I can’t believe how dismissive people are about people who are worried about their finances during this. So many false equivalencies being made about bankruptcy being preferable to death. I am not one of these people that is cavalier about COVID, it’s a real danger and the long term damage to the body is just being discovered. But we all know for sure what the long term health effects of poverty are. Whether you like to admit it or not, the economy is vitally important to our health, life expectancy, and quality of living. You can be worried about both COVID and the economy.
If you care about the economy, the best thing we (the US) can do is follow the lead of other countries that have gotten this under control with evidence-based measures, and push the government to provide support to those in need, so the economy can bounce back quickly, rather than sliding into depression.
It isn't only the government, it's a significant minority of the population nationally; and at a local level it can approach significant majority.
A Marion County Florida Sheriff ordered that staff and visitors to his office cannot wear masks. That order is uncivilized behavior. The state governor should have removed him from power. People speeding on roads get sanctioned more, for being less of a menace to society.
At least the kooks who wear masks to have Zoom conference calls aren't subjecting anyone to risk their health or life.
You've touched on exactly what worries me most about the Trump era. Somehow, unnecessary combativeness and flamboyant disagreement has come to be valued in and of itself. As if somehow anyone wins by acting childishly.
Some appreciate it. Some find it too tedious to bother pushing back on it. Meltdown on aisle 5! Toddler requires, and has gone, Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!
This is missing context. Marion County, specifically Ocala, has a very high crime rate, one of the worst in US. The sheriff is not allowing masked people to enter because of safety concerns due to the current hate/distrust people are showing towards police. He doesn't want to guess if the next masked person who enters the station is a visitor or assailant.
Yes, we’d be much better off with the currently sidelined government that has suggested the evidence should be ignored as long as you’re protesting civil rights.
People were pretty worried about this, but so far there isn't any evidence that protests caused spikes in case numbers. Obviously there's a lot about the virus we don't know or can't fully explain, but the prevailing explanation is that the combination of widespread mask usage by protesters, quarantining by would-be protesters who know they've been exposed, and being primarily outdoors prevented transmission.
PolitiFact tried to examine claims from the LA mayor and health director that: "it’s highly likely given the increased numbers that we’re seeing that some of this is in fact people who may have been in a crowded situation at one of the protests where there was spread."
They concluded:
> there’s not enough data to draw any definitive conclusions ...
> Medical experts say the protests likely contributed somewhat, but so did family gatherings [and] the reopening of businesses
New Zealand has just had to quarantine 1/3 of their population, again, because of 4 cases. Until the virus is contained everywhere you will yo-yo between closing everything and opening it.
Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years.
The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?
After 100 days clean and zero deaths, Vietnam just discovered a few cases from some Chinese who had snuck into the country illegally. Those have now grown into many more cases... and deaths.
NZ is seeing what has just happened in VN only days before and acting on it because they know what will happen if they don't.
Evidence from other countries suggests that there is no way of getting this under control and returning to normal, and it wouldn't save the economy anyway. Europe is seeing a resurgence of cases, previous success story South Korea is stuck unable to reopen without a similar resurgence and with no path to eliminating the disease, even the latest remaining success stories Vietnam and New Zealand discovered the hard way that their belief they'd eradicated the disease was an illusion after it had spread unimpeded. And even countries which have managed to dodge much of the direct economic damage have suffered a huge amount of indirect damage from the entire rest of the world shutting down.
Edit: I can't reply due to rate limiting, but you can't just dismiss the resurgences of cases in Europe because the absolute number of cases is small now - this is exponential growth with a rather alarming exponent, and that always starts out small until it isn't. Remember, it takes the same amount of time to go from say 1 to 2 cases per 10k as from 15 to 30.
> if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better.
As a counterexample to that claim, the Euro zone GDP fell 12.1% in the second quarter. That's an annualized rate of 40%, even worse than the widely reported annualized drop of 33% in the US.
US decreased 9.5%. The difference seems fairly marginal and could be affected just by timing of when the virus started. Germany though bought something with that. The interesting question will be what Q3 and Q4 looks like.
I'm sorry but this is just poorly informed. The US is projected to be either near the top, or at the very worst right in the middle, of projections for GDP growth to finish out 2020.
There is a sliding scale here, of course. If we locked everybody in their houses, we could get the covid numbers to 0, but it would also completely destroy our economy, and obviously would result in substantial loss of life due to the effects of poverty. What the US has done instead is to take a hit on covid in service of economics. So far it seems to be working (with regards to GDP, I mean.)
People (especially online) have been shockingly dismissive of everything, in COVID context.
Worried about the economy? You probably only want to get rich on the stock market. Worried you might lose your job? You probably have one of those shit-jobs we've been hearing about, no big loss there. Worried remote schooling might affect children's long term development? Schools are useless anyway. Worried that art and culture like concerts, museums, theatres might disappear? We don't need them, just watch operas on Youtube and browse pictures of famous paintings. Travel? Just go to StreetView.
It's scary how quick people are to let go of elements of society and civilisation, some of which took centuries to build. Yes, nothing is perfect but these attitudes are not working towards implementing something better.
The article says that parents are 5x as worried about C19 than about paying their mortgage. They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage, which suggests that they, too, are very concerned about the economy.
> The article says that parents are 5x as worried about C19 than about paying their mortgage.
> They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage
These two statements seem to be in conflict? I think your 2nd statement means to say "They're 1/5th as worried about their mortgage than they are about the possible deaths of their family members."
It feels like that this is an issue where the problem is looking at the averages, which are meaningless here.
We have a bunch of people who are rightfully very worried about their finances, but we also have very many people who are quite certain that their finances are going to be okay while other people will get kicked in the nuts by the downturn resulting in poverty and bankruptcies, so they have other priorities that they are worrying about - such as infection and schooling.
If 1 in 5 people can't pay their mortgage, that's an economic catastrophe - but even if such a catastrophe is upcoming it makes all sense if the other 4 in 5 people wouldn't be worried about paying their mortgage.
the problem is not people who are worried about their finances - that is understandable. The problem is people who want to put finances over covid, mostly because covid requires certain measures in order to be eradicated (objectively) whereas an economy can (at the very least temporarily) be switched to a mode where people do not have to worry about their finances (such as UBI or a command economy). What makes at least me angry is people who are pretending that the way our economy functions right now has to be how it functions in every situation. It comes off as dogmatic and religious thinking.
100% this. The economy isn't part of nature. In it's current form it's a relatively new social construct that honestly doesn't seem to be working very well for a lot of the global population
I would even dare to the say that post keynesian economics has been worse for a major part of the population inside a western economy.
Economic growth in and of itself might be better, but how much of the population sees the result of that? basic commodoties like housing and social wellbeing/services are worse, while most of the economic growth seems to be stuck at the top.
Also, having massive growth is simply not sustainable for our planet.
Dire change is needed, the question is what? It seems most major forces in politics are stuck in maintaining the status quo and not thinking long term. Change from that system would be hard to realise, especially in the complete gridlock of american politics.
Lockdowns only cannot eliminate this coronavirus. You'd have to also eliminate the virus from bat populations, or eliminate bats, else it will jump back into humans.
The most likely outcome for this is that it becomes endemic, another variant of the common cold, like the several others that already exist.
The 1968 flu killed 1-4 million people, in a world with half as many people. This is nothing unusual, diseases happen, part of being human, shocking news headlines to the contrary.
> The first thing to remember is that we haven't been successful at eradicating many viruses at all. Really the lone exception is smallpox, but many of these viruses exist not only in the human population but in animal populations.
> And then the expectation I have is that this virus will actually become the next common cold coronavirus. What we don't know with these common cold coronaviruses is if they went through a similar transition period.
> So, say something like OC43, which is a common cold coronavirus that was originally from cows. It's been historically reported that there was an outbreak associated with the transition of this virus from cows to humans that was very severe disease, and then after a few years, the virus became just the common cold.
The US implemented essentially an entire year of forbearance on federally backed mortgages (6 months automatically, and another 6 months for filing a form with no documentation). Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer. There are still more initial unemployment claims than there were at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. The $2400 per month unemployment subsidy has just expired and won't be fully replaced. In other words, the economic and social fallout has barely begun. Overdose deaths are already up 50% from last year in many places.
>Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer.
