"People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk". This might not exactly be the strongest point to make, as the Covid IFR rate for those under 17 is 20 in 1,000,000, or a 99.998% survival rate. Sure, there's a non-zero chance of death but it's effectively zero. It's great to say we should reduce risks further as a society, but is it really worth the costs to reduce risks like that further?

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

"IFR" (infection fatality rate) is not the be-all end-all metric of danger.

you don't have to die to suffer harmful long-term consequences from COVID, it appears to cause all kinds of organ damage including to the brain, this includes "the young", and these people usually did not suffer "severe" acute reactions during their infection.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4470

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210401/many-show-long-term...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-me...

it's not safe to get covid period the end, even if you're "young" and even if it doesn't kill you outright or even hospitalize you. it's still a dangerous disease and the spread still needs to be minimized.

I'm sure you mean well are are just trying to help, but please be very very careful when repeating claims like this. You could also make it clear and indicate what the articles actually assert as fact (versus just reporting data) to avoid confusing the lay public. The differences between what we know, what we suspect, what we think is likely, etc are nuanced and subject to being misunderstood.

What are the numbers on how often people are having those effects?

In a University of Washington longitudinal study, 32.7% of participants had persistent long-term side effects, and around 9% had moderate to severe long-term side effects.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Really don't know why some people are so determined to deny that COVID is a serious disease with a decent incidence rate of serious side effects. 10% of the population getting moderate to serious side effects from a single source within a year is a lot, and it sucks if you're that 10%! And another 20% get minor side effects on top of that. And it isn't just "the old" or anything like that, those side effects cut across the whole population, young and old.

I guess it's just the next iteration of the old "it's no worse than the flu" denialism. But a single bout of the flu doesn't leave 10% of the population with serious long-term side effects.

That study wasn't controlled. The most common reported symptom was fatigue. Many people who have never been infected also report fatigue symptoms. We'll need more research to reliably quantify how many patients experience long term symptoms.

It looks like they did have a control group, although it was fairly small with only 21 people.

I honestly hadn’t seen any hard numbers and was hoping to become more informed on the matter. That study looks decent, thank you for sharing it.

I think the study mentioned that this is largest and longest study about long-term effects, which I find a bit disappointing given the massive impact of the pandemic. The control group was quite small with only 21 people.

Anyways, I have adjusted my priors a bit. I’m not some sort of rabid denier :). But I am a bit wary of people arguing for very strict measures. The vaccine exists and is widely available (in the US). We won’t have a more powerful tool than that anytime soon. We need to start moving on with our lives. Not recklessly, but it needs to happen. Thankfully, the numbers seem to be getting better and better. Hopefully the trend continues.

It wouldn't be 10% of the population, though, right? It would only be 10% of the people who caught a case of the flu bad enough to be hospitalized or outpatient-treated?

Hmmm, I couldn’t find how exactly the study population was selected. Where did you see that?

it's 30%/10% of all cases, including weak/asymptomatic.

Consider then my family member, who is elderly and immuno-compromised such that the vaccine may not be effective.

Immunocompromised people always have been at risk and always will be at risk. The presence of one more endemic coronavirus doesn't really change anything. Other endemic coronaviruses already have a high fatality rate in that population. I don't mean to minimize your family member's situation but that's just medical reality.

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/223/9/1564/5899001

Having an already-high baseline risk before adding covid is a reason to be more cautious, not less. The point is that this particular vector is so trivially preventable.

Unless I'm mistaken, if we look strictly at risk of serious injury and death — not inconvenience and cost of hospital admission, etc. — then it should be less deadly to enter a crowded public place while infected with COVID than to enter the same crowded public place eating peanuts messily.

Of course, you shouldn't do either, and you should probably doubly not do the COVID thing; I'm just trying to get a baseline of risk to compare to.

How hard is it to get vaccinated? Just get the fucking shot.

We had to wait until just this last week to receive second doses. Shots have been rationed and rolled out by appointment only in our state.

That said, now everyone in our family is fully vaccinated.

did you get yours?

Are you seriously implying that the only negative outcome is death?

Some people have long term side effects. Even if you fully recover if you have a bad case you could be out of work for a long period of time. The negative impact is significantly higher on the poor who can't afford health insurance or to take time off.

Stop looking at death and look at the total impact.

Lockdowns have also had a high negative impact on the poor around the world by preventing them from working and earning income. Hunger is more dangerous to many of those people than COVID-19.

Remember that death isn't the only bad outcome: just because you survive doesn't mean you're out of the woods, unfortunately. I'm afraid "Long COVID" is a thing, for adults and children.

