Unpopular opinion but as countries get majority vaccinated they have to learn to not be as scared of it.
Also we have a large group of unvaccinated group which are under kids under 12. With life going back to normal, the standard diseases are back like RSV, paraflu and others. Get two at the same time and it’s a emergency room visit. Get 3 at the same time and it’s life threatening. Two at the same time isn’t uncommon before covid. Now my pediatrician says 3 is happening and it’s a kid killer. It boggles my mind why there is pushback on mandating kids to wear masks in schools.
It really shouldn’t if you’re an educated person who is following what scientific authorities are saying. The science here is still uncertain, but leaning towards masks for kids in schools not being worth it. See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...
> At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools… Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
> In the realm of science and public-health policy outside the U.S., the implications of these particular findings are not exactly controversial. Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms.
If it turns out they are useful, wearing them will have been a good idea.
If it turns out that they weren't useful, what harm has been caused?
(I'm aware that there are people out there who think wearing masks for a year or two will scar children for life, but for the most part I don't think those people are arguing in good faith. The biggest harm I see is to children with hearing problems who are prevented from lip reading.)
This is as an article by medical professors at USC and Stanford:
> At the same time, the long-term harm to kids from masking is potentially enormous. Masking is a psychological stressor for children and disrupts learning. Covering the lower half of the face of both teacher and pupil reduces the ability to communicate. In particular, children lose the experience of mimicking expressions, an essential tool of nonverbal communication. Positive emotions such as laughing and smiling become less recognizable, and negative emotions get amplified. Bonding between teachers and students takes a hit. Overall, it is likely that masking exacerbates the chances that a child will experience anxiety and depression, which are already at pandemic levels themselves.
I don’t know if you have young children, but facial expressions are a huge part of communication. My kids are constantly looking at my face to for “is this okay” signals. Kids learn to look at facial expressions of peers to understand what they’re thinking and feeling. There’s just tons and tons of research on this.
Masks for kids isn’t like masks for adults, where you can say “well even if they don’t work there’s no harm.” What we don’t have is research showing that wearing masks has persistent negative effects on kids, but based on what we do know that’s a real possible harm that has to be weighed against the possible benefits of masking.
Nobody's expecting you to wear masks at home.
Teachers have been vaccinated. Parents have been vaccinated. Kids aren’t at risk. Why this obsession with reducing cases if we took the sting out of covid?
Kids need to be children. They aren’t human shields for adults. Adults are expect to sacrifice for kids, not the other way around. Kids deserve their one and only childhood. They don’t deserve to be treated like disease vectors that need to be muzzled to make frightened parents and educators feel safe. Double so when all those adults can get a free, highly effective vaccine.
Making them mandatory is even worse. The state has no right to force my kid to wear a mask at school in order to have an education. Parents should be making that call for their own kid.
Honestly back then I would have felt the same thing that I do now: that I am happy to wear a mask so I and/or my parents/grandparents or other people around me don't die of a completely preventable virus, and that people who refuse to wear masks are idiots for not doing the most simple, effortless thing to help prevent the needless spread of the virus.
Wearing a mask doesn't steal anyone's childhood. Does wearing glasses steal your childhood? How about braces? We do A LOT of uncomfortable things in our life for our health and future. Wearing a mask is one of those things, due to the ongoing pandemic.
I mean, added bonus, I haven't had a single cold or flu or anything like that in over a year and a half. I'm guessing you (and anyone reading this) can probably say the same, if you strictly masked up, used hand sanitizer, etc. Yeah I've been sick for other reasons, but not a single time have I been sick from something transmitted by another person. First time in my decades of life that I've gone this long without any transmissible illness.
Stealing their childhood away, really? It's an article of clothing. My kid objects to wearing pants a whole lot more than he objects to wearing a mask. He still needs to wear pants.
Come to think of it, maybe that's why this is such a huge deal. People have come to think of clothing as a marker of your tribe, and not wearing the expected clothing as social deviancy. That's why wearing a hajib is so triggering for so many Americans, or why guys wearing skirts is an affront against nature (but strangely not in Scotland!), or why folks get killed over wearing gang colors, or why I desperately wanted a denim jacket when I was in 1st grade in the 80s.
And if that's the case, sure, you can have your tribe and I'll have mine, and my kid will wear a mask because that's what the people around him do, and yours won't because that's what the people around her do, and then maybe my tribe will still have ICU units available and yours won't. Okay. But I can assure you that kids in Singapore or Taiwan or now California, where mask-wearing is just accepted, grow up just fine.
I really wish that was true! Sadly in the USA the amount of "vaccine hesitancy" remains unbelievably high.
You might think the public health benefits outweigh this concern, but it's disingenuous imo to just assert that there are no conceivable negative effects for a two year old having their first social experiences.
If masks are ineffective, wearing them amounts to theatrics/fiction.
If that fiction creates a false sense of safety, it can encourage people to take risks like interacting in closer proximity than they would otherwise.
I have no knowledge or expertise on if masks are effective nor have any children, this is just an observation of what seems like an obvious potential harm.
A counter-argument says that wearing a physical thing can act as a constant reminder of covid, causing people to act more responsibly.
Back on the harms side again, there's a possibility that teaching kids "just do this and don't ask questions" can have negative consequences. Again, the counter argument of letting them ask questions and carefully explaining what we do and don't know can be a positive.
Don't worry. The schools teach that with or without masks.