Only if you're lucky enough to live in one of the progressive states, Louisiana has already started evicting people. In Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has already released documents saying that local governments can't stop or delay evictions.
Tennessee just made it a Class E felony to camp outside the capitol. Protesters have been doing this for months but it would apply to squelch protesters and homeless alike. Up to six years prison, and loss of voting rights, is the penalty.
I'm not sure they want to create more, there is a risk of "rebel's dilemma" if there are too many or things get too awful.
But the Republican party is merely the political wing of a certain aristocratic mind set which includes conservatism: rich people are better people, it is a fact. There should be either no public services or inferior versions compared to the free market, because that's how rich people are rewarded for being inherently superior people - they can afford to buy more and better things. This properly includes education, health care, clean air and water, and justice. These things are not rights. They are products you buy.
It's similar to prosperity theology. The closer to god, the more you are rewarded. The more rewarded you are, the closer to the deity you must be. Monarchies, feudalism, and Mandate of Heaven.
You can also be worried about both but more worried about one or the other. I'm a parent who was laid off because of COVID and I'm more worried about my kids health than the economy or my ability to get another job. That doesn't mean I'm not worried about the economy or trying to minimize the impact a bad economy will have on society/individuals.
> Whether you like to admit it or not, the economy is vitally important to our health, life expectancy, and quality of living. You can be worried about both COVID and the economy.
We have the technology to revive an economy - remember, we're on an all time stock rally & going higher.
At least from the NZ example (or Canada), it is clear that a war footing on the pandemic does bring back demand - the supply is easier to revive.
The economy is made of people, even if the entire supply side is automated.
Though if you automate both sides, you can end up with a two-body simulation of a high GDP economy[1].
Yeah this is definitely not surprising to the least! Even if I was laid off I am more worried about my children having long term health effects (or worse) than missing a few bills, and that is before considering how flexible lenders are claiming to be (I've gotten emails from all my major bills about covid related help they can provide).
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.
It's all about risk. Humans are terrible at understanding probability. There must be a threshold where it becomes ok to take on the risk (e.g. driving a car everyday for most Americans). So where is that threshold?
Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?
It might be the case that opening schools for younger ages with 2 shifts to reduce density (2 weeks in person, 2 weeks from home) could have an acceptable risk profile.
> Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?
Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.
The problem with all of these simple "risk profile" analyses is that we as a country are being forced to accept risk we don't have to. With cars, we understand there is some amount of risk but also we as a society also care about those deaths and make tons of regulations and improvements to make driving safer. As such, death rates have fallen over the decades even as miles driven have accelerated.
Whereas with the pandemic we seemingly are just accepting high death rates and hoping for the best instead of putting in the level of effort to fix it. That makes it not just about risk tolerance, but frustration with the level of concern the country is putting into fixing the problem.
You can see the death rate dropping while cases are dramatically going up which one could argue is that exact mitigation happening.
Masks, sanitation, and distance have likely lowered the overall viral load even if one does contract it. Obviously higher testing rates contribute to the decreasing death rate but given the blind studies from asia I don't think it would be that drastic of a reduction.
It gives me some hope we can lower the risk enough to have children interact with the caveat being adults actually enforce masks/sanitation/distance.
The big question marks are "Long COVID", which I haven't seen mentioned about kids (so, good news?), and ADE reaction (Antibody Dependent Enhancement , of the virus) which we'll see in the second wave, when people get re-infected.
> Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.
ok now imagine the virus lives on surfaces for 5+ years and never dies. now what? you can’t eradicate this virus by quarantining, someone, and it only takes one, is going to spread it somehow.
now answer with that in mind. “we would just fix it” is a cop out, we can’t fix it.
Your comments are all dead and I vouched for this one, but it's clear from your comment history why. Nobody likes reading "angry programmer" comments here because you're just not special around here, so nobody has to bear the cost of your malice in order to divine the meaning behind your words. "Shut the fuck up" and "delete your account" are really intolerable, stupid ass comments for HN, and if your response to this is that you know but you don't care, I would suggest finding a technical community that places more emphasis on free speech absolutism (like EFNet maybe) than just wasting bandwidth as you are here on HN.
> The risk due to lockdown are greater than this virus.
I'm gonna have to ask for a source on this, because every single legitimate source I can find says the exact opposite.
An analysis from the UK government [1] summarised:
> Socio-economic effects are estimated to have the greatest impact on quality of life of all categories investigated, over the short and long term combined; from March 2020 to more than five years from now, the impacts of lockdown and a resulting recession are estimated to reduce England’s health by over 970,000 QALYs – the health impacts of contracting COVID-19 are still unclear in the long term, but between March 2020 and March 2021, these represent 570,000 lost QALYs.
So with even all the coronavirus deaths in the UK, which had one of the highest mortality rates in the western world, the lockdown is having a bigger impact on health than the virus. This is justifiable if you believe without the lockdown orders of magnitude more people would have died. But there's reasons to believe that's not the case: some recent research suggests regions are hitting "herd immunity" at only ~20% infected with basic precautions due to cross-immunity. And indeed, Sweden which didn't do a major lockdown isn't looking much worse off than the UK when comparing excess mortality.
Lockdown cause massive unemployment, bankruptcy, mental health issue, kids not getting proper education, delayed treatment/care for non-covid cause, etc. All this for what ? for the virus that for vast majority of people if you do get infected you are not going to be sick (asymptompatic) or only have mild symptom and less than 1% death rate ?
>Lockdown cause massive unemployment, bankruptcy, mental health issue, kids not getting proper education, delayed treatment/care for non-covid cause, etc.
a lockdown doesn't inherently cause this. These things are caused by a badly implemented lockdown, a lockdown that doesn't have measures in place to make sure people don't go bankrupt, measures to make sure people's mental health doesn't deteriorate etc.
Sure, I will totally support such implementation that neither restrict people movement nor have occupancy restriction, at least for this specific virus.
If let say covid has severity of anthrax or ebola then restricting people movement maybe justifiable but not otherwise.
There is zero evidence that a suppression strategy with lockdown will work. And as you said in your other comment the pandemic is not over yet so pulling data from other countries isn't helpful.
As to evidence...
"One in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they've considered suicide in the past month because of the pandemic, according to new CDC data that paints a bleak picture of the nation's mental health during the crisis."
Perhaps it is time for parents to talk to their children about what they would like for a future? Most of the comments here are about the desires of the parents to be anxiety free.
Why is everybody going on about 'the lockdown'. There is exactly one city in the world that had a complete lockdown, that's Wuhan, China. Every other place had at best a partial lockdown with a ton of exemptions and a large amount of leeway for emergencies and other edge cases.
As for the suicide factor, yes, there is a chance of increased numbers of suicides, no for now there is no proof that such an increase is actually happening. If previous pandemics - without a lockdown - are any guide then a pandemic has regardless of the measures taken an increased risk of people committing suicide.
New Zealand had what you might call a timely response. If you test positive now your entire family will be moved to an isolation facility. It is not optional and if you refuse to do so you will be arrested.
> Bloomfield announced all of those who tested positive, as well as close family members who could be at risk, would now be put into self-isolation facilities.
> Bloomfield said they'd given moving confirmed cases into quarantine facilities "a lot of thought". It would help prevent spread between family members and limit the spread in the community from people coming to visit.
> It would "really strengthen our response", he said. [0]
Are you concerned with how lockdown effects children now?
Of course I'm concerned. But if you think that you'll be able to manage this without some inconvenience then that is a pretty strong delusion.
Think about the alternative: no quarantine, unchecked spread, lots of people dead.
If there is one country that is doing this by the book it is NZ, and they should be commended for it.
That you try to spin that as a negative is quite a feat.
I've been quarantined myself for two weeks, it wasn't as bad as it could have been and we managed. If I had to go through it again then I would, especially now that I know better how to prepare.
You're right. There may not be a way to manage this without locking people up and curtailing their rights. I'm not interested in doing that because this virus isn't the destruction of civilization. It doesn't effect 99.9% of people.
Your "by the book" is more like "at any cost." Why not just come out and say that you support draconian and authoritarian measures?
Your quarantine isn't comparable to forced isolation in a facility, right? Surely you can understand how that might damage a child?
