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?