Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills
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> They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage
These two statements seem to be in conflict? I think your 2nd statement means to say "They're 1/5th as worried about their mortgage than they are about the possible deaths of their family members."
PolitiFact tried to examine claims from the LA mayor and health director that: "it’s highly likely given the increased numbers that we’re seeing that some of this is in fact people who may have been in a crowded situation at one of the protests where there was spread."
They concluded:
> there’s not enough data to draw any definitive conclusions ...
> Medical experts say the protests likely contributed somewhat, but so did family gatherings [and] the reopening of businesses
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jul/21/how-much-did-...
A Marion County Florida Sheriff ordered that staff and visitors to his office cannot wear masks. That order is uncivilized behavior. The state governor should have removed him from power. People speeding on roads get sanctioned more, for being less of a menace to society.
At least the kooks who wear masks to have Zoom conference calls aren't subjecting anyone to risk their health or life.
Certain people apparently do.
Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years.
The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?
NZ is seeing what has just happened in VN only days before and acting on it because they know what will happen if they don't.
NZ leadership has chosen this illogical and self-destructive path because they don't understand risk or data or, apparently, economics.
Edit: I can't reply due to rate limiting, but you can't just dismiss the resurgences of cases in Europe because the absolute number of cases is small now - this is exponential growth with a rather alarming exponent, and that always starts out small until it isn't. Remember, it takes the same amount of time to go from say 1 to 2 cases per 10k as from 15 to 30.
It isn’t binary. All economies will take a hit. But if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better.
And if there is any seasonality at all the Fall could get quite a lot worse and make the economy worse than it already is.
As a counterexample to that claim, the Euro zone GDP fell 12.1% in the second quarter. That's an annualized rate of 40%, even worse than the widely reported annualized drop of 33% in the US.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/euro-zone-gdp-q2-2020-as-cor...
There is a sliding scale here, of course. If we locked everybody in their houses, we could get the covid numbers to 0, but it would also completely destroy our economy, and obviously would result in substantial loss of life due to the effects of poverty. What the US has done instead is to take a hit on covid in service of economics. So far it seems to be working (with regards to GDP, I mean.)
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.
But the Republican party is merely the political wing of a certain aristocratic mind set which includes conservatism: rich people are better people, it is a fact. There should be either no public services or inferior versions compared to the free market, because that's how rich people are rewarded for being inherently superior people - they can afford to buy more and better things. This properly includes education, health care, clean air and water, and justice. These things are not rights. They are products you buy.
It's similar to prosperity theology. The closer to god, the more you are rewarded. The more rewarded you are, the closer to the deity you must be. Monarchies, feudalism, and Mandate of Heaven.
We have the technology to revive an economy - remember, we're on an all time stock rally & going higher.
At least from the NZ example (or Canada), it is clear that a war footing on the pandemic does bring back demand - the supply is easier to revive.
The economy is made of people, even if the entire supply side is automated.
Though if you automate both sides, you can end up with a two-body simulation of a high GDP economy[1].
Economic growth in and of itself might be better, but how much of the population sees the result of that? basic commodoties like housing and social wellbeing/services are worse, while most of the economic growth seems to be stuck at the top.
Also, having massive growth is simply not sustainable for our planet.
Dire change is needed, the question is what? It seems most major forces in politics are stuck in maintaining the status quo and not thinking long term. Change from that system would be hard to realise, especially in the complete gridlock of american politics.
I thought we were flattening the curve...
What makes you think this can be eradicated? Source?
The most likely outcome for this is that it becomes endemic, another variant of the common cold, like the several others that already exist.
The 1968 flu killed 1-4 million people, in a world with half as many people. This is nothing unusual, diseases happen, part of being human, shocking news headlines to the contrary.
> The first thing to remember is that we haven't been successful at eradicating many viruses at all. Really the lone exception is smallpox, but many of these viruses exist not only in the human population but in animal populations.
> And then the expectation I have is that this virus will actually become the next common cold coronavirus. What we don't know with these common cold coronaviruses is if they went through a similar transition period.
> So, say something like OC43, which is a common cold coronavirus that was originally from cows. It's been historically reported that there was an outbreak associated with the transition of this virus from cows to humans that was very severe disease, and then after a few years, the virus became just the common cold.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/09/900490301/covid-19-may-never-...
