about him getting sick per se, which I figure is inevitable

It might be better to be exposed to immunity-challenging activities before a child is one year old in order to prevent the most common childhood leukaemia which is theorised to occur due to a combination of genetics and the lack of an immune-priming event in the first year of life.

https://www.icr.ac.uk/news-archive/leading-uk-scientist-reve....

We put our then 2-year-old in preschool last fall. Even though the whole classroom was supposedly masked (toddlers are not great at this, though our child is actually very consistent), she got RSV within a couple months. It cannot be avoided.

Are there any data on masks to prevent RSV? Even for Covid the data is pretty patchy, and anecdotally they don't seem to be highly effective, at least in actual use. Countries where mask usage has gone from very high to low in a short space of time have seen virtually no change to infection rates.

Daycare: and then you have this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100471/

> Epidemiologic studies indicate that infections in early childhood may protect against pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

As far as I've read, there is no effect of immunity debt. On the other hand, there are Covid interactions with reduction or destruction of certain classes of immune cells. This can have the effects which appear to be common viruses out of control. One example is the serious liver hepatitis cases with kids.

> RSV immunity debt

What is this exactly supposed to mean?

There is no vaccination for RSV where I live so the only way to get it is via child care or other contacts with toddlers.

To quote this article, "extended periods of low exposure to a particular pathogen."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...

As I understand it, just being out and about in the world gives an immune system (whether a baby or its family members indirectly) some practice.

But the child gets it eventually. Is RSV substantially worse to get at 3 vs 2?

Should we be coughing on children? Lots of kids in countries with more ventilation have fewer respiratory pathogens and seem to do fine.

I'm not sure about fine. Probably just undiagnosed? According to this, RSV kills 100k babies and kids between 0-5 per year. 97% of them are in low and middle income countries.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Well, this paper suggests I’m wrong and that lower and middle income countries get more infections and more death.

So….why again would avoiding infections be bad? The added infections appear to increase deaths.

The article mentions that mothers give toddlers antibodies from exposure to viruses during pregnancy.

I do not understand the term "immunity debt". What is this?

I remember as a kid in 1st grade (California 1991) I would walk to school from my Grandma's house. There would be streams of kids coming from the surrounding neighborhoods. Now, when I ride by elementary schools, I see lines of cars a mile long waiting to drop off their kids in huge noisy modified cars and trucks. Even the one I used to go to. Now they are tearing out playgrounds to add parking and places to queue up to drop off kids...

Ironically the area is no longer safe for kids because of these cars. Occasionally I see lifted trucks hopping curbs and minivans blowing through occupied crosswalks at 10 over the speed limit. Crosswalks are a deathtrap because of right on red. Lights are timed with zero consideration to pedestrian traffic. Residential streets are wide and used as short cuts.

Cars have become a plague in America.

The problem with kids is, again, statistics. When you have, say, 5 million children and all of them get covid because that is what happens when a virus races on unimpeded, even a 0.1% severe/long term complication is 500 kids with a ruined life - ME/CFS is not a joke.

And then you have the kids with geriatric parents. It is no rarity to have 10 year old kids with 60-70 years old fathers and 50 year old mothers these days, and both with diabetes or smoking-associated COPD on top of their advanced age which is both known to be a massive increase in risk. Or they're already fighting some sort of cancer. For these kids, the knowledge that politicians do nothing to prevent them from catching covid while at the same time they have to worry about their parents is incredibly stressful.

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