A plan for dealing with the virus is necessary to stop the virus. At least in the US, hard lockdowns have resulted as a last resort because the Federal government has been in denial all along about the severity of the disease, and has failed to provide the kind of support and leadership that would mitigate the need for major lockdowns.
Lockdown maybe necessary if covid has severity of ebola, but with such low death rate ? Its overkill, the damage due to the lockdown is greater than the covid.
I think this is textbook confirmation bias. When you have two seemingly equivalent theories (the threat of C-19 is serious vs overblown), you select the one that is more convenient for your worldview.
Mr. and Mrs. Applecart both have full-time jobs and four children; they don't have time to home-school and wouldn't know how if they did. Their lives would be more functional if the threat is overblown, so they believe the threat is overblown.
Mrs. and Mr. Bandersnatch work in the mining industry. If scientists are correct, the fossil fuel industry is going to lead to climate collapse within about twenty years. Their livelihoods depend on oil extraction. They have a vested interest in being skeptical of scientific authority.
As someone else here pointed out, the study doesn't seem to factor economic security. I bet you would find a very strong correlation between economic security and willingness to keep children at home that would cross political lines.
... and who ought to be advocating for better social safety nets for everyone. I feel a lot of the "get back to normal" fighters are failing to imagine a sensible social safety net that might enable a lot more people to remain home/locked down.
> what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years?
What societies have done throughout history for diseases like smallpox, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, the flue, etc. Essentially, we learn to accept it.
Yes, I know, eventually a vaccine was found for smallpox, etc., but those diseases had been around for centuries (millennia?). Only very recently have we found ways to deal with them.
> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.
Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor
Others have mentioned this, but just for emphasis: you do not know that. Nor does anyone else. Repeating it is irresponsible, and you should stop doing that.
There have been a lot of lessons the epidemic can teach us. But one big one is that magical thinking is still accepted as a substitute for reason by a frightening number of people, and that's before you get to the outright grifters.
You also don't know that the virus won't give you superpowers, but you'd be foolish to act like it.
According to the best evidence we have, children are very very unlikely to suffer serious consequences from covid-19. Yes, it's possible that there are future complications we aren't yet aware of - but we don't presently have any reason to expect it.
We have to live based on probabilities, not possibilities. 800 kids drown each year in swimming pools. We live with the risk because swimming is great. So is going outside, seeing other humans, and getting educated.
The difference in worry parents have over short term and "long term" death risks for their kids is marginal. In particular: if something could happen to jeopardize your kids lives while they are still kids --- which we do not know --- it's an overwhelming worry.
This is one of those conversations where message board logic stands a good chance of taking us far away from how real-world humans would reason.
I think all it really does is that it highlights the difference between those who have children and those who do not. As a parent, I couldn't care less about the monetary impact of COVID-19 beyond the basics to survive and the years have taught us to be very frugal when we need to be.
Meanwhile, the thought of sending my kids back to school in two weeks has me sleepless (again). We have already seen different evidence surface in the last month or so but zero adjustment to the school plans. As much as I would like to approach this all in a dispassionate and rational way the parent 'module' in me tells me in no uncertain terms that I'm doing something irresponsible by not standing up for them more forcefully and trusting the experts on this.
My kids are going back to college in a couple days. They're adults! They're sharing an apartment this semester! And I'm a wreck. It's hard for me to fathom how this story is even news. What would be shocking is if the numbers had come in any closer between infection and work.
Ugh. I feel for you. That's a tough position to be in, college is if possible even worse than grade school where mine are going. Even so in your case the risk is clear and present, and the University teachers are going to be a lot more likely to establish what their own risk appetite is than grade school teachers. This whole situation sucks. Way too many unknowns and too many people pretending there is no problem. I'm not looking forward to this winter. It seems like a perfect storm is brewing: COVID-19 resurgence, US Elections (which will generate a lot of friction no matter what the outcome), Brexit. This will be a rough ride. Hang in there.
My oldest daughter left for college yesterday, living in a dorm. She's only 10min away, but between having her move out and worrying about COVID, I'm a basket case. I expect the campus to shut down in a month when cases numbers balloon, but I hope I'm wrong and they keep things under control.
You should strongly encourage your daughter to commute from home, since her college is only 10 minutes away. Students will take precautions during classes which will limit the spread, but in the evenings when they return to their dorms, they will let down their guards and the inevitable will happen. COVID spreads easily in dorms.
There's also the potential that they bring it home, causing the op to get sick/die. I'm a little more afraid of dying early, not because I want to live, but because : A. I don't want my kids to grow up w/out a dad, and B. I don't want to miss the important things in life. C. I'm hoping their chance of serious illness is less, but if I were wrong, I'd wish for death quickly afterwards.
I'm also sure things are easier when you have a parent to lean on for support, when a crisis comes up. (Lots of those on the horizon)...i'd rather be here to help them w/ that.
So part of me feels me living is important to their survival (mine are <4 yrs old - 2 boys, I'm 40). So, it might be safer and less traumatic if they stayed in the dorm, assuming they're healthy and have higher chances, and assuming they're good at social distancing / masking up to keep viral load down.
It'd be a hard decision to weigh, but I'd probably have a family council discuss the pros and cons and call a vote or something.
Basically commute or dorms, they can still catch it. At least in dorms maybe they don't infect older more vulnerable people or family members. Honestly, I'd probably teach them to code and say, hey work w/ dad till this is over then go to college :).
As a parent, I couldn't care less about the monetary impact of COVID-19 beyond the basics to survive and the years have taught us to be very frugal when we need to be.
Did you ever think that some people with kids may not be in the position to work from home and have to go to work every day? I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics where a large percentage of Americans don’t have $400 in savings.
I also bet you have a job that allows you to work from home.
How many households are led by a single parent and/or two parents who have to go to a job where they can’t work from home?
I am not going to sit here tsk tsking all of the people who aren’t as fortunate as I am. Not only do I have a job where I can work from home. We were also in the financial position that we had the option of my wife not going back to work in the school system and just saying it wasn’t worth the risk.
> Did you ever think that some people with kids may not be in the position to work from home and have to go to work every day?
Yes, did you read the whole comment thread before asking that question? Because I specifically addressed it in another comment hours ago.
> I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics where a large percentage of Americans don’t have $400 in savings.
Yes, and as I've often said in other places and here as well: America is a country that has serious problems in terms of how the wealth is distributed. But that problem was there before COVID, and COVID is only going to make that problem worse. It is a systemic issue that won't be solved by how we deal with the virus and the associated disease.
Just like the 'war on drugs' impacts people from different social strata disproportionally, the same with three strikes laws and lots of other problems like that. It is a direct result of the laws you make and the politicians you vote for.
> I also bet you have a job that allows you to work from home.
That bet would work out, today. But six months ago that wasn't the case and as a result of that I contracted the virus at the end of the last job abroad and spent three weeks in bed. Fortunately I made it through and have decided that if I can't do my work remotely then I won't do my work.
> How many households are led by a single parent and/or two parents who have to go to a job where they can’t work from home?
Many. So, society should foot the bill there. It's only logical. This is how it is done in other countries.
> I am not going to sit here tsk tsking all of the people who aren’t as fortunate as I am.
Neither am I.
> Not only do I have a job where I can work from home. We were also in the financial position that we had the option of my wife not going back to work in the school system and just saying it wasn’t worth the risk.
Lucky you. But that is just you. For every you there are multiple people for who that is not the case. What are you going to do about that? Are you willing to pay increased taxes for a social safety net?
America is one giant study in the tragedy of the commons. And COVID just brings that out, it did not create any of it.
Take Lithuania or Latvia. Countries that suffered from being USSR satelite states for decades. Within a relatively short while their political structure and other infra put them on a footing solid enough to deal with this situation as it should be done, and many Western countries should look to them as examples of how you tackle a problem like this.
For those countries where it is worse - sometimes much worse - and which are substantially richer than Latvia and Lithuania you should be asking yourself what went wrong and why.
If there is any group we should be most cautious about when it comes to the unknown long-term risks it's children because they have the longest term that they'll be stuck dealing with it. For a 60 or 70 year old when we talk "long-term effects" we're talking 10-20 years. When we're talking about potential long-term effects for a 10 year old it's an entire lifetime - 50, 60, 70, even 80 years of unknown physical and financial burden. I'm not a parent but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that parents would be very troubled by that kind of potential downside no matter how remote or unknown or unquantifiable the possibility.