We have a bunch of people who are rightfully very worried about their finances, but we also have very many people who are quite certain that their finances are going to be okay while other people will get kicked in the nuts by the downturn resulting in poverty and bankruptcies, so they have other priorities that they are worrying about - such as infection and schooling.
If 1 in 5 people can't pay their mortgage, that's an economic catastrophe - but even if such a catastrophe is upcoming it makes all sense if the other 4 in 5 people wouldn't be worried about paying their mortgage.
Worried about the economy? You probably only want to get rich on the stock market. Worried you might lose your job? You probably have one of those shit-jobs we've been hearing about, no big loss there. Worried remote schooling might affect children's long term development? Schools are useless anyway. Worried that art and culture like concerts, museums, theatres might disappear? We don't need them, just watch operas on Youtube and browse pictures of famous paintings. Travel? Just go to StreetView.
It's scary how quick people are to let go of elements of society and civilisation, some of which took centuries to build. Yes, nothing is perfect but these attitudes are not working towards implementing something better.
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.
You see this kind of vague claim online all the time when it comes to COVID but with no actual data.
What are the actual risks of a child going to the hospital as a result of COVID infection? How does that compare to other risks that you regularly expose your kids to?
As we've seen that coronavirus immunity is enhanced with exposure to other coronaviruses, and innate immune system function, it appears children should not be isolated. By this rationale, they shouldn't even be wearing masks.
Compared to the flu, just looking at the proportion of children who are diagnosed positive cases, children would be about equally as likely to require hospitalization, but this likely overstates the hospitalization risk of COVID.
In terms of death rates, flu is significantly more deadly (at least 10x more deadly) in children 0-14, and about equally as deadly for ages 15-24. [1]
[1] - https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/07/14/coronavirus-covid-death...
Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
Sounds like you're using a proxy result (viral load instead of shedding or actual transmission) in a single unnamed paper to make a pretty strong assertion?
But that's one of the biggest unknowns. While children are at far lower risk of dying, according to data we have, we still don't know about long term health effects and we're finding out new information all the time. And much of that new information doesn't seem great.
For instance, MMR II was approved in 1978. How do we know that people who were given MMR II won't spontaneously die at the age of 60? Or perhaps to bring it closer to another problem, how do we know they won't spontaneously develop Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of 60? There hasn't been time. It's a pretty novel vaccine.
It also doesn't have to be a universal effect for it to generate effectively universal concern among parents. If it turned out that 1/20 kids suffered permanent kidney damage due to infection, most parents would keep their kids home. Look at the stats on school shootings and note that we pointlessly traumatize kids to assuage the concerns of parents. That's your figure of merit: that's how powerful the long-term C19 effect would need to be to change the behavior of the median parent.
* It is more likely that MMR has few significant long-term health effects than if COVID-19 does
* COVID-19 effects are unlikely to be binary outcome
* Effects need not be universal for them to affect parental behaviour
However, none of that agreement is important to the discussion I was hoping to have. My comment was solely on the epistemology. I suspect you also use the same methods I was talking about in my previous comment.
If that is the case, then perhaps some other day we can argue about what the priors are. If we're good about it, we'll end up with the Aumann Agreement Theorem (+ corollaries) result, and rapidly agree (through likely both of us shifting our priors as we exchange information).
I think we have no disagreement and am happy to conclude this here.
But if I had to guess, you're probably pro-MMR-2 (as am I), so the question is what epistemology permits that view?
For COVID-19 we are still guessing at most of this, hopefully the long term effects are not too bad and those effects of contracting the disease will get reduced over time.
But I would definitely not rule out some shocker long term effect at this stage that we are unaware of, especially not when taking into account developing organisms such as children, where effects can stay hidden for a long time.
There are some things we don't have high certainty on, but our epistemology would be faulty if we ignored how other coronaviruses behave, just like it would be faulty if we ignored how other attenuated viruses behave when we examine if MMR-2 will cause instadeath at age 60.
Others have mentioned this, but just for emphasis: you do not know that. Nor does anyone else. Repeating it is irresponsible, and you should stop doing that.
There have been a lot of lessons the epidemic can teach us. But one big one is that magical thinking is still accepted as a substitute for reason by a frightening number of people, and that's before you get to the outright grifters.
We don’t know what, if any, the long term consequences will be. But the short term death risk for young children appears to be minimal.
This is one of those conversations where message board logic stands a good chance of taking us far away from how real-world humans would reason.
