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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

This was a major reason governments decided to close schools. People seemed to think it was to protect kids (and it was, in part, especially in the beginning while the impact wasn't clear yet) but kids excellent carriers and superspreaders for all kinds of viruses and bacteria. Not just for COVID, but also for many other outbreaks such as the flu.

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Weird that seemingly only the US decided to close their schools for so long though. And the states that did stay closed don't have much better results (if at all) than all those countries who re opened schools by the end of the 2020 school year if they closed them at all. The results basically don't agree with you

I don't think there is a good way to study this, but one confounding variable I could see is that while kids in schools are fairly obviously great disease spreading vectors in general, the fact that COVID is relatively contagious might have made school spread less of a factor. In other words, for diseases that don't spread as readily, school spread may be a more significant factor since less hospitable environments might not allow them to spread at all or only very slowly.

Since COVID spreads well in all sorts of environments, whether or not school spread was controlled or not would matter less since it would still spread. And while parts of the US did have some pretty strict school closures for quite a while, other things being much less restricted might have meant the spread (or lack thereof) in schools didn't matter much since it was still spreading everywhere else. Whatever one might think of school closing as a policy, arguably the weirdest thing was that even in parts of the US that had more COVID restrictions in general, school closings were a uniquely restrictive outlier while everything else was relaxed. As was pointed out at the time, adults could go to packed bars far earlier than students could go to school. Even if school closings were worth it to control the spread, only closing schools seems like a questionable strategy.

At least in Chicago they kept trying to open back up, but the teachers refused return to the classroom.

That’s a stark misrepresentation of what happened here - the district refused to provide adequate (and, at times previously agreed-upon) safety measures.

Every teacher I know wants to educate their kids. They wanted to do so without putting their lives at risk, which is a reasonable thing to ask.

Schools stayed closed because they were waiting for the funding that didn’t come until 2021.

Schools closed because of a shelter-in-place order from the CDC. Fed was out of options after calling it a hoax during 2019 instead of preparing. There should have been a plan to reopen schools before the CDC’s “14 days”.

Schools were closed even more aggressively in parts of Canada. 20 weeks total in Ontario, which was the most in the country and one of the highest in the western world.

IMO, society needs to have a long conversation on what function school should provide. The reactions to closing during COVID (which was the right response, IMO) proved no one agrees on this, and I think a lot of our education problems stem from the disconnect between what people think school's role is (parents, kids, educators, administrators, lawmakers...).

My dad, a teacher now nearing retirement, expressed during the early days of covid that schools were primarily government-provided daycare services. His concern was that the economy would crumble if schools were kept closed. Then the American Federation for Teachers expressed a strong desire to keep schools closed for longer and he quickly reversed course. Even within the system it's abundantly clear that no one is sure of the role their profession plays, but it unfortunately often comes down to politics rather than the needs of students and society. I agree that such a conversation is needed, but I suspect that it would quickly devolve to the same vapid talking points.

No, that's incorrect. There was never any valid reason for closing schools. Some countries such as Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and they did fine. Extended school closures in the USA collective punishment of children for the benefit of teacher's unions.

Also one of the reasons it was important to vaccinate kids. People seem to have a really hard time reasoning about graphs. Typical white Americans also had trouble understanding outside their demographic multigenerational households are common. Kids killing their grandparents is a heavy burden in life.

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This logic of selectively applying externalities based on an arbitrary threshold of risk tolerance is not a good argument.

We might as well blame all the fat people as well. If they were thinner we’d have saved lives.

The article you’re replying to is that 70% of household infections started with a child. That’s selective application of externalities, that’s a causal statement. So, you could without a huge stretch of conditional probability say that ~70% of fat people dying in a household were due to their kids infecting them, assuming the paper is right. I am not blaming kids for anything, or fat people. I’m saying the focus on preventing kids from being infected had important knock on implications - which is a restatement of the paper linked itself, with the extension that all mitigants were helpful in saving household lives.

Except that the vaccines never stopped infection or spread. Here is a humorous video on it. https://youtu.be/E0Mup2cs6Uw

But the vaccines have almost certainly prevented, at minimum, hundreds of thousands more deaths.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/report-covid-19-vaccines...

Why is the video description just a link to Matt Taibbi's substack?

This is absurd. Your ilk was willing to risk well being and health of youth for some hypochondriac fear because the very old and co-morbid had some risk. There's nothing honorable or good about this.

>Typical white Americans

This is pathetic

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Last I checked, covid has killed over 1,000,000 Americans, even though pretty strong measures were taken.

Your characterization of this as "hypochondriac" fear is almost unconscionable.

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