Nobody knows anything for sure, but "the virus might be causing huge hidden damage to kids" is in the same kind of unlikely tail risk as "social distancing might be building up so much social pressure it'll cause a violent revolution". Sure, it might be, but speculation like that can't be a primary factor in decisionmaking.
> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
But that's one of the biggest unknowns. While children are at far lower risk of dying, according to data we have, we still don't know about long term health effects and we're finding out new information all the time. And much of that new information doesn't seem great.
Everything novel has this problem, and fortunately our epistemology is up to the task. We set our priors to a weighted linear combination of other similar things and then revise as evidence comes in.
For instance, MMR II was approved in 1978. How do we know that people who were given MMR II won't spontaneously die at the age of 60? Or perhaps to bring it closer to another problem, how do we know they won't spontaneously develop Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of 60? There hasn't been time. It's a pretty novel vaccine.
There is no indication whatsoever that MMR has likely long-term health effects, and there are indications that C19 could have long-term health effects, and what we appear to learn month by month is more alarming, not less, with respect to the question of whether or not C19 is a "you either die of it in a month or you're fine" situation.
It also doesn't have to be a universal effect for it to generate effectively universal concern among parents. If it turned out that 1/20 kids suffered permanent kidney damage due to infection, most parents would keep their kids home. Look at the stats on school shootings and note that we pointlessly traumatize kids to assuage the concerns of parents. That's your figure of merit: that's how powerful the long-term C19 effect would need to be to change the behavior of the median parent.
I agree with these (hopefully not incorrectly) restated things I think you believe:
* It is more likely that MMR has few significant long-term health effects than if COVID-19 does
* COVID-19 effects are unlikely to be binary outcome
* Effects need not be universal for them to affect parental behaviour
However, none of that agreement is important to the discussion I was hoping to have. My comment was solely on the epistemology. I suspect you also use the same methods I was talking about in my previous comment.
If that is the case, then perhaps some other day we can argue about what the priors are. If we're good about it, we'll end up with the Aumann Agreement Theorem (+ corollaries) result, and rapidly agree (through likely both of us shifting our priors as we exchange information).
I think we have no disagreement and am happy to conclude this here.
Just to give you one possible side effect: sterility. There are plenty of viruses that when caught as a child do not give much in terms of symptoms but will make you sterile for life. That's not something that will come out in the next two months.
It could, but we have a lot of data on those diseases and typically a weakened or reduced dose live virus shot has a known outcome with some outliers where the shot leads to the disease or something worse in the relatively short term.
For COVID-19 we are still guessing at most of this, hopefully the long term effects are not too bad and those effects of contracting the disease will get reduced over time.
But I would definitely not rule out some shocker long term effect at this stage that we are unaware of, especially not when taking into account developing organisms such as children, where effects can stay hidden for a long time.
I think we're close to agreement, but not quite. We're not, after all, guessing at most. For instance, it's pretty unlikely that COVID-19 will cause you to grow three extra feet from your nose within the next 60 years.
There are some things we don't have high certainty on, but our epistemology would be faulty if we ignored how other coronaviruses behave, just like it would be faulty if we ignored how other attenuated viruses behave when we examine if MMR-2 will cause instadeath at age 60.
But there are quite a few examples of some pretty nasty effects that only show up when a person reaches maturity. So better to take this the slow and the sure way, more evidence is better.
Even if the kids are fine, if both parents get sick at the same time it's going to be hell taking care of the kids. Especially when you can't hire outside help due to social distancing requirements.
That is my biggest concern as well. Plus the reality that if both parents come down with serious symptoms the kids likely have it, so it would not be ideal to send the kids to other family members to watch long term
> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
Even if this is true (we already have evidence it's not for some children), it's completely irresponsible to allow schools to open. We know children are infectious and easily spread the disease. There are other members of society besides children. Letting the virus run rampant in schools will lead to parents and other adults getting sick and dying. It's not ok for children to die but if their parents, grandparents, teachers, or parents' friends die it's somehow ok? What kind of logic is that?
there's other forces at work with the rush to open schools than just covid19. Keep in mind, extended unemployment is expiring as well as a number of other emergency programs. School is the only place where many kids get a semi-square meal regularly. For many kids it's also a much safer environment than not school.
Then extend those programs. That should be obvious. Open up socially distanced food lines for kids and their parents that give out free food. None of this is impossible especially with the amount of wasted food we have. None of these problems lead to the conclusion that we should open schools when we can resolve these side issues in smarter, better ways that don't put the entire society at risk for covid. The House passed a relief bill 3 months ago. The failure of the Senate to do the same is simply inexcusable. That failure should not be the reason for even more people to die. This is so fucking absurd.
Sure, but they can pass it as easily as an adult can (saw a recent paper that said that children under 5 have higher viral loads than adults so they might actually be more infectious). There's a myth that kids can't pass it, but it's only a myth.
Sounds like you're using a proxy result (viral load instead of shedding or actual transmission) in a single unnamed paper to make a pretty strong assertion?
> Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
I think that's assuming that death is the only thing you have to worry about with this disease, and that if you don't die you'll recover and be no worse for wear. That may be a false assumption, and it could be that many children suffer from some kind of long term damage from the disease.
I think a bigger problem is fear mongering like this without providing sources or data to back it up. People have become distrustful in general because frankly it's exhausting figuring out what is true and what isn't.
We don’t know an infinite number of things. You can’t make decisions based on unknowns. You have to make decision based of evidence, not the lack of evidence.
What? Of course you can. We know there's potential long term health effects in adults who get COVID-19, there's risk children face the same ones. We don't know how severe or how likely children are to get them (much like in adults), but we can absolutely decide not to take the risk anyway, and keep kids out of schools.
I should have said that you can’t logically make a decision based on unknowns.
Certainly many people make all kinds of decision based on irrational fear.
“We know there’s potential long term health effects” — without a percentage qualifier of how many people are affected, and a qualifier on the magnitude of the effect, this statement is utterly meaningless. There’s “potential long term health effects” (of some unspoken magnitude, to some unspoken percentage of the population) to everything.
“We don’t know how severe or how likely children”.... hundreds of thousands of children have tested positive for COVID. What we know for sure is that most will never know they ever even had it, and of those that do, less than 1% require hospitalization. 10-24 year olds are about 25x more likely to die of suicide than of COVID. (6,500 vs 175)
One thing we absolutely do know for sure is that social isolation will increase the suicide and overdose number in older kids. We also know that detected cases of children abuse and neglect are way down since lockdowns started, and it’s not because kids are being abused or neglected less. We know many kids primary source of good nutrition comes from school lunches. The evidence all points to closing schools being more dangerous for children than opening them. Particularly for children in low income households.
There may be an argument for closing schools, but it’s one that sacrifices children‘s social, mental, and economic wellbeing for the sake of potentially lower transmission among other truly at-risk populations.
This keeps being trotted out but is actually a solved problems. For those situations where both parents have to work and both have to work out of home the schools can stay open and give a limited number of pupils regular lessons.
That way you cut down tremendously on a potential vector of transmission with as limited an impact as possible. We've done this here in NL successfully and in other countries besides.
There is absolutely no proof that children will not have long term health impacts that could reverberate for the rest of their lives. There are signs of chronic health repercussions for adults who have been infected. There is no telling yet what we can expect for children as they grow.
you can look at available data about chronic inflammation in people who have survived the initial infection. You can also look at data that a small number of kids are showing acute autoimmune reactions leading to severe illness and in a small number of cases death. You can then say, “we don’t know fully yet how big to expect this to be, but we should not risk exposing children to potentially life long health complications until we do.” Easy to reason through.
People put a lot of weight in early studies from countries that didn’t see outbreaks in schools. My problem with those studies has been: 1) Community spread in those areas was very low. 2) Kids were/are not being tested at anywhere near the same rate as adults. 3) We really have no idea whether there are long term effects in asymptomatic individuals.
Regarding both 2 and 3, kids seem to be largely asymptomatic. That would explain the lower testing rates. People are generally not going to go have their kid swabbed if there’s no apparent reason to do so. But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects, it seems pretty cavalier to just assume kids won’t. Hopefully they don’t, but we really don’t know.
