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The case against masks at school

theatlantic.com

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Re: The case against masks at school

#991

Post by ya_throw »

joshuamorton wrote: post #986
ya_throw wrote: post #975

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now there's where we get into interesting territory. The UK significantly relaxed regulations around March 2020, and basically made it very easy to put "Covid" on death certificates. The requirement for a coroner's report in the case of a novel disease (ie, Covid) was also dropped, as well as the requirement to do a Covid test (or even certify the death in person). [1] As a result, it will never be possible to know h…

So can you explain something to me: We know how many people die of non-covid viral induced pneumonia in a normal year (and in a bad year). Most of it is caused by the flu. We also know that covid policies have demonstrably reduced flu rates to some of the lowest ever over the past few years. So what other cause of viral induced pneumonia do you suppose is the one killing everyone?

I already did. We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked.

I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?

Re: The case against masks at school

#992

Post by totony »

perardi wrote: post #384
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…

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…

>Oh, and by the way: I have plenty of sympathy towards health care workers. I am dating a nurse. I have doctors, nurses, and paramedics as friends. I have extreme empathy towards them, and full seething burning anger towards the unvaccinated septuagenarians ruining our health care system. And the rest of our economy while they're at it.

Instead of blaming unvaxxed people, you should blame the government for not having more capacity and not planning on how to handle surge in demand for hospitals. We're lucky covid is so tame, this could have been a crazy disaster.

This rhetoric where we try to divide the population is insanely toxic when the fault should be placed on the ruling class for mishandling both the planning, the communication and the handling of the pandemic.

Re: The case against masks at school

#993

Post by closeparen »

dsl wrote: post #406
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…

I know multiple households where the initial infection vector was the kids. Grandpa might be stupid and refuse the vaccine, but keeping little Billy from becoming a carrier lessens the hospital load. If screaming Karens are going to insist on in person learning, we need to mask test and vaccinate in the schools.

Until when? What’s the endpoint? Children are little bundles of disease; it has always been and will always be strictly better for public health to prevent children from interacting with each other. But what kind of world is that?

Re: The case against masks at school

#994

Post by joshuamorton »

ya_throw wrote: post #991
joshuamorton wrote: post #986

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So can you explain something to me: We know how many people die of non-covid viral induced pneumonia in a normal year (and in a bad year). Most of it is caused by the flu. We also know that covid policies have demonstrably reduced flu rates to some of the lowest ever over the past few years. So what other cause of viral induced pneumonia do you suppose is the one killing everyone?

I already did. We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked. I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?

> We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked.

What do you think causes viral pneumonia? If you get in a car crash and bleed out and die, they put both "massive hemorrhage" and "vehicle accident" on your death certificate. If you die of covid-induced viral pneumonia, they put both on your death certificate, because the covid is what caused the pneumonia. You're trying to draw a distinction where there isn't one. Deaths from covid-induced viral pneumonia are deaths from covid, in exactly the same way that deaths from car-crash induced massive bleeding are deaths from a car crash.

> I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?

See https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm#anchor_16336269..., notably the heading "Are there other metrics that can be used to compare the 2020-2021 flu season with past seasons?", which shows a table. That table compares the 2019 and 2020 seasons. Essentially they tested around the same number of specimens and the incidence of influenza was 1000x lower.

This is probably the most accurate datapoint, other things match up (such as reported hospitalizations also being ~100x lower than the year prior) but those are more prone to accidental misclassification of flu-as-covid. You can't really screw up a test in the same way. But generally speaking, they were low enough that the CDC couldn't actually calculate the likely impact, it was too low to make reasonable predictions about. This year it's higher, but still 10x less than a normal year.

(the reason for this is also straightforward: covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission)

Re: The case against masks at school

#995

Post by ya_throw »

joshuamorton wrote: post #994
ya_throw wrote: post #991

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already did. We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked. I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?

> We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked. What do you think causes viral pneumonia? If you get in a car crash and bleed out and die, they put both "massive hemorrhage" and "vehicle accident" on your death certificate. If you die of covid-induced viral pneumonia, they put bot…

>What do you think causes viral pneumonia?

Clue's in the name. A respiratory virus, of which there are many.

>covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission

Apparently common colds and the like are even more contagious than Covid-19, as the country where I live has had a mask mandate since September 2020 and I have been ill numerous times with regular sniffles and colds.

I take your point with the data you provided (although there's no information on sampling methods and thus the statistical significance of those numbers. We also don't have a similar data point for the UK), but it's a stretch to attribute it to masks and social control measures. I'm not in the US, but I don't think that policies have changed much over the past year - yet flu is back this winter.

Re: The case against masks at school

#996

Post by gilbetron »

taylodl wrote: post #936
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.…

Here's the thing - my wife works for the school system, I have 3 kids, and I'm involved in kids activities. The "shutdown" happened in the Spring of 2020. In the Fall of 2020 all the sports leagues resumed as normal and all the kid activities resumed as normal. The schools were partially open and they went to fully open in the Spring of 2021. In total there were 3-4 months where the kids were "locked up" in their hom…

My son had a total of 6 days of in-person school for the '20-'21 school year. All after, in-person school activities were canceled the entire year. Almost all sports were canceled as well. The summer of 2020 all summer camps were canceled except for a handful of virtual camps. This past summer, there were a handful of camps available, fortunately.

School is in person this school year, although there have been about 10 virtual days so far for his school, all have been in 2022 because of Omicron making staffing really tough. There are a handful of after school activities, but many are canceled. Sports are largely back to normal.

Re: The case against masks at school

#997

Post by Closi »

a_shovel wrote: post #672
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…

I do believe we should rebuild global society to prevent death from hunger. I don't know how to do that, but it's a thing we need to prioritize more. When I see people minimizing COVID, I wonder if they've somehow avoided seeing an excess death graph even once for the past year-and-a-half.

> When I see people minimizing COVID, I wonder if they've somehow avoided seeing an excess death graph even once for the past year-and-a-half.

In the UK where I am from, I’m not entirely sure you would come to that conclusion - you would probably find that the first two waves caused significant excess deaths but the impact of the last wave has been much lower (probably from a combination of multiple factors).

Uk government data below, see “all persons” tab:

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiYmUwNmFhMjYtNGZhYS00N...

Looking at the (fairly low) excess deaths only tells half the story though - you also have to look at quality of living, which is undoubtedly lower in my view.

Re: The case against masks at school

#998

Post by taylodl »

gilbetron wrote: post #996
taylodl wrote: post #936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing - my wife works for the school system, I have 3 kids, and I'm involved in kids activities. The "shutdown" happened in the Spring of 2020. In the Fall of 2020 all the sports leagues resumed as normal and all the kid activities resumed as normal. The schools were partially open and they went to fully open in the Spring of 2021. In total there were 3-4 months where the kids were "locked up" in their hom…

My son had a total of 6 days of in-person school for the '20-'21 school year. All after, in-person school activities were canceled the entire year. Almost all sports were canceled as well. The summer of 2020 all summer camps were canceled except for a handful of virtual camps. This past summer, there were a handful of camps available, fortunately. School is in person this school year, although there have been about 1…

That's awful - especially at the start of 2021 when we fully understood the vectors and how to manage the transmission of the virus. Summer Camps in 2020 really struggled with sick staff. Even camps that did open had to close due to high rates of infection. Summer 2021 was a completely different story thanks to the vaccine. It's been really frustrating to see the people clamoring for a return to normalcy are taking action to prolong that return to normalcy.

Hope your son is doing okay.

Re: The case against masks at school

#999

Post by pcmoney »

sjg007 wrote: post #960
pcmoney wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is VERY different than polio/small pox. We have no chance with current medical tech of eliminating a highly mutagenic coronavirus. Even if we did the cost/benefit of doing so would not be adequate.

Mutagenic describes a mutagen which is something that mutates DNA.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4934755/

Re: The case against masks at school

#1000

Post by GiorgioG »

pcmoney wrote: post #867
GiorgioG wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you talked to kids? Seen them? This has deeply and possibly irrevocably damaged many if not most of them.

Seeing as I have 2 kids and plenty of kids live in my neighborhood, none of them are walking around like damaged zombies - it's hard to take you seriously.
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