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Comment by jjgreen | Hacker News Reader

During Covid, when I read that the US required children to wear facemasks from the age of two, it sent a shiver down my spine.

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Why does that upset you?

Children should be protected against airborne transmittable sickness.

Also, we are still in COVID it's not over.

I had two small kids in the kindergarten in 2020.

Two year old children will remove their facemask to pick their nose, or share a licked cookie with their best friend. You can try to teach older kids to use a facemask corectly, but for two years olld it's security theater.

Definitely hinders their development

It's well documented that 1) children are/were barely affected by COVID, and 2) mask caused more problems, especially for younger kids who are learning to speak, and need to be able to see facial expressions.

COVID is around, and always will be. And "protecting" causes more harm and weakens the development of the immune system.

All well known and common sense stuff, to those who don't live in fear of merely getting sick.

We don't actually know that children were barely affected by covid. Covid is a pretty unknown disease in the long term. It could be like chicken pox which looked harmless in children until a few decades later with shingles. Maybe we'll find out that having young co-relates with later adult outcomes like how having multiple serious bouts of the flu qas corelated with mental decline. We don't even know if covid would be like the flu when it first appeared where future waves would be worse in children. It's best to be cautious with a disease that still hasn't settled into a stable form.

Pascal's wager. Masking and isolating children has a known cost, your speculative consequences don't

Sure they do: children might live lives of weakness and disability, even die.

That risk elicits a disproportionate response in rational people. Dismissing it is useless.

I'll dismiss it until the risk is quantified, because all I've heard is "might" and "maybe" when it comes to long term effects. Then compare that quantified risk to the precautions required to avoid being infected (i.e. a lot more than what was done, because everyone still got it) and there's your actual rational response.

Again, go ahead and dismiss it. And see how far you get. Zero, that's how far.

Merely getting sick is a wild oversimplification. My parents just got sick for the first time with it. 7 vaccines in. Yeah they didn't die but I personally don't want to get what they got. My long distance GF got it and her athletic cardio endurance is markedly worse.

Guess what prevented me from getting sick last time I was in the car with my father just days before he tested positive? I was wearing a mask.

Mask and get your vaccines and boosters and limit exposure. For everyone!

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