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

The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

841–850 of 1001 posts

Re: The case against masks at school

#841

Post by brohoolio »

I’m sure this comment will be buried but I’ll talk about my experiences. Our school has a mask policy and transmission in the classroom has been almost nonexistent.

The district north of us has no mask policy and it’s been a shit show. My friend is a teacher there and they don’t bother with close contacts or tracing. Basically everyone got covid and they had to shut the schools down because so many teachers were sick.

This has been while the hospitals have been full of covid cases this fall and winter. Kids might not get real sick, but it infects a bunch of family, who can end up in the hospitals.

The time to roll back the mask mandates is either at the end of this school year or when we have widespread availability of the Pfizer drug paxlivod and folks can get ahold of it and take it when they have covid.

Re: The case against masks at school

#842

Post by xedrac »

baskethead wrote: post #722
dsl wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you think it wasn't that bad, you must be from a privileged household, and haven't paid attention to the data. Children, especially low-income children, have been devastated by remote learning. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/online-l...

Remote learning was a disaster for my family, and we have great internet with many computers, and a father who could troubleshoot all the problems, and tutor them some of the time. I cannot imagine what it was like for low income families.

Re: The case against masks at school

#843

Post by beerandt »

reanimus wrote: post #648
pcmoney wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How Does an individual choice to get vaccinated or not impact others? Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid. They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid. Thus the decision to vax or not is clearly a personal choice.

> Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid. They don't stop it, but they do decrease your chances of acquiring it and they do reduce the viral load you shed. > They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid. So they prevent you from taking up a hospital bed, exposing the people who have to care for you to COVID and preventing other non-COVID eme…

All these things will just select for more virulent, more severe, more contagious forms of the virus. And extend the lifetime of the pandemic.

You might as well be telling people to take antibiotics 'just in case' because a partially resistant strain of something is going around.

That partially resistant strain won't be "partially" resistant for long.

Re: The case against masks at school

#844

Post by tagoregrtst »

a_shovel wrote: post #820
tagoregrtst wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "no…

No, my judegement wouldn't be different if a similar number of “healthy, athletic” were somehow pegged as high COVID risk (perhaps a genetic marker?). What forms my opinion are their small numbers. Its easy to cater to the exception, but exceptions make bad generalities.

The “artificial” refers to point that immunocompromised people already (justly!) have greatly extended lives because society has expanded a lot of resources on research and development for their care. These people are our sisters and brothers and should be taken care of, and have been to a large extent (otherwise they’d be dead).

They do have a claim to our assistance, and Ill gladly pay more taxes for better programs, but they don't have a claim to have society turned upside down on their behalf

Lockdowns are not reasonable accommodation.

“ 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?”

Your original point was about immunocompromised, a small group. I gave one example of people that are being killed by lockdowns. Add deferred cancer patients, etc.

Anyway, today if you’re not immunocompromised and you’re still dying of COVID you probably made the choice not to get vaccinated. Which is fine, btw.

“ Also, why are you telling me this? ”

You want to lock me up in my room like a truant schoolboy.

“ Find a housebound person to tell that they're "not really living".”

They’d agree with the general sentiment. Certainly its harder to grasp at life’s meaning when your only companion is TV.

My very independent 95 year old grandma who has been housebound for two years due to COVID is uncharacteristically depressed. Which is why instead of a pseudo-philosophical talk like we’re having she’d probably appreciate it more if I took her for a walk in the mountainside (alas, she lives 10 000 km away).

Perhaps because I cant be there for my grandma, next week we’re planning on taking my housebound ex-neighbors for a trip outside the city. They’re very lovely but they’re too old to drive and housebound to a large extent. I’m sure they agree with me about lockdowns.

“Find an immunocompromised person to assure that it's fine if you never wear a mask except when they're nearby.”

Does telling a friend with a kidney transplant that my kid goes to school without a mask count?

Re: The case against masks at school

#845

Post by adolph »

dsl wrote: post #414
adolph wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid. That claim is misinformation, please edit and delete. Medicine as a field is very broad and plenty of other conditions are being treated.

