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Comment by FiReaNG3L | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: at first it was extremely obvious that this virus was affecting you harder the older you are, with 60+ populations starting to be at risk. Nobody thought it was harming children.

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The reasoning here is flawed: we had early positive evidence that COVID-19 was particularly dangerous for the elderly and those with a variety of medical preconditions. We didn't have positive or negative evidence that children weren't an at-risk group (for any number of reasons: lack of case evidence, the fact that children can't be modeled medically as adults, etc.).

Instead, we applied the lessons of the common flu[1]: children do get more sick from the common flu than young and middle-aged adults and so, in light of a novel severe respiratory disease, it doesn't make sense to take chances.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm

No. As the article explains, this uncertainty might explain at most a couple months of the initial response. It was very obvious, very early, that the risk to children was low and did not fit the age profile of the flu. Nearly all the debate around closing schools was in regards to their role as general transmission hubs (many argued that kids didn't even transmit COVID enough to worry about) and the risk to teachers. Nobody who was paying attention thought going to school was going to kill lots of kids relative to historically normal levels of child mortality.

If you're having a hard time remembering how things actually played out in 2020, just ask yourself: did you hear about pediatric wards filling up with COVID patients? No, you did not. You heard about an extremely rare multisystem inflammatory disorder and that's about it.

You've performed a very subtle conversational pivot here: I didn't assert that COVID is more deadly to children, or that public policy was structured around that hypothesis. I said that we didn't know how dangerous it was and that, among other things, treating COVID as potentially flu-like in young children was a reasonable policy.

When it became clear that children weren't dying in large numbers from COVID, keeping them out of school throughout 2020 because of the transmission theory was (and may still be, depending on other circumstances) sufficient justification.

I did not pivot. And to anyone reading my post, it should be so obvious that I did not pivot that your claim that I did verges on flatly dishonest.

We knew COVID was not dangerous to children by early summer 2020. The article says this and the article is correct. I simply and plainly repeated this.

It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.

Please dispense with any further nonsense about subtlety. Speak plainly and without subtlety, as I am doing.

> It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.

This is the aforementioned pivot. Nobody made this claim.

The claim is that, early in the pandemic, unknowns about the dangers of COVID to children were one among many sufficient conditions for closing schools. Once we learned what we currently know, that condition lost its sufficiency. But that didn't change the sufficiency of the other conditions (read: community transmission, teacher health, &c.), which remain.

Putting away the continued nonsense about subtle pivots - it's not even the same claimed pivot, and I explained from my very first sentence that the early uncertainty could make closing schools understandable, if only for a couple months - it is extremely untrue that the other conditions were widely considered sufficient.

That's why TFA was written. Tons of people still deeply disagree with this risk calculus.

>We didn't have positive or negative evidence that children weren't an at-risk group

Why aren't the low death rates for the 0-17 cohort enough?

Because, again, children's health is not accurately reflected in adult models. "Kills adults" can be correspond to almost anything in children, and telling people to bet their children's health on an unknown respiratory disease isn't good politics or good public health policy.

It's a blood/brain pathogen that is infectious via respiratory means.

A lot of the "varied issues" that long-COVID sufferers deal with are more easily explained by the disruption of the circulatory system (esp. as it affects the brain - when the body's defenses kill COVID-infected brain cells en-masse that results in the "brain fog").

Because people are experiencing long-term effects besides death.

Actually, a recent meta-analysis found that when you actually add a control group, most of the "long COVID" symptoms disappear. Higher quality studies were was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms. "Long COVID" appears to be almost entirely an artifact of bad science (and bad science reporting)

See https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876 and https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

Glad to see that. Appears to be just for children, do you know of similar studies on adults?

How good is this data? How does it compare to long term effects of other common viral infections?

But how many, and is it more than other respiratory illness?

From the very start children were considered essentially immune to COVID. I remember in 2020, well into the pandemic, that there was huge news coverage the first time a kid ended up hospitalized.

Counterpoint: It was extremely obvious that this virus was hitting old folks hard because nursing homes were concentrating them in recirculated air. It wasn't completely obvious that the same thing wouldn't happen in schools.

It should be obvious by now, however.

Before vaccines the major concern was children as a vector for spreading it (especially because they were more often asymptomatic), anyone with school age kids know how quickly they spread illness.

There was some secondary concern of long-term side-effects ("long covid") cases in children as well, and I recall some talk of MIS-C and Kawasaki disease... but even early on those seemed fairly rare.

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