While I have two myself, I am the first to say it: Children are disease carrying vermin

My phrase is "The world is a filthy biological soup", so the less we're in the world, the less covered in soup we are.

There's a reason a lot of epidemiologists I know, myself included, are fond of the phrase "fecal patina"

I prefer "walking petri dish".

I refer to mine as pint-sized biological weapons labs. I never thought catching a cold was such a big deal until I caught one that had been mutated first by preschoolers.

In Germany meanwhile it has become a meme that "schools are not the driver off the pandemic" stated by all politicians who are obviously taking a page from the Iraqi information Ministers playbook.

That's been borne out by data from several countries, children don't seem to readily spread COVID-19. Adults are the primary spreaders, which is sort of the reverse of the flu.

Except when they do: they were only at lower risk, not no risk, and the new variants also had more and heavier effects on children.

Compounding this with parents having to bring their children to school, thus generating more contacts than just kids alone.

All in all, there was some data at the root of the policy, but sending kids to school is still a shitty proposition from a safety perspective.

> Except when they do

There's no evidence to support the idea that children under 12 are a much risk of spreading COVID-19. According to the CDC which is notoriously conservative, "in-person learning in schools has not been associated with substantial community transmission". According to the NYT [1], NYC school reopening did not drive spread. Here's another [2] look a children 9 and under in Israel showing both low infection rates and low spread in Israeli schools.

We also know that basically no children die of COVID-19. But we do know that for small children being isolated at home is terrible for their mental health and educational futures.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/world/nyc-schools-covid-t...

[2]https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Is that data from countries where schools are closed? If so, yeah, of course they won't be the main spreaders, they are quarantined. Opening up schools because the closing of the schools is working in control the spread is just the worst.

No, it's from when German schools were open, when Israel's schools were open and from Sweden. There's also contact tracing data from a bunch of countries.

Denn, so schließt er messerscharf, daß nicht sein kann was nicht sein darf.

(Because - he concludes in clarity - nothing can be what is not allowed to be, a part of a famous German poem)

It's a political ploy: If children don't go to school, parent's cannot go to work. This hurts the economy. A certain number of Covid deaths is acceptable as long as the economy is not hurting.

Where I live parents don’t understand what a lockdown is. During extended school holidays the children are all playing together. What’s the point then?

If they're playing outside, that's probably safer than being locked inside poorly-ventilated cages all day alongside unvaccinated teachers

Boom. Got it in one, although I expect that a few flu cases are being blamed on Covid.

Maybe in a couple more generations of improvement of telepresence we can mostly eradicate infectious disease. Next up: We each get a nutrient bath and direct hook-up.

You may be interested in Soylent as a food source. It's the closest thing I can find to hooking up to an IV for nutrients