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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

#191

Post by eirini1 »

doorstar wrote: post #164
nend wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

maybe the solution is that parents shouldn't have to work during a pandemic if they can't.

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

#192

Post by renewiltord »

jacquesm wrote: post #146
renewiltord wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spontaneou…

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.

True, and whether MMR 2 will kill you or your mind in 60 years isn't something that comes out in 42 years. We don't know that yet.

But if I had to guess, you're probably pro-MMR-2 (as am I), so the question is what epistemology permits that view?

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

#193

Post by thex10 »

rwcarlsen wrote: post #76
latchkey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fear is not death. 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 ha…

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…

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).

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

#194

Post by fiblye »

rwcarlsen wrote: post #52

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 t…

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.

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

#195

Post by schemy »

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.

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?

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

#196

Post by screye »

fiblye wrote: post #186
screye wrote: post #169

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…

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.

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

#197

Post by schemy »

roland35 wrote: post #19

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 speci…

Are you worried about your children living on the streets? Because for 1/3rd of people this is a reality when the federal money stops flowing.

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

#198

Post by cmurf »

jacquesm wrote: post #165
spaced-out wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#199

Post by makomk »

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.

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.

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

#200

Post by john_moscow »

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.

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