This type of thinking often gets dismissed as “alarmist”, however a bit of alarm (and an abundance of caution) over a rapidly spreading novel virus is warranted.
(This is my armchair analysis. I’m not a health expert.)
People put a lot of weight into early proprietary models that turned out to be absolute garbage.
> But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects
Unfortunately, there's no control for these assumptions. People are exposed to all sorts of things over their lifetime. Not everyone produces antibodies, so there will be no definitive way to link any person having an infection and any long term effects. Need to establish the risk compared to existing baseline.
So far, deaths are down for the year, so everyone's switched to 'unknown long term effects.'
> Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU
You see this kind of vague claim online all the time when it comes to COVID but with no actual data.
What are the actual risks of a child going to the hospital as a result of COVID infection? How does that compare to other risks that you regularly expose your kids to?
The risk in children is from diabetes and metabolic syndrome, conversely what protects children most is a relatively well functioning immune system.
As we've seen that coronavirus immunity is enhanced with exposure to other coronaviruses, and innate immune system function, it appears children should not be isolated. By this rationale, they shouldn't even be wearing masks.
About 1% of detected cases in children require hospitalization. That number of course does not account for undiagnosed, subclinical, and fully asymptomatic cases in children.
Compared to the flu, just looking at the proportion of children who are diagnosed positive cases, children would be about equally as likely to require hospitalization, but this likely overstates the hospitalization risk of COVID.
In terms of death rates, flu is significantly more deadly (at least 10x more deadly) in children 0-14, and about equally as deadly for ages 15-24. [1]
Plus we know nothing about the long term health consequences. Kids may not be dying at a high rate but they may suffer long term heart, lung, or organ damage. It feels like everyone is just assuming that if it isn’t death then it is fine. Just because you survive something doesn’t make you stronger.
I’m basing my risk assessment on evidence of likely long term damage to adults. Combined with very little data there is a huge amount of unknown risk still to children.
I hope I’m wrong. In six months or a year maybe I’ll feel more comfortable with the risk to my kids (and myself with a damaged spinal cord), but right now I don’t and to equate it to anti-vaxxers is fairly insulting.
Most vaccines have been in use for years, sometimes decades. They're given nearly universally. We've had ample time and sample size to uncover their dangers (if any). Covid hasn't even been around for a year. The two situations are nothing alike.
The difference is that anti-vaxers make this point against vaccines that have been used for a long time about which we do understand the long term health consequences.
This is contrasted to the long term health consequences of COVID-19, which appears could be significant, but we just aren't certain yet only because there just aren't any long term survivors yet and thus studies [0] related to it haven't been completed. I don't think this is past the limit.
Or people are assuming that the long term effects of COVID on children are similar to that of the flu on children, given similar death rates. (Which seems plausible, if you count '10x higher' as 'similar'. Overall, the flu is about 1/30th the IFR of COVID-19, but apparently most of the difference is at older ages)
EDIT: And, in fact, the CDC says that the Flu is more dangerous to healthy children than COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm and search for 'children'. Though the CDC may not be a trusted source for many...
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.
Those people think "opening the economy" is worth more than human (kid or otherwise) lives. They're either politicians trying to convince an electorate that they didn't fail miserably at their job, or are regular Joes falling victim to disingenuous cable news networks.
Please consider the long-term implications here. We don't get to choose whether economic damage happens - it's already happened and will continue. People who are scared are not going to go out unnecessarily, and even if that's only 30-40% of consumers it'll have a massively negative effect on the economy.
We have only one thing we can do to get the economy back on the rails: bring the case count down. The longer we let this go without properly managing it, the harder it is to bring the case count down. The longer the case count is too high for reasonable, cautious people who care about their parents and grandparents' survival and their long term lung health to participate significantly in the economy, the more damage the economy will sustain.
If you want businesses to be opening up now, you should've demanded for them to close 6 months ago. If you want schools to open, you should've been demanding that everyone wear a mask 6 months ago.
At this stage of the pandemic, people who selfishly refused to do their part for their fellow citizens are entirely to blame for the continued necessity of mask requirements and schools closing.
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid
Perhaps people are simply desensitized to kids catching colds & flus? My kid probably brought home twenty different novel coronaviruses, all before his second birthday.
> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.
Because we have forgotten how to say to ourselves, "I generally agree with this ideology, but on this subject, I agree with other people." Politics (and this is, sadly, political) is a zero sum game now.
> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.
Minimization and denial are powerful psychological forces, and the fact that some children get the condition without severe symptoms lulls some people into complacency.
The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection.
> The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection
If this is the way to treat with life, how would you be still alive? Isn’t it the very reason we get ill because the body is treating the virus.
Do you have any source to believe that asymptomatic infected person has long term negative effects from infection?
It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction so long as they have a child at home.
The parent will not abandon the child home alone to go to work, no matter how big the stick.
School being effectively state subsidized working hours daycare, it must resume before low wage workers can once again be coerced back into risking their lives to avoid homelessness.
> It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction so long as they have a child at home
Impossible? definitely not. (i would argue this is the exact issue many people in the US face today).
highly immoral and with a total disregard to one's decency or life? absolutely.
How is this a failing? The system is performing well for its stakeholders - maximizing wealth extraction for the upper class, with a simulation of free market choice to keep the middle and lower classes occupied and pacified. From this perspective, a 1% fatality rate should merely translate into the stock market declining by 1%, and then we move on.
Yes! It's also a failure of imagination of the American public. It's like a social safety net DURING A PANDEMIC is just too far outside the Overton window. It's crazy!
Covid-19 might be a major challenge for the society, but individual risks for younger people wothout health issues are still small, at least based on the knowledge we currently have. I am afraid the attitudes described in the article are more due to uninformedness and normal parental anxiousness than anything rational.
I know 7 people now that have had it. The worst affected one had to stay in bed a day, most of the others just lost taste or felt a bit run down. Children had sniffles. 2 were asymptomatic.
> some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid
I mean, that point of view was literally expressed in a public forum by the president of the United States. It must carry weight in some circles at least.
The survey does say just enough about their methods to make it sound like it's not at all something that can be taken all that seriously.
"In a recent survey, we asked about 1,000 parents what their biggest worry amidst the pandemic was, and what we found was a surprise. It turns out that the majority of parents are worried about their families being infected by the virus rather than finding work or paying the mortgage."
I'm not sure why that's surprising. If you ask 1,000 people who have jobs that aren't gone or at immediate risk of going away, then yep, that's exactly what we're going to worry about. There's probably some serious statistical problems there.
Good question, I didn't really mean all those people had jobs, I guess what I really meant was more like if you're not careful in choosing who you ask you'll end up with 1000 people who have safe jobs, or just a way larger percent of people who have safe jobs than do in the general population.
Could be, but if you want to answer the question "what are most people worried about" the correct thing to do is ask a random sample of 1000 people, not just to ask the people who've lost jobs.
Yup! I’m equally worried about my kids and bringing home the bacon because my travel industry employer is going out of business and I still haven’t found a new job.
People are, statistically speaking, really bad at figuring out what to worry about. See: terrorist attacks, plane crashes, shark attacks, abduction by strangers. So maybe this is good news about the pandemic.
No... that would just imply that it isn’t a useful signal. The case where it would be good is if people were good at worrying about the wrong things. I don’t think that is true, people worry about plenty of legitimate things too.
Are they? Nobody seems to care much about the ordinary flu, though lots still die from it. Hospital acquired infections are a major cause of death, but few worry about that. The most likely causes of death for children are drowning and car accidents, but people worry far more about terrorist incidents. And on it goes.
We know how to deal with the flu. Healthy people do not normally die from it.
COVID-19 is on pace to put a million people in the ground by the end of the year (IIRC) and certainly leave many survivors with serious health problems, and we really still know very little about treating it, and it is more contagious and more deadly, especially to the healthy population.
I'm not dismissing covid as "just a flu". I'm pointing out that people dismiss the annual deaths from the flu. For example, few people take any particular steps to minimize transmission of the flu, like wearing a mask or keeping their kids out of school.
Again. You can treat the flu. 40k of those deaths are in the elderly. Probably more are people who are already sick. Not only is COVID not the flu, there’s basically no comparison.
