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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

At face value, it sounds doubtful. The kid in the article is 3 now, so we can assume he was 1 when the pandemic started.

In former communist countries in Eastern Europe, maternity leave up to 3 years is not uncommon now, and was much less uncommon before the fall of the respective regime. Of course kids would be taken out and play with others at playgrounds even if there's no kindergarten and the mother takes care of the kid for 3 years, so it's not total isolation. But the pandemic hasn't resulted in total isolation either, there were schools/kindergartens that opened at least for some periods of time, playgrounds too (past the initial lockdowns which were pretty much full panic mode). Those kids didn't spend 2 years locked at home.

So what's the difference? The masks? Did kids under 3 even wear masks?

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> Those kids didn't spend 2 years locked at home.

Plenty of kids spent two years locked at home. Plenty of middle-class adults with remote jobs spent two years locked at home, with weeks at a time literally not opening a door to the outside.

In the two cases I know of relatively wealthy (upper-middle class developers) couples with remote jobs who had a child either in the year before or at the beginning of lockdown, they were 100x more isolated than the other people I knew.

I blame this on the hysterical coverage of infant covid deaths on the news, when the national numbers of infant deaths were something you could have counted on your fingers. Every infant death was national news for some stupid, obvious reason.

edit: And this was real isolation. People wouldn't allow relatives or parents to visit. They were more likely to get their mothers to move in and live with them than to let them visit (thinking about one of the two couples specifically.) This is the opposite of what normally happens with newborns.

> with weeks at a time literally not opening a door to the outside

That sounds very exaggerated. Do you think they stocked up on weeks worth of frozen food to survive?

Instacart dropped off at front door.

I think we can assume that pessimizer means that opening the door for the supermarket delivery doesn't count.

Amazon has a feature that if the customer allows it the delivery person can open garage place items inside garage and close garage door.

I must be very exaggerated, because I don't ever go to the grocery store more than once every two weeks. I've pushed it to a month or more many times out of laziness, but that's also when I clean out the back of my cabinets and learn new recipes.

edit: and the back of my freezer. You have to empty that thing periodically, and you're not going to choose that mystery meat in the ziplock willingly unless you're out of everything else.

> Every infant death was national news for some stupid, obvious reason.

I had a child born in March 2020. Given how new the virus was and how dangerous it was for the very old and the fact the we had virtually no information about how it would affect infants, I absolutely wanted to see that reporting. As sad as it is to hear about those individual cases, it was actually reassuring to know that the cases of infant deaths were so rare that it made sense to report on individual cases rather than just numbers.

The problem is that the overcoverage made it seem common, not rare.

Personally, that wasn’t my experience. The coverage didn’t make it seem common to me.

I have doubts, too. There's lots of rural kids who didn't have much contact with others in infancy, pre-pandemic. Wouldn't this have shown up in them? Wouldn't it be part of the constant "advice for new parents" flood?

If you're rural enough to not have any infant contact, you're not talking about lots of kids, you're talking about a very small population. Even then, you're still probably going to be exposed to whatever community you are a part of. Very few people are actually "off the grid" in that respect.

Rural kids added up is a big enough population to see a difference in the stats.

When you go on maternity leave you don't stay in isolation with the kid, and the rest of your family continues to interact with many people as well. Copmare that to the past 2+ years where family units stayed isolated for long periods and then only interacted with masks, distancing and enhanced cleaning protocols. Chlidren globally most certainly avoided infections during this time, the stats for any children's hospital back this up.

Some of the kids would have been totally isolated, especially if they or a parent are otherwise classed as "clinically vulnerable". Or just very determined not to risk COVID.

Sounds like the difference may be circulating adenovirus and AAV-2.

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