"Evidence from the first study of long covid in children suggests that more than half of children aged between 6 and 16 years old who contract the virus have at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days, with 42.6 per cent impaired by these symptoms during daily activities. "

There are folks that are still debilitated, almost a year after their "recovery". We don't know if/when their sequelae will disappear. Time will tell.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

This isn’t a paper, it’s an editorial, and it’s utter trash, printed in a bad “journal” (New Scientist is essentially a mass-market magazine, on par with Discover). The only evidence advanced for the claim is this:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.23.21250375v...

This is a survey of parent-reported symptoms in 129 children, and of the “long-term” symptoms, all are vague, (e.g. headache, fatigue, muscle pain) overlapping substantially with the aches and pains of daily life.

They don’t even bother to link to it directly in the editorial; they simply mention the doi in the text. This wasn’t even proofread by an editor.

I think your perspective shows one side of a continuum between Personal Freedom <----> Collective Safety. It would seem that at some point maybe in the 50's or maybe the 80's a majority of people decided the debate around this was solved and the US would favor personal freedom over everything else. It's clear that as a society we have decided to re-open this debate.

While the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle the most important part of this issue is the nuance. It's become very common to lash out and villainize people on the other end of the spectrum or just people in a slightly different place on the spectrum. I think we first need to carefully consider the variables and hedge our statements.

For example, a friend of mine in her 50s was recently verbally accosted, by an employee of the store she was at, for not being vaccinated because she was wearing a mask after it wasn't required . But she is in fact vaccinated and wants to continue to wear a mask because she has many health problems.

Just assuming the other side is needlessly putting other people at risk because they are selfish is overly simple and will fail to address the root issues at play. The same is true for the other side of the argument, assuming people hate freedom and want to make all your decisions for you because their evil or think your stupid is also failing to address the real issues.

With some nuance and understanding injected into these conversations we might be less polarized and have options that work for more people.

At the bottom of it all, different people have different values and there's no way around that.

And some people are hateful and aggressive due to their personal mental state.

> But she is in fact vaccinated and wants to continue to wear a mask because she has many health problems.

Does she know that a mask, by itself, offers effectively no protection from being infected by covid-19?

That is not true.

Street design can help a lot with pedestrian (and bicycle) safety. Unfortunately most of our efforts most have been put towards the safety of the people inside the car instead.

Have the statistics changed for people under 10 with covid? Early on data suggested almost no hospitalizations or deaths for young people.

According to this link 287 out of 568.000 has died from Covid, though that is in the age group 0-17 years.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

If you assume that lung damage is to an extent irreversible and accumulates over time (peobbat less true for pre-puberty children than adults), then you'd expect lung damage to be less immediately fatal in the young yet still have similar effect, just delayed.

That is not a valid assumption. There is no evidence that lung damage is common in children, or that it is irreversible.

Your three year old son is at 20x greater risk of dying from Influenza than COVID:

https://freopp.org/the-chances-of-dying-from-covid-19-90cd5b...

Hence why he has gotten and will get a flu shot every year.

In a good chunk of the US driving is unavoidable due to long distances and poor options. There was a story a few years ago about a Detroit man who walked 21 miles to work https://amp.freep.com/amp/22660785

I like building out transit but to be quite realistic we are never going to get to China levels of building out fast enough transit covering a majority of jobs and we can’t undo the great big sprawl of places like Houston or Dallas or Atlanta.

One of the biggest upsides of self-driving car tech developing further is that it will make life safer for pedestrians and cyclists. (But it definitely isn't there yet).

Self-driving cars will not work well until we realize and accept that there will be casualties caused by these autonomous vehicles.

I think it could work on the freeway and similar controlled environments, but it won't work in cities unless we start to modify the city environment, e.g. no bicycling allowed and so on.

>Similarly while I'm vaccinated and thus my risk of hospitalization or death from COVID 19 is effectively 0, my three year old son is not.

When will you get your son vaccinated?

As soon as vaccines are available for his age group.

Not quite familiar with the term twist me up, but i take it that you take offense with people freely choosing not to be vaccinated.

To me that kind of thinking while understandable has to go away. You have exactly the same situation with the flu, yet here we don't judge.

So when the vaccines start doing their thing, i sincerely hope that this judgemental attitude will go away.

In the same vein we should also treat vaccinated and non-vaccinated equal, otherwise it will be very hard to live with the virus.

We do judge for measles, mumps, and rubella. In the us, we don't allow the unvaccinated to attend schools.

Good point, to be specific i was only talking about the flu and Covid.

More freedoms in Europe when it comes to that matter.

I judge the shit out of people who don't get the flu shot, too.

Get your goddamn vaccinations and protect yourself and everyone around you. It's real simple.

I think Covid will lead to a reevaluation of flu, and people have been disregarding the flu deaths and illness occurrenc rate as inevitable for too long.

This post is akin to someone pinching me and saying "hey, we live in polarized country!" The so called culture wars just seem to be escalating.

