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Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

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Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#161

Post by thomaslord »

WalterBright wrote: post #107
Animats wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is encouraging. People are most worried about the most serious problem.

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.

Do you believe that the flu poses a more significant risk than COVID-19, despite being both more contagious and more deadly?

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#162

Post by elliekelly »

koolba wrote: post #91
_jal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 befor…

But we do know that. Or at least we can glean as much based upon the distribution by age for hospital admittance and death. We don’t know what, if any, the long term consequences will be. But the short term death risk for young children appears to be minimal.

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.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#164

Post by doorstar »

nend wrote: post #125
zaroth wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You can’t make decisions based on unknowns. 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.

Keeping kids out of school _is_ a decision, and not an easy one when having kids at home means the parents can't work.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#165

Post by jacquesm »

spaced-out wrote: post #135
oxymoran wrote: post #123

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…

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.

You currently do not have a government that will be swayed by evidence.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#166

Post by x87678r »

ghouse wrote: post #101
x87678r wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know two people who have had it. Once lost her sense of smell four months ago. Not back yet. The other died.

Wow that is incredibly bad luck.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#167

Post by ardy42 »

Solvitieg wrote: post #144
ardy42 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think you analogy is well thought out. 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.

> I don't think you analogy is well thought out.

> 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.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#168

Post by jacquesm »

matz1 wrote: post #128
thomaslord wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 ?

There is precisely zero evidence that a lockdown leads to even a measurable fraction of 1% deaths.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#169

Post by screye »

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. ________

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.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#170

Post by JackFr »

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.

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