Meanwhile, the thought of sending my kids back to school in two weeks has me sleepless (again). We have already seen different evidence surface in the last month or so but zero adjustment to the school plans. As much as I would like to approach this all in a dispassionate and rational way the parent 'module' in me tells me in no uncertain terms that I'm doing something irresponsible by not standing up for them more forcefully and trusting the experts on this.
I'm also sure things are easier when you have a parent to lean on for support, when a crisis comes up. (Lots of those on the horizon)...i'd rather be here to help them w/ that.
So part of me feels me living is important to their survival (mine are <4 yrs old - 2 boys, I'm 40). So, it might be safer and less traumatic if they stayed in the dorm, assuming they're healthy and have higher chances, and assuming they're good at social distancing / masking up to keep viral load down.
It'd be a hard decision to weigh, but I'd probably have a family council discuss the pros and cons and call a vote or something.
Basically commute or dorms, they can still catch it. At least in dorms maybe they don't infect older more vulnerable people or family members. Honestly, I'd probably teach them to code and say, hey work w/ dad till this is over then go to college :).
Did you ever think that some people with kids may not be in the position to work from home and have to go to work every day? I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics where a large percentage of Americans don’t have $400 in savings.
I also bet you have a job that allows you to work from home.
How many households are led by a single parent and/or two parents who have to go to a job where they can’t work from home?
I am not going to sit here tsk tsking all of the people who aren’t as fortunate as I am. Not only do I have a job where I can work from home. We were also in the financial position that we had the option of my wife not going back to work in the school system and just saying it wasn’t worth the risk.
Yes, did you read the whole comment thread before asking that question? Because I specifically addressed it in another comment hours ago.
> I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics where a large percentage of Americans don’t have $400 in savings.
Yes, and as I've often said in other places and here as well: America is a country that has serious problems in terms of how the wealth is distributed. But that problem was there before COVID, and COVID is only going to make that problem worse. It is a systemic issue that won't be solved by how we deal with the virus and the associated disease.
Just like the 'war on drugs' impacts people from different social strata disproportionally, the same with three strikes laws and lots of other problems like that. It is a direct result of the laws you make and the politicians you vote for.
> I also bet you have a job that allows you to work from home.
That bet would work out, today. But six months ago that wasn't the case and as a result of that I contracted the virus at the end of the last job abroad and spent three weeks in bed. Fortunately I made it through and have decided that if I can't do my work remotely then I won't do my work.
> How many households are led by a single parent and/or two parents who have to go to a job where they can’t work from home?
Many. So, society should foot the bill there. It's only logical. This is how it is done in other countries.
> I am not going to sit here tsk tsking all of the people who aren’t as fortunate as I am.
Neither am I.
> Not only do I have a job where I can work from home. We were also in the financial position that we had the option of my wife not going back to work in the school system and just saying it wasn’t worth the risk.
Lucky you. But that is just you. For every you there are multiple people for who that is not the case. What are you going to do about that? Are you willing to pay increased taxes for a social safety net?
America is one giant study in the tragedy of the commons. And COVID just brings that out, it did not create any of it.
Take Lithuania or Latvia. Countries that suffered from being USSR satelite states for decades. Within a relatively short while their political structure and other infra put them on a footing solid enough to deal with this situation as it should be done, and many Western countries should look to them as examples of how you tackle a problem like this.
For those countries where it is worse - sometimes much worse - and which are substantially richer than Latvia and Lithuania you should be asking yourself what went wrong and why.
You also don't know that the virus won't give you superpowers, but you'd be foolish to act like it.
According to the best evidence we have, children are very very unlikely to suffer serious consequences from covid-19. Yes, it's possible that there are future complications we aren't yet aware of - but we don't presently have any reason to expect it.
We have to live based on probabilities, not possibilities. 800 kids drown each year in swimming pools. We live with the risk because swimming is great. So is going outside, seeing other humans, and getting educated.
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.
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.
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.
"Hey Grandma can you take care of my covid-kid while I am slowly maybe dying here?"
There is 0 societal support here.
I think that's assuming that death is the only thing you have to worry about with this disease, and that if you don't die you'll recover and be no worse for wear. That may be a false assumption, and it could be that many children suffer from some kind of long term damage from the disease.