What part of this is in any way related to "culture war"?

Attitudes toward balancing risk versus convenience are cultural. Historically, the United States was pretty accepting of risky and risk creating activities. These days much less so.

Attitudes toward driving are deeply cultural and affect many aspects of life. I just got back from Dallas. It’s extremely car-oriented, with a vast network of express lanes connecting far-flung suburbs. It also has low housing costs and tons of kids and kid-related activities. These are all related: wrangling one kid on a subway train is doable, much less so three. When you say “driving is bad” you’re touching on myriad aspects of how people have chosen to structure their live, including their reproductive choices.

I know you meant the car centric anecdote to be an analogy and not the point itself, but I must nitpick.

Public transportation/buses/subways are honestly quite convenient even if you are wrangling 3 kids around. The problem is that public transportation in the US at its best (NYC, Boston) is still a far-cry from actually 'good' public transportation systems. In many places kids as young as 11 are able to independently navigate the city without the parents help when public transportation is well built. If anything, car dependence means that kids take 5 more years (16) before they can be independant and parents will often struggle to meet diverging needs of 3 children when the car is a single bottleneck.

Not-just-bikes does a great contrast between North America and the Netherlands to highlight how car-dependence can lead to struggles as a parent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98

Also, given that most upper middle class families usually have 3 cars (2 for parents work and 1 for a 16-yr old child), if public transport allows you to go from 3 -> 1, that's already a huge plus. It is not like families in European capitals do not own 5 seater hatchbacks. Public transport isn't against cars. It's is against car essentialism. If anything, moving people to public transport will improve the experience of those who need cars by declogging highways.

Lastly, car essentialism, highways, the suburban dream and white flight were all distinctly post-WW2 phenomena and heavily subsidized to be that way. It is by no means a part of American culture. Most pre-ww2 cities such as the ones in the NE had perfectly acceptable public transportation for the time, which has since not been maintained as well. Even smaller cities such as Portsmouth NH and Portland ME are incredibly walkable, dense and public transport friendly. (rural culture is an entirely different point. If you own 10,000 acres of corn fields ofc you own a tractor or a pickup. No one is suggesting public transportation for them)

Older American suburbs are actually far less cardependent than you'd think: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVeSiWTU74s)

Dallas style urban design has existed for less than 70 years, and was specifically engineered by politicians and corporate interests rather than being a natural outcome of American cultural desires.

The birth rate in transit friendly European cities has collapsed, so I’m not sure what that gets you. You make a good point about older children, but if you have 3 kids (American women in average want closer to 3 than to 2) you’re going to spend 15 years or so with at least one kid below 10.

Of course you can have three kids in the city, but you can also do your laundry by hand. That doesn’t mean people want to go back to that way of living. And birth rates in cities were never particularly high in the modern era. Most people in America at the turn of the 20th century lived in rural areas.

Also, a bunch of other stuff has changed since the pre-suburbanization era. Both parents typically work, and have to reconcile commuting to work with child care drop off and pickup (which isn’t necessarily located near transit).

That said, I know someone with three young kids living in Chicago without a car. But she’s a champion, and most people aren’t as hard as her. Dallas-style cities make a lot of the ancillary aspects of parenting much easier.

Arguing that a phenomenon is less than 80 years old doesn't mean that it's not a part of American culture.

And there is more than just public transportation keeping 11 year olds from navigating the city by public transit. We also have crime rates far higher than western Europe or Asia.

Making public transit suitable for unaccompanied children would involve an unacceptable, probably illegal curtailment of the freedoms of mentally ill homeless people to do as they please in public spaces.

> Similarly while I'm vaccinated and thus my risk of hospitalization or death from COVID 19 is effectively 0, my three year old son is not. People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk, which really twists me up inside.

It appears that you understand that the vaccine doesn't make you immune to COVID but rather reduces the symptoms. Given this, you can still catch it and pass it to your child. You are probably still their most likely vector. Have you changed your habits (being more social) since receiving the vaccine? If so, is your argument that those you are now socializing with are responsible for spreading it to your son through you?

This is outdated. The CDC guidelines about masks explicitly stated that studies in the real world confirm that you are exceedingly unlikely to get or spread covid after vaccination with the mRNA shots. That’s why they said it is not needed for vaccinated people to wear masks.

This is not outdated, The CDC website still says this is an active area of research. “Early data” indicates otherwise but we already know vaccines are not 100% effective. I don’t know why you’re believing the CDC on this after they pulled the same stunt on masks early on to achieve a political mission (reserve PPE for medical people) and even admit this is to incentivize those who are opposed to getting vaccinated by dangling the “no mask required” carrot in front of them. The default stance of the CDC should be cautious towards early data and not use it as a means to alter people’s behavior.

Wow, you're next level. Have you thought about how that comment reads to a worried parent?