Except that in kids COVID is about as lethal as the ordinary flu. It’s more transmissible, but the number of kids we’ve seen suffer serious consequences across the US has been very, very low. We don’t make kids wear helmets everywhere they go, though it would be decidedly more efficacious from a safety perspective. It seems to me some relativity is in order.

Isn't the concern that children act as a massive spread vector such that breakthrough cases in adults may still overwhelm hospital systems?

A couple months ago I would have maybe agreed, but the delta variant seems to really through a wrench into this line of thinking.

Serious breakthrough cases remain rare, delta has not changed this

The CDC estimates that the survival rate for the 18-49 age bracket (which accounts for most parents of young children) is 99.94%. And that's since the start of the pandemic without vaccination. For vaccinated parents now the survival rate is virtually 100%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Some 18-49 year old parents have cancer diagnosis that they're living with and are taking immune suppressants, or they're taking care of older family members.

You can't erect a solid barrier around that population demographic like they never come into contact with vulnerable sections of the population.

And enough people are being stupid about vaccinations that they're out there getting sick, and unfortunately if you just let them roll the dice while letting the virus rip through kids, it will find all the vulnerable people out there and overload the hospital system and affects everyone. Kids don't exist in a vacuum and the virus will happily hop through them to find every vulnerable adult it can.

Once again we find ourselves in a "flattening the curve" problem.

And you need to stop focusing on death rates. In terms of hospital resources, a patient who spends 2 weeks in the ICU and recovers is just as bad as one that spends 2 weeks in the ICU and dies. And per patient they're more resource intensive than other respiratory viruses.

> Some 18-49 year old parents have cancer diagnosis that they're living with and are taking immune suppressants, or they're taking care of older family members.

If your immune system is already compromised, there's TONS of other stuff just as scary as COVID. The risk of the flu to these people in past years was just as high, but this argument wasn't used because the entire world can't put life on hold forever.

Do any downvoters care to actually explain their reasoning? Wikipedia puts flu deaths during the last pre-pandemic season at 60K in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...

I mean there is no reasoning. We never did this crap for other illness. It’s as if people woke up on March 2020 and discovered “holy crap people die of illness!!”

Orlando is having a water shortage due to lack of liquid oxygen to treat water, because it is being diverted to COVID patients. That does not typically happen during flu season.

Immune suppressed individuals and the people who interact with them I would assume are, as a population, used to taking care of themselves in the face of the common flu and other things which present danger to them.

The ease at which COVID, especially delta, spreads basically guarantees immune suppressed individuals will come into contact with it w/o everyone taking precautions.

You don't have to put your life on hold forever. Wear a mask, be vaccinated, and encourage others in your life to do the same. Live your life within the bounds that helps others survive this. We're in this together.

According to those same cdc numbers the hospitalization rate in that same population is ~40x higher than just the mortality.

It doesn't matter how low the death rate is if the hospital system collapses.

So, yeah, I guess the grandparents and older aunts / uncles they may be living with are fucked. But who cares about them?

I really just don't understand the hyperventilation about this stuff. At this point, the vast majority of elderly people are fully vaccinated, and breakthrough cases -- especially those resulting in severe illness or death -- are extremely rare. The risk is nonzero, but living with zero risk is simply not a realistic goal. It never has been and never will be.

And the hospitals are overflowing with people winding up on the wrong side of that nonzero risk, which impacts everyone.

That's absurd. To the extent that hospitals are "overflowing," it's due to unvaccinated people, not people with breakthrough cases (the nonzero risk I mentioned).

The context here is that somehow if kids get Covid it's a death sentence for their grandparents, and that's simply not true when the vast majority of Americans over 50 have been vaccinated.

You educate people on the risks of covid, tell them how it spreads and let the individuals and families decide what level of precautions they feel are appropriate.

Grandma only has a few years left… they wanna see their grandkids. My daughters grandparents would rather die of covid than not be able to hug and interact with their grandchildren. Who the hell is the state or some blowhard health “expert” to deny them that?

The odds are overwhelmingly high they won’t with COVID either. Let’s not forget that the survival rate in all populations is well north of 90%. Parent age populations closer to 99%. Even higher if the parents are vaccinated.

Adults sacrifice for children. If children aren’t at risk, we have a moral obligation to let them be kids and live their short, once ever childhood.

Making kids protect adults by sacrificing their one and only childhood is morally bankrupt.