Socializing in masks is massively inferior. It sucks talking to other people and not being able to read facial expressions or to see smiles. Right now American health officials are asking children to an spend the majority of their waking hours for an entire year of their lives (or more??) around friends and teachers without that essential human experience of seeing smiles. That is harm in an of itself. Even if the kids bounce back, and you can't find a developmental difference in any statistic, that year of their life, a year they will never get back, will still have been a year of being deprived of essential human connection.
>. The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.
I'm not sure how 21% lower is considered "not statistically significant", in trying to suppress the spread, ANYTHING > 0% is helpful. Full stop.
Other stand out qualifiers from same report
>This finding might be attributed to higher effectiveness of masks among adults, who are at higher risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection but might also result from differences in mask-wearing behavior among students in schools with optional requirements. Mask use requirements were limited in this sample;
>The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations.
> * First, many COVID-19 cases were self-reported by staff members and parents or guardians, and prevention strategies reported by administrators or nurses might not reflect day-to-day activities or represent all school classrooms, and *did not include an assessment of compliance* (e.g., mask use).
>* Second, the study had limited power to detect lower incidence for potentially effective, but less frequently implemented strategies, such as air filtration and purification systems; only 16 schools reported implementing this ventilation improvement.
> * Third, the response rate was low (11.6%), and some participating schools had missing information about ventilation improvements. However, incidence per 500 students was similar between participating (3.08 cases) and nonparticipating (2.90 cases) schools, suggesting any systematic bias might be low.
>* Finally, the data from this cross-sectional study cannot be used to infer causal relationships.
Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.
Statistical significance has a specific meaning in the context of hypothesis testing. It is a measure of likelihood that the observed result occurred due to a real difference between groups (rather than random chance).
In their own words in that section, by the incident rate ratio it is statistically significant, even after having been adjusted for county level 7 day incidence.
You can try and figure it out on page 4 of the cdc report, it does not appear to be a null hypothesis test.
This is not a rebuttal.
If you establish a policy, and people do not follow the policy, that's on you, not on the people. You don't get to compare your intervention against an ideal world and claim that "it would have worked, if only for those darned humans!"
> Basically was relying on self reporting. If a student contracted and was asymptomatic, not shown here, etc.
A great many of the pro-mask papers in 2020 that claimed to "prove" that masks work started from self-reported data (the infamous "hairdressers" CDC report comes to mind...if a customer was asymptomatic, they were ignored; there was no control, so it's impossible to know what would have happened otherwise; etc.) The standards for "proof" across the pandemic have been dismally low, and tribalism and politics have supplanted science.
The difference here is that we actually have examples from across the globe where kids weren't masked in schools, and no matter how you look at it, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. If we're going to be skeptical (we should!) let's be skeptical of every claim, and demand proof of effectiveness for our medical interventions before imposing them across all of human society.
New York Magazine is an “anti-vax site?”
https://nymag.com/author/david-zweig/
7 articles about kids/scool/covid in last year, and one "asking the question" if vaccine is causing a dangerous heart condition in young men.
1) Is your government adopting a comprehensives and realistic plan to achieve zero covid? (Such a policy must include 100% international travel shut-down, zero exceptions. If there are exceptions, your government does not have a zero covid policy.)
2) Is ICU or hospital usage approaching capacity in your area?
If the answer to those questions is both "no" (as it is in my jurisdiction which is requiring school kids to mask) then your statement is not true. A 21% lower incident rate is not helpful at all, everyone will still all get exposed to covid eventually.
It's the older kids (who could have received the vaccine but opted out) who will have more "adult-like" patterns of transmission and should be more of a concern (not for their own health, really, but they might infect their elderly or infirmed unvaccinated relatives). One would expect masking to help prevent spread from these people.
But of course... these kids and their families likely already self-select and associate closesly with other anti-vaxers outside of school to begin with, so school seems like the least of their worries. At a certain point you kind of have to ask whether it's worth trying to protect people from themselves.
Unfortunately, since this is also a political issue, erring on the side of caution with mask requirements and being wrong generates more mistrust amongst the older people who have opted out of the vaccine (i.e. those already distrustful of the CDC and at risk of serious illness just have one more reason to dig in and ignore the advice to get vaccinated).
It's possible that such mask mandates for young children may prove harmful because they further entrench anti-vax sentiment (even if is ultimately proven that they have marginal benefits in reducing spread).
This is a fascinating and complicated issue indeed...
Being treated like a toxic disease vector for two years surely has direct health downsides. Not learning to read faces surely has direct health downsides. Breathing god knows what those masks are made of every day surely has health downsides.
And it isn’t even my job to prove any of that. People that want to force kids to wear masks at school need to prove those aren’t something to worry about. They can’t just shrug they crap off and say “yeah well covid”. We are well beyond being able to simply use covid as an excuse to enact some restriction. Prove kids need masks and prove they won’t suffer long or even short term effects from wearing masks all day. Then and only then can you even dream of forcing kids to wear masks.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
"Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status."
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-...
Also, the very study NYMag talks about still recommends: "Because universal and correct use of masks can reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission (6) and is a relatively low-cost and easily implemented strategy, findings in this report suggest universal and correct mask use is an important COVID-19 prevention strategy in schools as part of a multicomponent approach."
Unfortunately, given that 1910s America and 2020s America both had significant (and in my mind, unwarranted) resistance to wearing face masks; I would not be surprised if "wear a mask if you feel sick" fails to make it into common understanding in America a second time.
This same line of argument was used to question climate change for decades and to support the argument that we should not take any aggressive measures to avoid it.
There's a good chance wearing masks in schools makes the community safer from serious illness. And the risk in wearing masks if they prove to be useless is...what exactly? That masks are a little uncomfortable?
"surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: "I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it at all." This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them."[1]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859145
[1] - http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/2010/02/its-ideology-st...
I have noticed that wealthy, educated, conservatives (for tax benefits) work hard to justify and provide some vaguely scientific and logical grounding to all kinds of weird conservative talking points. This might be by punching hard at some corner of the liberal/scientific consensus on an issue that is not quite well developed or the audience lacks full detail on. This equalizes both liberal and conservative positions as some what unscientific, while the reality is quite opposite. You will never find rayiner attack conservative talking points, only liberal ones.
You think you are in a scientific discussion, but you are actually participating in a political one.
As to your climate change example—here, the US is again the odd one out. Other developed countries are not masking toddlers, like the CDC recommends.
One could argue that an increased sample size would yield a statistically significant result, and on the flip side another could argue that the effect size would be minimal if you need a larger sample size.
The rebuke, of course, is that even one extra case could kill a loved one that the kid would spread disease on to.
Personally, perhaps reframing the argument that one should wear a mask at school so that they shouldn't have to wear one at home would be a more compelling argument, but I suspect many would disagree..
It was a study of a single month in Georgia before Delta. Aside from the narrowness of the inputs I highly doubt school policy and ground truth were aligned.
That study is not enough to be driving policy.
Most I've seen cited by mask proponents either don't use control groups (and thus can't really distinguish btwn other factors that correlate with mask wearing) or are laboratory tests just testing what % of particles are blocked by masks--which ignores almost every relevant question about mask mandates and relies on suspect theoretical models about how covid actually transmits between people.
I'm mystified why people on both sides are so up in arms about masks, but nobody gives one shit about uncontroversal and more effective mitigation techniques like air filtration and circulation.
An infected kid in classroom without proper air circulation could fill the classroom with enough virus to cause a super spreader event--mask or no-cotton/surgical mask.
The HVAC is continuously circulating air from the time it is on until after school when it turns off. There is some time before school and maybe 20min after school when it is on.
They have settled on only pulling air from the outside instead of recycling the warm or cool air in the room.
And having some kind of agreement on the merv rating of the filters. It may be merv 7(but I'm not sure.)
How much would it cost to retrofit a bunch of schools with this stuff?
Ideally you'd do both. Have better air circulation, and institute masks when the regional caseload goes above a certain threshold.
Those are some wildly different standards. You can convince yourself of anything if you assume it’s correct and raise the bar high enough for counter evidence.
It isn’t my job to prove it isn't necessary. I’m the one that needs to be convinced, not the other way around. Y’all are the ones trying to force this, not me.
The problem is that we're dealing with "if it save even one child's life it's worth it" (for any "it") reasoning, which is impossible to argue against.
"Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective."
No! If you cannot find a statistically significant benefit, perhaps your experiment design is flawed. Perhaps your sample size is too small. Perhaps you have too many confounders. But you cannot conclude the measures are not effective!
It gets better! Read the article. It says:
"COVID-19 incidence was 37% lower in schools that required teachers and staff members to use masks and 39% lower in schools that improved ventilation. Ventilation strategies associated with lower school incidence included dilution methods alone (35% lower incidence) or in combination with filtration methods (48% lower incidence)."
In other words, the study actually found many significant interventions in schools, among which masks. Unbelievably bad reporting from Intelligencer.
You’re misreading the article. He’s not saying they’re not effective. He’s saying that a high-powered study couldn’t prove them effective, which is the same thing you’re saying.
I'm frankly surprised that Zweig made such an embarrassingly simple public mistake that any statistician could have pointed out to him had he bothered to ask. His readers might not have that kind of access, but he certainly could get this answered in five minutes.
What is absolutely undisputed is that the primary mechanism for covid spread is airborne out of the nose and mouth.
The science is uncertain but leaning towards masking children at schools being worth it. The fact that a study that included mask intervention in Georgia schools showed a double digit percent reduction in community transmission but was underpowered to be statistically significant by itself should not cause us to update beliefs very much, let alone update them in the direction of the null hypothesis, let alone update them all the way to the null hypothesis as Zweig has done, given that our priors are informed by CERN simulations, mechanistic experiments, and adult transmission studies that demonstrate effectiveness. That just demonstrates Zweig's poor understanding of statistics terminology.
We now know what it takes to protect a person from COVID in an environment where they are likely to be exposed to significant virus concentrations; unfortunately, getting kids to scrub up like COVID ward nurses is probably not realistic.
Of course, the problem is, and always has been with COVID, that my common sense is different from yours and vice versa...
It doesn't really boggle my mind, it's just that the conclusions it suggests about fellow Americans are really hard to swallow. There is a lot of political polarization in the US and cranking through the implications and reasons for ostensibly pro-COVID policies and attitudes is really disheartening. It's a schism that isn't healed easily.
If anything, an impersonal virus, an implacable, impossible-to-anthropomorphize, zero-upside health hazard could have easily been something for the entire world to unite against. Instead, we got more and deeper division and louder and more extreme and more destructive arguments. And we lost a lot of people and maimed even more. And the reason that couldn't happen: Money. The economy. Me. Freedumbs!
COVID exposed people's real priorities and objectives and showed how craven and myopic our political leaders really are.
TLDR: To get the sort of protection people imagine that cloth masks provide, you would need to be wearing an n95 mask, tightly fitted to your face so no air leaks in through the sides.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
It doesn't have to personally protect you at high effectiveness from getting infected to reduce spread at a population level.
