Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 714 posts

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#331

Post by kadoban »

toolz wrote: post #308
kelseyfrog wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how. It matters when.

No, it doesn't matter when, a parent dying when a kid is 10 is no different than when the kid is 11. Let's not pretend people are avoiding covid for multiple years here, because statistically they aren't.

A parent catching covid after they are vaccinated and/or after there are better treatments is a parent far less likely to die. A parent catching covid with and without the hospitals currently being overrun is also a huge difference.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#332

Post by throwawaylinux »

323 wrote: post #281
vitro wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Times have changed, we are more sensitive now to death. In the past it was considered normal to lose 50k soldiers in a war, have 3 of your kids die as infants, ...

We have and we haven't. There's been a lot of apathy about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, interventions in Syria and Libya etc which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands probably millions of people. Millions of children dying of easily preventable diseases. If we dismiss that and say oh well we're not sensitive to deaths of others, only our fellow countrymen that's also not true. Deaths caused tobacco, obesity, alcohol, and drugs cause an entire COVID pandemic of deaths every 9 months or so, ongoing, forever (in the US). Even deaths caused by flu kill one of those 50k wars worth of people every couple of years and people are pretty blase about that. Staggering gun murder rates among black American communities (often times I see these discussed it's dismissed with "oh that's mostly gang related"!!).

So I don't think we're necessarily all that sensitive to death, although we I suppose if it's highly publicized and pushed (like war deaths or non-gang-related murders). We're much more sensitive to fear, which is perception of risk (which obviously includes mortality), but it is also very strongly driven by the amount and tone of news coverage, politicians, social media, etc.

Not to comment on the merits of the response to covid or any of these other issues or whether fear is justified, but the reason why economies were shut down for covid was because of fear not deaths.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#333

Post by ianbicking »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #280
ianbicking wrote: post #239

I'd love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it's not just the educational loss now, it's the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we're causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each da…

> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays? Stresses by the pandemic itself hav…

"I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity?"

Why the resentful reaction? Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing!

I'm proposing that the cost benefit analysis would show that we should invest more in keeping schools safely open, and doing so will probably pay off immediately without even factoring in future harm or benefit to children. It's not wrong to factor in that future, but if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus. (It's still not easy to build a consensus, but that's because our civil society is running on automatic and we struggle at making even win-win decisions)

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#334

Post by toolz »

hhmc wrote: post #330
toolz wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't matter when, a parent dying when a kid is 10 is no different than when the kid is 11. Let's not pretend people are avoiding covid for multiple years here, because statistically they aren't.

It does matter when. Outcomes are dramatically better if your local healthcare system isn't overloaded.

US staffed beds are down 7% for the year, what makes you think it's not getting worse?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#335

Post by mathgorges »

shmel wrote: post #207
mithr wrote: post #111

It's amazing to me that this article presents the "hard choices" as mostly "should we trade off harming children against harming adults ?", rather than "should we trade off not harming anyone against people's freedom to choose to go about their normal lives while unvaccinated ?" and only mentions the unvaccinated offhandedly. It's less that the US has chosen to prioritize adults over children and thus children are su…

Will it even help? In what country did it help? France mandated vaxx passports literally everywhere (pretty much like you suggest) and yet they reported, what, 270k cases just today? Why do you expect a different result in the US from the very same policy?

I believe that the comment you're replying to is meaning to imply that remote learning mandates are primarily to protect the unvaccinated (who are at a considerably greater risk of death due to COVID complications).

That is to say: if there were more vaccinated people there would be less need for remote learning since the risk calculus would be very different.

(My science isn't strong enough to take a stance here, I'm merely providing my understanding of the comment you're replying to)

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#336

Post by secondaryacct »

ajmurmann wrote: post #83
superfrank wrote: post #18

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…

"For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19." This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their children returning to badly ventilated classrooms

And what harms a child more, in a rational compromising world: part of the family dead or losing revenue due to hard sickness, or staying away from school for a while?

This writer may not have children, im terrified to leave my toddler behind, am I selfish? What is this fake dichotomy...

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#337

Post by hattmall »

ajmurmann wrote: post #83
superfrank wrote: post #18

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…

"For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19." This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their children returning to badly ventilated classrooms

There have been large districts that have been open almost the entire time. The impact between those and other communities where schools have remained closed / virtual for nearly two years is minimal. My nieces went to a lower income Atlanta area public school. In March of 2020 when they switched to virtual leaning my niece was one of 6 children who ever logged in to do virtual assignments... from her entire grade!

Some districts simply weren't able to do virtual learning, and almost every parent their was an essential worker. They did a ton of outreach over the summer distributing Chromebooks getting people internet access etc but it still had a dismal turnout and had to go to modified in person in fall of 2020 for a couple weeks and then just full time regular school after a month or so. Even then they had a record number of non-returning students, and we are talking elementary school, first and 3rd grade. They can't find these kids, the official line is that they left the district, but there's no reason so many low income families would move in a single year.

They did masks, plexiglass, spacing and all the other stuff to start with, but it made instruction nearly impossible and they had so many problems with students bringing contraband including guns to school that they basically removed anything COVID related and had to ban book bags and made lunch free for everyone and no outside food without written persmission for allergies. They sent letters pleading for parents to please remind children not to bring guns or drugs to school. Delta 8 gummies have been a major problem. Again this is a school of about 1200 students that only goes to 3rd grade.

I think those on the outside of low income communities are really under estimating how a certain segment of the population is being drastically negatively impacted. Despite my families commitment to public education by nieces were sent to private school. There are still issues in their public schools and if you go to Walmart or just ride around their are school age children everywhere all day long even though full time in person instruction has been going on since Fall of 2020.

Like I'm not even sure how some communities will recover. This is an area that already had around 70% graduation rate now the pace of instruction is significantly reduced and 2nd grade is basically a repeat of 1st grade.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#338

Post by eli_gottlieb »

>Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.

That's almost an improvement! Usually we accept more harm to children in exchange for less mild annoyance to adults.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#339

Post by disambiguation »

superfrank wrote: post #18

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…

What's the "big difference" that you take issue with?

IMO it's just as good an argument that children and their activities don't affect adults and covid mortality, so by extension opening schools shouldn't be a problem.

Sure, closing schools may "slow the spread", but what does that matter among a population that is ultimately very safe from the effects of covid?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#340

Post by khazhoux »

artursapek wrote: post #96

None of the people worried about "Omicron" could explain what the hell it is

What gives you that impression? Do you suggest the article should have started with a detailed explanation of what the Omicron variant is?
Post reply on HN