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Comment by flagrant_taco | Hacker News Reader

The virus is endemic and, though we weren't supposed to say this before, will continue to circulate and act much like the common cold. Ventilation in schools would be extraordinarily expensive, would only impact that 8 hour period of each kid's day, and with the state of average school buildings in the US we would never seal them up well enough for a positive pressure system to reliably keep them ventilated.

Unfortunately we can't just throw money at every problem to fix it. There could be more effective avenues if we want to spend that minry though, revisiting the food our kids eat might be more effective at keeping our kids healthy for example.

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> would only impact that 8 hour period of each kid's day

That 8 hour period of each kid's day where they're surrounded by dozens of other potential disease vectors. The period before they go home and infect their parents, and potentially kill their grandparents. It's expensive but let's be frank, we're okay with thousands of people dying annually because we don't want to spend the money to do anything about it.

Especially when they found that only five minutes of exposure to someone else's exhalation was sufficient to transmit covid-19 with that South Korean restaurant case.

> The 8 hours of each kid's day where they're surrounded by dozens of other potential disease vectors.

Would ventilation really stop this though? Kids will still ride on school busses, play during recess, share classroom supplies, eat in the same cafeteria, etc. Ventilation isn't magic, I don't think there are any ventilation systems that could swap out the air so quickly that kids wouldn't be exposing each other. I also haven't seen any studies in which they retrofitted an average school building and tested transmissability, though I'd be very interested if anyone has a source to such a study.

> The period before they go home and infdct their parents, and potentially kill their grandparents.

This isn't how infection works. If a kid is exposed at school they won't go home and immediately infect others. I also feel for any child made to think that if they step out of line at all they would kill their grandparents.

> It's expensive but let's be frank, we're okay with thousands of people dying annually because we don't want to spend the money to do anything about it.

This gets to the question of what gives the most impact for our buck. If saving lives if the question we would first need to decide if all lives are equal and whether there are other causes of death that can be more easily or cheaply mitigated.

If the goal is to save on the scale of thousands of lives, investing in helping our people eat better would almost certainly make a bigger impact, I'm sure there are many other examples that would be more efficient than retrofitting all school buildings with ventilation systems effective enough to show a change in Covid deaths.

Stop. Getting. Infected.

There is no living with the pandemic.

Not quite sure what you mean, humans have lives with plenty of viruses that circulate regularly and people don't choose to get infected.

The term pandemic is also pretty specifically defined as the time period where an infection is spreading rapidly through a population. Once it has spread everywhere you can't accurately keep calling it a pandemic, the period of rapid spread is over.

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