I'm a bit worried that because of a year and a half of mass fear even the slightest risk of covid will be blown up.
I saw this effect here in Barcelona. There was an article on young people thinking they could not get covid. And an ICU nurse was quoted saying that's not true and they have a girl there who is bad.
But this doesn't take into account that the numbers are so low. Many young people die because of traffic accidents and the like. There has to be a point where we say it's mitigated enough and just move on with life.
I'm not saying we're there yet but we should start talking about where that point is.
A society that sacrifices the psychological wellbeing of its children to prevent moderate illness in adults has really screwed up its priorities, and that's increasingly the situation in places where the most at-risk have been vaccinated.
• For age 65+, the infection rate was 23% and the hospitalization rate 4.9%.
• For age 5-17, the infection rate was 42% and the hospitalization rate was 0.27%.
Kids 5-17 were actually the group with the highest infection rate, followed closely by 18-49 at 41%, then 50-64 at 31%, and 0-4 tied with 65+ at 23%.
The hospitalization rates strictly went up with age: 0.26% for 0-4, 0.27% for 5-17, 0.98% for 18-49, 2.3% for 50-64, and 4.9% for 65+.
I wonder if we would have done better to keep the schools open the first few months, but as boarding schools until most children have had it. Once nearly all children have had it, school goes fully back to normal.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
A few problems:
• Parents have to agree to not see their children for several months.
• Adults need to be present to supervise / teach the children, and they will be at risk from COVID.
• Early on, there was debate about whether contracting COVID led to immunity. (I personally thought people were being overly cautious about this, but even so.)
Taken together, I just don't see it working.
I am surprised we didn't see any college campuses (which really are boarding schools) attempt to isolate themselves. Both students and staff (!) are not allowed to leave campus or invite guests, and must quarantine for two weeks before arrival—but in return, you get to live a normal college life. It would be a huge commitment for professors with families, however.
On the one hand, I thought it strange a year ago when some authorities based policy on the assumption that kids didn't spread it. On the other hand if kids are mostly asymptomatic it would make sense that they don't spread it as much. I know that private schools in my area were running normal classes, en masse nothing bad seemed to happen.
Hard data would be nice to see, if it's out there.
Also, old people can be vaccinated now, so fears over children spreading it to vulnerable population is becoming a moot point.
Apart from that, there have been numerous studies showing kids transmit less than others, and this was known mid last year (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200710100934.h...). European countries reacted rationally by opening schools earlier while politically motivated decisions were made in America to keep the country and economy locked down in an intense election year.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999241558/in-kids-the-risk-of...
As far as I can tell the linked report mentions nothing about severity of illness, only mortality.
Edit: Second study is linked to further down the page which addresses the severe illnesses, as ricardobeat points out.
Anecdotally, Type 1's exploding along with other auto-immune disorders. The problem is, of course, we've got a 6-12 month lag on type 1 diagnosis, and various often long delays on other auto-immune failures.
The real question in my mind is the prevalence of Long COVID and other longer lasting changes. Having seen the debilitating effects of post-viral fatigue syndrome (non-COVID, but still very similar) I would caution everyone to do as much as possible to avoid getting illnesses that are known to trigger extended disability like this.
A COVID infection isn't a binary outcome of live or die. There's a lot of potential for lasting damage that isn't fully studied yet, so we need to stop treating the statistics as a simple matter of life or death.
It's also misleading to consider the statistics for children in isolation because children obviously don't live alone in isolation. If kids get a contagious illness, the parents are highly likely to get it. This is especially true for younger children, as any parent will tell you.
Polio was asymptomatic in 95% of cases and most of the symptomatic cases were unspecific and mild, but now we know that it can be followed by the much more severe Post-Polio Syndrome even 3-5 decades after the original infection, which may affect almost 30% of all cases, including the asymptomatic ones.
That children are unlikely to die or have severe complications from Covid doesn't mean it's safe to allow children to be infected, even if we ignore that this could make them asymptomatic carriers infecting at-risk family members who may not be able to get vaccinated for health reasons.