Even if this is true (we already have evidence it's not for some children), it's completely irresponsible to allow schools to open. We know children are infectious and easily spread the disease. There are other members of society besides children. Letting the virus run rampant in schools will lead to parents and other adults getting sick and dying. It's not ok for children to die but if their parents, grandparents, teachers, or parents' friends die it's somehow ok? What kind of logic is that?
Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?
It might be the case that opening schools for younger ages with 2 shifts to reduce density (2 weeks in person, 2 weeks from home) could have an acceptable risk profile.
Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.
The problem with all of these simple "risk profile" analyses is that we as a country are being forced to accept risk we don't have to. With cars, we understand there is some amount of risk but also we as a society also care about those deaths and make tons of regulations and improvements to make driving safer. As such, death rates have fallen over the decades even as miles driven have accelerated.
Whereas with the pandemic we seemingly are just accepting high death rates and hoping for the best instead of putting in the level of effort to fix it. That makes it not just about risk tolerance, but frustration with the level of concern the country is putting into fixing the problem.
ok now imagine the virus lives on surfaces for 5+ years and never dies. now what? you can’t eradicate this virus by quarantining, someone, and it only takes one, is going to spread it somehow.
now answer with that in mind. “we would just fix it” is a cop out, we can’t fix it.
Masks, sanitation, and distance have likely lowered the overall viral load even if one does contract it. Obviously higher testing rates contribute to the decreasing death rate but given the blind studies from asia I don't think it would be that drastic of a reduction.
It gives me some hope we can lower the risk enough to have children interact with the caveat being adults actually enforce masks/sanitation/distance.
Mr. and Mrs. Applecart both have full-time jobs and four children; they don't have time to home-school and wouldn't know how if they did. Their lives would be more functional if the threat is overblown, so they believe the threat is overblown.
Mrs. and Mr. Bandersnatch work in the mining industry. If scientists are correct, the fossil fuel industry is going to lead to climate collapse within about twenty years. Their livelihoods depend on oil extraction. They have a vested interest in being skeptical of scientific authority.
As someone else here pointed out, the study doesn't seem to factor economic security. I bet you would find a very strong correlation between economic security and willingness to keep children at home that would cross political lines.
(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.
What societies have done throughout history for diseases like smallpox, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, the flue, etc. Essentially, we learn to accept it.
Yes, I know, eventually a vaccine was found for smallpox, etc., but those diseases had been around for centuries (millennia?). Only very recently have we found ways to deal with them.
I mean, that point of view was literally expressed in a public forum by the president of the United States. It must carry weight in some circles at least.
The parent will not abandon the child home alone to go to work, no matter how big the stick.
School being effectively state subsidized working hours daycare, it must resume before low wage workers can once again be coerced back into risking their lives to avoid homelessness.
Impossible? definitely not. (i would argue this is the exact issue many people in the US face today).
highly immoral and with a total disregard to one's decency or life? absolutely.
If that’s their only option, they will end up homeless, with their child.
It's a failing of the government that so many Americans have to face this choice.
That was what the Chinese data said - they had fewer cases so presumably they didn't see the full range of possibilities.
I'm not anti-vax, but anti-vaxers use this same tactic; they use ambiguity to breed fear against vaccines.
I get that some unknowns are dangerous, but there has to be a limit, right? We can't be afraid of everything we don't know.
This is contrasted to the long term health consequences of COVID-19, which appears could be significant, but we just aren't certain yet only because there just aren't any long term survivors yet and thus studies [0] related to it haven't been completed. I don't think this is past the limit.
0 - https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2020/looking-forward-understa...
https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/07/08/from-lung-scarring-to-h...
I hope I’m wrong. In six months or a year maybe I’ll feel more comfortable with the risk to my kids (and myself with a damaged spinal cord), but right now I don’t and to equate it to anti-vaxxers is fairly insulting.
EDIT: And, in fact, the CDC says that the Flu is more dangerous to healthy children than COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm and search for 'children'. Though the CDC may not be a trusted source for many...
Regarding both 2 and 3, kids seem to be largely asymptomatic. That would explain the lower testing rates. People are generally not going to go have their kid swabbed if there’s no apparent reason to do so. But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects, it seems pretty cavalier to just assume kids won’t. Hopefully they don’t, but we really don’t know.
This type of thinking often gets dismissed as “alarmist”, however a bit of alarm (and an abundance of caution) over a rapidly spreading novel virus is warranted.
