The case against masks at school • Hacker News Board

Re: The case against masks at school

#811

Post by nradov » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #555

taylodl wrote: post #304

General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors. And i…

> You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they're not having kids. I don't think this is a short-term aberration. We're a population literally in decline. I'm one of these folks. I think it's wrong to blame this solely on COVID. I won't have kids because my position in the United States is nowhere near guaranteed. I have survived three economic recessions, one of which I lost everything i…

You're under no obligation to have children but historically it has been very rare for anyone to have a "guaranteed" position. The norm of human existence has been brief periods of stability punctuated by wars, famines, epidemics, depressions, and disasters. Yet through it all our ancestors kept reproducing. Our problems today are minor by comparison.

Re: The case against masks at school

#812

Post by genewitch » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

treesknees wrote: post #806

darth_avocado wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Slightly inconvenienced” is a term I can assure you would be only used by someone who doesn’t have kids. Sure, the first six months, or even a year can be discounted as an aberration in the child development process and can be compensated for. This is year 3 with no end in sight. Do you even realize how much children develop in 3 years? A 6 year old and a 9 year old have a significant difference in cognitive capabil…

It's been almost 2 years. Your point still stands, but it has not been 3 years of lockdowns and schools closing their doors.

Louisiana schools closed in March of 2020 toward the end of the month. In August/September they were virtual learning only for a while, and it was not good, or so I was told.

Essentially, they got a "pass" for 2020 regardless of what their grades were, without ever stepping back into class or remote learning.

We also had a massive hurricane and two smaller ones that year, and that had more people at home in October than the SARS-CoV-2 virus did.

Either way, assuming other states allowed or encouraged remote learning and continue to this day, as of, say April of this year we enter year 3 of remote learning. I'm on mobile so I could be wrong, but I believe the original post said "going on/into 3 years at this point" - or at least that was how I interpreted it.

Re: The case against masks at school

#813

Post by sidlls » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

dsl wrote: post #688

brimble wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning In defense of the Karens (ew, I feel gross even typing that) remote learning absolutely was the disaster they say it was. It was really, really bad. It's hard to exaggerate how bad it was. And I mean specifically for the kids, not for the parents (it also sucked for them/us, obviously). We can probably recover well-enough from a semester or two of it, bu…

No. It wasn't that bad. School still continued. Your children are at most slightly inconvenienced during a global pandemic that has killed MILLIONS of people. All you have to do is keep your kid looking at a screen. They may need to repeat a year of school. At some point in their future your kids boss may say "oh right, you were a pandemic kid, here let me show you." It's like someone in WW2 UK complaining that the G…

This is comically out of touch with both how schooling works now and how the adult world will react to these kids' experience when they mature.

Re: The case against masks at school

#814

Post by esyir » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #618

amerkhalid wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing I wonder about is what are the affects of wearing masks at young age and not getting usual amount of exposure to viruses and other germs. I remember reading here and elsewhere that early childhood exposure to germs builds a robust immune system. While my kid doesn’t wear mask in his class but his school is following very strict cleaning procedures. So he hasn’t gotten sick as much before pandemic. Maybe…

Having young kids myself, I can say pretty confidently that kids are going to expose themselves to quite a lot of germs no matter what precautions we take, short of putting them in solitary confinement in clean rooms. So I think it's possible that precautions reduce viral and bacterial exposure, but since they don't completely stop it, immune systems may still get enough exposure to build immunity to things while sti…

This seems to run counter to the current hygiene hypothesis, which is the current mainstream scientific opinion on one aspect of allergy development. Children in developed countries are decreasingly exposed to various microorganisms, and this is thought to result in increased rates of allergic disorders.

Re: The case against masks at school

#815

Post by scarygliders » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

tjr225 wrote: post #751

rcurry wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only modern medicine was reserved for the Master Race, it would be so much simpler, and cost effective! But before you seek medical treatment we’ll just need you to fill out this questionnaire: 1. Have you ever had an alcoholic beverage? 2. Do you have a BMI greater than 18.5? 3. Have you ever eaten at The Cheesecake Factory? 4. Do you ride, run, or swim less than 40 miles per day? Please understand that your answ…

None of those things have forced us to all drastically alter our lives in the forms of economic and social lockdowns like covid has. It is a pretty silly thing to compare.

Covid didn't make economic and social lockdowns.

Governments did.

Re: The case against masks at school

#816

Post by genewitch » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:42 AM UTC

rhexs wrote: post #689

eddieplan9 wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe insurance companies should drop them (or raise their premium, just like what they do with smokers).

Should insurance companies also drop low income Americans with diets that trivially lead to heart disease? Shouldn't we, as a society, take care of those who don't know better?

Just record license plates at all fast food restaurants, probably most restaurants, really, average meal runs over 3/4ths of what an average adult male needs to maintain weight.

Liquor stores and bars, too. Ethanol is at least as bad for your body as straight sucrose/fructose.

Log time spent on Facebook, steam, Reddit, etc. Statistically inactivities.

