Closing the world's schools caused children great harm • Hacker News Board

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#101

Post by musicale » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

musicale wrote: post #96

AndrewBissell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.

I found this for Sweden: Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670 19 teachers per 100000 received intensive care through June 2020, and it's unclear if any died. Sweden's motor vehicle death rate is relatively low, 2 per 100,000 over an entire year (vs. 11 in the US), but that's over the entire population, not just teachers. The effects of sc…

In 2020 in California, some 51,000 people died from covid vs. 3,723 from traffic crash injuries.

I haven't found exact statistics for both covid and crashes in 2020, but it looks like around 20% of covid deaths are in the 24-54 age range, as are around 45% of crash deaths, for an estimated 10,000 covid deaths vs. 1675 crash deaths in that age range.

So in spite of California's high traffic crash rate, covid deaths seem to have been a much greater risk in 2020 for the 24-54 age group.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#102

Post by musicale » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

mk81 wrote: post #99

jfengel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they weren't. There are half a million COVID deaths last year. There are around 30,000 deaths a year from automobile accidents. COVID is more deadly than automobile accidents, by an order of magnitude.

>There are half a million COVID deaths last year. What a joke. Please read about excess mortality before saying stupid things. Most people who die in car crashes wouldn't have died otherwise. Huge numbers of people who died "from COVID" would have died from something else.

> Please read about excess mortality

The World Mortality Dataset: Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7852240.2/

"Summing up the excess mortality estimates across all countries in our dataset gives 3.3 million excess deaths. In contrast, summing up the official COVID-19 death counts gives only 2.1 million deaths."

Interestingly enough, their conclusion was that covid deaths are being undercounted:

"At the time of writing, the world’s official COVID-19 death count is 2.9 million. Our results suggest that the true toll may be above 4.5 million."

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#103

Post by AndrewBissell » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 12:40 AM UTC

kurthr wrote: post #98

AndrewBissell wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would be accurate, if only those school age children didn't have older teachers or parents. Then this should have been handled on a case-by-case basis. What share of families actually have an elderly or otherwise at-risk relative living at home with them? What share of teachers were actually in a high risk category? These questions were easily answerable by the middle of 2020 but all such nuance was thrown out…

Yearly flu vaccines are available for elderly and high risk populations. Typically all personnel (medical, orderly, food service) in hospitals are required to take flu vaccines (as well a TB and others) every year. Not available with COVID until Jan-March. With a death rate (using ICU intervention and the latest treatments) death rates in developed countries are still 5-15x higher than typical flus, and hospitalizati…

> Hospitals don't normally run out of respirators and morgue space. These are all well reported and documented.

I'm surprised people still believe the whole "overloaded hospitals" thing, it's a canard driven by selective reporting from a few very under-resourced jurisdictions like Lombardy and low-income NYC. Overall hospital occupancy was lower through 2020 than it was in prior years because people were scared away from hospitals and staff were furloughed.

The delta variant is a totally unsurprising development in the evolution of a virus: more transmissible and less lethal.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#104

Post by AndrewBissell » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 12:58 AM UTC

musicale wrote: post #102

mk81 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are half a million COVID deaths last year. What a joke. Please read about excess mortality before saying stupid things. Most people who die in car crashes wouldn't have died otherwise. Huge numbers of people who died "from COVID" would have died from something else.

> Please read about excess mortality The World Mortality Dataset: Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7852240.2/ "Summing up the excess mortality estimates across all countries in our dataset gives 3.3 million excess deaths. In contrast, summing up the official COVID-19 death counts gives only 2.1 million deaths." Interestingly enough, t…

lol so in a year where tons of the developing world was forced into food insecurity as a byproduct of Covid response and lockdowns, they want to attribute every excess death to "Covid"?

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#105

Post by HKH2 » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 4:15 AM UTC

HonestOp001 wrote: post #85

GVIrish wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go one step further. We wouldn't have had to close schools for so long or at all if we had responded aggressively to Covid before the outbreak got large. South Korea largely controlled their outbreak without lockdowns because they aggressively tested, contact traced, and quarantined in the early days of the pandemic. Today, South Korea has something like 1/300th as many deaths even though it has about 1/5th t…

There were intimations at closing down the border from President Trump, howls of racism were made. Nancy Pelosi went down to Chinatown and asked what was the president afraid of. The president tried to take action, but politics was and is involved. We have a report from last week saying that scientists were afraid to speak up because of fear for saying orange man bad was correct. If you believe these super simple arg…

Pelosi flouted the lockdown too by getting her hair done at a salon that wasn't allowed to open.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#106

Post by isolli » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

jhayward wrote: post #73

iforgotpassword wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This yes. Though, I'm still mad that they vaccinated old people first instead of children so that they could return to school sooner. Old people are retired and can stay at home. Yes it sucks, they're lonely yada yada but ffs they already lived their lives, why should the next generation botch their edication just so the old people can travel again sooner?

Please give an example of a nation which was highly successful in isolating old/at-risk people during COVID, while letting the epidemic run wild.

Florida

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#107

Post by isolli » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 9:10 AM UTC

seasoup wrote: post #30

This article doesn't take into account that maybe the kids didn't all get sick because closing the schools helped stop the spread of COVID in kids. It's like saying I exercised and lost weight so clearly that exercise was a waste of time, I would have lost weight anyway.

You need to look at other countries. Sweden kept their schools open, and not only did not a single child die, but the prevalence among teachers was no greater than in the general population.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#108

Post by isolli » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 9:13 AM UTC

jacob171714 wrote: post #53

Um, children can still spread covid. Even if they have a low chance of dying ignoring that its not binary and you can have long term health effects even if you don't die they can make family members and teachers/staff sick and get them killed. Children are really good at spreading illness.

No, you should stop spreading misinformation. Children are micro-spreaders. In countries that kept schools open, teachers have not fallen ill at a higher rate than other adults in the community.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#109

Post by isolli » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

JoeCianflone wrote: post #36

Oy. This article is silly. In March of 2020 when schools started to close we did not know the full impact of COVID. decisions were made with the best knowledge AT THE TIME. Also we still don’t know the full impact of COVID. This article has a sample size of 1 year. As a parent of 3 with a child who started Kindergarten in September and did the entire year virtually—I’d rather deal with the fallout of having to “catch…

Closing schools in March 2020 was acceptable. Closing them after summer 2020 was ridiculous, as the data made clear. Many countries chose to keep schools open (e.g. Switzerland) and demonstrated that it was safe, not to mention the right thing to do. Your comment looks like it was written in March 2020.