(This is my armchair analysis. I’m not a health expert.)
> But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects
Unfortunately, there's no control for these assumptions. People are exposed to all sorts of things over their lifetime. Not everyone produces antibodies, so there will be no definitive way to link any person having an infection and any long term effects. Need to establish the risk compared to existing baseline.
So far, deaths are down for the year, so everyone's switched to 'unknown long term effects.'
Those people think "opening the economy" is worth more than human (kid or otherwise) lives. They're either politicians trying to convince an electorate that they didn't fail miserably at their job, or are regular Joes falling victim to disingenuous cable news networks.
What about the long term health consequences of poverty? At least those are known.
We have only one thing we can do to get the economy back on the rails: bring the case count down. The longer we let this go without properly managing it, the harder it is to bring the case count down. The longer the case count is too high for reasonable, cautious people who care about their parents and grandparents' survival and their long term lung health to participate significantly in the economy, the more damage the economy will sustain.
If you want businesses to be opening up now, you should've demanded for them to close 6 months ago. If you want schools to open, you should've been demanding that everyone wear a mask 6 months ago.
At this stage of the pandemic, people who selfishly refused to do their part for their fellow citizens are entirely to blame for the continued necessity of mask requirements and schools closing.
Minimization and denial are powerful psychological forces, and the fact that some children get the condition without severe symptoms lulls some people into complacency.
The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection.
If this is the way to treat with life, how would you be still alive? Isn’t it the very reason we get ill because the body is treating the virus.
Do you have any source to believe that asymptomatic infected person has long term negative effects from infection?
I'm confused as to why you're taking my observation about a novel deadly disease as advice to live the rest of your life by.
Because we have forgotten how to say to ourselves, "I generally agree with this ideology, but on this subject, I agree with other people." Politics (and this is, sadly, political) is a zero sum game now.
Perhaps people are simply desensitized to kids catching colds & flus? My kid probably brought home twenty different novel coronaviruses, all before his second birthday.
"In a recent survey, we asked about 1,000 parents what their biggest worry amidst the pandemic was, and what we found was a surprise. It turns out that the majority of parents are worried about their families being infected by the virus rather than finding work or paying the mortgage."
I'm not sure why that's surprising. If you ask 1,000 people who have jobs that aren't gone or at immediate risk of going away, then yep, that's exactly what we're going to worry about. There's probably some serious statistical problems there.
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 flawed.
Not anywhere near as many as are dying from Covid.
I'm well aware of the flu risk, and already had my vaccination for that for this season. Most people I know poo-poo getting that vaccination, despite it taking only 5 minutes and is already paid for by one's insurance.
COVID-19 is on pace to put a million people in the ground by the end of the year (IIRC) and certainly leave many survivors with serious health problems, and we really still know very little about treating it, and it is more contagious and more deadly, especially to the healthy population.
We are past “it’s just a flu.”
Not really. We just are used to it. 12,000 to 61,000 US deaths per year over the last decade. This adds up year after year.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html#:~:text=Whil....
I'm not dismissing covid as "just a flu". I'm pointing out that people dismiss the annual deaths from the flu. For example, few people take any particular steps to minimize transmission of the flu, like wearing a mask or keeping their kids out of school.
Dismissing the annual death toll of the flu as not a real problem is what my point was. We're used to flu deaths, they aren't news. But several tens of thousands in the US still die of the flu every year. It is not a solved problem, the vaccine is only partially effective, and most people don't even get one.
I'm definitely more worried about infection, too.
Financial problems are, aslong as the basic needs are met (food, water, housing etc) purely a societal problem.
A disease with a deadly track record and no cure is far worse and is something you or anybody else in society has little to no control over.
We all will die. Can't let a fear of dying prevent us from living.
I started self isolating me and my family 4 weeks before my country imposed a lockdown, after seeing neighbouring countries being hit by the virus and not knowing what to expect. I stopped caring completely after seeing the hospitals were empty and after seeing a reported death rate of around 1% in my country.
According to my mother, who is a doctor who fought covid on the first line (despite being at risk of death, given her age and statistics), the guidelines given by the government were nonsensical: ventilators probably did more harm than good in the majority of cases and there was a stance against steroidal treatment (which would have been the first choice she would have picked if it wasn't for the guidelines) which have been subsequently reevaluated. There was also a problem with dropping requirements for counting covid deaths which created a massive statistical problem. These factors make me think covid deaths are probably over-counted and it explains why this second peak of infections doesn't have a peak in deaths.