Even a 50% reduction in spread is huge in a population. Maybe we aren't getting that with masks, but it's not a binary "you are protected"/"you are not protected" problem.
>Needless to say, masking is political hot button beyond anything I've ever seen in public health.
At the same time i think we've all done a disservice to the public.
When you actually look at face cloth coverings, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.
Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.
I've been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking can do or not do.
On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.
The bottom line though is by telling people that in fact just putting a face cloth covering on is going to protect you is simply not true.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
Cloth masks are nowhere near good enough protection to allow children too young to be vaccinated to return to school.
A 50% reduction and we still all get covid. It is actually binary -- either we have a realistic and obtainable plan for zero-covid (which we do not) or everyone gets exposed to covid eventually.
A 50% reduction in spread might be helpful in certain areas where the hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed (in which case just close the schools for a few weeks), but in the United States there are a lot of mask mandates in schools being pushed in areas where the hospitals are not under any significant pressure. That is nonsense.
Probably pretty close to zero when we’re talking about being in a classroom with 30 other kids for a few hours. The mask protects against things going straight ahead, not against slowly filling up a room with aerosols.
I guess masking up might mean everyone gets slowly infected over the course of days though (through aerosols), instead of getting a full dose of virus straight in the face. I presume that affects the severity of the subsequent disease.
I appreciate the simplicity of the message to mask up, since it’s almost certainly better than nothing, but it’s no panacea.
The likelihood that a cloth mask can do that in a classroom however…
Best mitigator would be good HEPA room air purifiers, ideally multiple per classroom.
They can be too loud to run while class is in session, especially if they move enough air to be worth a damn. Double-especially if you're also masked (so speaking is already a bit muffled).
There is no "best" here, mitigations all mitigate different things and work together to provide a safer environment.
Where do you think the extra air goes?
It still makes it into the air, just in different directions. Some of the viral particles are probably caught in the mask, but I’m not sure how much of the total we can count on.
Specifically, anything that covers your mouth.
If we had enough N95 masks to give to everyone (and they’d actually wear them) we could stop the virus within a few weeks :P
Hell, just switching to surgical masks would make a ton of difference.
Edit: Allow me to clarify - the research everyone is citing that says masking is effective in teachers and ineffective in students (the 37% number) predates both the delta variant and widespread infection in Southern states. Further, masking is understood etiologically as a prevention method and has been used successfully in other outbreaks and in other countries. Clinicians and policy makers as a rule work with incomplete data in an emerging situation, so unequivocally stating that masking kids in schools doesn't help is a very bad misrepresentation of both the data/research and the implications to policy.
My understanding was that masks were primarily effective at preventing high viral load droplets from spreading the virus during short interactions.
I don't have any source to prove that to be the case because data on the effectiveness of masks seems frustratingly sparse.
We may not have trials or studies (these things take time) to back a very certain and/or specific claim such as "do masks prevent the spread of Covid 19?" What we do have, is fundamental knowledge and common sense and so typically, in a clinical setting we ask these questions when any new situation arises (as it happens often in medicine):
- Does this reccomendation cause more harm than good?
- is there even a slight chance that this clinical decision would increase the percentage chance of survival?
- is it worth the inconvenience it could cause?
This is called Clinical Reasoning. Thinking critically and clinically is a core tenet of the field.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 It does note that non-medical (e.g. cloth) masks may be less effective, but whether those are used a lot seems to depend on environment (nobody seems to use them here). Edit: One more for cloth masks https://www.nature.com/articles/jes201642
Key paragraph: Between Nov. 16 and Dec. 11, researchers found that infection rates were 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff members were required to wear masks. The difference between schools that did and did not require students to wear masks was not statistically significant.
A good recent article in NY Mag also discussing this issue, including the fact that the World Health Organization recommends against masking kids under six: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-maski...
Many countries in Europe have decided against masking for any students in K-12 schools because it is unclear that the harms outweigh the benefits. The idea there is some "simple" scientific & research consensus on this is wrong.
Is it worth the cost? That’s a different question.
I’m not really opposed to masks in a classroom as a mitigation method, but if people believe it will significantly alter the trajectory of the infections I have a bridge to sell them.
We have been on and off masks here in Denmark, and it seems to have no effect on spread. Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one.. from a family member or a friend..
> Also mostly you get covid when not wearing one..
The conclusion I would draw from your own beliefs here is that we should be wearing masks all the time, especially around family... not that masks don't work.
Personally while I wear a mask most of the time when out, I do feel that we really don't know as much as we'd like to think about mask efficacy. The trouble is your own reasoning here is inconsistent. Either masks don't work as well as we think and risk of infection is equally likely in public or at home, or they do work effectively but we don't wear them at important times.
The argument you should have from your own beliefs here should be for more mask wearing not less.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00256...
We now know that Covid is spread by minute particles so small that they float on the air for hours. Cloth masks do not filter the air you breathe from particles of that size.
You would need an n95 mask or better to do that job.
Remember that mask wearing almost completely did away with last year's Flu season while we simultaneously had a huge Covid surge.
And not just that but you have to wear it properly. This means if you have a beard, you better shave it.
They can simulate blowing stuff through various types of filter material all they want, it doesn't change that none of the epidemiological curves reacted to mask mandates anywhere.
They do work great as an ideological symbol though, thanks to the topic's polarisation.
“Masks don’t work” and then in the next paragraph “mostly you get COVID when not wearing [a mask]”
So basically, the masks are effective, but people take the masks off around family and friends and if one of their friends or family has COVID they will pass it on during the unmasked time.