Also, adults have a vaccine… so they aren’t at risk either.

But their parents are (or can be) vaccinated, thus imune to the disease.

This is outdated information.

Delta strain is worse - more dangerous for kids and those under 30.

More dangerous than what? Even if it were 200% more lethal, 2x a very small number is still a very small number.

Whilst I don't have the figures to specifically source, yesterday's daily pressing briefing for my area had the health minister saying that delta was 100x more lethal than the flu in children, or 1000%.

That is not a very small number.

Your health Minister seems to be spreading misinformation.

The mortality rate for my state is 4% of all cases. [0] The mortality rate for the entire country is about 5.6% [1].

There has not been a single certified influenza death in Australia since 2020. [1]

It certainly appears that my health minister was downplaying the difference, not playing it up.

[0] https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir...

[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...

Excess mortality rates aren’t relevant at all to the lethality of the delta variant in children relative to prior strains. Overall mortality isn’t even asking the right question, and it’s a very poor proxy even for the lethality rate of SARS-COV-2 (contingent on pervasive testing). And that we’ve eliminated influenza deaths is no argument that influenza is no longer lethal.

Unless Australians are an order of magnitude more vulnerable to COVID than elsewhere in the world, those numbers are more the result of low test rates missing infections than anything else.

In the US, the CDC estimates an actual mortality rate of 0.6%, compared to the ratio of cases/deaths of ~1.6%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Australia has had an order of magnitude fewer infections than elsewhere in the world. We have come close to eliminating its spread altogether several times, so it should come as no surprise that the proportion of deaths is higher than somewhere else that has failed to contain the illness.

How does that follow? How deadly a virus is for any given individual should be independent of how many other people got it (outside of situations where the health care system is overwhelmed and can't provide adequate care - but that'd make the numbers worse for the US, not better).

If the virus is under better containment, those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions. Thus death rates when looking at the entire length of the pandemic are likely to be higher.

Delta is the first time Australia has seen widespread infection in healthy people.

> those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions

I'm not totally sure that's the case - it's at least something you can't just aver as self-evident. I'd guess that those most likely to be infected early on are going to be people who travel or those who come most into contact with them (service & tourism workers).

But I also think it's a moot point. In the context of this thread - which is about how to move forward once we've accepted that containment is off the table, and especially about the risk that poses to the healthiest members of society (kids) - it doesn't make sense to cite numbers that you yourself acknowledge overstate the risk of COVID by being biased towards the most unhealthy members of society.

Australians now have to post a sign on their door saying they are in quarantine. People are not allowed to travel within the country. They locked down a state of 1.3 million people with 5 hours notice because of one case they said was from a pizza box.

They are also building giant quarantine facilities, indicating they are gonna do this for the long haul.

Australia is hardly a model country for how to handle an infectious respiratory virus.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-21/sa-tougher-border-res...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8980913/South-Austr...

Which country or state is a model?

Seems to be a case of damned if you do and damned if you dont!

I live in SA, the state that got shut down for the Pizza Delivery incident.

By and large the citizens of this state support the actions of our state government!

We go hard, and go early!

For the most part we've lived through this pandemic with our lives going on as normal!

We dont have to worry, and we have very few restrictions.

Snap lock downs for a few days are a small price to pay that almost all of us are willing to pay!

We do it in solidarity for each other. Everyone wears a mask. Everyone checks in with QR codes. The few that dont are a small minority.

So when you say "they locked down a state" you mean we locked down a state. We the people of South Australia support our government's actions.

Please don't try to spin decisive actions into an oppressive narrative!

What you sound like is a deluded and emotionally post-justifying case of Stockholm syndrome. There is nothing normal or in any way ideal or worth romanticizing about the measures you describe, or their absurd over-reach for increasingly minuscule justifications that have moved goal posts to a degree that moderate rational analysis and weighing of risks reveals as somewhat demented. How sure are you that so many people in your state so whole heartedly support such a normalization of social control on the flimsy clinical pretexts you describe.

Calling actions decisive doesn't spare them from being badly decided or indeed even oppressive. Decisiveness first requires solid reasoning, not just a defense that rests on an action simply being decisive.

Masks, snap lockdowns, closed borders and mo international travel, privacy violating monitoring… Oh yeah, that sounds really normal.

What’s your end game?

Source?

No it's not. There's still no evidence that there is any real risk to children. Please prove otherwise. Anecdotes and one in a million cases don't count.