Of course, the issue has been politicised and if you say something like the above you'll be socially ostracised - or just downvoted.
Alas, that's not the world we live in. We don't trust anything, the media is busy being sensational, big money only cares about making more money in way possible, our leaders continuely lie to us and foster partisanship and miscommunication.
How about the fact that long term effects are unknown. Or what sort of ongoing medical issues will people have for the rest of their lives?
There is people who believe that once you're done with this virus, it is gone from your system and you're back to normal. Certainly that is the case for many, but there are still many more that will continue to suffer from what they are calling now 'long haulers'.
Spend some time in a large (91k people and growing) Survivors group [0] to get a feeling of what people are facing.
I believe these hard to measure costs are enormous but easy to ignore because the affected demographic can't fight for their rights/desires - they can't even vote. And privileged SV folks and internet yuppies are happy to drive this line forward. I have friends who have lost their jobs. I have a cousin who has lost their small business. Not because of COVID - but because of the "cure" for COVID.
Adverse affects of closing schools for a year on 56 million elementary, middle, and high school students? Or maybe 500,000 people dying a bit early (just making numbers up on this one - adjust up or down depending on various factors)? That is not so one-sided obvious as many people on the internet seem to want to make it.
How many children will bring it home to adults? For me, 1 is enough and we are already there.
On the other hand, not all 56 million kids will end up ruined if education is delayed a bit or parents need to come up with new and creative ways to educate their children safely.
You're basically arguing to 'stay the course' during a global pandemic and fact is that isn't workable either.
This is equally as irrational as people who just want to fling the floodgates open.
~5 children per year die on playground equipment in the US. Are you actually proposing that we sit around until we've neutered a lethal virus enough that it's less dangerous than playground equipment?
The IFR for school age children is astonishingly low. Low enough that we don't even really have a good sample size. CAs data right now is showing 1 death out of ~50k infections. My first Google hit with IFR estimates for those age ranges puts them at 0.0016% for 5-9, and 0.00032% for 10-17.
Assuming every single one of those kids is in the higher risk 5-9 bracket and that every single one gets infected, we would end up with less than a thousand fatalities. That's about 10% lower than children that die from drowning (or congenital birth abnormalities, or drug overdose/poisoning, they all hover around 980 per year). It's slightly higher than the number of children who die from heart disease.
On the other hand, it's less than a quarter the number of children who die in car crashes per year, and less than a third the number who die from firearm accidents.
I don't suppose that you're going to stop putting your kids in the car, despite it being 4 times more likely to kill them than the worst case scenario of Covid in schools.
I am not a doctor so I won't give you advice, but Dr. Gupta is. I felt like his reasoning for not sending his kids back to school in this article [1] was spot on.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9R6jgE7SQ
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/12/health/covid-kids-school-gupt...
> According to Makenbach, there are two main issues in dealing with the coronavirus. The first is to what extent this disease, which mainly affects the elderly, should be allowed to damage younger generations who are losing their jobs and falling behind in education, he said. And the second is to what extent the virus and measures against it should be allowed to further increase inequality. Socio-economically vulnerable people are more likely to become seriously ill, and also most disproportionately affected by drastic anti-coronavirus measures, Makenbach said.
https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/06/netherlands-dealing-coronaviru...
Sounds fun. The reality of what in-person school looks like isn't anywhere close to what your children are looking forward to.
Our oldest is going into Kindergarten this year. We chose distance learning before that became the only option because we didn't want her first experience with "big girl school" to be something out of Handmaid's Tale.
- professional conferences - sport games - concerts - school reunions - weddings - grieving death of elder together with family - baby showers - travel/vacations - birthday parties - having friends over for support while stuck at home with a newborn (editors note: it me)
It’s been hard of everybody. Maybe this is my perspective from having grown up in poverty/underclass talking- but I don’t get this hand wringing over how hard this is for children in particular.
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.
- 1 whole semester of in-person instruction for all 56 million school-aged kids in the US
In exchange for:
- The cumulative remaining years of the 50k(?), 100k(?), possibly even more that will die directly from the virus in the US alone
- Freedom from long-term health issues caused by the virus for another several hundred thousand at minimum who won't die but also won't get "the flu"
Now your turn. What is your number?