If you notice at the moment the corona numbers are high in Netherlands and Denmark while low in Germany.
Because Germany has kept more restrictions in place, in particular mask wearing in shops and transport.
We wore them for a year. Covid is still here. It won't go away if we wear them for another year. It won't go away if we wear them for another ten years.
That sounds like an argument against bullet proof vests. People still die while wearing them. LEO have been wearing them for years. Obviously, they don't work.
You don't understand the actual goal of wearing masks: protected people and reducing the spread of covid. It's not going to magically eliminate covid when half the country doesn't actually wear them.
So in other words, your expectation is that we'll be wearing masks for the rest of our lives?
However, on the question of medical-grade masks, there is clear research that now shows some masks (e.g. FFP3 masks) are effective in stopping COVID-19 infection.
Covid: Masks upgrade cuts infection risk, research finds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57636360
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027663917/rsv-covid-children
> At Texas Children's Hospital in Houston on Thursday, 25 of 45 hospitalized pediatric patients were diagnosed with RSV as well as COVID-19. "A hospitalization rate much higher than for either virus alone," according to officials.
> At the moment there is little data available on the impact of contracting both viruses and whether the two together can make a person sicker. But health officials worry it could put young patients — who are not eligible for the vaccine — at greater risk.
Would be interested to see the exact breakdown here. If 19 children are hospitalized with RSV+Covid, 5 with just RSV, and 1 with just Covid, it could just indicate RSV is particularly virulent for children and they are likely to also have Covid given they have been exposed to RSV. This would certainly fit with what we already know about the relative risks posed to children by RSV vs Covid.
This article from the Guardian suggests that the reason RSV is having an off-season surge is because children now have an "immunity debt" from being isolated as part of Covid protocols. It would probably not be a good idea not for us to double down on the measures that have brought us to this point. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/new-zealand-ch...
Good thread by an MD here discussing these issues and saying that coinfection rates are 50% for kids: https://twitter.com/contrarian4data/status/14298548764151316...
There's no evidence that wearing masks prevents contracting Covid (or any other airborne virus). It does a bit toward preventing spreading it if you already have it, but if you already have it, the schools send you home anyway. It's also not as if masks are themselves neutral either - constant mask wearing is associated with higher rates of bacterial pneumonia. Even medical professionals never wore masks all day (until last year), just when they were performing surgery.
What you just described is the same thing, it's simply a matter of perspective. If you wear a mask, it helps me by reducing the chances that you spread it to me if you have it but aren't experiencing symptoms yet. It works the same way in reverse. I don't wear a mask to protect myself, I wear it to protect others in the case that I'm shedding virus and don't know it yet.
Most of the schools that do testing due so weekly. With delta someone can be contagious up to 36 hours after infection. That means someone who gets tested on Friday morning, goes to a poorly ventilated party with a COVID-19+ that evening and returns to school on Monday could spread the disease for a week.
If you’re in a car accident, you may not get the life saving attention you need, because so many someones refused to vaccinate.
That’s the cascading effects we need to deal with, here.
I’m not worried about getting covid, myself. I wasn’t too worried before I was vaccinated and I’m not worried at all, now.
I’m terrified of needing normal, emergency medical care, or so-called elective surgeries (which is almost all surgeries, even the vital ones), and being unable to get it because thousands of beds are filled with people on respirators.
The reality is if you're a health adult, an overburdened ER or OR poses a very small risk. Probably much less than what could be made up by eating one extra daily serving of vegetables.[2] You have far more to fear from lockdown induced supply chain disruptions that cause fresh produce shortages at the local grocer.
[1]https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-med... [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4727264/
A person getting in a car accident is relatively low chances; but when there's a car accident, I want there to be supply for every single person that was in that car accident and not already dead to have a hospital bed.
Also, why not make being a healthy weight mandatory? I mean, other than it isn’t a patented pharmaceutical product to be sold? We already have determined that indefinite, population-wide house arrest is OK.
My thoughts are that if you’re afraid of SARS and have confidence in Pfizer and friends, then purchase their products. They’re 99% effective, right?
And "I'm so wise and noble and everyone who doesn't share my opinion is a selfish ass" is still a dumb way to frame it.
And they will have had every opportunity to get vaccinated, so we shouldn't optimize for them.
The desire to see this pandemic solely in terms of an individual moral play (on all sides of the debate!) is really strong on this website, and I think it's very unhelpful.
We're all in this together. I got my shots. All my family members of age are vaccinated. All our friends and regular acquaintances are vaccinated.
I still wear my mask where I have to be near people in public, because every little bit helps. My risk is not zero, and if I get sick so might someone else who isn't as protected. I still avoid restaurants. I still work at home. I still limit travel.
We can stop this when the pandemic is controlled. Until then, it remains all of our collective responsibility. And I for one am willing to bear that.
Besides, the virus is not standing still. It is responding to selective pressure by becoming ever more transmissible. The more we try to control the virus by social distancing, the more the virus responds by becoming easier to transmit. We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing, even with perfect compliance.
That is a mischaracterization. I mean, it's true, but only in a specious sense that all organisms respond to changes in their environment (including vaccination techniques!). It's absolutely not an argument that pandemic mitigation strategies are universally doomed to failure!
> We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing
Again, this is wrong. And in fact it worked to control covid (not perfectly, but well, well under what you'd expect from the early exponential curves in places like Milan and New York) for almost a year before vaccines showed up.
You're making another common mistake here, and imagining that all arguments are about absolutes. In your mind, mask wearing either Works Perfectly or Must Be Abandoned.