Dismissing the annual death toll of the flu as not a real problem is what my point was. We're used to flu deaths, they aren't news. But several tens of thousands in the US still die of the flu every year. It is not a solved problem, the vaccine is only partially effective, and most people don't even get one.
The flu comes around every year, so one would have to look at the cumulative risk.
I'm well aware of the flu risk, and already had my vaccination for that for this season. Most people I know poo-poo getting that vaccination, despite it taking only 5 minutes and is already paid for by one's insurance.
Worrying about a potentially deadly illness that you can do little about, vs worrying about losing your source of income and having to.. look for another job.
Yep. If you have to spend a week in hospital in the US it can break you even if you have "decent" insurance. Three words that strike terror into the hearts of Americans: "Out of network"
I worried about getting infected a lot back in February or March, so I ordered from Japan and India several different types of medicine with distinct mechanisms of action that were hypothesized to help with the disease. Several of these are in Phase 3 trials now or have had positive RCTs published outside the US. I still wear masks and avoid crowds, but it makes me feel a little better. For the sake of HN's SEO I won't list them out. This did not include the big bad one that was most heavily politicized, but these are also used by hundreds of millions of people per year.
I've personally heard from several tens of parents that they are primarily worried about the economic and social affects of all these so-called safety measures governments and communities are taking. Just because it's easy to measure cases and deaths and hard to measure lost human connection, depression, children being left in environments of neglect, delayed/paused innovation and economic growth, etc. doesn't mean that those costs are less than the loss of life incurred from not being "safe". I would rather my children (and I have 5) grow up not being told they need to be afraid of everything. I would rather they grow up being able to learn with and interact with their peers face to face. And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren and great grandchildren can grow up in a better world.
We all will die. Can't let a fear of dying prevent us from living.
How about the fact that long term effects are unknown. Or what sort of ongoing medical issues will people have for the rest of their lives?
There is people who believe that once you're done with this virus, it is gone from your system and you're back to normal. Certainly that is the case for many, but there are still many more that will continue to suffer from what they are calling now 'long haulers'.
Spend some time in a large (91k people and growing) Survivors group [0] to get a feeling of what people are facing.
Sure - but the point/principle still applies. Every day we confront unknown risks that we don't fully understand. But we just keep on living. I think we have enough data for people to evaluate their own personal risk and generally take appropriate personal measures for safety. We can and should make efforts to accommodate those who assess their personal risk to be significant. But when you/others ask schools to close - are you really considering what the short-medium-long term costs of those choices really are? I have personally taken neighborhood kids to pick up free lunches offered by schools while they were shut down - because those kids' parents didn't care to take them and neither cared to help them feed themselves. I've seen working parents leave their young children at home because child care logistics and cost were not acceptable for their circumstances. I know kids down the street that are basically ignored by their parents that are not likely to have a healthy structured school environment they can count on.
I believe these hard to measure costs are enormous but easy to ignore because the affected demographic can't fight for their rights/desires - they can't even vote. And privileged SV folks and internet yuppies are happy to drive this line forward. I have friends who have lost their jobs. I have a cousin who has lost their small business. Not because of COVID - but because of the "cure" for COVID.
Most of this just speaks to how problematic it is for a society to rely on (poorly-funded and unevenly-resourced) schools alone for universal childcare, alleviating child hunger, ensuring safety from awful households, and other concerns that could have been addressed elsewhere (this is all orthogonal to the effects of COVID).
Yes - in some imaginary world it might be easier to close schools without adverse consequences. But we don't live in that world. We live in one where closing schools has lots of bad short and long term consequences. So acknowledging that we must decide between existing alternatives - not between fictitious ones - what do people want?
Adverse affects of closing schools for a year on 56 million elementary, middle, and high school students? Or maybe 500,000 people dying a bit early (just making numbers up on this one - adjust up or down depending on various factors)? That is not so one-sided obvious as many people on the internet seem to want to make it.
How many kids need to die from attending school and catching covid? For me, 1 is enough and we are already there.
How many children will bring it home to adults? For me, 1 is enough and we are already there.
On the other hand, not all 56 million kids will end up ruined if education is delayed a bit or parents need to come up with new and creative ways to educate their children safely.
You're basically arguing to 'stay the course' during a global pandemic and fact is that isn't workable either.
> How many kids need to die from attending school and catching covid? For me, 1 is enough and we are already there.
This is equally as irrational as people who just want to fling the floodgates open.
~5 children per year die on playground equipment in the US. Are you actually proposing that we sit around until we've neutered a lethal virus enough that it's less dangerous than playground equipment?
The IFR for school age children is astonishingly low. Low enough that we don't even really have a good sample size. CAs data right now is showing 1 death out of ~50k infections. My first Google hit with IFR estimates for those age ranges puts them at 0.0016% for 5-9, and 0.00032% for 10-17.
Assuming every single one of those kids is in the higher risk 5-9 bracket and that every single one gets infected, we would end up with less than a thousand fatalities. That's about 10% lower than children that die from drowning (or congenital birth abnormalities, or drug overdose/poisoning, they all hover around 980 per year). It's slightly higher than the number of children who die from heart disease.
On the other hand, it's less than a quarter the number of children who die in car crashes per year, and less than a third the number who die from firearm accidents.
I don't suppose that you're going to stop putting your kids in the car, despite it being 4 times more likely to kill them than the worst case scenario of Covid in schools.
Everybody has a cost above which they are not willing to pay to save someone's life. If you can't admit that, then there is nothing we have to discuss.
I think this is one of those cases where you are taking a bunch of anecdotal evidence and drawing the wrong conclusions from it or at least biasing them towards your own dislikes... 'privileged SV and internet yuppies'. Your response feels a bit like Dunning-Kruger [0] effect going on here.
I am not a doctor so I won't give you advice, but Dr. Gupta is. I felt like his reasoning for not sending his kids back to school in this article [1] was spot on.
> According to Makenbach, there are two main issues in dealing with the coronavirus. The first is to what extent this disease, which mainly affects the elderly, should be allowed to damage younger generations who are losing their jobs and falling behind in education, he said. And the second is to what extent the virus and measures against it should be allowed to further increase inequality. Socio-economically vulnerable people are more likely to become seriously ill, and also most disproportionately affected by drastic anti-coronavirus measures, Makenbach said.
It's a sad affair. The measures wouldn't have to be so severe if there wasn't so much noise about it.
A bit of cool headed thought, compliance, and leaders we could trust might have saved our grandparents while ensuring a pretty good upbringing for our children.
Alas, that's not the world we live in. We don't trust anything, the media is busy being sensational, big money only cares about making more money in way possible, our leaders continuely lie to us and foster partisanship and miscommunication.
> And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren ...
Sigh. I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out for you and your ilk.
There are other people out there beyond your grandparents. Regardless of how you and they personally feel — I don’t want to die just because your personal definition of “living” (hello, a few months of lockdown or similar is still alive) facilitates disease spread. I AM NOT WILLING TO DIE PREMATURELY just so your kids can avoid going a few months without physically engaging peers, or just so you all can avoid having to take simple personal precautions when outside.
Lest anyone accuses me of not understanding without raising children- I am literally holding my sleeping 5 month old as I type this.
It’s not about being told to be afraid of everything (where does this idea come from? literally no one is advocating that). It’s about responding to existing, real dangers with appropriate measures.
I think this is really unfair to OP. Who among us hasn't taken health risks because we enjoy our culture? When I heard about heart disease as the leading cause of death I did not immediately change my diet. I assume many others here did not as well.
And yet isn't not eating bacon a relatively easy step to take so one is around to spend time with family? The answer is not so clear.
One question I have is why you believe lockdowns will help? A vaccine may be approved but it's likely it won't work for obese Americans that make up 40% of the population.
> “Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
> “Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
> In 2017, scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill provided a critical clue about the limitations of the influenza vaccine. In a paper published in the International Journal of Obesity, they showed for the first time that vaccinated obese adults were twice as likely as adults of a healthy weight to develop influenza or flu-like illness. [0]
This essentially means we are going to have large numbers of cases for the next 3+ years.
But how many people? Should 10,000 kids lose school and all the problems that can avalanche into for the future to save 1 year of 1 life of one person who already has degrading health?