Hell, we could probably reject 75% of Americans in the first three months without any sort of death panels being necessary, just let Google, Target, and walmart machine learn AI the rejection criteria and alert the insurers.

Re: The case against masks at school

#817

Post by caddemon » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

ericd wrote: post #580

sleepybrett wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why indoor dining rooms should still be closed. Pretending we aren't living through a pandemic that is respiratory in nature is fucking madness. Maybe if we had locked down harder for longer and treated this thing seriously in the beginning we wouldn't be almost two years into this with no end in sight.

People over here in France are generally living pretty normally. Far from madness, it's pretty nice. Sure, everyone masks up and whips out their phone for constant QR scanning, but restaurants are still pretty full, trams busses and trains as well, and people are getting together. Schools are in person. It probably helps that home tests are cheap ($25 for 5) and super easy to get. It's frankly pretty weird that these…

People bitching about restrictions in the US just want something to be mad about, because there really aren't any life-altering ones. Masks on public transit and in healthcare facilities, and in some schools (it is very variable by district). Some cities require proof of vaccination for indoor dining or large events. That's basically it, just as you describe it in France. The only things that have been cancelled lately have been due to staffing issues (e.g. concerts happen unless performers get COVID, schools are open except where the absence rate is very high there may be a brief shutdown, etc.).

I'm in the northeast, and it has been this way for at least 9 months now. Just imagine how little life was impacted by restrictions in some other areas of the US. So IMO it's the people mad about "restrictions" that should calm down with the hyperbole. Yes there are also some hyper anxious pro-lockdown people, but reality doesn't reflect their opinion anyway. I don't get what there is to be upset about.

For those that are so angry about US-based restrictions, what have you been prevented from doing in the last 9 months?

Re: The case against masks at school

#818

Post by ifyoubuildit » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #745

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else. I encourage you to read the linked study, particularly the parts about the included cohort…

I did read, when it came out. I’m quoting Dr. Benjamin Silk, one of the authors: "The evidence in this report does not change our vaccination recommendations. We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19.” The reasoning is easy: many more people do not develop as strong a response from infection as they do from vaccination, and vaccination happens on a known schedule. This is…

Maybe you can help me understand this: if what you keep saying about reliability and timing are a thing, why doesn't this data support that?

The study shows a cohort of people who had infections sometime between the advent of testing and march of 2021, and that cohort had better outcomes than the vaccinated but uninfected cohort. How can that be? What does it mean for immunity solely from vaccination to be "stronger" and "more reliable" if the outcomes are worse? What am I missing here?

For the alpha vs delta point, what does it matter if the relationship flipped? They're basically equivalent either way. The important part is that they're both much better than seronaive.

I think you might have lost track of my original response to the question that started this thread (what is a reason to not get vaccinated) where I said:

> Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated.

How are pox parties and "waiting for people to get infected" and "having people get infected randomly" relevant to the scenario that I mentioned, where people don't have the choice of getting vaccinated before they get infected, since its already happened? There's no waiting, there's no parties, there is just dealing with the cards you've been dealt. By now there should be far more of these people than straight up seronaive folks.

Similarly, "We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19", sounds like the same thing: if you need to gain protection from covid, we recommend getting it via vaccine rather than illness. That doesn't apply in this scenario, since protection has (as it seems to me we see empirically here) already been attained.

Re: The case against masks at school

#819

Post by scarygliders » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:46 AM UTC

sleepybrett wrote: post #607

Closi wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the only deaths we seem to care about those that are Covid related? If we are worried about killing people worldwide, far more people die of hunger-related causes each day, but we aren't rebuilding our entire society to save those people. But I can't see a reason why deaths from Covid are more of a tragedy than those we left to starve. Or take smoking for instance - more people die each year from smoking than…

Smoking, at least where I live is heavily taxed and regulated. You can't smoke in any building open to the public or place of employment, you can't smoke within 25ft of any entrance to any of those buildings either. Cigarettes are taxed to hell and back as well. I guess we could do that to the people unwilling to get vaxxinated. Tax them for their status and bar them from any building open to the public or place of e…

Sure thing.

We could get them to wear a yellow badge as well. /s

Re: The case against masks at school

#820

Post by a_shovel » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 2:47 AM UTC

tagoregrtst wrote: post #807

a_shovel wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This plan would kill a large portion of immunocompromised people worldwide.

Im not willing to build society around a theoretical risk for a very small population that is alive only because of artificial means. Writ large, its immoral failing Kant’s categorical imperative. Massive utilitarian fail (you got to count the lockdown suicides and others too!). Aesthetically gross (life glued indoors is not really living). Reasonable accommodations are fine, and necessary and can include: wearing a…

When you remark that they're "alive only because of artificial means", are you implying that your judgement might be different if they were, say, healthy and athletic young adults?

Are you proposing that additional suicides due to lockdowns are comparable to the number of deaths prevented by social distancing and stay-at-home orders?

Also, why are you telling me this? Find a housebound person to tell that they're "not really living". Find an immunocompromised person to assure that it's fine if you never wear a mask except when they're nearby. (Don't do either of those things.)