In the real world, you wear masks when the pandemic is at a high infection rate and growing, (like now) because marginal improvements are important ("every little bit helps"), and not as much when it's low and shrinking (as it was in June, when I even went to a few restaurants unmasked!).
Would the delta variant have arisen were it not for social distancing? Perhaps, that's unknowable. But we certainly created a lot of selective pressure for it to exist.
That's not to say that social distancing was bad or wrong. It was our only choice at the time. But in a future where social distancing is much less effective and where compliance by vaccinated people will be low, the utility of these interventions is becoming ever smaller. You can of course do whatever you want individually according to your conscience.
Where do we go from here? The world needs to increase vaccine production to billions per month, and decrease response times to new variants so that if there is a new vaccine-resistant variant we can vaccinate the world again quickly.
It's not about protecting those that are unvaccinated by choice. It's also about protecting those that cannot get vaccines for whatever reason and also to stop breakthrough infections.
Also the majority of UK residents at least are still wearing masks[1] so I think at least that's some evidence that people do share this compassion.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/uk-still-weari...
No, we aren't. Obesity is an epidemic. Nearly all of those people made a decision to make themselves more likely to contract covid, more likely to exhibit symptoms longer (thus spread it), and more likely to occupy critical healthcare infrastructure - as well as more likely to die from covid.
There has been almost 0 acknowledgement of this as well as 0 promises to fix this issue. If you're still obese (or not calling for mandatory weight loss) and upset others aren't getting a vaccine you're not fairly applying "every little bit helps".
You're picking and choosing which issues we should bear "collective responsibility" for. It's some kind of irony we're passing out krispy kremes when you get your vaccination.
Pandemics aren't about personal choice. Period. Pandemics aren't about personal choice. People who do all the right things still suffer. So... how about we try to minimize that instead of making excuses and placing blame?
Post-vaccine, we are not all in this together.
I used to think this too, but the “Covid is a hoax” crowd have made it very clear that we are not
We often overlook those who were previously infected. I believe this is a common mistake that makes for inaccurate groupings, which negatively affect the common good.
Headlines and policy have adopted the narrative that the unvaccinated are driving the most severe cases. Those previously infected are not acknowledged and could significantly overlap with the unvaccinated population.
Those who have previously had an infection with mild to no symptoms should be acknlowedged as a third group in evaluating public health policies (vaccinated, previously infected, and unknown exposure).
Do we know that this is something not currently taken into account? I wouldn't be too surprised if this is already influencing policies. The other thing is if it's being communicated to the public. Also, the data the officials have is most definitely a lower bound since not everyone with COVID was captured by the statistics. Add all that nuance and it may be difficult to send the point across in a way that is understandable to everyone...
What aspect of them are we overlooking, and what is the impact on the common good? I know they have some resistance, though not as much as if they also got vaccinated, so it seems like the original point still stands: Unvaccinated should still be scared of it.
If previously-infected had as much resistance as vaccinated, they should not be more scared than the vaccinated. Even if they would have more resistance if they were also vaccinated.
Did you mean to say that previously-infected have much less resistance than the vaccinated? I would very grateful for a source on that. I tried to find out numbers on that but couldn't find apples-to-apples comparison.
I'm saying that the previously infected w/o a vaccination are more likely to get reinfected that those who were infected and then get vaccinates: about 2.34x as likely. Reinfection rates are low [0]
The risk of reinfection if not vaccinates may also be higher than the risk for an initial infection if vaccinated: Reinfection rates are about 0.31% [1] and as high as 0.7% in some populations [2] while infection rates among vaccinated are about 0.18% [3]
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/study-finds-covid-19-rein...
[3] https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9392...
I tested positive the last week of December 2020 (exactly three weeks before I was scheduled to get the vaccine, which I did also eventually get). When I spoke to the county health department, they said they had already seen repeat infections. They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months, which is backed up by the fact that the virus had only been in my state about 10 months at that point.
Vaccine protection is much more robust.
I'm sorry about your experience. Having Covid sucks. But your anecdotal data here is inaccurate at best, especially since it was from pre-Delta variant (you said December 2020 was your time of this happening) and we do have studies from that time showing how robust immunity was for those who had natural infections:
"Available scientific data suggests that in most people immune responses remain robust and protective against reinfection for at least 6-8 months after infection (the longest follow up with strong scientific evidence is currently approximately 8 months)." [0]
No offense, but these kind of anecdotal reports that "someone said" (even a health official), which sound authoritative because of the context, are how misinformation spreads.
0: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-...
That's why they still exclusively discuss being fully vaccinated, and discount natural immunity. They believe it's better.
Furthermore, I have seen no-one in the health community that has recommended not getting the vaccine if you've already had the virus. Compare this to, for example, chicken pox, where they only recommend the vaccine if you haven't had it.
In the context of this thread where the comment I was responding to was trying to argue that natural immunity is being short-changed somehow, I think the sentiment I'm expressing is perfectly accurate regardless of how exact timelines have been shifted in the past year. You still need to get fully vaccinated even if you've had the disease. Nothing about that has changed.
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 -- This study was published this month
This is insane. No vaccine works better then natural protection from real stuff - simply because its less stressful to the body and more stress equals better immunity.
I have nothing against vaccines in general but this is nothing but pharma propaganda.
Other research shows that natural immunity is long lasting.
Please stop using atomic anecdotes to percieve the world, or at least stop propogating them.
Almost certainly vaccine immunity is more robust than asymptomatic infections (especially those that rely on the innate immune response rather than adaptive immune response). Asymptomatic infections (especially in the young) are extremely common and possibly in the majority for those under 30.