Nearly 300 hospitalized per day, nearly 500 dead so far. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/07/health/children-covid-19-prot...

Unknown how many will long-term health effects.

Even seemingly innocuous viruses like Epstein-Barr are tied to various health problems later in life. Why should we knowingly expose an entire generation to a little understood virus?

So less than one in a million children hospitalized per day. And 500 dead after almost two years is nothing, sorry to be so blunt.

You can say epstein-barr, I can say other corona viruses like the cold virus. You can't just choose an arbitrary virus to compare to. We need strong evidence of serious risk to impose such restrictions, and not ungrounded fear which is not backed by data.

Fear mongers run out of ammunition for forever lockdowns. Low quality of arguments will be compensated by hysteria and insults. For instance that you don't care about children (while in their age group it's less harmful than a flu).

Two things. Vaccines got full approval today. And with it the powers that be's patience with people with your view point it as and end.

And We're about 5-6 weeks away from vaccines to be approved for children 5-11 years old.

With that the hammers going to come down on people whose argument for prolonging this is 'I don't wanna'

Supporting vaccinations and supporting lockdowns are separate. You can support one and not the other.

Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

We are actually _incredibly_ fortunate that Covid spares children to the degree that it does.

> Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year:

No, not only does this exaggerate the normal annual impact, but it has killed far fewer (about half) in that age group than COVID has during the COVID crisis. Most of the COVID countermeasures (everything other than the vaccine itself) are effective against the flu, too, and COVID is much more dangerous (considering both deadliness and infectiousness) than the flu even to kids.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...

> Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year:

No, it does not. You didn't actually look at the numbers. One of the worst years overall shows 115 for 0-4 and 528 for 5-17:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

There are some years where the total is a little over a thousand, but most are well below.

Don't spread this bull.

With apologies, I'll correct myself: flu kills hundreds, sometimes thousands of children per year. My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid. It's important to keep that in perspective, is all I'm saying.

> My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid.

This is false if you include the period during which COVID-19 has been around in “every year”, because COVID countermeasures also suppress the flu. Without COVID countermeasures, and without vaccination for most kids, COVID would kill far more than the flu normally does. Now, the COVID vaccine right now is more effective than the flu vaccine usually is (but that may be temporary if COVID is endemic and different variants proliferate), so with vaccines available to younger kids than now that might get evened out or reverse, but right now COVID is clearly far more deadly to kids.

You can't make a direct comparison between a global pandemic and a normal year for influenza. In future years there won't be as many opportunities for people to be infected with Covid, further reducing the risk.

I'm already bored to tears talking about this, though. The only point that I'm trying to make is that we have always accepted a certain level of mortal risk to people, including children. At some point, we are going to have to do that with Covid as well.

So looks like more kids were hospitalized and more died from the flu? What bull are you referring to? Were you outraged about them in any of the last 20 years?

> What bull are you referring to?

The bull that was clearly quoted? "Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year". The linked data does not say that at all.

You're being difficult just to be difficult here.

It's not about children getting it and being ill, it's about children getting it and spreading it. This is the concept behind 'herd immunity'. If we can cut the chain, we mitigate older and people with weakened immune systems from getting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

Yes, but parent poster wrote: "Any talk of lifting restrictions before march is basically a re-formulated "fuck the kids"."

which is not honest in my opinion. The kids so far have suffered the most from corona - no school, no friends - no activities - yet had the least, to fear from it.

So vaccinating the kids is not really about saving the kids - it is about the older population.

But if vaccinated people are also spreading it, I don't get the point of waiting for kids to be vaccinated.

The population at risk being vaccinated was the big deal, but that's done now (apart from those who refuse to be vaccinated, but then it is their problem).

> Bit if vaccinated people are also spreading it

They are less likely to be infected, and it looks like they have a shorter infectious period.

Herd immunity may be achievable with this in mind, but no one really knows right now. New variants may change the calculus too.

The Delta variant is contagious enough that we'll never achieve a level of herd immunity sufficient to protect unvaccinated people. All of us will be infected eventually, it's basically inevitable. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing deaths.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

This presumes we can't tweak boosters to better target Delta, which seems like a silly assumption.

> But if vaccinated people are also spreading it

It is not a binary 0 or 1 as far as if vaccinated people will spread the infection if they are infected. The vaccine lowers the chances, so the more people we can get vaccinated, the lower the chances can get.

