231–240 of 714 posts
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Counterpoint: at first it was extremely obvious that this virus was affecting you harder the older you are, with 60+ populations starting to be at risk. Nobody thought it was harming children.
Counterpoint: It was extremely obvious that this virus was hitting old folks hard because nursing homes were concentrating them in recirculated air. It wasn't completely obvious that the same thing wouldn't happen in schools. It should be obvious by now, however.
I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…
I think the article does a good job at looking at this as a trade-off. No where in the article do they state outright that there is no change to transmission. The main point is to ask the question "Is avoiding the damage to those that are older worth the damage to those that are younger?"
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The answer is simple: it will stop when people decide it is over. Only non-compliance on massive scale will solve this. Science clearly said that Covid will be with us forever. We know that vaccines didn't stop the spread in even a single country. There is nothing else to wait. Take back your freedom now.
Yeah see this is why we can't have a real conversation about this. Every time I bring up this topic I'm bombarded with "ThEy'Re tAkInG YoUr FreEdOm!!" and "VaCcInEs DoN'T EvEn WorK" type people. I'm not part of that group.
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What has this got to do with covid? Also, guns have been more easily available in the past than they are now. Access to guns isn’t causing the uptick in school shootings. If we knew what was causing it, perhaps we could address the problem.
We pretty much do know what causes school shootings though? I mean the causes are complex and there is much disagreement about which ones contribute what and how much, but the broad strokes are known. The issue is that 1) this information comes from the hn-accursed social sciences, 2) people don't like the answers and 3) we aren't willing to solve the problem anyway so why proselytize it?
Aaaaand there’s the consensus manufacturing the NYT is famous for.
Of course the NYT omits that schools were open in several states, but that would be too much reality in a single dose.
> "For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults. " The overall tone and style of this article is just... I don't know. As a parent of elementary school children, I spent 2020 and 2021 seeing this stuff first-hand. Having arguments with other (non-parent) liberal friends on social media. Once they discovered that I was out of step on this one item of the cur…
I feel your pain about the political binary we've developed though. I hold varying positions on a number of issues and would have formerly been called an 'independent' but now I'm just on the opposite side of anyone I talk to
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> The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance. Is this really true if the entire class missed a few years? It is very different having one kid who missed a lot and then later interacts with kids who all didn't miss a lot, and a class where every kid is behind a couple of years.
It's not like every kid is falling behind though. Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright. Zoom and a mask isn't ideal, but a lot less stressful in comparison to something that could easily have given you significant PTSD.
I wouldn't be surprised if kids who fell behind during remote school are clustered at the same schools.
I'm not a huge fan of cost-benefit decision processes but they are useful for removing some false dichotomies. Like "we can't afford to do the right thing" when the right thing is actually more cost effective.
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There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead. On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so…
The quora answer [1] by Franklin Veaux to question "How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States?" explains nicely that it is not binary live/die at all. Mind though that this was written in the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have the same information as now, so numbers may be imprecise, but the explanation still stands. https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shu...
Also with an evolving disease you don't know what its death-rate will be and it will depend on the preventive measures you and the government take, one of which is "shutting down" another being vaccination, which was not available at the beginning. If there had been no vaccine surely the death-rate had been larger.
According to data below the mortality rate is 7.5% in Mexico. In US it is 1.5%, not 1% as implied by whoever posed the question.
"Shutting down" will affect the mortality-rate because presumably it will protect the most vulnerable population more. If they don't get infected the mortality rate will be smaller.
And as far as I can tell US was never really "shut down" was it? Everybody still got their groceries. Many died of Covid, nobody died of hunger I believe. Subways and buses were running.