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Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

Kids need routine and social interaction with their peers and teachers.

Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. Like immeasurably bad idea.

They never closed down schools (except for universities) in Sweden for this reason. They also never forced masks or curfews. The main thing that they did was to limit inside capacity to 50 people max for restaurants and other avenues.

There were groups of people who would protest that the government should be enforcing masks, basically full reverse of what people were protesting in all other places around the world.

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> Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold.

I wonder if the debate was stifled because of reductionist comments like this. COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold. How can we be expected to have a real discussion about this topic when you either don’t understand or choose not to understand the difference between a cold and COVID?

This may be true, but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, don’t be surprised when people think it’s a duck

If a creature that quacks like a duck killed over 1000 children in less than 3 years(1) I would be surprised if people still treated it as a duck.

1) https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b...

As someone who was vaccinated three times, obeyed quarantine and had a kid during the pandemic— I don’t think that stat is having the effect you intended.

Kids were relatively resilient from the virus.

Now addressing the logic in your response, are you suggesting we should have similar school shutdown measures for the flu every year? For a similar three year period influenza will kill 400-600 kids.

I'm curious how this compares to other causes of deaths for kids under 18. I'm sure there have been more teen suicides, overdoses, accidents, and car accidents that tragically ended lives (about which the government largely does nothing, except for the National Suicide Hotline, which is important).

> ... but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience.

And that doesn't matter one bit, because their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality. Millions of people are dead and using one's own personal experience to pretend that it was actually no big deal is just willful ignorance.

As you grow older and wiser, remember that you said this:

“Their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality.”

This is how the enlightenment ends, in a nutshell. Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics and buggy models.

“Since we’re awash in this contemporary ocean of speculation, we forget that things can be known with certainty, and that we need not live in a fearful world of interminable unsupported opinion. But the gulf that separates hard fact from speculation is by now so unfamiliar that most people can’t comprehend it.” — Michael Crichton

I think you will find they were saying that there were more than 6 million deaths from it globally so far and the fact that your personal experience with it wasn’t particularly serious isn’t a meaningful data point.

I’d also argue that a random quote from the author of Jurassic Park isn’t really moving the conversation forward.

> Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics

Sounds far far more like the people who think covid is nothing more than a cold.

It's less than that for people with so called asymptomatic infections. The vast majority of people have had covid my now, and it wasn't much worse than a cold or flu.

In a naive population covid is far deadlier than the flu, let alone the common cold. During a Delta wave in NSW, Australia case hospitalisation rate peaked at 14%.

And at least in Australia the vast majority of cases of covid happened after people where vaccinated, so on a personal experience level that's why most didn't have a severe sickness from it.

You actually believe that without question? Most people didn't have a severe reaction to it even before the vaccines. Only very old and very unhealthy people did.

What happens when old sick people fill up hospitals?

Where did that happen? In many countries they got sent out to care homes.

I’m glad that no one close to you died because of this disease. Other people’s experience is very different.

Your anecdotal experience is not reality.

Your argument is an appeal to emotion, not to facts.

6 million dead from a population of over 8 billion, and that took 3 years to happen.

Mortality rate of less than 0.03%.

Average age of death in the UK was 83 and with 2 or more comorbidities.

Completely overhyped.

Compared to well under 50,000 flu deaths in that same period. So it's 100x deadlier than the flu.

They changed the way they're counting deaths at least in the USA.

In the UK they were carrying out over 1000 times the number of covid tests as flu tests. The false positives alone would have been more than the number of flu tests. Try looking at excess mortality compared to previous years for a more accurate picture. It was worse then preceding years, but less than 2003 and age adjusted less then 2008 in the UK.

Excess mortality would point to covid deaths as undercounted, not flu deaths. The best data I can find shows that covid was at least 10x worse than the worst flu season on record in the UK (2008).

How can you say that when we were only testing for one of them?

I must say, COVID showed how many people didn't treat their bodies as their temples.

Many obese people and then you wonder why they can't fight this off. Now, the exception is the less common immune deficient people - that I understand but damn I know people who eat like utter rubbish

“Many people’s direct experience”

Those same “many people” are often quoted, often alluded to, and often used to ignore quantifiable facts.

Your direct experience does not negate my direct experience, and I’ve never experienced an otherwise healthy adult entering the hospital because of a bad case of the flu and dying. I cannot say the same for COVID.

While I agree that COVID may have been overblown in some respects, it was also politicized and in doing so a lot of FUD was spread. Which led to many people rejecting a vaccine that would have reduced the impact to not only themselves but the rest of the population around them.

>COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold

Not for kids.

And we always knew this, but our public officials didn't listen. It's one of those cases where it was better to do _nothing_ instead of force this massive mask trauma on our children. And still, they want us to vax 5 year olds against a virus that has long passed us by. For what?

I'm pretty sure I caught COVID but thought I was constipated (suffer from that because I eat lots of tastey stuff).

Anyways, long story short - I'm pretty sure it was COVID .

Sweden has about 2x the number of per capita deaths from Covid vs any of Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. You can't simply blow that off and not acknowledge that you are making a tradeoff.

My anecdata shows that the children who fared well through all of this didn't need group interaction at all. A small number of peers (<4) and a teacher or two were completely sufficient for children up through almost teenage years. In fact, those students are WAY ahead of where there would be even before Covid.

Small groupings like that for children would have been completely fine through Covid.

The problem in the US is that we, as a society, lack the collective will to fund something so obviously, ridiculously beneficial like that for an extended amount of time.

People always talk about school closures by citing the fact that Covid was relatively less dangerous for children, always conveniently leaving out that you need adults to actually operate a school.

Such a narrative would seem to imply that those adults are expendable.

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