> It's not about children getting it and being ill, it's about children getting it and spreading it.

Vaccinated people can still get ill and spread it so why do you keep pushing vaccines to children who have no risk whatsoever if the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated and are safe??

Older people can get vaccinated

Did you already forget the comment that started this thread? This is assuming the rest of the population is vaccinated.

Early this year it looked as if the virus was on the way out in Israel until they started opening up schools again. The risk to children is small, but it's a communicable disease - school is how it spreads between households.

When doing risk assessments I wish people started looking beyond their own immediate circle. Then again, Pharao let the Children of Israel go only after his own firstborn son died.

Asymptomatic spread of the virus is negligible from everything I've read. Children that don't show symptoms aren't a threat. Additionally, there's really no evidence that schools are spreading the virus more.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/21/925794511/were-the-risks-of-r...

I suspect the reason children are the hold up here is less around current data than around where we are in this pandemic and patterns of thought/risk assessment. Here's an analogy that maybe will work with the HN crowd. Say we've got a service that, for 75% of the API endpoints, often gets a severe error. 25% of the endpoints only very rarely get the same error. My team discovers that by applying one simple change to the 75% of the affected endpoints, their error rate drops dramatically. We can't, for whatever reason, apply the same fix to those 25% yet, but we're confident that within a relatively short amount of time we'll be able to.

Do we declare that the service is now working well and move on to other items? Maybe -- in a real setting it'll of course depend on what other priorities the team's juggling at the moment. Maybe this is "good enough" to move on. Still, I think we can all relate to the emotional pull to say "hold on, we still don't actually know why those 25% of our endpoints weren't affected as often. Something could easily change there so that we start seeing similar error rates. We have a fix on the way for this -- can we wait just a bit longer so we can roll this out?"

I think that's where a lot of people are. Again, one could certainly argue that we're close enough, but OTOH I think the reluctance to declare this "over" yet makes a lot of sense too.

Too many holes in this analogy. For instance, there are other unrelated errors that happen more frequently.

If you want to talk about “real risk” then I think it’s only fair to ask you to define what that acceptable risk level is.

Almost 4000 children die each year from drowning in the USA, with double that having a non-fatal drowning [0]. Note that non-fatal drownings can cause long-term health problems. They haven't banned pools yet, so it follows that, as a country, the USA considers 4000 dead children an acceptable risk of having open water, such as rivers, ponds, and pools. And bath tubs, I suppose.

Now with that number in mind, how many children are expected to die if all of them were to be infected with covid-19? I found it hard to find some numbers about this, in my country all corona-deaths of people aged 49 or less are grouped together these days because there are so few that they could be traced to individuals otherwise.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html

The information on that CDC page is misleading. While the page is about children, the text that mentions the 3960 annual drowning deaths does not specify "children," and the number seems to be across all age groups.

This source states ~800 children deaths/year to be children (in 2014). [0]

(I am not commenting on your overall point, just that statistic.)

For reference, the CDC notes annual total US children deaths (if defining "children" as <= 14) as a little over 9000 (in 2019, I think). [1]

[0] https://www.safekids.org/press-release/almost-800-kids-drown...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/child-health.htm

Thanks for the correction! I guess I sound a bit callous in my previous post, but I'm quite happy to learn that 3000 fewer children drown each year than I anticipated (it did feel like a high number). The 800 deaths per year figure can still function as a comparison for the expected child deaths from covid-19.

It's the job of those imposing restrictions to define the risk.

This is not true of Delta strain.

Younger people, under 30, and children are getting it and ending up in hospital.

It’s widely reported here in Australia.

Children are at risk.

> Younger people, under 30, and children are getting it and ending up in hospital.

To emphasise this point, in Victoria, Australia, most of the cases are in the 20-29 age group. Most of the active cases are in the 0-9 age group.[0] NSW data doesn't have the pretty graphs, but the raw data [1] bears out similar groupings.

[0] https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/victorian-coronavirus-cov...

[1] https://data.nsw.gov.au/data/dataset/nsw-covid-19-cases-by-a...

Your first link reports that out of the thousands of total cases, only 20 are in the hospital, 9 of which are in the ICU. This does not support the claim that young people are "widely" ending up in the hospital from COVID.

A COVID case != serious illness, especially in vaccinated individuals. We need to stop pretending that they are equivalent.

> Your first link reports that out of the thousands of total cases, only 20 are in the hospital, 9 of which are in the ICU.