At your dentist or plastic surgery clinic, sure. Hospitals everywhere are short on nurses and anything that can be delayed still is. A friend was recently transfered to another hospital to give birth because the maternity ward was unstaffed.

"short on nurses" != "only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid"

Re: The case against masks at school

#846

Post by adamcstephens »

lovich wrote: post #655
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, there no way to check someone’s vaccination status. There are fake cards, there are people who got vaccinated before government databases, there are people who got vaccinated without documentation, there are people who got documentation from medical people who didn’t actually perform the vaccination. Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a…

> Secondly, it is massively against a breach of ethics to intentionally withhold care from people because of a moral judgement. I don’t think framing it as a moral judgement is correct. We don’t have the capacity in our medical system to keep this up forever, and the electorate has signaled they don’t want to pay for increasing the systems capacity. Cutting off the purposely unvaccinated is just triage

Sure, the electorate has thus far been unwilling to increase the capacity. At the same time the private medical facilities have been underpaying, overworking, and under-resourcing our hospitals. They close rural hospitals because they're not profitable /enough/. We could have more beds, and happier staff, but then the profits would be lower.

Re: The case against masks at school

#847

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

GiorgioG wrote: post #823
gilbetron wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong. Deeply wrong. I respect HN's rules, so I won't reply as I really want to. There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year. Have others had it worse in history? Sure. But that's like saying if you get run over by a Prius, it doesn't matter because people that got hit by a truck had it worse. And for all that keeping kids at home, we really didn't gain anything.…

You're wrong. Deeply wrong. There is no deep psychological damage. Children are not fragile snowflakes - they're adaptable, resilient little humans. That's why as a species we continue to thrive. Stop inventing new problems that don't exist - there's already enough to go around.

My wife used to teach reading to elementary aged children with reading comprehension issues. And she found that you cannot teach children how to make letter sounds via Zoom. They cannot see, hear, and experience the inflections and mouth/tongue movements required.

The result is these children don't learn how to read. And studies have shown for ages that if a child is not a proficient reader by grade 3, they will likely never be proficient, ever.

That's just one of many costs. We're leaving these children behind.

Re: The case against masks at school

#848

Post by baby »

alsetmusic wrote: post #611
perardi wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and? The hospital case load is overwhelmingly, screamingly, massively dominated by the elderly unvaccinated. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/... Given the extremely contagious nature of Omicron, what plausible way do we have to prevent these individuals from getting COVID and using hospital space? And don't say masking up kids—because if they haven't gotten vaccinated, then why do you…

There’s a simple solution, but good luck getting everyone on board with it: stop treating the willingly unvaxxed in hospitals. Only vaxxed patients and medically-ineligible unvaxxed patients get treatment. If you can’t do this minuscule thing to help society then society can’t be turned on its head to help you.

That sounds very unethical.

Re: The case against masks at school

#849

Post by [deleted] »

monksy wrote: post #765
jtbayly wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens if you fail 50% of the students for 3 years in a row? It turns into a disaster.

You come up with a plan to identify the problem, you find a way to tutor them, etc. There are many ways to help those who want to be helped. If they don't want to be helped.. well that's not a new problem.

[deleted]

Re: The case against masks at school

#850

Post by wallacoloo »

caddemon wrote: post #825
wallacoloo wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i love this viewpoint because your behavior is so similar to what i see among 90% of my friends, it seems logically consistent, and you seem to have arrived at it from your own reasoning/volition. and then we have the mandates. presumably, your behavior is the same with v.s. without them. as is the case for most people i know. with the exception of my one friend who was building a japanese-style coin-operated 24/7 un…

"a year into the pandemic" vaccines were literally just becoming available to the general public. Mandates pre-vaccine were a totally different ball game than mandates now, as far as what would be reasonable in the interest of public safety. I also find it hard to believe that Aurora was requiring strip mall stores to check vaccine cards before any vaccine was even fully FDA approved, and I can't find any evidence of…

an arcade is an entertainment venue. entertainment venues (along with bars, restaurants) are required to check vax cards (i believe that’s a WA requirement, as opposed to a local requirement). i was being approximate when i said “a year”: more precisely i think the vax card mandate was sometime in June? July? a few months after the vaccines themselves had widespread availability.
Post reply on HN