I acknowledge that we are choosing between two bad alternatives here. I personally believe that we should trade all N hundred thousand lives for a normal school year for 56 million kids.
The rest of society is certainly not happy to make that sacrifice for your extreme selfishness and callousness and frankly, we shouldn't have to die because your kids might grow up fearful. What a selfish, disgusting attitude.
Around my city I'm seeing a lot of kids lonely, anxious and unhappy where I've never seen before. My children were really looking forward to school and seeing friends, were crushed when told it wouldn't be happening.
And a lot of adults were similarly disappointed. I mean, aside from the whole possible loss of livelihood and disruption to earning potential thing... I’ve seen adults who were really looking forward to these things that didn’t pan out as planned thanks to COVID:
- professional conferences
- sport games
- concerts
- school reunions
- weddings
- grieving death of elder together with family
- baby showers
- travel/vacations
- birthday parties
- having friends over for support while stuck at home with a newborn (editors note: it me)
It’s been hard of everybody. Maybe this is my perspective from having grown up in poverty/underclass talking- but I don’t get this hand wringing over how hard this is for children in particular.
I agree. Perhaps it is because we are rapidly approaching the date when most schools around the U.S. begin opening back up (or not) after summer vacation. So this is on many people's minds and many decisions are being made about it at local and state levels currently. This is why it is on my mind particularly anyway. I think people are way underestimating the negative consequences economic, social, psychological, etc. of covid mitigations generally. I think we have long passed the point where benefits are worth the costs.
Seeing their friends. In a mask. Without being allowed to talk or interact with them before, during, or after class.
Sounds fun. The reality of what in-person school looks like isn't anywhere close to what your children are looking forward to.
Our oldest is going into Kindergarten this year. We chose distance learning before that became the only option because we didn't want her first experience with "big girl school" to be something out of Handmaid's Tale.
I think teaching kids to be afraid of disease is one of the few things separating humans from animals. It’s one thing that’s let us survive for so long and build societies.
You perhaps were being sarcastic, but there is truth in the statement. And while it is unpleasant, I think it is an aspect of this pandemic that is worth considering - not necessarily in an of itself, but perhaps as a way to begin discussing our culture's unhealthy view of prolonging life at all costs. I don't want to spend my last days/weeks/months slowly rotting in a hospital bed.
If you're worried you're going to die from coronavirus given the current statistics you can self isolate.
No need for the entire population to do the same.
I started self isolating me and my family 4 weeks before my country imposed a lockdown, after seeing neighbouring countries being hit by the virus and not knowing what to expect.
I stopped caring completely after seeing the hospitals were empty and after seeing a reported death rate of around 1% in my country.
According to my mother, who is a doctor who fought covid on the first line (despite being at risk of death, given her age and statistics), the guidelines given by the government were nonsensical: ventilators probably did more harm than good in the majority of cases and there was a stance against steroidal treatment (which would have been the first choice she would have picked if it wasn't for the guidelines) which have been subsequently reevaluated.
There was also a problem with dropping requirements for counting covid deaths which created a massive statistical problem.
These factors make me think covid deaths are probably over-counted and it explains why this second peak of infections doesn't have a peak in deaths.
Of course, the issue has been politicised and if you say something like the above you'll be socially ostracised - or just downvoted.
This is a terrible article. It’s subtle clickbait, seemingly designed too discourage constructive discussion while encouraging argumentation.
The choices are ambiguously worded to the point that one could project a spectrum of meanings to them. We know nothing about the sample other than that there are 1000 of them and they are parents. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know whether they’re employed and what their level of employment and financial circumstance is. We don’t know how old they are or how old their children are.
Finally they are asked what their greatest worry is and then they have to choose between three choices or assert that they have no worries at all.
At the same time the completely ambiguous results and ambiguous wording allow anyone who feels like arguing to project their own hopes and fears to the results.
Just stay away from bullsh*t like this. It’s poison.
"Just stay away from bullsh*t like this. It’s poison."
I say that to myself so much when reading any kind of news on the pandemic. The pandemic landing in a US presidential election year has made it at least 3x worse in my opinion.
This seems like a worthless comparison. One hundred percent of parents can get C19 and 100% of their children can get it too. How many of these parents still have jobs? The unemployment rate for parents is probably lower than the aggregate population. Again, this (5x!) is a worthless comparison.
The headline is completely wrong. The study shows that infection is the top concern of five times more parents than work or paying bills. The parents most concerned about infection may only be slightly less concerned about work or money.
I am going to sound like a looney, but bear with me.
The mortality rate of Covid isn't that much higher than the seasonal flu for those aged under 50. (most children or their parents). It is far lower for those under the age of 30. Assuming 200k Americans have died from Covid, current stats put the number of deaths under the age of 18 at 70/200k and 18-44 at 6k/200k.
In other words, you child is more likely to die of the seasonal flu and about 50-100x more likely to commit suicide than dying of COVID 19. The parents themselves are at about an equal risk of dying of Covid as they are of dying by the flu.
Covid is killing plenty of folks over 50. We know this. We've known this from the start. It is incredibly odd to me, that no country has taken precautions that particularly target the safety of these older people. In places where Covid is on its last legs like MA/NY, a large number of deaths are coming out of old age homes. Surely there must be way to address those directly.
The concerns around COVID are misplaced. It is a drop-let borne disease that primarily kills old people and uses delayed symptoms to facilitate spread. Sanitizing surfaces is not going to help. Acting paranoid about your kids is not going to help.
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P.S: I have looked up legitimate stats for my claims, but am not linking them atm, due to lack of time. Also, I am purely looking at death and not side effects. I also don't claim to make the comparisons in controlled-trial manner. Lastly, masks and distancing are essential, irrespective of the points I make above. It also assumes that the current strategy is to distance until a vaccine arrives. Because, I don't think herd immunity or complete eradication are realistic possibilities.
I don’t think comparing only mortality rates is accurate. I can’t say « you are much more likely to die by falling into a volcano than to die because of the flu » just because the mortality rate of falling into a volcano is much higher than getting the flu.
I think one also has to factor in the likelihood of the event, in the case of diseases we might look at how contagious the diseases are.
Besides cherry picking your stats you are making a giant mistake: COVID-19 has not yet run its course and any and all stats are subject to continuous change.
Your PS covers a lot of ground that invalidates your previous writing, what you call 'side effects' are normally called just 'effects', if a disease does not kill you what remains are the symptoms, some of which can last a lifetime. You don't just gloss over that if those are as severe as they can be in the case of COVID-19, it's not that you end up sneezing once per day or something innocent like that.
I think the big concern for young people is the lingering effects. Once people get a flu and recover, they’re back to normal. People with COVID are struggling to breathe months later and heart damage is being reported.
I particularly left them out because it is insanely difficult to find any real stats on what the rate of lingering effects of COVID might be. The only thing we know, is the effects only manifest for seriously symptomatic patients.
Of course, in case of substantial rate of effects post illness, my comment would be rendered entirely invalid.
Parents have good reason to be worried, not so much that their kids will suffer permanent complications, but that they will spread it around the whole family, hitting the elderly hardest.
Teachers have a right to be heard on this as well.
There is far too much “survey says!” in the place of news.
I can’t quantify my emotions and share their weight distribution. Anybody writing an article like this has already written the entire thing before doing any of the questioning, and it’s stupidly easy to get a survey result by asking the right question.
Damn work has always been the easiest part in life, I mean as long as I can find one. And once I get a job I won't worry too much about bills.
But infection and school...I have no control over them. They control me, and definitely I'm going to be more worried about them. Same for kids and family.
Yeah, I think the lack of control is a key observation here. I bet most people would tell you they're more scared of plane crashes than car accidents, even though most people are at much larger risk of a car accident.
people who need or are use to being in control are having a very tough time.
My mother-in-law is high strung, controlling, and anxious pretty much 24x7 (I still love her (family is family)). There are times when talking to her is like talking to a stranger because she gets so wound up and out there.
We have family friends that are losing their minds. Some, seemingly normal, friends are falling deep into the conspiracy mess others are divorcing or making odd decisions. One refinanced their house to buy a Lotus, 3 small kids + infant and he just shows up one day with a Lotus...
the mental effects and relationship stress because of Covid19 are pretty crazy too.