My first link reports 492 total active cases, not thousands.

If you want to use the total cases, then you should be noting that 820 people have died, and 20,212 have recovered. The mortality calculated from that is a simple 3.8%.

20 hospitalised cases out of 492 total active cases, is about 4%, and the 9 in ICU are about 2% of total active cases.

>My first link reports 492 total active cases, not thousands.

You are correct, I was looking at total cases, not active cases. My apologies!

However, this still does not support the claim that young people are "widely" going to the hospital. Even assuming that age ranges are going to the hospital at equal rates (which is a preposterous assumption), given 20 total hospitalizations spread across 492 active cases (of which 290 are ages 0-29), we would only expect ~11/290 active COVID cases under 30 to be hospitalized. But again, this an extremely unrealistic upper bound, based on the ludicrous assumption that all ages get hospitalized at equal rates.

On top of that, these data are from Australia, where the population is still not widely vaccinated. I assume the vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients in Victoria are not fully vaccinated.

>The mortality calculated from that is a simple 3.8%.

This (and all previous calculations) depend on accurately estimating the denominator, i.e. the total number of cases. Given the amount of asymptomatic/low symptomatic cases, how is this accurately done? Has the composition of who gets tested shifted over the course of the pandemic? Has it ever actually accurately sampled the true number of cases?

Data please.

It's widely reported in the US, too. But the data doesn't bear it out.

The vast majority [0] of cases in Victoria are for the 20-29 age group. There are as many cases for the 10-19 age group as the 40-49 age group.

The vast majority of currently active cases right now are for the 0-9 age group.

Whilst there isn't a current breakdown of mortality by age rate, the overall mortality rate for Victoria is 4%, meaning that there is a high risk to children.

The data does bear out the risk.

[0] https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/victorian-coronavirus-cov...

A mortality rate of 4% in Victoria is obviously wrong. The only way to get a number that high is to ignore all the asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic cases. US CDC data shows a mortality rate of only 0.6%, and that's mostly from earlier in the pandemic before vaccines were available.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

> The vast majority of currently active cases right now are for the 0-9 age group.

Either I can't read graphs, or you can't.

And you absolutely cannot take the overall mortality rate and apply it to the one age group we know practically none have died from in the past.

So, as I said, the data doesn't bear this out so far as I've seen.

> Either I can't read graphs, or you can't.

That would be _you_. Here's the numbers from said active case graph.

+ 0-9 - 112

+ 10-19 - 100

+ 20-29 - 78

+ 30-39 - 105

+ 40-49 - 54

+ 50-59 - 25

+ 60-69 - 14

+ 70-79 - 3

+ 80-89 - 1

The Victorian government data you linked is very unclear.

It treats cases in aged care vs. not in aged care as separate sets, but is not clear on whether or not hospitalisation cases come from both sets.

At the top of the page it says "cases in hospital by age" but I can't seem to find any reference to the age of those people in hospital.

What's clear to me, though, is in the age group of 0-29 there's been a total of 1 death in Victoria. It's not a whole lot to go on, but it seems unlikely to me that many in the 0-29 group require hospital treatment.

Just to be clear, you said:

> The vast majority of currently active cases right now are for the 0-9 age group.

And then you shared data that shows 0-9 age group with less than 30%. Since we apparently agree on how to read the chart, I can only assume the words “vast majority” were not what you meant.

This is absolutely not true.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/child-covid-19-hospital...

"North Texas runs out of pediatric ICU beds amid Covid surge" (August 13): https://news.yahoo.com/north-texas-runs-pediatric-icu-175912...

Only 73 Pediatric ICU Beds in North Texas (from the Yahoo! Article)? This article puts a little different perspective on that reality - ‘No Staffed Pediatric ICU Beds Available’ In North Texas Area, DFW Hospital Council Says https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2021/08/12/no-staffed-pediatric-icu...

Anecdote.

There are risks to all of us when we let millions of children act as a breeding and mutation substrate for the virus. I would think that would be blinding obvious to anyone with even a basic grasp of biology.

It’s also completely unknown what the long term effects of the virus are.

Edit: Disappointed but not surprised by the amount of anti-science on this site. I feel like a lot of people have let politics destroy their ability to think critically to the point of near suicidal ignorance. Sad.

The other user was suggesting lifting restrictions would be equal to "fuck the kids". Clearly that is not the case.

As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?

