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Comment by dustinmoris | Hacker News Reader

> but everyone is apparently cool with that because "kids don't get sick from it" (ignoring any long-covid repercussions, which seems foolish to me)

If kids don't get sick, then they don't get sick. What's foolish or difficult to understand about this? BTW when someone says "kids don't get sick from it" they don't talk in absolute terms. Kids also can get cancer, yet we are not screening their prostate yearly like we do with old men.

Wanting to harm children's future, education, development and mental health because out of your own fear is rather distasteful.

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Kids don't get sick but they can still transmit the virus to the adults that care for them.

...which have been vaccinated by now (unless they are young), so why penalise kids for a risk assessment which doesn't exist anymore?

You know most parents with "kids" are under 50, right? OP is complaining that the vaccination rate <50 is too low.

Because vaccines are never 100% effective, and there are plenty of people who legitly can't receive one due to other medical conditions.

An honest question: At what point should we stop trading the healthy development of children for a reduction of risk for certain vulnerable parts of the population?

The general decision seems to be at the point when vaccines are widely available.

Which is in just a few months.

In some countries at any rate.

When everyone that wants a vaccine gets one (well, two).

And I mean everyone in the world unless we a) close the borders completely for absolutely everything, or b) implement covid passports.

That statement is demonstrably false. UK is only at 8% vaccination rate overall. 60% of eligible adults have had a single dose, but that 60% is heavily biased to the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions.

The single dose has been shown to provide good protection in the short term, so the 60% number is more relevant than the 8% one. Although percentage of total population rather than adult population would probably be a more accurate representation.

What's your solution to kids that have young parents? Every child of people 50+ years old go back to school, and the others stay behind?

Young parents are also much less likely to get severely ill than older parents.

So the ones that do get infected and die are just part of the sacrifice?

People die of the seasonal flu all the time too. We don't shut life down over it. Covid is much much worse than the seasonal flu for many people. For others, it's less dangerous. That said, people still get hit with it.

You can't get to 0

I don't understand the point of your comment if you admit that Covid is much worse than the seasonal flu. We don't shut life down over the season flu, but we might for a much more dangerous disease. That's the whole point.

> If kids don't get sick, then they don't get sick.

There's no data about prevalence of long-term symptoms after an infection yet, regardless of whether people show immediate symptoms.

If the fear is long-term damage, then we must stay locked down and isolated for another two years to first wait for any real long term damage to show and then study it. With this mentality, what's the point of life? Might as well commit suicide, especially those grandparents which might not survive until then anyway.

It's not a binary choice between opening up now and staying in lockdown forever. We could wait a bit longer with opening up till more people are vaccinated, to reduce the risk of getting an infection for everyone (don't forget vaccines aren't 100% effective). We also could decide the immediate harm of lockdown outweighs the risk of long-term effects.

It's a complicated situation, and there's likely no perfect answer. However, it's definitely not as black-and-white as "if they don't get sick, they don't get sick", and such reductionist statements don't help make an informed decision.

Depends if the lock-downs are at your doorstep or at the border. The UK had a few opportunities to pursue a zero covid strategy but squandered them all.

>There's no data about prevalence of long-term symptoms after an infection yet

There's also no data about the prevalence of long-term symptoms of the covid vaccines, since it's literally impossible to test the 2-5 year effects of something that's only existed for one year, so by your logic should non-at-risk populations avoid taking that?

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