A quick scan says:
* 13% of those with natural immunity "lost detectable IgG titers" after 10 months
* Protection durability from the vaccine is still mostly unknown, but appears to be good for 2-3 years
My anecdote is from 8 months ago, so I'm not surprised the data has been revised. I got my first dose of the vaccine less than a week after I'd recovered, which at the time was the recommendation of the CDC and health department. Less than three weeks after my first dose, they revised that to have people wait six to eight weeks.
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
Barring unusual preconditions
Thanks, but I’ll still be thinking about it.
At some point life returns to normal.
But in my callousness I would simply illegalize treating people that are anti-vaccine.
What about not treating lung cancer in smokers? Or diabetes in morbidly obese?
The immunocompromised will have accelerated shots etc.
More generally, we can't solve for the 0.5%, we have to solve for the 98%.
Either way, you're still less of a risk to your own health and the health of other people if you get vaccinated.
You seem to be trying to make a black & white argument: The vaccine isn't 100% effective, and therefore isn't necessary/people shouldn't feel obligated/it doesn't reduce risk/or something like that. But it doesn't have to be perfect in order for it to be much much much much much much much much much much better than nothing
(1) is and always has been true for COVID, but (2) remains unresolved at this point.
Unfortunately you can't isolate a world-altering issue like this from its psychological and political context, so for me any respiratory-disease-related risk is secondary to the much bigger threat. "Live free or die" is not an empty slogan. I will be standing with the unvaxxed to the bitter end, although it probably won't go that far.
Note: there are half-way decent arguments against taking the vaccine. Resisting govt oppression is not one of them.
The problem with COVID-19 has never been the risk it poses for you as an individual, but the public health aspects. It is highly infectious; some number of cases require hospitalization; if too many people require that at the same time, the public health implications are substantial, much broader than COVID-19 itself, and potentially lethal.
Ergo, we have a civic responsibility to take steps to reduce the chance of this happening, and the simplest way to do that is vaccination and masks.
Getting vaccinated is not about you only. It is about reducing the risk to all of us.
If so, doesn't that mean your decision affects others?
I hope that you would do the responsible thing and offer to pay your full medical bill in that scenario, in which case, disregard my question.
STDs don't have a vaccine. You can get one entirely unpreventably as well, e.g. because your spouse is cheating.
Most importantly, preventative measures for obesity and STDs are not:
- nearly 100% effective
- totally free
- easily available
- universally recommended by health organizations
The age groups to whom the vaccine is not yet available have no reason to fear Covid in 2021 any more than they did influenza in 2019.
If so, then your position is hard to justify. If not, then I would be interested in your explanation for that belief.
had covid last week, it's preferable to a common cold
Glad it worked out for you, but plenty of other healthy people are dying. Others are passing it on to people who then die.
when covid is so insignificant to people who are healthy.
A truly selfish perspective
If you are so unhealthy that you need the vaccine (remedy) then you have bigger concerns.
Sure, and plenty of people have underlying conditions through no fault of their own, and the unvaccinated are adding to their concerns significantly by gambling with their own health (which is alright, I guess) and by extension the health of everyone around them (which, again, is selfish)
Also what do you mean by remedy? Definitions that I see do not match your use of the term. That word may not mean what you think it means.
> If so, then your position is hard to justify.
Sorry, no. For the record, I'm fully vaccinated, but that argument doesn't work. If we all stopped driving cars, fewer people would die in accidents. That's no belief etc, it's a fact. Yet we obviously don't, because cars are super convenient and relatively few people die. We're perfectly fine accepting some people dying for lots of convenience for everyone.
The same will have to eventually be accepted for Covid. We can't live in a perpetual half-lockdown because the omega-variant will kill 0.1% of seniors otherwise.
Speak for yourself. There are a significant number of people on this site who are pretty vocally opposed to cars precisely due to the safety hazards. There was an article on here just the other day about how drivers of larger trucks and SUVs are twice as likely to kill a pedestrian as drivers of sedans.
I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.
1) The vaccinated are not getting it anywhere near the rates of the unvaccinated, so they are not spreading it at anywhere close to how much the unvaccinated spread it.
2) If they do spread it to another vaccinated person, that person is highly unlikely to get very sick at all.
3) If they spread it to an unvaccinated person, that person is much more likely to get sick and have a better opportunity to spread it to even more people.
4) People who get sick & end up in the hospital still have lots of time before they get to spread the virus before being hospitalized.
5) Vaccinated people who get COVID are infectious to others for significantly less time than unvaccinated people.
6) Current does not show vaccinated people causing new or more powerful strains. [0]
7) New strains are still significantly less infectious & dangerous for those who are vaccinated.
So I fail to see how your points are relevant from an overall risk-reduction point of view. Available evidence points towards vaccination as a superior risk reduction mechanism than the alternative (which I guess is do nothing? If not, please clarify) that you are proposing.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccine-variants/f...
90% of ICU cases are people that think like you in my county. Almost all new severe cases and deaths are people who believe they are above the risk.
Tell me this, since you are a "healthy" individual do you also forego all cancer screening? Do you simply have such an attunement to your own body that you can feel any rogue cells as they form? Perhaps you rub yourself with quartz because you consider it to be a "good" crystal with healing properties.
I think people who haven't had a chronic condition (including doctors) tend to underestimate the impact they can have on your life. Long COVID symptoms may not be "severe" or "serious" in a medical coding dictionary, but those terms in a medical dictionary are quite distinct from their everyday meanings.