The goal has shifted. The lockdowns and extreme shutdowns were in an effort to keep hospital resources from becoming overridden thus causing even more death.
The new goal of attempting to prevent the actual transmission of the disease itself has been disastrous.
Yeah the health ramifications are massive. you may go under debt and probably accrue more of you default on a few payments but if you are sick and can’t get back up fast potentially your entirely family will suffer a lot
The bigger worry here is that the kids pass it to a parent since most cases in children are mild. A bad case of covid (not even talking about a fatal case) could have you out of commission unable to work for months. And then medical bills on top of that.
5x more worried? That implies measuring “worriedness” on a ratio scale (ie a scale with fixed zero). This wasn’t discussed in the article. Maybe they meant “5x more parents are worried,” although looks more like 3.5x
Who was sampled in this study? Renters do not pay a Mortgage. Only the unemployed (not working & looking for work), the employed looking for another job, or the underemployed are worried about finding a job.
Well of course - they can delay retirement, cut back, or work longer hours later to make up for financial hardship and address debts eventually. They cannot bring their children back from the dead.
I wish I was living in a country where the government takes care of its citizens and makes sure they don't have to worry about losing their jobs or homes because of a global pandemic.
> I wish there was more conversation happening about other countries who have already successfully put kids back at school.
> That might give confidence to people in North America who feel uncertain about it.
This is like trying to give someone confidence to jump out of a plane without a parachute by talking about all the people who've safely jumped out of planes with parachutes. It's BS: the situations are different, so the examples don't apply.
Step 1 of opening us schools in the US is implementing policy to get to the (lower) infection rates of those countries that have been able to safely open up schools. Unfortunately, there are US political factions that just want to skip that step and go straight to the end of the plan.
It's more like giving them the confidence to jump by telling them that other people have successfully jumped.
Perhaps the jumper does not have the ideal mindset, but it's better to inform them that it is possible rather than keeping them in the dark, acting as if no one has ever successfully jumped before.
> It's more like giving them the confidence to jump by telling them that other people have successfully jumped.
No, you're missing the point: other people have successfully "jumped" (opened schools), but the person you're talking to (the US) is not equipped like they were and will die if they jump. Success in this case doesn't have anything to do with having the mindset to jump or not, it has everything to do with having made the right preparations before jumping.
The kind of mindset change that you seem to be advocating for is the exact thing that got us into this mess: the idea that you can be successful merely by confidently believing you will succeed (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Positive_Thinking...). That kind of thing causes people to overconfidently blunder into failure like an idiot.
If there's any mindset change needed here, it's to convince the person adopt the the mindset to be willing to turn the plane around, land, buy a parachute, take a parachuting class, go back up in the plane, and only then jump.
Those countries have been more successful overall in limiting the spread of covid. In the US it's pretty much out of control in many areas. You can send kids back to school if community spread is limited and you can do effective contact tracing - but neither of those things is true in the US.
> Actually neither Japan nor Germany have a central govt authority similar to the CDC, and they are far outperforming the US response.
But Germany, at least, has functioning nonspecialist central government authorities that are trying to do the right thing. Even if the US government has the right kind of specialists, it's dysfunctional as a central authority.
Our response to the virus as adults is so beyond the pale that it's crazy we're even talking about sending kids to school. Many places in the country have higher infection rates than when they were locked down and the current "plan" is to just live with it. Schools that have already opened have resulted in hundreds of kids quarantined as early as the first day.
Over 1,000 people have been dying a day has become the norm. New Zealand just partially shut down again because 4 people became infected.
Talking about successful school openings in other countries is as relevant as talking about magical unicorns at this point.
It's an interesting thing to balance. The health risk of the disease vs the 'developmental' risk of a lack of 'normal' social interaction with other kids and teachers in a 'so-called' formal school setting.
I am all for my kids returning to school, but that is easy for me to say and so I think everyone needs to have the space to make the decisions that they feel comfortable with. And that extends to the teachers as well, and this is where it gets really interesting. What happens if the teachers aren't comfortable with going back to a class full of little germ spreaders?
Not me. I'm more concerned about my kids going back to school so that I don't need to be here all day and try and monitor their education on my own AND trying to focus on my job. The risk of me or my children DYING from COVID is practically zero.
The average age of a COVID death is 70+ years old. The average life expectancy in USA is < 80 years old. People won't live forever, no matter how many masks we wear or how hard we lock down.
My spouse has no relevant health complications, and has been knocked absolutely FLAT from this. We didn't have to go to the hospital, there were no ventilators involved. But now, almost 4 months later, and they struggle to walk 100 paces, to go upstairs, etc. The risks are more than dying vs not-dying.
You might not die from Covid, but what if you and your partner are hospitalized for weeks at the same time? Who's going to take care of the kids? Maybe you have family or reliable friends around who can step in, but not everyone does.
I don't like that the handing of COVID has turned into a partisan issue. Putting emphasis on death risks has become an equivalent of Democrat virtue signalling, while focusing on the economic factors is almost solely viewed as support for Republicans.
Wake up, people, that's not how you solve problems. What we need is a good, high-quality debate, and a way to quantify and compare costs and benefits from both sides. We need mortality numbers for different age groups from different independent sources. We need research on mental health effects of lockdown and pulling kids away from school. Anecdotally, I have a 6-year-old son, who got noticeably distressed after the school went online-only during his Kindergarten. I am not worried about his academic success (he's doing Grade 2 workbooks at home), but the lack of social interaction is certainly freaking him out. Except, I don't know the real numbers. In fact, nobody does, because there is too so much focus on political stand-offs instead. It's hurting both sides, really.
It's like with Hydroxychloroquine. Ever since Trump endorsed it, the republican media is proclaiming it to be The Cure (with people literally considering it for prophylactic (sic!)), while the democrat sources are censoring videos and avoiding the topic, because the paper stating its benefits used weak methodology. And again, your stance on HCQ is used as a proxy for your political orientation, rather than an honest professional opinion. All that instead instead of an actual unbiased research aimed at discovering cases and circumstances where it could work. And a proper debate between medical professionals on risks and possible advantages.
It could be huge or tiny depending on the size of the mean and standard deviation of the effect you're looking for in comparison to the mean and sdev of unrelated variations.
Given that the QOI is a single multinomial proportion, an unweighted[1] random sample of the population has a maximum[2] ~3.1% margin of error on either side.
You could argue the QOI is something else (the sum or difference, or even the ratio estimator reported in the title). Margins of error on ratio estimators are quite a bit larger because of numerical properties of ratios.
Since there is interest, I ran a quick simulation[3] to derive the CI of the ratio estimate above ("5x"). By Monte Carlo and using standard assumptions, the confidence interval on the "5X" quantity of interest is 4.51 - 6.82x calculated via the quantile method.[4]
The confidence interval is not appreciably smaller in magnitude if you double the sample size, we're well past the point of diminishing returns.
[1] Weighting would induce a design effect, but here I would suggest that the real problem is a poorly defined population and sample frame, not sample error. This is the real issue here: we have zero reason to believe these 1,000 people are a random sample of any interesting population.
[2] For a parameter \theta = 0.5 -- uncertainly decreases as the statistic becomes further from 0.5. But classical MOEs overreport like this.
[4] Similar results come from taking the numerical sd of the sampling distribution and calculating a NACI about the mean, I just did the quantile trick because it's less code.
There is a massive, silent demographic who wants a return to status quo.
There was a conference call with the school district the other night. A friend in the district was in awe at how many parents want their children to return to school, are upset about sports, etc.
Many people want to look at this as a black and white issue - either you believe social distancing and masks are necessary, or you believe that Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in your head. The media is of course greatly to blame for this.
The reality is that there are many people who share different priorities than vocal groups on the Internet. Several times I have written blog posts about lay statistical analysis of the virus, and how more conservative states have the benefit of seeing reopening in action in states like Florida and Texas. Many of the responses assume I am against masks, against social distancing, trolling etc. No discourse is possible.
On the Internet, I believe so. You see the crazies and the anti-maskers but anyone worried about e.g. the mental health of their children or the viability of their family business is filtered out.
We are seeing waves of permanent restaurant closings where I am from, and people seem reluctant to put 2 and 2 together.
