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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

I'd really love to see a citation for young children being in no real danger and poor spreaders, especially considering they are the hardest group to ensure mask compliance with.

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From the CDC

> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare, particularly when prevention strategies are in place. An Australian study of 39 COVID-19 cases among 32 students and seven staff traced contacts across 28 schools and six early childhood centers and found only 33 secondary positive cases (28 students and five staff members) out of 3,439 close child contacts and 385 close staff contacts.58, 59 Several contact tracing studies have found limited student-to-student transmission in schools.47, 54, 60, 61

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

To date only about 1200 people 18 and under have died from/with COVID, and those numbers were far lower before the B variants.

>An Australian study of 39 COVID-19 cases among 32 students and seven staff

A study about Australian schooling and children probably doesn't hold as much here in the US. My family involves lots of teachers. The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.

Well then here's a meta-analysis from June 2020[1], the time in question vis-vis school closures. A study from 2021 finding that school closures had little effect on community transmission[2]. Here's another from 2020[3]. Here's another from last year showing lower transmission by children[4].

>The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.

What the research suggests is that you're probably seeing kids under 12 getting COVID from adults.

You can poke around google scholar and see for yourself. Public health articles are quite readable.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7311007/

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S018844092...

[3] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...

[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ppul.25344

not being spreaders seems dubious, they certainly get it and spread it imo.

But no real danger is easily verified by the stats. Mortality in kids and young adults is a very small percentage.

- https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

"Danger" has other dimensions than mortality. Some of polio's worst effects emerge a decade or more after infection for example. The confidence of these assertions about the effects on children are not warranted at all. I'm grateful they don't die at the same rates but that's not an indication it doesn't affect them.

Maybe. We know what language skill acquisition loss does to children, especially the poor. And now with the extreme virility of newer variants it seems impossible to prevent infection over the medium term. So we’ve probably stunted the development of a generation of kids for no benefit to them.

It sounds like you're making a case for "a necessary or acceptable risk" which I don't really agree with but I think is a valid position. But that's very different from the "no real danger" claimed above, which again I don't think anyone has the knowledge to honestly and confidently assert right now.

Every other OECD nation went back to in person schooling pretty quickly, and mostly without masks. They didn't have catastrophic outcomes. There is to date, no known serious long term risk to children in general, but nearly a century of data about the importance of socializing with other children to childhood development. In the US we got this wrong.

The extremely contagious nature of the newest strains is in many ways a direct consequence of our global failure to contain it early on before it had so many chances to mutate. (eg how we did with MERS and the original SARS)

Asymptomatic spread and a lack of clarity on whether it was even "airborne" plagued our early efforts to contain it.

That being said, the lockdown-related learning loss is also a disaster, and one that will disproportionately impact disadvantaged kids and their communities.

The only argument I'm making here is that closing schools and switching young children to "distance learning" was a bad tradeoff and a disaster. It was driven by fear, anti-science nonsense, and the concerns of large US teachers unions. The CDC in general failed, and is run by liars with contempt for the general public.

I'm not sure what we could have done once the virus entered wild mammal populations and began circulating in places with no public health infrastructure. This happened pretty early on. The Omicron variants came out of mice populations in South Africa.

As I pointed out in another comment, numerous studies in several countries have found that children infrequently spread COVID to one another or TO teachers but spread does move in the other direction.

should be easy to provide a source then. Certainly many children are asymptomatic.

But I'm not sure why the direction of spread would be one way though, that's highly unusual.

You could have looked 2 comments up to find this[1]. This was well known at the time and the basis for COVID measures in schools in basically all of the OECD.

> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

Anecdotally, from speaking to the teachers in my orbit, the young kids weren't the problem when it came to masks. The parents, OTOH...

Small children never needed masks and weren't forced to wear them in any other OECD nation. Masks are terrible for language acquisition and social development. Also as I pointed out above the CDC even states that small children ~10 and under were never a major source of spread. Wasting effort putting masks on toddlers was social capital that could have been better spent on useful mitigations.

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