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.

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.

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.

> Socio-economic effects are estimated to have the greatest impact on quality of life of all categories investigated, over the short and long term combined; from March 2020 to more than five years from now, the impacts of lockdown and a resulting recession are estimated to reduce England’s health by over 970,000 QALYs – the health impacts of contracting COVID-19 are still unclear in the long term, but between March 2020 and March 2021, these represent 570,000 lost QALYs.

So with even all the coronavirus deaths in the UK, which had one of the highest mortality rates in the western world, the lockdown is having a bigger impact on health than the virus. This is justifiable if you believe without the lockdown orders of magnitude more people would have died. But there's reasons to believe that's not the case: some recent research suggests regions are hitting "herd immunity" at only ~20% infected with basic precautions due to cross-immunity. And indeed, Sweden which didn't do a major lockdown isn't looking much worse off than the UK when comparing excess mortality.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

a lockdown doesn't inherently cause this. These things are caused by a badly implemented lockdown, a lockdown that doesn't have measures in place to make sure people don't go bankrupt, measures to make sure people's mental health doesn't deteriorate etc.

If let say covid has severity of anthrax or ebola then restricting people movement maybe justifiable but not otherwise.

As to evidence...

"One in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they've considered suicide in the past month because of the pandemic, according to new CDC data that paints a bleak picture of the nation's mental health during the crisis."

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/13/cdc-mental-health-p...

Perhaps it is time for parents to talk to their children about what they would like for a future? Most of the comments here are about the desires of the parents to be anxiety free.

As for the suicide factor, yes, there is a chance of increased numbers of suicides, no for now there is no proof that such an increase is actually happening. If previous pandemics - without a lockdown - are any guide then a pandemic has regardless of the measures taken an increased risk of people committing suicide.

Besides that a proportional and timely initial response would have been the very best way of avoiding all that.

> Bloomfield announced all of those who tested positive, as well as close family members who could be at risk, would now be put into self-isolation facilities.

> Bloomfield said they'd given moving confirmed cases into quarantine facilities "a lot of thought". It would help prevent spread between family members and limit the spread in the community from people coming to visit.

> It would "really strengthen our response", he said. [0]

Are you concerned with how lockdown effects children now?

[0] https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/13-new-community-cases-a...

Think about the alternative: no quarantine, unchecked spread, lots of people dead.

If there is one country that is doing this by the book it is NZ, and they should be commended for it.

That you try to spin that as a negative is quite a feat.

I've been quarantined myself for two weeks, it wasn't as bad as it could have been and we managed. If I had to go through it again then I would, especially now that I know better how to prepare.

Your "by the book" is more like "at any cost." Why not just come out and say that you support draconian and authoritarian measures?

Your quarantine isn't comparable to forced isolation in a facility, right? Surely you can understand how that might damage a child?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Hey Grandma can you take care of my covid-kid while I am slowly maybe dying here?"

There is 0 societal support here.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

Perhaps people are simply desensitized to kids catching colds & flus? My kid probably brought home twenty different novel coronaviruses, all before his second birthday.

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.

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.

That was what the Chinese data said - they had fewer cases so presumably they didn't see the full range of possibilities.

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.

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.