EDIT: If you find the time to downvote this comment, also check out nojito's link to the paper about Long Covid in children: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27793752
If the lower estimate of 20% of Covid cases resulting in Long Covid are right and we lift hygiene restrictions for children because of their "low risk" for hospitalization, that means we could see Long Covid in up to 20% of the population under 12 (assuming vaccinations become available for ages 12 and over).
And that's assuming the data about "low risk" is interpreted correctly. The article states that 25 dead in 12 million children translates to a death rate of 2 per million (or 0.2 in 100,000 if we want to use the same scale used for numbers about the general population) but this wrongly assumes that all of the 12 million children have at some point been Covid positive, which seems impossibly pessimistic given that there have only been 5 million recorded infections in the UK across the entire population.
For comparison, the ONS report[1] estimates roughly 1% of children between age 2 and school year 6 (age 10-11) having been positive with no data on ages younger than 2. This would take the number from 0.2 in 100,000 to 20 in 100,000 -- compared to the total mortality of 228.6 in 100,000[2].
In other words, it looks like children are only 1/10 as likely to die as adults, not 1/1000 as likely.
Also, the article only considers the 25 children who directly died from Covid, not the 36 children who were tested positive but died from "other causes". I'm not sure if this has changed in the UK given that you often read about "deaths within 28 days of a positive test" now, but at least for most of 2020 these 36 children would have counted towards the total death count as I understand it. If we compare the 20 in 100,000 (or 20.8 in 100,000 if we want to be pedantic about rounding) number to the "deaths within 28 days of a positive test" number we actually get slightly more than 1/10 because that rate is 192.2 in 100,000.
[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Even some of the cities with the strictest regulations still felt like business as normal, albeit with masks, after about April or May of last year.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
Aside from Long Covid, there's also a danger of adult's not being able to work, as people either self-isolate or are too ill to do their jobs.
Remote won't necessarily fix this - partly because if you're ill at home you're still ill, but also because there are many jobs which need people on-site.
If you get a huge peak at the same time, not only are hospitals overwhelmed - already happening in the UK - but other critical services are also endangered.
Long-term symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection in school children: population-based cohort with 6-months follow-up (Preprint)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.16.21257255v...
Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/obm0wy/longterm_sy...
That's not what the study says. They found that the seropositive group of 6 to 16 year olds was more likely to report a symptom beyond 12 weeks than the seronegative group. 4% of the seropositive students versus only 2% for the control group.
The study authors conclude that the prevalence is low, but they do not conclude that it's about zero.
For comparison, Polio is estimated to be asymptomatic or extremely mild in 90% or 95% of cases. Polio only moves to the central nervous system in about 0.5% of cases, and only about 2-5% of children with CNS infection die (15-30% of adults with CNS involvement). That's a relatively small percentage, but at scale it's a devastating number of people impacted. At epidemic scales, you can't simply waive away small percentages in the 2% range as inconsequential when it translates to millions of people impacted.
That's not low for a virus which is infectious as Delta, and it's certainly not "about zero".
That, and it will also be interesting to discover how different it is from the ordinary flu. I remember the last time I had a proper flu (well before COVID) it was months before I felt like I'd gotten over it even though the visible symptoms cleared up in a week or so.
The background rate of life-altering disease always seemed rather high to me. Life is far messier than what a "healthy/sick" binary can capture.
Are there any numbers on long covid in children? I would assume that those numbers are probably pretty low, also.
I agree with you that covid outcomes are not binary. The same as for other viruses, especially those that affect internal organs.
Lastly I think your closing comment that parents are highly likely to get infections from children is misleading. Numerous studies show children are less likely to transmit COVID (example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200710100934.h...).
I think behaving as-if the pandemic is over will do collectively far more for the well-being + psyche of fatigued citizens who have likely felt some measure of hope disappear over the past year. It does no benefit to keep circulating disproportionate levels of information about an uncertain and vague threat when we have the solution in vaccines. At this point "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" as the saying goes.
Why should anyone believe you instead of them?
This is surprising to read, guess it depends on where you live? Different countries are still at different stages of the pandemic, and it is most certainly not over for a lot of them, especially with the delta variant causing a third/fourth wave.
This is but true in a sense that pandemic never started.
> Although this is pure randomness with such close measurements.
That's not how this works at scale. We need larger studies, yes, but you can't simply dismiss a doubling of long-term symptom reports.
