Children are almost immune from the virus. Everyone below 40 is also extremely extremely unlikely to die from the virus, just to a lesser extent.

First, that’s factually incorrect. Second, children can transmit COVID even if they don’t get severe cases. Ever send a kid to school or daycare and then spend a year or two sick with everything every child in that school or daycare had? Kids spread cold/flu like viruses probably faster than anyone.

That has been true for us up until the pandemic - at least in our case. The combination of the school taking extra precautions and parents not sending sick kids to school is working. We've had our daughter in daycare for months with 1 total illness (minor cold). And in that case I believe it was from taking her to outdoor dining. Kids seem to touch every part of those restaurant high chairs which are never sanitized.

> We've had our daughter in daycare for months with 1 total illness (minor cold)

To be fair you can't be sure that wasn't covid, unless you have come up seronegative. Not every adult gets it bad

I get your point, but it's really a stretch. There's been no reported cases of covid at our school and the symptoms matched common cold. Sure I guess there's a chance it could have been some mild case of covid the same as it could have been flu or some other illness.

Prior to the pandemic she used to be in a tiny school with 4-6 kids and 2 teachers and she was sick seemingly every other week. The difference seems to be the combination of teachers sanitizing everything, keeping kids in smaller groups, temperature checks, and parents not sending sick kids to school.

This is one of the problems with the newly-developed vaccines. It's not clear if they confer sterilizing immunity, so it's not clear if a smaller percentage of people getting the vaccine will stop the disease spreading. Therefore, it may be necessary to get most people vaccinated if we don't want the disease around at all.

You might want to update. There were two studies out of Europe last week stating that children are just as likely to get the virus as adults.

I think the poster above you was talking about the chances of death from the virus, not simply the chance of infection.

I think it's pretty well established at this point that the case fatality index for children is vastly lower than for older adults, about 0.1% for people under age 29. [1]

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518649/

The actual best estimate of infection fatality rate for people under age 29 is way less than 0.1%.

0-19 years: 0.003%

20-49 years: 0.02%

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

And that's counting people who have bothered to get tested. If younger people are getting asymptomatic or minor symptom covid that looks like a cold, then the "true" ifr will be even lower

Infection fatality rates are based on antibody seroprevalence studies and thus accounts for asymptomatic cases. What you're thinking of is the case fatality rate, not the infection fatality rate.

You can't get an accurate community seroprevalence measure when your community is told to shelter in place.

Seroprevalence studies have been conducted all over the world. For example in Delhi India approximately 50-60% of the population now have antibodies for SARS-CoV-2. There are statistical techniques for adjusting the raw results based on population demographics.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/delhi-may-be-head...

Note that seroprevalence studies will underestimate the number of infections because some recovered patients don't produce detectible levels of antibodies.

There's more to this virus than fatality. Many people that live will have debilitating aftereffects for the foreseeable future.

The virus hasn't been around long enough to make that claim.

No one will pay the political price of causing infections among children by reopening rapidly. And I'd like to believe that as a society, we are cautious about letting children be infected with a novel disease whose long-term effects are unknown.

Inflicting on all children the certain damage of social isolation, screen learning, and further economic precarity, to avoid theoretical and undemonstrated long-term effects (of a perhaps serious but not crippling nature) to a small percentage of them, does not strike me as societal wisdom in any way.

Also, do you know what else has unknown long-term effects in children?

I'm not arguing that children should be kept out of in-person school. In fact, I'm against it, and was against it even when the pandemic was raging last year. I agree with you that children have been silent victims of schoolteachers' refusal to do in-person school. I do, however, strongly support reasonable precautions including masking and physical distancing, which can be achieved with children (not very young children, but certainly 2nd grade and up) with continual reinforcement until it becomes a habit.

> I agree with you that children have been silent victims of schoolteachers' refusal to do in-person school

What should a schoolteacher do then, die? I'm not going to ask them to do that.

They should be put in one of the top priority categories for vaccination, and THEN we can expect them to go in classrooms (but we shouldn't be doing that anyway unless all kids are also vaccinated - otherwise they will keep the virus in circulation. They tend to have extremely mild or completely asymptomatic cases, but they DO catch it and spread it further)

> What should a schoolteacher do then, die?

Feudal traditions aside, no one has the right to draw an income from a position where they are not doing the job. So, if teachers don't want to teach, then they can find another occupation which they are comfortable doing.

> What should a schoolteacher do then

Why not the same thing a grocery clerk is expected to do? Or do you not consider primary education to be “essential” ?

I’m not sure your reading of the political climate is accurate. A lot of places have already reopened schools, and I’ve heard a lot of politicians explicitly say that they’re willing to pay the price because it’s not a big deal if kids get it. Maybe they’re wrong, but if you expect that there’ll be public support behind keeping things closed when the death and hospitalization rates start plummeting, I think you’d better readjust.

> it’s not a big deal if kids get it

The Academy of Pediatrics says this. It's not just some politicans who don't know anything about epidemology and likely have never even taken a college-level biology course.

I'm not saying that places will be shut down completely. I was talking specifically about masking and physical distancing mandates and other such restrictions. I don't think big business and the public will tolerate losing another season of attending (in-person) Football, Baseball, Ice Hockey, <insert favorite sport here> games.

> I don't think big business and the public will tolerate losing another season

The whole "COVID fatigue" thing is one of the craziest things I keep hearing with regard to this pandemic. The virus doesn't care if you're bored of the disease and "won't tolerate" staying home from more football games. It's not like it's just going to go away because we're tired of it! I sincerely hope governments aren't going to just open things up because 2021 is a different year and everyone's just really bummed of it all. Surely we have better sense than that.

Avoiding getting Covid is not the only thing that matters in life. As the cost (in months of normal life lost) of the lockdown increases, it may be perfectly rational for people to think it’s no longer worth the decreased risk of catching the virus. Seen in this light, “Covid fatigue” makes perfect sense.

Said another way: imagine an alternate reality where none of the vaccines worked, and we kept getting winter flare-ups of Covid year after year - would you think we should continue the restrictions _forever_ ? If not, why not?

Assuming also that immunization did not emerge some other way also (like from getting the disease once) then yes I’d expect we would permanently change our way of life. What’s the alternative? Just accept the casualties year after year? For what? So we can eat at Olive Garden and go to football games?

How can you reduce all of human social and cultural life to “Olive Garden and football” ?

And yes, of course it’d be worth a slightly lower life expectancy in order to not live under permanent lockdown. If you don’t agree with that, we probably have such a fundamentally different worldview that we will never see eye-to-eye.

Since we're doing scenarios, what do we do when a hypothetical COVID-21 comes along which is 20x deadlier and kills uniformly across age ranges? Do we simply ignore it because we're tired of stay-at-home and we all gotta live our (now potentially shorter) lives?

Yes, if there were a virus that killed 10% of people of all ages and was as contagious as Covid-19, it would be a civilization-level threat and it would be worth extreme measures to attempt to stop its spread (I'm not optimistic that it _could_ be stopped, but it'd at least be worth trying). What's your point?

It's that fundamentally, our opinions are similar: There exists some point beyond which the threat is great enough to change our lifestyle permanently. We simply disagree about exactly where that point is.