And yet isn't not eating bacon a relatively easy step to take so one is around to spend time with family? The answer is not so clear.
One question I have is why you believe lockdowns will help? A vaccine may be approved but it's likely it won't work for obese Americans that make up 40% of the population.
> “Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
> “Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
> In 2017, scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill provided a critical clue about the limitations of the influenza vaccine. In a paper published in the International Journal of Obesity, they showed for the first time that vaccinated obese adults were twice as likely as adults of a healthy weight to develop influenza or flu-like illness. [0]
This essentially means we are going to have large numbers of cases for the next 3+ years.
[0] https://ctmirror.org/2020/08/09/americas-obesity-epidemic-th...
The choices are ambiguously worded to the point that one could project a spectrum of meanings to them. We know nothing about the sample other than that there are 1000 of them and they are parents. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know whether they’re employed and what their level of employment and financial circumstance is. We don’t know how old they are or how old their children are.
Finally they are asked what their greatest worry is and then they have to choose between three choices or assert that they have no worries at all.
At the same time the completely ambiguous results and ambiguous wording allow anyone who feels like arguing to project their own hopes and fears to the results.
Just stay away from bullsh*t like this. It’s poison.
I say that to myself so much when reading any kind of news on the pandemic. The pandemic landing in a US presidential election year has made it at least 3x worse in my opinion.
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 the seasonal flu and about 50-100x more likely to commit suicide than dying of COVID 19. The parents themselves are at about an equal risk of dying of Covid as they are of dying by the flu.
Covid is killing plenty of folks over 50. We know this. We've known this from the start. It is incredibly odd to me, that no country has taken precautions that particularly target the safety of these older people. In places where Covid is on its last legs like MA/NY, a large number of deaths are coming out of old age homes. Surely there must be way to address those directly.
The concerns around COVID are misplaced. It is a drop-let borne disease that primarily kills old people and uses delayed symptoms to facilitate spread. Sanitizing surfaces is not going to help. Acting paranoid about your kids is not going to help. ________
P.S: I have looked up legitimate stats for my claims, but am not linking them atm, due to lack of time. Also, I am purely looking at death and not side effects. I also don't claim to make the comparisons in controlled-trial manner. Lastly, masks and distancing are essential, irrespective of the points I make above. It also assumes that the current strategy is to distance until a vaccine arrives. Because, I don't think herd immunity or complete eradication are realistic possibilities.
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.
I think one also has to factor in the likelihood of the event, in the case of diseases we might look at how contagious the diseases are.
Of course, in case of substantial rate of effects post illness, my comment would be rendered entirely invalid.
Do you have a source on that?
Teachers have a right to be heard on this as well.
I can’t quantify my emotions and share their weight distribution. Anybody writing an article like this has already written the entire thing before doing any of the questioning, and it’s stupidly easy to get a survey result by asking the right question.
But infection and school...I have no control over them. They control me, and definitely I'm going to be more worried about them. Same for kids and family.
My mother-in-law is high strung, controlling, and anxious pretty much 24x7 (I still love her (family is family)). There are times when talking to her is like talking to a stranger because she gets so wound up and out there.
We have family friends that are losing their minds. Some, seemingly normal, friends are falling deep into the conspiracy mess others are divorcing or making odd decisions. One refinanced their house to buy a Lotus, 3 small kids + infant and he just shows up one day with a Lotus...
the mental effects and relationship stress because of Covid19 are pretty crazy too.
The new goal of attempting to prevent the actual transmission of the disease itself has been disastrous.
That might give confidence to people in North America who feel uncertain about it.
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.
Over 1,000 people have been dying a day has become the norm. New Zealand just partially shut down again because 4 people became infected.
Talking about successful school openings in other countries is as relevant as talking about magical unicorns at this point.
> That might give confidence to people in North America who feel uncertain about it.
This is like trying to give someone confidence to jump out of a plane without a parachute by talking about all the people who've safely jumped out of planes with parachutes. It's BS: the situations are different, so the examples don't apply.
Step 1 of opening us schools in the US is implementing policy to get to the (lower) infection rates of those countries that have been able to safely open up schools. Unfortunately, there are US political factions that just want to skip that step and go straight to the end of the plan.
It's more like giving them the confidence to jump by telling them that other people have successfully jumped.