At population scale, even a 1-2% incidence means millions of people.
The pandemic is over in America (for now), definitely not true for all of the rest of the world though.
I do suspect while there are long term complications from particularly bad covid cases (lung damage, etc.) - the OP is probably right that the more generic “long covid” symptoms (fatigue, brain fog, heart rate) sound a lot like physical symptoms of anxiety - I’d expect probably those numbers to go down.
Fully vaccinated rate: 6%
Ability for under 40s to get a vaccine: Only if you lie.
Some quick ones:
- Stay Tuned with Preet (legal policy stuff)
- Persuasion with Yascha Mounk (nuanced policy and politics, liberalism)
- Making Sense with Sam Harris (nuanced discussions on culture war topics, but other interesting stuff too).
- Noah Smith Substack
- Money Stuff with Matt Levine (finance)
- Stratechery (best tech analysis)
- Rationally Speaking with Julia Galef
- The Diff (more financial and company analysis)
- The Weekly Dish with Andrew Sullivan (center right, but reasonable - gives me a nuanced perspective on issues I may hold different positions on)
- Coleman Hughes has been interesting too.
- Astral Codex Ten (not really news, but an insightful blog on a wide variety of topics).
- Tyler Cowen and Marginal Revolution
- Balaji Srinivasan on Twitter (not news, but usually interesting and forward looking), same thing applies to others on Twitter if you can find them.
Any of these is 10x better than something like the NYT, on a regular basis. The MSM writing and discussion isn’t even close in complexity or depth. MSM anchors don’t seem as smart (imo) and are mostly preaching to their own choir with whatever motivated reasoning they need to do so.
Thanks again!
Some others that I forgot are the 538 podcast, Bari Weiss, and the new Joe Lonsdale YouTube channel.
My kid plays in the dirt, but he does it with me, not at preschool (where apparently they don't even do play-dough and sand these days). He does have some recess & free-play time - I can't imagine managing a 3-year-old without it - but it's time-boxed into 30 minute increments.
I’m not really looking back through rose tinted glasses, this was also at a quite competitive academically driven private school (if you did not then pass the 11+, bye bye) but like, you really were free to do a lot. Perhaps things really have changed then (and I really have gotten old), I like to hope not. I dunno - I really just don’t think it’s fair to do that to the young. Especially coupled with the justification that ‘if you do rough and tumble play with your mate you will kill your grandmother’ reasoning that they must have picked up on.
- lab leak hypothesis
- “masks don’t work”
- “not transmissible via the air”
- “it’s not a pandemic, don’t panic”
The authority has shown its capacity to be wrong here repeatedly and in obvious ways. This isn’t direct support of what OP said, but appeal to authority does little for me. The specifics matter.
There was definitely a mindset of potential panic being worse than the disease itself early on. Perhaps not downplaying per se, so much as resisting making any major pronouncements of danger until the evidence was overwhelming.
They also framed virus fears at the time as racism and complained about border closures.
The “masks don’t work” arguments came from scientific authority though.
Same with “not transmitted via the air” and dismissing the lab leak hypothesis.
I’m not arguing with a partisan position - partisanship is what lead to a lot of dumb positions from scientific authority (and politicians too obviously).
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/states-r...
(link says march-15, page is updated through July 8)
At the time “masks don’t work, “it’s not airborne”, and especially “it wasn’t a lab leak” were the overarching consensus - it was a handful of minority voices that pushed back on this, and they were not the authority.
The authorities largely failed us, my guess is because of political partisanship and motivated reasoning (along with a weaker MSM with bad journalists and some CCP pressure on WHO).
It was largely specific individual voices that were more correct at each step, rather than authority. The trick is you had to be able to tell which ones.
Sadly, no and no.
Even in many US states it's also not enough yet.
And many countries must be looking at their situation regarding vaccine production in general, particularly dependency on other countries, and finding that to be something that they want to secure for themselves.
> for vaccinated persons means the virus is no longer a threat
I would call it a much diminished threat, which would be further diminished by vaccinating more other people, rather than "no threat".
Delta variant is probably going to change that. Some parts of the country will have a delta wave. But it’s going to be mostly in vaccinated people with serious infections.