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Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

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> If we actually cared about child development we would still be much more serious about controlling the virus. We would still wear masks.

“[Masks] had a significant effect on the children’s emotion recognition accuracy” along with causing a decline in language processing ability.

Try again.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637007/

Did you read the study you linked? "face masks did not significantly impair basic language processing ability" is right there in the abstract.

Besides, that's the best you can do? "We found that children have a harder time discerning happy masked faces from angry masked faces?" And that's the most concrete harm you could come up with?

My dude. Children died. Hundreds of thousands have a lifetime disability now.

I'm not talking about masking at home, or even in elementary schools. Those settings can be covered with air exchange and filtration. If American adults actually cared about children (and people with disabilities), they'd wear real masks in airports and on public transit and in crowds.

“Not significantly” = they did, and we’re going to downplay by how much.

“Children died”. No. They didn’t. Children had the lowest overall mortality.

> That analysis, which included empirical data on mortality in 2020 from more than 110 countries and areas and from more than 80 countries and areas for 2021, found no evidence of widespread, significant excess mortality among those under age 25 or excess stillbirths for 2020 or 2021.

- unicef

Try again.

Can you define significance for me? Because the way you're using it is not the same as the way your evidence uses it.

You're either being ignorant or dishonest, and I'd hate to assume whichever one you find more objectionable.

Both quotes are an example of the same principle.

The differentiator is indeed, in what the writer’s definition of significance is.

Covid was appeals to authority all the way down. The whole plot rested on “shut up, disengage your brain and listen to these people we decided to label as ‘experts’”.

Experts don’t get to make policy decisions. Ever. That isn’t their job. Our reaction to covid was living proof of why that should never, ever happen.

> Experts don’t get to make policy decisions.

And they didn't.

Sadly, policymakers in the US didn't listen to them too closely either, and prefer to use COVID as a weapon for their tribalist wars, so here we are, with over a million death.

We would have had a million deaths no matter what we did. Covid wasn’t going anywhere. The idea we could control or contain it was a fantasy.

How exceptional is the US, compared to other countries?

Many other developed nations had better outcomes with stricter measures, and here you are, arguing that it doesn't matter because, whatever?

China had the strictest of all and they still had covid spreading around. You can’t control a respiratory virus like covid no matter how much you convince yourself.

What an idiotic take.

In China, 10% of their population got COVID.

In the US, it was more than 35%.

Are you asserting we should have done what China did?

I’m just pointing out that what you just said is false.

Almost everyone will get covid, symptoms or not, especially in China after the lockdown, and especially because their vaccines weren’t very effective.

Who's were?

The COVID vaccines used in the West are very effective.

100s of thousands more died in the US because of how little we listened to experts. That's just fatalities, not other negative consequences . Our vaccination rates are abhorrent.

Even if you just look economically, the US set itself back massively with supply chain and labor issues we will be dealing with for decades because of it.

The US set itself for supply chain and labor issues for hysterically enacting crazy mandates that gave the appearance of dealing with exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of every other problem in the world. This myopic fixation on covid and only covid is what we will be dealing with for decades.

Our numbers are basically the same as any other country on earth. The truth is you can’t contain or control a highly infectious respiratory virus no matter what “The Experts” or politicians claimed. And even if we could have, that doesn’t make any of the draconian mandates okay. Even if we did absolutely nothing the numbers would have been basically the same, only we wouldn’t have destroyed our schools, government institutions, our local communities, the elderly, the or working class.

But hey, who cares about the costs of the mitigations. Only covid mattered. Worrying about anything else made you a grandma killer subject to all kinds of verbal abuse.

Worse still was the tendency of the control-measure and lockdown theatrics to later extend into a strange national version of Goodheart's law, in which the measure of cases (not deaths but just cases, even after the virus became milder) became a target and fixation for pursuing continued control measures that by almost all estimates didn't work much at all.

I can think of only one large country exception to this, which was China for a time (though their numbers can't be trusted) and at least as far as i'm concerned enacting those kinds of measures is unacceptable in any context for a virus that eventually would end up causing more or less the same mortality effects either way.

Much of the highly biased, often irrational lockdown obsession in the U.S (and other countries) was a deluded technocratic attempt to impose pseudoclinical fantasy on a reality that didn't conform.

The "interesting" part (as in, interesting to study for a psychological and social angle) was the aversion of some people to understand the situation (which was complex) and be a good player. Lots of people have a hard time to extend their view of the world, and play in their own bubble

The US was doomed due to obesity rates.

Don't be ridiculous. COVID-19 was never a serious risk to children. It's less dangerous to them than RSV which has been around forever, and we never forced people to wear masks because of RSV. And there is no reliable evidence that masks were even effective anyway.

https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6

"The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions."

There have been other studies that have found effectiveness, and basically all agree on no downside.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

As far as children, there are a lot more negative effects that can happen that aren't fatal. There is a lot we don't know still

Wearing masks also potentially has negative effects on children, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637007/

I think it's pretty clear that we didn't (and still don't) understand either the disease or the consequences of the actions taken in response to the disease very well.

We didn’t even understand the mitigations that were enacted, which is the worst part. To this day nobody can provide evidence that the lockdowns or almost three years of mask mandates did a single damn thing. And if the answer requires a phd to understand, it means it was never worth doing because the massive easy to foresee collateral damage would have outweighed whatever minuscule benefit the measures had.

I've downvoted you because COVID, while less likely to harm children than adults with comorbidities, was still a danger. I know because I had to take my 9-month old son to the hospital twice when he caught COVID. He developed a fever over 104 degrees both times, threw up anything more substantial than water, and barely responded to anything because he was exhausted but unable to sleep with the discomfort.

I know it's anecdotal, but I can't help but get upset when people say it was "harmless" for children (not your word, but one I've heard often).

While your anecdote is indeed sad, that still doesn’t mean lockdowns and masks worked or should have been forced.

Just like yes tons of people died from covid, but that doesn’t make our response okay.

>If we actually cared about child development we would still be much more serious about controlling the virus. We would still wear masks.

If you are a scientist, don't willfully evade evidence you don't want to accept.

Look at you being a prime example of an “expert” thinking we should enact his politics because he said so. Exactly the kind of thing GP is saying.

I literally said "Don't fully defer to me. But maybe listen a little sometimes, as a treat."

Wearing a mask is as political an act as washing your hands with soap after you poop.

I'm not saying what the policy should be, but I am articulating what actions would both protect people and grow the economy. Some of those things are facts (filtration reduces transmission rates of aerosolized pathogens), and some of those things are morals (not giving children diabetes is a good thing, actually)

"Debate" of the facts is a waste of my time. Debate of the morals might be interesting, and I would love an actual policy debate, but I'm not holding my breath.

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