I don’t think that’s clear at all.

> As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?

Vaccinate everyone, there’s no shortage of vaccine. Remember when Bill Gates fought to stop the manufacture of vaccine in other countries? People like him are the enemy to a fully vaccinated population.

Given global vaccination rates, it will have abundant and plentiful opportunities for breeding and mutation forever. There is no vaccinating the entire globe for coronavirus. Certainly not in our lifetimes. And not given the declining effectiveness of the vaccines.

> And not given the declining effectiveness of the vaccines.

Times like these I wish HN had a downvote button, since that’s total misinformation.

It's really concerning you're wrong and also wish for the ability to silence others instead of engaging with them.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0818-covid-19-boost...

It does once you have sufficient karma. Also, you’re wrong. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-booster-shot-cdc-...

I agree that the whole globe will not be vaccinated and that will continue to be a problem. That doesn’t negate what I said though, unvaccinated children are a huge part of that problem.

> And not given the low effectiveness of the vaccines.

I have no idea what this means. It sounds like you’re under false impressions. The vaccines are quite effective.

I meant “declining.” Revised simultaneous with your comment. If the vaccine immunity does not persist and requires boosters, we will never reach global here immunity. The parent article is on point.

>It’s also completely unknown what the long term effects of the virus are.

Long term beyond a year and a half? I think it's safe to assume there is very little.

Because COVID poses very little risk to children. The flu poses more risk to that age group. No one is running around saying we need to mask children for the flu and vaccinated all of them.

The CDC definitely says we should vaccinate almost all children against influenza. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccinations.htm

Cool now show me the school lockdowns, masking, and forced influenza vaccine passports for children.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1920estimates.ht...

No more than 64% for school aged individuals. So, since you're supposedly using this as a reason why we should be keeping everyone locked down then I'm going to assume you feel the same for influenza? Which means you're saying we should have shut schools down and mandated all sorts of measures to protect them since the inception of the influenza vaccinations?

Full vaccination COVID is not an achievable goal.

It's not so much "fuck the kids" as "fuck the teachers".

Even if you believe that "kids don't get sick from COVID", you can't ignore that teachers do. And many of them are in high-risk groups -- older, with comorbidities. Most are vaccinated, but they're still taking a risk.

Teachers are already smarting over the fact that (in the US) they're literally trained to take a bullet for their kids. So when you tell them to open the schools "for the kids", they're hearing that they're disposable human beings, and they don't like it.

Open the schools incautiously, and there won't be any schools to open. Because a school without teachers is just a warehouse.

> Most are vaccinated, but they're still taking a risk

Pre pandemic they took a risk every day as well, so it's a matter of acceptable risk, which I believe is what the article was focused on. What level of risk is that?

That existing risk was already at the limit of acceptability. New risk being added on pushes many past that limit.

It's made worse by the fact that this additional risk is being left out of the discussion so often. People talk about what's good for the children and their parents and the economy, but not about what the teachers need. They're being treated as disposable, which exacerbates the perception of risk further.

Discussions about school openings that ignore a critical factor are not going to result in what people hope for.

So 0 covid is the only answer? I don't think 0 covid is possible. We would need vaccines that provide sterilizing immunity for that.

> That existing risk was already at the limit of acceptability.

Do you actually thinks so? I've never heard that aspiring teachers are thinking about their increased risk to illnesses, especially since many have children of their own and are exposed to an increased risk by children anyway.

> That existing risk was already at the limit of acceptability.

Nobody forced them to become teachers.

And nobody is forcing them to remain teachers.

With the rise in gun violence at schools, teachers have had to undertake additional training for scenarios that they had not priced in their initial decisions. They did not like that, and they like even less being ignored in the discussion of whether or not to open schools.

So a great number will not remain teachers if they do not feel like they're part of the decision. They're used to being told to "do it for the children", but there are limits, and this will push many past them.

Gun violence in schools is extremely rare. Students and teachers are far more likely to die in vehicle accidents traveling to and from school.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/11/lockdown-...

Isn't it easier and safer to vaccinate the teachers? There are less of them and they are of the age where the current vaccines are considered safe.

In NYC, teacher's unions refused to go back to work until a vaccine was available. Despite that, the vaccination rates were only 40-60% before the mandate that public sector workers be vaccinated.

I suppose that the teachers that chose not to be vaccinated would not want to impose that on their pupils.

Also, kids are absolutely getting sick from Delta.