Perhaps the jumper does not have the ideal mindset, but it's better to inform them that it is possible rather than keeping them in the dark, acting as if no one has ever successfully jumped before.
> It's more like giving them the confidence to jump by telling them that other people have successfully jumped.
No, you're missing the point: other people have successfully "jumped" (opened schools), but the person you're talking to (the US) is not equipped like they were and will die if they jump. Success in this case doesn't have anything to do with having the mindset to jump or not, it has everything to do with having made the right preparations before jumping.
The kind of mindset change that you seem to be advocating for is the exact thing that got us into this mess: the idea that you can be successful merely by confidently believing you will succeed (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Positive_Thinking...). That kind of thing causes people to overconfidently blunder into failure like an idiot.
If there's any mindset change needed here, it's to convince the person adopt the the mindset to be willing to turn the plane around, land, buy a parachute, take a parachuting class, go back up in the plane, and only then jump.
The average age of a COVID death is 70+ years old. The average life expectancy in USA is < 80 years old. People won't live forever, no matter how many masks we wear or how hard we lock down.
Wake up, people, that's not how you solve problems. What we need is a good, high-quality debate, and a way to quantify and compare costs and benefits from both sides. We need mortality numbers for different age groups from different independent sources. We need research on mental health effects of lockdown and pulling kids away from school. Anecdotally, I have a 6-year-old son, who got noticeably distressed after the school went online-only during his Kindergarten. I am not worried about his academic success (he's doing Grade 2 workbooks at home), but the lack of social interaction is certainly freaking him out. Except, I don't know the real numbers. In fact, nobody does, because there is too so much focus on political stand-offs instead. It's hurting both sides, really.
It's like with Hydroxychloroquine. Ever since Trump endorsed it, the republican media is proclaiming it to be The Cure (with people literally considering it for prophylactic (sic!)), while the democrat sources are censoring videos and avoiding the topic, because the paper stating its benefits used weak methodology. And again, your stance on HCQ is used as a proxy for your political orientation, rather than an honest professional opinion. All that instead instead of an actual unbiased research aimed at discovering cases and circumstances where it could work. And a proper debate between medical professionals on risks and possible advantages.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/howcan-a-poll-of-...
You could argue the QOI is something else (the sum or difference, or even the ratio estimator reported in the title). Margins of error on ratio estimators are quite a bit larger because of numerical properties of ratios.
Since there is interest, I ran a quick simulation[3] to derive the CI of the ratio estimate above ("5x"). By Monte Carlo and using standard assumptions, the confidence interval on the "5X" quantity of interest is 4.51 - 6.82x calculated via the quantile method.[4]
The confidence interval is not appreciably smaller in magnitude if you double the sample size, we're well past the point of diminishing returns.
[1] Weighting would induce a design effect, but here I would suggest that the real problem is a poorly defined population and sample frame, not sample error. This is the real issue here: we have zero reason to believe these 1,000 people are a random sample of any interesting population.
[2] For a parameter \theta = 0.5 -- uncertainly decreases as the statistic becomes further from 0.5. But classical MOEs overreport like this.
[3] R Code on Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/raw/UjHg7qnR
[4] Similar results come from taking the numerical sd of the sampling distribution and calculating a NACI about the mean, I just did the quantile trick because it's less code.
Usual caveats apply obviously.
I subscribe to Hanlon's Razor, but at this point we're well past any benefit of the doubt.
At this link, check out the euromomo section:
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
The charts above clearly show the effect on 14+ due to covid this year.
If you scroll down further, you can select 0-14 in the country-by-country data.
What you'll see there is that Sweden looks the same as all of the other countries for 0-14, and they did not close their schools for those ages.
EDIT: what's with the downvotes for showing data?
There was a conference call with the school district the other night. A friend in the district was in awe at how many parents want their children to return to school, are upset about sports, etc.
Many people want to look at this as a black and white issue - either you believe social distancing and masks are necessary, or you believe that Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in your head. The media is of course greatly to blame for this.
The reality is that there are many people who share different priorities than vocal groups on the Internet. Several times I have written blog posts about lay statistical analysis of the virus, and how more conservative states have the benefit of seeing reopening in action in states like Florida and Texas. Many of the responses assume I am against masks, against social distancing, trolling etc. No discourse is possible.
We are seeing waves of permanent restaurant closings where I am from, and people seem reluctant to put 2 and 2 together.
:s/believe/know