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Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

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Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#171
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yes, I know, confirmation bias cuts both ways Indeed. I suspect people who are adamant for more aggressive lockdowns are those who have good WFH options and good job security.

... and who ought to be advocating for better social safety nets for everyone. I feel a lot of the "get back to normal" fighters are failing to imagine a sensible social safety net that might enable a lot more people to remain home/locked down.

That's an easy allegation to throw out. Someone can advocate for a social safety net and still have bills due next month.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#172
post #125
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t know an infinite number of things. You can’t make decisions based on unknowns. You have to make decision based of evidence, not the lack of evidence.

>You can’t make decisions based on unknowns. What? Of course you can. We know there's potential long term health effects in adults who get COVID-19, there's risk children face the same ones. We don't know how severe or how likely children are to get them (much like in adults), but we can absolutely decide not to take the risk anyway, and keep kids out of schools.

I should have said that you can’t logically make a decision based on unknowns.

Certainly many people make all kinds of decision based on irrational fear.

“We know there’s potential long term health effects” — without a percentage qualifier of how many people are affected, and a qualifier on the magnitude of the effect, this statement is utterly meaningless. There’s “potential long term health effects” (of some unspoken magnitude, to some unspoken percentage of the population) to everything.

“We don’t know how severe or how likely children”.... hundreds of thousands of children have tested positive for COVID. What we know for sure is that most will never know they ever even had it, and of those that do, less than 1% require hospitalization. 10-24 year olds are about 25x more likely to die of suicide than of COVID. (6,500 vs 175)

One thing we absolutely do know for sure is that social isolation will increase the suicide and overdose number in older kids. We also know that detected cases of children abuse and neglect are way down since lockdowns started, and it’s not because kids are being abused or neglected less. We know many kids primary source of good nutrition comes from school lunches. The evidence all points to closing schools being more dangerous for children than opening them. Particularly for children in low income households.

There may be an argument for closing schools, but it’s one that sacrifices children‘s social, mental, and economic wellbeing for the sake of potentially lower transmission among other truly at-risk populations.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#173
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can’t make decisions based on unknowns. What? Of course you can. We know there's potential long term health effects in adults who get COVID-19, there's risk children face the same ones. We don't know how severe or how likely children are to get them (much like in adults), but we can absolutely decide not to take the risk anyway, and keep kids out of schools.

Keeping kids out of school _is_ a decision, and not an easy one when having kids at home means the parents can't work.

This keeps being trotted out but is actually a solved problems. For those situations where both parents have to work and both have to work out of home the schools can stay open and give a limited number of pupils regular lessons.

That way you cut down tremendously on a potential vector of transmission with as limited an impact as possible. We've done this here in NL successfully and in other countries besides.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#174
post #26

The study doesn't say how many of the respondents still have jobs. If I have a steady job, then of course I will worry more about my kids -- because I don't don't have to worry about the bills! If you have kids you will worry about their safety. If you lost your job, you may still worry about their safety more than your bills, since you know that the bills can always be dealt with later. This survey seems quite flawe…

[deleted]

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#175
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, a lot of countries have far more centralized authority to figure things out.

Actually neither Japan nor Germany have a central govt authority similar to the CDC, and they are far outperforming the US response.

> Actually neither Japan nor Germany have a central govt authority similar to the CDC, and they are far outperforming the US response.

But Germany, at least, has functioning nonspecialist central government authorities that are trying to do the right thing. Even if the US government has the right kind of specialists, it's dysfunctional as a central authority.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#176

I've personally heard from several tens of parents that they are primarily worried about the economic and social affects of all these so-called safety measures governments and communities are taking. Just because it's easy to measure cases and deaths and hard to measure lost human connection, depression, children being left in environments of neglect, delayed/paused innovation and economic growth, etc. doesn't mean t…

> And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren ...

Sigh. I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out for you and your ilk.

There are other people out there beyond your grandparents. Regardless of how you and they personally feel — I don’t want to die just because your personal definition of “living” (hello, a few months of lockdown or similar is still alive) facilitates disease spread. I AM NOT WILLING TO DIE PREMATURELY just so your kids can avoid going a few months without physically engaging peers, or just so you all can avoid having to take simple personal precautions when outside.

Lest anyone accuses me of not understanding without raising children- I am literally holding my sleeping 5 month old as I type this.

It’s not about being told to be afraid of everything (where does this idea come from? literally no one is advocating that). It’s about responding to existing, real dangers with appropriate measures.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#177
post #169

I am going to sound like a looney, but bear with me. The mortality rate of Covid isn't that much higher than the seasonal flu for those aged under 50. (most children or their parents). It is far lower for those under the age of 30. Assuming 200k Americans have died from Covid, current stats put the number of deaths under the age of 18 at 70/200k and 18-44 at 6k/200k. In other words, you child is more likely to die of…

Besides cherry picking your stats you are making a giant mistake: COVID-19 has not yet run its course and any and all stats are subject to continuous change.

Your PS covers a lot of ground that invalidates your previous writing, what you call 'side effects' are normally called just 'effects', if a disease does not kill you what remains are the symptoms, some of which can last a lifetime. You don't just gloss over that if those are as severe as they can be in the case of COVID-19, it's not that you end up sneezing once per day or something innocent like that.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#178

I can’t believe how dismissive people are about people who are worried about their finances during this. So many false equivalencies being made about bankruptcy being preferable to death. I am not one of these people that is cavalier about COVID, it’s a real danger and the long term damage to the body is just being discovered. But we all know for sure what the long term health effects of poverty are. Whether you like…

The US implemented essentially an entire year of forbearance on federally backed mortgages (6 months automatically, and another 6 months for filing a form with no documentation). Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer. There are still more initial unemployment claims than there were at the peak of the 2008 financ…

>Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer.

Only if you're lucky enough to live in one of the progressive states, Louisiana has already started evicting people. In Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has already released documents saying that local governments can't stop or delay evictions.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#179

I can’t believe how dismissive people are about people who are worried about their finances during this. So many false equivalencies being made about bankruptcy being preferable to death. I am not one of these people that is cavalier about COVID, it’s a real danger and the long term damage to the body is just being discovered. But we all know for sure what the long term health effects of poverty are. Whether you like…

the problem is not people who are worried about their finances - that is understandable. The problem is people who want to put finances over covid, mostly because covid requires certain measures in order to be eradicated (objectively) whereas an economy can (at the very least temporarily) be switched to a mode where people do not have to worry about their finances (such as UBI or a command economy). What makes at least me angry is people who are pretending that the way our economy functions right now has to be how it functions in every situation. It comes off as dogmatic and religious thinking.

Re: Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills

#180
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have no idea what the long term effects of this disease are, or how they depend on severity.

We don’t know an infinite number of things. You can’t make decisions based on unknowns. You have to make decision based of evidence, not the lack of evidence.

We absolutely can. We could be wrong and dead and we could be wrong and not dead. I'll pick the latter every time.
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