The best evidence we have seems to be that somewhere very roughly around 20% of people who get infected (vaccinated or not) get it -- more if you're older, less if you're younger. Experts don't seem to be willing to say much about what fraction of those people will have symptoms forever, or to what extent (very happy to hear otherwise if somebody knows better!).
While case numbers are high again (in the UK) and with the more infectious and virulent Delta variant having replaced others, it's not totally clear to me that the risks from long COVID are even all that much changed since before the vaccines.
Another important point is that currently, the risks of long COVID seem not at all well understood. "Unknown risk" is quite a different thing than "low risk" or "high risk". The lengths to which it makes sense for people to go to avoid it right now depend on those risks, so lying low seems quite sane to me.
A worse problem still is, I think, that "we're all going to get it" is a self-fulfilling prophecy: viruses have been unconquerable in the recent past, but this is 2021, we have incredible understanding of the mechanisms (no, not most of the details: they're not all worth knowing) that should give us incredible power over them at some point in the relatively near future (as in the next few decades). If the next few decades, why not the next few years? If we believe it's "inevitable", we'll make it so. (not to mention abandoning effective measures like masks)
Perhaps because "always worried me more than the risk of death"? If so: this is because the evidence always seems to have said that the risk of long COVID has been at least an order of magnitude higher than the risk of death. Also, if you have no dependents, death involves less suffering: in the unlikely event it happens, you're out of the picture already after a short period of misery. On the other hand, chronic illness can come with a lifetime of suffering.
I've received both shots and was pretty low risk to begin with.
However, local hospitals were shipping patients off to other cities, and sending adults to the children's hospital.
I don't think it's a stretch to believe that the outcome of something like being in a car accident would be worse now than normal.
We can do one of two things as communities:
(1) Mandate vaccination for everyone, and provide everyone care
(2) Allow everyone the freedom to remain unvaccinated, and limit care
There's no other "normal" world where a highly communicable disease that causes a sufficient number of hospital cases exists and circulates in the human population.
* Where normal means "normal freedoms of movement" + "normal social interactions allowed" + "normal economic operation" + "hospitals aren't overwhelmed and have capacity for normal care"
It looks like flu (influenza) hospitalizations run at about 0.15% of total population, per year.
SARS-CoV-2, at 1-5%? Although that might be vs confirmed cases (?), which would muddle the numbers.
But suffice to say substantially higher. So I think there's an argument to be made for this being a COVID only measure (and probably measles, etc too).
IMHO, people are entitled to freedom regarding their choice to vaccinate.
But if they choose to exercise their freedom in ways that limit my freedom (via resulting lockdowns, mandatory masking, banned social gatherings, preventing businesses from operating normally, etc.), then that doesn't feel very fair.
They're externalizing the consequences of their decisions onto me, and the rest of society.
So yeah, IMHO, their decisions: their bill to pay. With their life, if necessary.
(But I may be biased, as I have family working ICU, triaging unvaccinated coronavirus deniers who show up at the ER, begging to be saved, who are then sapping care from non-COVID patients...)
You can easily make that argument for plenty of things though. Didn't care for education and wanted to party instead? No welfare for you! Overweight? Sorry, you're limiting my freedom via increased healthcare costs. Broke your leg while skiing? Sorry, you knew the risk, now live with it, insurance is for real accidents only.
However, the calculus changes when the health system is at or over capacity. Now, if two people come in and both are critically ill, but you only have room for one, I'm ok with choosing the one that was vaccinated. Likewise with many other situations and illnesses. If you cause a car accident, and both you and the person you hit require the ICU, but there is only one spot open, I'm ok with the person that got hit getting the spot.
Now, I'm assuming you are jaded like me and know that actual answer is probably the person with the most money tends to get the treatment, but that's another bitter, cynical discussion.
At some point, it's like, "Jesus. Just stop talking, and please let me help you not kill yourself."
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
Our health care system is unsustainable. And it's unsustainable because of one very simple reason: we want people to have absolute freedom and an absolute right to emergency care.
I don't think those two are compatible. I don't think they've ever been, but historically that contradiction has been papered over with others' money (either in the form of your insurance premiums or your tax dollars).
Cue present situation.
We have a scenario where there is a (1) free, (2) available, (3) well-tolerated, (4) effective preventative option in vaccines.
If someone chooses to remain unvaccinated, without medical reason, that is a pure personal choice.
And moreover, unlike in normal scenarios, their making that choice directly burdens everyone else.
Economically, through damage to normal economic functioning. And medically, through consuming limited hospital capacity.
These arguments could be made for other conditions (e.g. obesity), but in a much murkier and more tortured manner. COVID is crystal clear: if you can be vaccinated, and you choose not to be, you are imposing a greater burden on society.
Last I heard, the anti-vax crowd was big on personal responsibility. So why shouldn't individuals pay that debt of their own making?
Edit: I am ok with triaging the vaccinated over the unvaccinated in a scenario with limited space as mentioned by another poster below.
If the numbers were flat maybe you would have an argument, but I strongly disagree that we need to "learn to live" with a situation that is rapidly getting worse. I do not want to learn to live with full hospitals and oxygen shortages, as is currently happening in parts of the US.
I'm vaccinated but quite fearful of anything which puts me in needing medical attention. The unvaccinated are a burden i'm tired of supporting.
I'd say I'm disappointed and surprised that more people aren't concerned about it but there's a reason it's a historical trope.
I think a lot of people are concerned about it. And I'd further say for a segment of population this also triggers vaccine hesitancy.